Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [277]
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CRIMES OF THE SELF: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LEGAL CULTURE
ONE MAJOR PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN TO SHOW OR SUGGEST CONNECTIONS between criminal justice and the larger society. We took a close look at the face of nineteenth-century legal culture, especially at the way social and spatial mobility affected the system. This chapter, in turn, is about some aspects of twentieth-century legal culture, the legal culture of our own century, and how it reverberated in the world of crime and criminal justice.
Of course, the shouting and partying that brought in the twentieth century, the wild celebrations when the clock struck midnight, did not produce a new legal culture. January 1, 1900, was a special day of a special year, with the special magic of big, round numbers. But social life is a river that flows broad and deep; the river does not always flow at the same speed; it has calm spots, and areas of turbulence. Certainly, we cannot measure and mark off social change by the ticking of a clock or the banging of a drum.
The turn of the century was more than a lifetime ago. By now, in its closing years, we see more clearly how the world has turned in this, our own century. Above all, it has been a century of amazing change. In some senses, change has been disastrous; this has been a century of deadly wars and catastrophes and upheavals and revolutions. In other senses, it has been a time of wondrous, remarkable, fairy-tale change. Technology tore society up by the roots and put it together again. This is the century of the automobile, the jet airplane, television, air-conditioning, antibiotics, and, very notably, the computer. It is the century of gene splicing and in vitro fertilization; the century of the pill and surrogate mothers. It is also the century of the hydrogen bomb, the greenhouse effect, and mass toxic pollution. It is a century in which nothing has stood still, in which social change has been as radical as anything that went before, and incomparably more rapid.
I want to begin by describing a case that straddles the turn of the century. The villain of the piece is a certain Miller, convicted of grand larceny in New York.1 Miller was, to put it plainly, a swindler. In 1899, he had put out the word to friends and neighbors that he had important inside information of the financial type—he knew how to make a killing in the stock markets. Miller was the manager of something he called the Franklin Syndicate. A picture of wise old Ben Franklin appeared in all his ads, together with the motto “The way to wealth is as plain as the road to market.” Miller invited investors to deposit their money with him, promising to pay them at the astonishing rate of 10 percent a week on their money. The deposit could be withdrawn whenever the “investor” wanted to, and the principal was “guaranteed against loss.”
As P. T. Barnum put it, there’s a sucker born every minute. The money rolled in. At first, Miller ran his business out of a candy store; later he rented part of a two-story house; still later his “syndicate” had so swollen in size that he needed the entire building. “The house was filled with clerks, all working from nine in the morning until ten at night, drawing dividend checks, receiving money, and sending out circulars and newspapers.” People stood in line to get in, to deposit and withdraw. “Money was piled in heaps about the place, upon the counter and the floor.” It took twenty clerks,