Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [284]
Executions are no longer public in this century. But the press is public, and newspapers continued to recount every gruesome detail. Twentieth-century executions took place in the bowels of the big house. The newspapers followed them there. When Ruth Snyder was electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928, it was front-page news in the New York newspapers. Here was one account: “Tomb-like silence. Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. The crunching sound of the executioner cramming down a lever. A sinister whine and a crackling, sputtering sound like a Fourth of July sparkler. Silence.... Then the prison physician breaking the silence with these words: ‘I declare this woman dead.”’20 Thomas Howard, a reporter on special assignment for the New York Daily News, sat in the front row, with a concealed camera on his ankle. As the first jolt of electricity surged through Ruth Snyder’s body, Howard took a sensational photograph, which the newspaper printed. People gasped in horror—but they bought, and they looked. No need, in this case, to rely on “artist’s conceptions.” The camera was there.
The fascination with crime and criminal justice never flags. The hero is not always the cop or the detective. There is a certain tendency to glorify the outlaw as well, or at least certain outlaws. This is an old strain in American literature, and in stories people tell and retell.21 An enormous literature, and an enormous mythology, surrounds outlaws and gunmen of the Old West—Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp. In the twentieth century, there was Bonnie and Clyde, who were, among other things, the subjects of an extremely successful movie; in the Hollywood of the thirties and forties, there was a rash of gangster movies; they cleaned up at the box office. The censors insisted that crime could not look as if it paid in the movies; still, crime had an awfully good run for its money.
Later on, in the seventies and eighties, The Godfather and its two sequels were even more successful in making money. The Godfather was a glossy, Technicolor update of the gangster movies. It, along with many other movies about crime families, carried a disturbing message hidden in the folds of the narrative. The message was this: members of criminal gangs are really ordinary businessmen who just happen to do crime (including murder) for a living, and a very good living at that. The flickering screen invests these men with that peculiar combination of glamor and banality that are the essence of a celebrity culture.
The celebrity criminal, like the celebrity outlaw, did not spring up overnight in the twentieth century. The twentieth century simply stepped up the pace. Defendants in the great trials are, of course, celebrities par excellence. Harry K. Thaw, tried for the murder of Stanford White in the early years of the century, was a celebrity defendant. When Thaw escaped (from an insane asylum), fled to Canada, and was arrested there and held, crowds of Canadians gathered to catch a glimpse of him in his place of confinement: “Men and women almost trampled upon each other in a mad rush to shake his hand. When he went to the courtroom he rode in an open carriage, acclaimed by the populace, lifting his hat and bowing right and left like an emperor.”22 There always seems to be at least one woman ready to throw herself at the feet of a famous murderer (or alleged murderer) or to marry a convict on death row. Few women are on death row, but Ruth Snyder, waiting to die at Sing Sing, got “many offers of marriage.”23 After all, a celebrity is a celebrity.
Ultimately, it is impossible to tell what impact movies and stories about gangsters have on the public; after all, outlaw themes are popular in many cultures, even those where crime rates are low and people do not tremble in fear of muggers and burglars. There is, I think, a distinction between outlaw themes in older cultures