Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [432]
Like McDowall, Bennett expressed indignation at vice while closely portraying its lineaments for the delectation of respectable readers. Yet Bennett avoided McDowall’s fate, partly by vigorously upholding the established class and gender order, which McDowall had challenged, and partly by fashioning a new journalistic persona. Bennett became the intrepid reporter, the public’s representative, duty bound to expose even the most sordid aspects of New York’s underworld. This proved a winning and lucrative formula: in one week, the Herald’s circulation shot up to fifteen thousand per day.
Benjamin Day’s Sun and the Transcript took the opposite tack. Robinson was no innocent boy but a villainous man about town. Jewett hadn’t seduced him; he had seduced Jewett, yet another instance of an upper-class dandy sexually exploiting a working-class woman. He had murdered poor Helen and now would now try to cheat the gallows with help from highly placed friends. This egalitarian analysis, worthy of the penny papers’ Workie roots, accorded with assumptions many working-class readers brought to the issue.
After more than a month of discussion in the court of public opinion, the courtroom trial commenced at City Hall on June 2, 1836. Each of its five days was a circus. Even on the second morning, when it rained fiercely, five to six thousand would-be spectators thronged the area. Crowds of clerks—a Robinsonian claque—jammed the courtroom almost daily. They were permitted to whoop and cheer testimony favorable to the prisoner and hiss and boo prosecution witnesses.
To defend Robinson, his employer hired three of New York’s most celebrated lawyers: William Price, Hugh Maxwell, and Ogden Hoffman. The evidence against their client was circumstantial but plentiful. Robinson’s roommate swore he had been out late the night of the murder. Townsend and a bevy of the prostitutes placed him at the crime scene. Townsend testified about motive as well, noting that Robinson, recently engaged to a young woman of good family, was anxious to retrieve letters he had sent Jewett, two score of which were found in her room.
Intense coverage of the Jewett murder in the penny press created a market for cheap pamphlets that provided graphic embellishments while drawing moral lessons from the event. (© Collection of The New York Historical Society)
In rebuttal, Robinson’s lawyers produced a witness—a respectable grocer named Furlong—who insisted the youth had been reading papers in his shop a mile and a half from Thomas Street that evening. Well aware that many believed Furlong’s testimony had been purchased with Hoxie’s cash, the lawyers also attacked the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses—on moral grounds. Women like Townsend, who had led an “infamous and abandoned” life, could not be trusted to tell the truth.
Here the lawyers were bucking convention. Legally, madams had been treated like small businesspersons and protected against threats to their person or property—threats that had increased dramatically in the 1830s. Brothel riots, expressions of community disapprobation of sin, were an old story, but recently small groups of workingclass toughs had been bursting into fancy brothels, physically assaulting and sometimes raping the women, breaking furniture and windows. Some of these incidents were drunken sprees. Some were fueled by misogyny: brothel bullies found the prosperous independence of prostitutes intolerable at a time when working-class males’ income and prerogatives were being undermined. Some were driven by class animosity: attackers were furious that upscale brothels barred their access to women who were readily available to clerks and merchants.
When ruffians went on rampages, prostitutes did not hesitate to initiate legal proceedings against them. In 1833, after three men had barged into Mrs. Townsend’s Thomas Street house shouting indecent language, she had them charged with assault and battery. The municipality was prepared to defend prostitutes from attacks by lower-class antagonists; would