9. Ibid., pp. 4–5, 8.
10. F. C. Nelles, “Purposes of the Whittier State School,” Los Angeles School Journal, Vol. 6, No. 8 (January 15, 1923), pp. 24–25.
11. Bryant, “Family History No. 183,” pp. 2–4, 5.
12. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
13. Ibid., pp. 17–19; William Henry Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California: A Study of Agencies and Institutions (New York: Russell Sage Foundation/Department of Child-Helping, 1915), p. 79.
14. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 114.
15. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 12; Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 9, 1933, p. 6.
16. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 12; Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 3, 1933, p. 2.
17. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 13; Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 9, 1933, p. 6; Wertham, The Show of Violence, pp. 114–115.
18. “Robert Irwin’s Own Story,” New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 3.
19. See Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 11, 1933, p. 2 and report of B. G. Dodge, p. 13.
20. Report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 3, 18.
Chapter 7. Epiphany
1. Roberts Liardon, The Azusa Street Revival: When The Fire Fell (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Press, 2006), p. 170.
2. See “A Letter Written from Rose City Camp Ground, Portland, Ore.,” www.Apostolicfaith.org, and “Religion: Camp Meeting,” Time, August 19, 1935, p. 43.
3. Harriet Hammond, “Bob Irwin’s Secret Life,” New York Daily Mirror, April 18, 1937, p. 24.
4. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 14.
5. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 111. Pember’s official Certificate of Death from the State of California, County of Nevada, Nevada City (File No. 95–038240) lists his last known occupation as “Classical Guitar Teacher.”
6. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 8.
7. Ibid.; Hammond, “Bob Irwin’s Secret Life,” April 22, 1937, p. 14. For a good summary of Simpson’s life and career, see Ralph Friedman, Tracking Down Oregon (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1978), pp. 58–70.
8. Hammond, “Bob Irwin’s Secret Life,” April 19, 1937, p. 3.
9. Ibid., April 25, 1937, p. 14.
10. Ibid., April 22, 1937, p. 14.
11. L. E. Hinsie, “A Contribution to the Psychopathology of Murder—Study of a Case.” Criminal Psychopathology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (July 1940), p. 4.
12. Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich (Holyoke, MA: Elizabeth Towne, 1910), p. 36. Also, see Catherine L. Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), and Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919).
13. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 11, 1933, p. 1; Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 117.
14. Hinsie, “The Psychopathology of Murder,” p. 8.
15. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 15.
16. Ibid., p. 13.
17. Hinsie, “The Psychopathology of Murder,” p. 8.
18. For an excellent discussion of Ingersoll in the context of his time, see Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2004).
19. Ingersoll’s essays are available online at various sites, including Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org).
20. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 112.
21. Hammond, “Bob Irwin’s Secret Life,” April 27, 1937, p. 3.
22. Ibid., April 22, 1937, p. 14.
23. Ibid., April 24, 1927, p. 3.
24. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 4, 1933, p. 4, and January 6, 1933, p. 8.
25. Report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 15–16; Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 4, 1933, p. 4; Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 117.
26. 1926 census for Brickstore, Newton County, Georgia, T625, reel 271, ED 109, p. 2A; Hammond, New York Daily News, April 18, 1937, p. 24.
27. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 7.
28. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 18.
Chapter 8. Romanelli and Rady
1. “Irwin Bares His Struggle in Art,” New York Daily News, April 13, 1937, p. 17.
2. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 10, 1933, p. 5.
3. See Gloria Ricci Lothrop, ed., Fulfilling the Promise of California: An Anthology of Essays on the Italian American Experience in California (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2000), p. 255.
4. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 7, 1933, p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 3.
6. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 31, 1933, pp. 3–4; Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 117.
7. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 18.
8. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 8; Time, October 1, 1934, p. 68; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 18.
9. Trygve A. Rovelstad, “Impressions of Lorado Taft,” Papers in Illinois History and Transactions for the Year 1937, Vol. 44 (1938), pp. 18–33.
10. Allen Weller, “Lorado Taft, the Ferguson Fund, and the Advent of Modernism,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Price (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 40.
11. Henry B. Fuller, “Notes on Lorado Taft,” Century, Vol. 76 (October 1908), p. 618.
12. Hamlin Garland, “The Art of Lorado Taft,” Mentor, Vol. 11 (October 1923), p. 19.
13. Timothy J. Garvey, Public Sculptor: Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 60.
14. Rovelstad, “Impressions of Lorado Taft,” p. 29.
15. Curtis Gathje, A Model Crime: A True Fiction (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1995), p. 114.
16. My description of Irwin’s arrival at Taft’s atelier draws on Ruth Helming Mose, “Midway Studio,” American Magazine of Art, August 1928, pp. 413–422. Taft’s reaction to the little bust of Charles Lindbergh is recounted by Irwin’s Chicago roommate Arthur Halliburton. See the typed transcript, “Mr. Arthur Halliburton, reporter from [Sunday] Mirror Magazine, reports about his contact with Robert Irwin,” in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
17. Weller, “Lorado Taft, the Ferguson Fund,” pp. 44–45.
18. “Robert Irwin’s Own Life Story,” New York Daily News, April 14, 1937, p. 3; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 22.
19. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 7, 1933, p. 3, and January 9, 1933, p. 2.
20. Ibid., January 24, 1933, p. 1.
21. Ibid., January 7, 1933, p. 3; January 10, 1933, p. 4; and February 7, 1933, p. 3.
22. Ibid., January 24, 1933, p. 1.
23. From a letter to Alice Ryan, January 1, 1931, transcribed by Wertham, Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
24. A photograph of the letter, which was typed on White House stationery and hand signed “Lou Henry Hoover,” appeared in newspapers around the country on April 10, 1937.
25. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” November 30, 1932, p. 2.
26. My reconstruction of Bob’s speech to Alice Ryan is taken from a letter he wrote to her in late December 1930. The letter—eleven single-spaced pages in its typed form—was transcribed by Wertham in early January and is contained in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
27. From a typewritten manuscript dated June 11, 1947, “Mr. Arthur Halliburton, reporter from [Sunday] Mirror Magazine, reports about his contact with Robert Irwin,” in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
28. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 119; Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 7, and January 11, 1933, p. 4.
29. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 7, and January 10, 1933, pp. 3–4.
Chapter 9. Depression
1. John Kenneth Galbraith,
The Great Crash, 1929 (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 132–133, 146; Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 (New York: Harper & Row/Perennial Library, 1972), p. 27.
2. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 10, 1933, p. 5.
3. James Thurber, “Pets and Trophies,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1929, p. 8.
4. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (New York: Washington Square Press, 1953), pp. 317–318.
5. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 11, 1933, pp. 3–4.
6. Ibid.; Hinsie, “The Psychopathology of Murder,” p. 10.
7. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 122.
8. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 22.
9. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 25; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 114.
10. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 123.
11. See report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 2, 22, 25.
12. See New York Times, December 4, 1909, p. 10, and December 7, 1909, p. 9, as well as Frank K. Sturgis, “The Winifred Masterson Burke Relief Foundation,” Journal of the National Institute of Social Sciences, Vol. 3 (January 1917), pp. 83–93.
13. “Statement of friend, Charles Smith, 240 E. 53rd Street,” in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
14. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 6, 1933, p. 8.
Chapter 10. The Gedeons
1. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” January 26, 1933, p. 2; report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 2, 22.
2. Alan Hynd, Murder, Mayhem, and Mystery: An Album of American Crime (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1958), p. 81.
3. Gathje, A Model Crime, pp. 22–23, 49.
4. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” February 7, 1933, p. 5.
Chapter 11. Wertham
1. Wertham, clinical notes on “James Adamson,” February 7, 1933, p. 4; Wertham, The Show of Violence, pp. 106–107.
2. New York Times, November 3, 1941, p. 19, and December 24, 1982, p. B6.
3. James Gilbert, Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 63.
4. The best book on the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s is David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
5. “Peace Loving Psychiarist,” MD: Medical Newsmagazine, Vol. 11, No. 7 (July 1997), p. 230.
6. Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2005), p. 19.
7. My capsule biography of Wertham draws on material from James E. Reibman, “The Life of Dr. Fredric Wertham,” in The Fredric Wertham Collection (Cambridge, MA: Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1990), pp. 11–22, and Gabriel N. Mendes, “A Deeper Science: Richard Wright, Dr. Fredric Wertham, and the Fight for Mental Health Care in Harlem, NY, 1940–1960” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2010), pp. 59–110.
8. Mendes, “A Deeper Science,” p. 100.
9. See Cornelius F. Collins, “N.Y. Court Requests Psychiatric Service Clinic for Criminals Supplemental Memorandum,” Journal of the American Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 19, No. 3 (November 1928), pp. 337–343, and Emanuel Messinger and Benjamin Apfelberg, “A Quarter Century of Court Psychiatry,” Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1961), pp. 343–362.
10. Schechter, Deranged, pp. 299–300. As it happened, the jurors agreed with Wertham that Fish was insane. They found his crime so appalling, however, that they thought he should be executed anyway.
11. Beaty, The Critique of Mass Culture, p. 33.
12. Messinger and Apfelberg, “A Quarter Century of Court Psychiatry,” p. 344; Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 107, 110.
13. Among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. See Reibman, “The Life of Dr. Fredric Wertham,” p. 13.
14. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 111.
15. Except where otherwise noted, all quotes from Wertham’s psychotherapeutic sessions with Irwin are taken from the transcripts made between December 12, 1932, and March 13, 1933, filed in Box 21, Folder 8, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
16. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 124.
17. Ibid., p. 126.
Chapter 12. Bug in a Bottle
1. New York Journal-American, February 14, 1938, p. 2.
2. See Donna Cornachio, “Changes in Mental Care,” New York Times, January 3, 1999, p. 7. Bernard’s series ran February 14–24, 1938. The Snake Pit, published by Random House in 1946, was made into a hugely successful, Oscar-nominated movie two years later.
3. New York Journal-American, February 16, 1938, p. 6.
4. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 129.
5. “Robert Irwin Revealed as Asylum ‘Bully,’ ” New York Journal-American, February 26, 1938, p. 4; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 115.
6. New York Journal-American, February 14, 1938, p. 2.
7. Fredric Wertham, Letter to Robert Irwin, May 19, 1933, Box 21, Folder 4, Papers of Fredric Wertham.
8. Wertham, The Show of Violence, pp. 127–129. As Louis B. Schlesinger explains, “The term catathymia is derived from the Greek kata (‘according to’) and thymos (‘spirits or temper’). Feyerabend’s Greek dictionary gives various translations, the most appropriate of which is ‘in accordance with emotions.’ Catathymia (Katathymie) was first used by Hans W. Maier [in a paper published in 1912] as a psychodynamic explanation for the development of the content of delusions. The concept later became used, notably by Fredric Wertham, as an explanation for extreme acts of violence and some types of sexual homicide.” See Louis B. Schlesinger, Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2004), p. 109.
9. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 117.
10. New York Daily News, April 6, 1937, p. 8; New York Journal-American, April 6, 1937, p. 3.
11. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 129.
12. T. H. Trent, “Murder of the Model—the Mother—and the Lodger,” Official Detective Stories, July 1, 1937, p. 13.
Chapter 13. The Snake Woman
1. Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 22.
2. New York Daily Mirror, April 6, 1937, p 3.
3. Ibid., p. 14.
4. Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 44.
5. Ibid., p. 49.
6. New York Daily Mirror, July 1, 1937, p. 5.
7. Ibid., July 3, 1937, p. 3.
8. Ibid., July 4, 1937, p. 4.
9. Robert Leibowitz, The Defender, Casebook II: The Life and Career of Samuel S. Leibowitz, 1933–1941 (Denville, NJ: SBC Enterprises, 2004), p. 334; Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 129.
10. Trent, “Murder of the Model,” June 15, 1937, p. 12.
11. New York Daily Mirror, June 31, 1937, p. 5; Leibowitz, The Defender, Casebook II, p. 334.
12. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 129; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 116; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 117.
13. Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 116.
14. Trent, “Murder of the Model,” June 15, 1937, p. 12.
15. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 130; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 19; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 117.
16. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 30; New York Daily News, April 15, 1937, p. 11.
17. Leibowitz, The Defender, Casebook II, p. 335; New York Daily News, April 15, 1937, p. 11; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 3.
18. New York Daily News, April 16, 1937, p. 6.
19. New York Evening Journal, April 6, 1937, p. 1.
20. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 3; New York Daily News, April 16, 1937, p. 6.
21. Report of B. G. Dodge, p. 31.
22. Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 134.
Chapter 14. Canton
1. New York Daily News, April 16, 1937, p. 6.
2. Reynolds, Courtroom, pp. 117–118; Leibowitz, The Defender, Caseb
ook II, p. 335; New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 8.
3. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 117.
4. Wertham, The Show of Violence, p. 130; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 117.
5. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 118; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 117; report of B. G. Dodge, p. 3.
6. New York Daily News, April 8, 1937, p. 8; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 117.
7. Kirk Douglas, The Ragman’s Son: An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 52.
8. New York Evening Journal, April 8, 1937, p. 1; Trent, “Murder of the Model,” June 15, 1937, p. 12.
9. See Leibowitz, The Defender, p. 235.
10. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 118.
11. Ibid.; New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, pp. 3 and 8.
12. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 118; Syracuse Herald, April 6, 1937, p. 2.
13. Report of B. G. Dodge, pp. 4, 46; Syracuse Herald, April 6, 1937, p. 2; New York Daily News, April 12, 1937, p. 8; Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 118.
14. Fredric Wertham, “The Catathymic Crisis: A Clinical Entity,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Vol. 37 (April 1937), pp. 974–978; Gathje, p. 117.
Chapter 15. Crisis
1. E. J. Kahn Jr., The World of Swope (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), p. 37; New York Mirror, November 9, 1935, pp. 2 and 6; New York Daily News, November 9, 1935, p. 8; New York Times, November 9, 1935, p. 18; New York Journal, March 29, 1937, p. 3.
2. Lee Horsley, “Dead Dolls and Deadly Dames: The Cover Girls of American True Crime Publishing,” in Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film, eds. Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty (London: Continuum, 2011), p. 110; Gathje, A Model Crime, pp. 60, 62; West F. Peterson, “Veronica Gedeon, Model for Inside Detective, Is Murdered,” Inside Detective, July 1937, p. 6.
3. Reynolds, Courtroom, p. 118. The first giant panda ever shot was killed in April 1928 by Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit. For a complete account of Sheldon’s experience, see William G. Sheldon, The Wilderness Home of the Giant Panda (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975).
4. New York Evening Journal, April 6, 1937, p. 1; Francis C. Preston, “Unpublished Facts in New York’s Artist Model Murders,” True Detective Mysteries, September 1937, p. 81.
5. New York Evening Journal, April 6, 1937, p. 1; Gathje, A Model Crime, p. 118.
6. New York Evening Journal, April 6, 1937, p. 3; New York Daily Mirror, April 6, 1937, pp. 13 and 34; Gathje, A Model Crime, pp. 118–119.
The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation Page 33