Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  Benjamin Day, editor of the Sun, then printed letters from Robinson that showed he was the killer, the Sun charged. Bennett roared back with accusations that the police had leaked the letters to the Sun and charges that the Sun was defrauding the reading public. The Sun answered back that it was the Herald, not the Sun, that was doing the defrauding. Someone suggested that Bennett had flirted with the whores at 41 Thomas Street on the day he interviewed Rosina Townsend. Bennett, stung, refuted the charge and went into a long printed diatribe against hookers that had all of New York chuckling. Other editors joined in the rumble of newspaper chiefs. Circulation climbed.

  Philip Hone was one of the many New Yorkers who did not think the case was an open-and-shut affair. He had a dim view of prostitutes and believed that many other New Yorkers did, too. Who would believe the testimony of any of them against Robinson? And the defendant looked innocent. “He is young, good looking and supported by influential friends. He certainly looks as little like a murderer as any person I ever saw,” Hone said. “There are good reasons for public sympathy.”16

  And there was the lingering suspicion that the police had not performed well in the case. They made the arrest too quickly, made uncertain assumptions, and had no real evidence to back up their murder charges. The Robinson trial in New York at the beginning of June was wild. Six thousand people rushed toward the courtroom in City Hall each morning, pushing and clawing at each other for the few available seats. The rush was so great that on one morning the crowd knocked over the wooden railings in the courtroom. Those who could not get in crowded around on the lawns outside the building, beneath open windows, to hear the proceedings. There were police at the courthouse to keep order, but they did a poor job, and it further reflected badly on the entire police department’s performance in that case and in many others. Many of the spectators were certain Robinson would hang. Other spectators looked forward to Robinson’s acquittal, not believing that the prosecution could convict him. “There is no doubt of the guilt of the wretched youth, but it is to be feared he will escape punishment,” said Philip Hone.

  The judge was Ogden Edwards, one of the most respected in the state. He was the grandson of the famed preacher Jonathan Edwards, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening religious movement. The district attorney was Thomas Phoenix.

  Phoenix’s case was simple: A number of prostitutes had seen Robinson go into Helen’s room with her. Later, after the murder, an ax from his store had been found along with his cloak, and a piece of string on the ax was said to be from a tassel on that cloak. There were love letters between the two, and talk that Robinson was insanely jealous of her other clients. In addition to all of that, he had testimony from a druggist’s clerk who said that prior to the murder, Robinson had talked to the druggist about buying a bottle of rat poison (by implication, to use on Helen).

  The defense’s case was just as simple: Someone else killed Jewett and framed Robinson, who as a jealous suitor could be seen as a likely victim for the plot. The defense also had a grocery store clerk, Robert Furlong, who testified that Robinson was in his store, smoking cigars, at the time of the murder.17

  In a series of stunning decisions, Judge Edwards ruled that the jury should not pay much attention to the testimony of the women who testified against Robinson because they were ladies of the evening. He added that the love letters between Robinson and Jewett were not admissible and that her diary could not be introduced, either.

  Hone felt that the case against Robinson relied on too much circumstantial evidence and that it would be easy for his lawyers to prove that any number of Jewett’s numerous lovers might have killed her.

  The trio of defense lawyers did a fine job. They tore apart Rosina Townsend’s testimony and skillfully suggested to the jury, aided by the judge, that prostitutes could not be believed. The defense delivered a detailed three-hour summation of the case.

  Robinson was acquitted after the jury had deliberated for just twenty minutes.

  Hone, who through his connections got to sit in the courtroom during the trial, had yet another reflection, and it weighed heavily on the depth of crime in New York. “I was surrounded [in the courtroom] by young men, about his own age, apparently clerks like him, who appeared to be thoroughly initiated into the arcana of such houses as Mrs. [Rosina] Townsend’s. They knew the wretched female inmates as they were brought up to testify, and joked with each other in a manner illy comporting with the solemnity of the occasion.”18

  Those young men, and others in the courtroom, roared their approval at the jury’s verdict. Bennett wrote that “the cheering and huzzas were tremendous—in vain the court assayed to stop them.… They might as well have tried to choke the current of a river with sand, as to put a stop to that hearty outburst.”19

  Law enforcement received all of the blame for the acquittal. The district attorney was criticized for not calling a number of men caught in the house at the time of the murder. He was protecting his male buddies from scandal, right? He was blamed for not having corroborating witnesses to back up the testimony of the prostitutes. He should have realized that the judge would discount the hookers’ testimony. He should have had a better attack than just that all the evidence found at the scene of the slaying was connected to Robinson. It did look like a frame-up to many.

  The judge was blamed for not emphasizing the testimony of eyewitnesses—the prostitutes—and the constables were heavily criticized for arresting a man who turned out to be the wrong one and was acquitted. Because they focused only on Robinson, they let the real killer get away. They had no investigative skills and did a very poor job in the case against Robinson. One of the four was so dumb, people said, that when he was summoned to 41 Thomas Street he believed the call was not to solve a murder but to break up a fistfight.

  The not-guilty verdict did not seem to solve anything. Many always believed Robinson killed Helen. Five books were written about the case, along with dozens of magazine articles and hundreds of newspaper stories. The New York press kept up its landslide coverage of the trial for nearly two weeks after it ended, pages and pages filled with analysis of the verdict. The penny press howled about the outcome. Why couldn’t law enforcement do its job? And, equally important, how did a group of watchmen all standing within a block of 41 Thomas Street allow not only a murder to take place, but a fire as well? And, if that wasn’t enough, how had they stood by while the killer fled? And how was it that law enforcement was so feeble that anyone could plan, and carry out, a vicious murder right in the middle of a brothel right in the middle of one of the busiest neighborhoods in town? What was the city, the world, coming to with law enforcement like this?20

  Almost all the newspapers that covered the trial were unhappy with the verdict and some, like Thurlow Weed in the Albany Evening Journal, believed that it made a fool of the legal system.

  There were charges that Robert Furlong lied when he testified that Robinson was with him on the night of the murder, and he later killed himself. Others accused Robinson’s employer, store owner Joseph Hoxie, of bribing the jury (never proved). His lawyers were accused of chicanery and the jurors of prejudice against the hookers who testified.

  “The acquittal of Robinson on the charge of murdering Helen Jewett was the foulest blot on the jurisprudence of our country,” snorted Philip Hone.21

  George Templeton Strong, who had followed the trial carefully in the newspapers, thought that Furlong lied to protect Robinson. “I have no doubt whatever that Furlong is a perjured man … and perjured himself for Mr. Hoxie’s cash. No matter—time will show—and if it should not, that will make no difference in the final punishment of either perjury or murder.”22

  There was some benefit to Helen’s murder, though. Surely, everyone believed, the incompetence of the constables in solving the murder, and in law enforcement in general, plus the unprecedented press coverage of the case, would finally bring about the end of the constables and herald a new era with a trained, competent police force.
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  Or would it?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Extra! Extra! The Penny Press Chases Crime

  Everywhere is their influence felt. No man can measure it, for it is immeasurable.

  —Walt Whitman

  Nobody understood what had happened to the New York media because of the Helen Jewett murder and trial better than James Gordon Bennett, the truculent, cross-eyed Scotsman who was editor of the Herald. Right from the minute that he walked into Jewett’s bedroom and looked down at her charred body in the early spring of 1836, Bennett knew that the slaying was a turning point in both press and American history. Following the killing of the gorgeous prostitute, Bennett worked tirelessly, with his editors and reporters, to reshape the Herald to make it the first and most successful tabloid in the United States. It became a newspaper whose pages overflowed with both domestic and international news and opinion, but a newspaper full of sordid crime, lurid sex, and juicy scandal, too. He was one of the editors who would change the look of city newspapers, and American journalism, over the next twenty years. And, over those two decades, nobody in the United States worked harder than a fed-up Bennett to bring about the creation of a paid, professional police force in New York. He was joined by other editors. The penny press led the war on crime and the war to get a professional police force.

  A professional police force was necessary to replace the bungling, stumbling constable force, he told everyone—at parties, in street-corner conversations, and in the pages of his paper. The changing times demanded changing policies. New York was no longer a city of quiet streets and lovely views of the water in the harbor. It had become, sixty years after the Revolution, a hustling, bustling, and very congested and overcrowded city. One in every twenty-five Americans lived there.1 It was also a city reeking with sin. It had become an ugly city, too, infested with rats, garbage, whores, and drunks.

  And it had become a city full of criminals.

  The flamboyant Bennett, whom his reporters referred to as “the Emperor,” more than anyone else, pushing and prodding the politicians and civic leaders, would become responsible for a new look at crime and criminals in the city and in all of America. New York was changing. The United States was changing. The police might not have been necessary when George Washington took office and only twenty thousand people lived in the twisting, winding streets of the town, but they were certainly needed now, when blood flowed in the streets, people feared for their lives, and killers escaped unscathed.

  All of the criminal mayhem was wonderful grist for the sensational new “penny press,” and its editors made the most of it. The editors of the titillating penny sheets revolutionized American journalism. The penny press editors were the first to employ street-corner newsboys (the city had about three hundred of them) shouting out to passersby to purchase a paper. They shouted out more crime-story headlines at the top of their lungs than any other stories because crime sold newspapers.

  The newsboys, ragamuffin heroes of stories, movies, and plays for a hundred and fifty years afterward, stood on top of wooden crates with a thick pile of freshly printed papers at their feet on chilly February mornings and steamy July afternoons. They all wore slouched cloth caps, wrinkled jackets, and breeches, went barefoot, and possessed, one man said, “a dirty face with hands to match.” The newsboys seemed to live in their own world. “Tom Newsboy … swears, we know, freely; drinks, fights, and very often stays out all night.… [He] indulges too in games of Chance, and is scarcely ever without dice, small cards, and other implements of hazard in his pocket,” said one observer. They waved the newspaper in the air and shouted out the headlines to sell the papers. Whether it was a murder, a fire, or a circus elephant run amok, the ten- and eleven-year-old kids screamed out the headline for all to hear—“Extra! Extra! Read all about it—banker slays wife!”2

  The newsboys popped up anywhere there was a chance to sell a newspaper for a penny. They jumped onto omnibuses without paying a fare and badgered people to purchase a paper until the harried omnibus conductor chased them off the vehicle. The newsboys stood outside of theaters, or baseball fields, and shouted out their headlines about murder and mayhem as long and loud as they could to draw a crowd. They were generally a grimy lot of ragamuffins who had little money and came from poor families. Some were so destitute that Bennett and other editors allowed them to sleep in the offices of the newspapers. In the 1850s, one paper opened up a boardinghouse just for newsboys. Some newsboys fell in love with the venues where they sold their papers. Barney Williams, as an example, sold papers outside of a theater, was entranced by the entertainment he saw inside of it, and became a professional Irish jig dancer.3

  The penny press editors hired boats to take their reporters out into the harbor at dawn to greet newly arriving oceangoing ships bobbing in the water to gather news from Europe and interview politicians and entertainers. Anything that anybody said in those interviews was blown up into a gargantuan story the next morning. Newsboys would shout out the headlines gleaned from shipboard interviews, and people would get the news first on street corners. Hundreds of New Yorkers waited eagerly for shipboard news from Europe during the Crimean War.4 The penny papers did not rely on the financial support of the city’s political factions, as the other newspapers did, but instead courted large department stores and other businesses to advertise, guaranteeing them huge lists of readers. Beholden to no one, the journals could comment on everyone, sometimes viciously.

  And, best of all, they were affordable to everyone. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, all the news of the day,” wrote Benjamin Day in the inaugural issue of the first penny sheet, the Sun. Five years later, after considerable success, he wrote that “the Sun has probably done more to benefit the community by enlightening the minds of the common people than all the other papers together.”5

  Poet Walt Whitman saw the penny press as extraordinarily powerful in New York. He often said that the candid, fiery penny press was to American reading what the public school was to education. Whitman was a reporter for several papers and then became an editor. He filled the columns of his paper with crime stories and stories in which he and his writers quoted critics of the erratic city force of constables.6

  It was the Sun that started regular crime reporting. Soon after it opened its doors in 1833, shortly after a cholera epidemic claimed the lives of thirty thousand New Yorkers (including Horace Greeley’s son), the Sun’s reporter George Wisner began to cover the proceedings in the city’s police court on a regular basis. His reporting was printed in a regular crime column entitled “Police Office.” The very first edition of the Sun featured a string of crime stories, from armed robbery to petty domestic disputes. The Sun not only ran as many murder stories as it could find in New York but reprinted homicide stories from other newspapers around the country. In one early edition it had tales of murder from Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.7

  Wisner and other reporters, especially those from the Herald, loved crime stories tied to divorce cases. There was always some woman in front of a judge charging that her husband had thrown a pot at her or hit her with a broomstick. The judge made fun of both of them, and so did the police reporters, which spun the crime proceedings into lengthy, sarcastic stories that amused readers.8

  Newspapers of that era generally sold for a nickel or six cents, but the heads of the penny press believed that if they sold their sheets for only a penny they could sell so many of them, targeting the general public and not the well-to-do, that the profits would surpass those of publishers who sold their newspapers for more. To sell that many papers, they naturally turned to sensational stories. Crime led the list. Bennett wrote in 1842 that crime had caused all of the disorder and confusion in the city, and other editors in New York heartily agreed with him.

  Along with all of his stories about crime and murder, Bennett ran numerous pieces and editorials on the hapless and hopeless police force of unskilled constables and ins
isted, from the Helen Jewett murder onward, that the city had to get rid of its constables and hire an all-new, trained police force. He constantly criticized the constables and the government that seemed to love them.

  New York was home to eleven daily newspapers by the late 1830s, some published in the morning and some in the evening, most with circulations of around three or four thousand, and their number grew to thirty-five by the early 1840s. In 1830, the United States had 857 papers, but by 1840, that number had doubled and total circulation of newspapers climbed from 68 million to 196 million.9

  This was made possible by an exploding population and the development of the Napier steam printing press, which could publish twenty times as many copies as the old wooden hand presses. The new presses did not use single sheets of paper, like the old hand presses, but continuous rolls of paper that could be fed through quickly to produce an enormous amount of copies. All of the penny presses in New York began with small staffs, usually just an editor and a printer, but by the mid-1840s papers like the Herald had a dozen reporters and editors and twenty or so compositors.

  The cheap papers had a willing audience for their crime stories and tawdry features. By the 1840s, thanks to increased public education, America’s literacy rate was high, and almost everybody could read the newspapers. Tens of thousands preferred reading the penny press because the stories were written for the average person and were colorful and short. Horace Greeley of the Tribune advised his reporters that “a half column has ten chances [of publication] where two columns have one and three columns none.”10