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Subject: Crosspost from Jhistory: Metzmeier on Trotti, _The Body in the
Reservoir_
Michael Ayers Trotti. The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and
Sensationalism in the South. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina
Press, 2008. ix + 301 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5842-4;
$59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3178-6.
Reviewed by Kurt Metzmeier (Louis D. Brandeis School of Law Library)
Published on Jhistory (July, 2009) Commissioned by Donna
Harrington-Lueker
The Rise of the Mass Media and the Changing Nature of Crime Reporting in
the Southern Press
The murder trial and execution has been a central motif in Western
culture since the story of the passion of Jesus was entered into the
Christian canon. This timeless narrative has been expressed very
differently throughout history, and how it is expressed is a window into
the cultural assumptions of the tellers of the story. In _The Body in
the Reservoir_, Michael Ayers Trotti effectively uses the study of the
newspaper of one city, Richmond, Virginia, to examine this theme over
the boundaries of time, region, and race. He looks first at the history
of crime journalism and the emergence of the penny press in the
nineteenth century, examining the issues in the context of the cultural
differences of the U.S. North and South, and how those differences were
lessened by the rise of mass culture.
Trotti also examines an alternate view of justice reflected in
Richmond's African American press, and shows how this perspective
changed over time.
Trotti's book has two parts. The first part covers the history of the
treatment of sensational murder trials in Richmond's newspapers, showing
how that treatment changed and became first more sensational and later
more realistic with the emergence of the popular press. The second part
looks at the same themes from different perspectives. The distinctive
view of murder and criminal justice by the African American press in
Richmond is the theme of one chapter; another looks at the evolution of
newspaper illustration from woodcut to half-tone and how such
illustrations conveyed their own story of a murder trial. The final
chapter discusses press coverage of executions, which often become tales
unto themselves in which mythic elements of evil, redemption, and human
doubt play in equal parts.
Trotti begins by surveying the beginnings of crime reporting in colonial
and early republican Virginia. Virginia's newspaper press evolved from
the early gazettes of the English-speaking world. These newspapers,
chartered and strongly subsidized by the colonial government, were
typically filled with state decrees, legislative enactments, public
notices, advertisements, and reprinted extracts from British and other
colonial newspapers. There were no reporters, but the papers published
letters from readers that conveyed local news and occasionally political
opinion--something that became more common leading up to the American
Revolution. Virginia's governors were very wary of the press, and the
colony's first paper, the Williamsburg-based _Virginia Gazette_, was
only established in 1736.
The _Gazette_ was completely dependent on official business, which
filled most of its columns, and had little interest in crime, failing
even to reprint the moralist "execution sermons" popular in New England
papers. The first murder case of any interest was the murder of Robert
Routlidge by John Chiswell. Letters from friends of the two politically
connected men were published, but in the five-month period from the
murder to Chiswell's likely suicide relatively few column inches were
used on the story.
The papers of republican Virginia at first showed the same indifference
to crime, focusing attention on politics and the establishment of new
governmental institutions, with only brief notices of murders and
executions. When criminal activities were covered in any detail, the
context was typically that of political scandal. Crime journalism first
appeared in the pamphlet press, not in newspapers. The 1816 murder of
Judge Peter Randolph by Captain Thomas Wells was the subject of a
ninety-four-page publication by a local attorney that summarized the
evidence presented and the arguments made at the trial. Between 1816 and
1830, seven murder cases were the subject of pamphlets as well.
The first murder to receive any serious newspaper coverage was a case
from the North, the 1836 murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett in New
York. The lurid case drew much coverage in U.S. newspapers, and the
newspapers of Richmond were no exception, with one notable difference.
Unlike the northern press, the southern city's chivalric newspaper
editors were reticent as to details of the victim's profession.
The coverage of murder in Richmond changed in 1850, when James A.
Cowardin founded the city's first "penny paper," the _Dispatch. _New
press technologies, along with the introduction of telegraph machines to
newsrooms, brought inexpensive newspapers to the city, with more
reporters and more columns to fill. The new expanded audience led to a
more popular approach to reporting, reflected in the depth of crime
coverage of the 1867 murder of Mary Pitts Phillips by her husband, James
Jeter Phillips. The case, which involved two trials and a lengthy
appeal, resulted in 124 stories in the _Dispatch_, ten times the number
published for any antebellum crime, even the abortive slave revolt of
Nat Turner.
But the real "murder of the century" in Richmond was the heavily
reported murder of Lillie Madison, whose body was found in the old
reservoir on the edge of the city. The investigation and the trial of
Madison's cousin, Thomas J. Cluverius, in 1887, exhausted "exorbitant
amounts of ink, testimony, banner headlines, and occasional heightened,
melodramatic prose" in the Richmond _Dispatch _and the thirty-five daily
papers sold in the city (p. 77). Despite the extensive and often
sensational coverage, the city's press maintained its reserve regarding
the female victim, leaving many indelicate details about the young
woman's life out of print. Madison was portrayed as an unfortunate
innocent woman despite a complex past that was marked by family conflict
and mysterious conflict with a man against whom a lawyer had to be
employed to secure the return of her private letters. Cluverius, in
contrast, was cast into a villain's role that ill-suited the bland young
clerk. Trotti argues that in one way the Richmond papers "explored this
crime in all the same sorts of ways that northern papers" did, with the
"important exception that they refrained from drawing Lillian's
character into question" (p.
77).
The turn of the century brought a new realism to American crime
journalism. The 1911 coverage of the trial of Henry Clay Beattie Jr.
for the murder of his wife, Louise, showed that the Richmond press was
in tune with this new realism and also that nineteenth-century southern
particularism--reflected in a reluctance to place feminine virtue in a
poor light--was eroding. Richmond's reporters had little problem
reporting on Beattie's extramarital affair with Beulah Binford. The life
of the attractive Binford was spread across full pages illustrated with
large half-tone engravings. Moreover, the trial also reflected how
readers were becoming more open to complexity in crime coverage, and
that reasonable doubt was not restricted to the jury.
The second half of Trotti's book takes a thematic approach to its
examination of Richmond's coverage of violent crime, starting by looking
at the topic from the completely alternative view of justice by the
city's African American community, represented by the Richmond _Planet_.
The _Planet_, edited from 1884 to 1929 by John Mitchell, an energetic
editor and political activist, saw the criminal justice system through
the lens of lynch law of the South and its respectable counterpart,
legal lynching by all-white juries uninterested in establishing the
guilt or innocence of black offenders. The _Planet_'s readers were
justifiably suspicious of Richmond's justice system, especially when
African Americans were in the dock, and Mitchell used the paper's pages
to agitate against the South's embrace of lynch law. However, Trotti
also shows how Mitchell's later emphasis on black self-help in the
twentieth century coincided with crime coverage in the _Planet_ that
tended more and more to mirror the white press.
In another chapter, Trotti describes the role of illustration in the
development of sensational murder reporting. The visual depiction by
newspapers of the murder cases changed significantly over America's
first century and a half. Illustration in colonial and early Revolution
newspapers was crude, with simple woodcuts providing the only graphics.
Simple engraved illustrations replaced woodcuts, allowing the
representation of individuals, but illustrations used to depict the
victims and purported villains in celebrated murders were caricatures.
The victims--especially women--were painted as stereotypical innocents
while the visages of the accused murders were distorted to reveal the
evil in their souls.
The introduction of half-tones, detailed engravings that simulated
photographs, dramatically changed the emotive effect of the graphic
depiction of the people involved in murder trials. Instead of monsters,
the half-tone--perhaps shockingly at first--showed that reputed
murderers looked like ordinary people. Trotti compares the graphic
coverage of the Cluverius and Beattie cases discussed earlier in the
book, making a persuasive case that the widespread use of half-tone
coverage in the latter case engendered more complex feelings toward the
accused. He suggests that the realism that visually confronted readers
brought about more realistic journalism.
In the final chapter, Trotti discusses the history of executions in
Richmond, from open-air hangings to private electrocutions. The coverage
of capital punishment in the city's papers often featured mini-dramas in
their own right, voicing doubt over the verdict unexpressed in the
reporting of the trial. After all, the central feature of the type of
trial that garnered sensational coverage was that it was not
cut-and-dry. With the rise of the penny press and greater resources,
more doubt found its way into print as reporters interviewed lawyers and
followed appellate proceedings. Most of these trials involved
circumstantial evidence that, while perfectly fine evidence for lawyers,
the public mind has always doubted. The "get"
most sought in an execution story was a confession from the killer, but
in the Richmond cases that was not always given. The secrecy of the
electric chair added dignity but often not resolution to the story.
Trotti also notes that African American reporters sought a different
resolution: The best story was one where an innocent black cheated the
gallows.
Overall, Trotti has written a useful work that should be of equal
interest to students of print culture and legal history. His use of a
regional case study to explore the larger issue of how crime reporting
and sensationalism contributed to the development of mass culture in
America adds texture and subtlety to this enquiry. The organization of
the book into a series of chronological chapters and a series of
thematic chapters works well, and the two parts are well integrated. The
result is a work that is accessible to general readers, but that covers
a range of themes.
The book has a few minor technical errors regarding the early American
judicial process probably noticeable only to a legal historian, but
generally it is exceedingly well researched. The endnotes contain full
discussions of the sources that are sometimes as interesting as the main
text.
_The Body in the Reservoir _is an excellent contribution not only to the
history of America journalism but also to the legal history of criminal
justice as a feature of democratic society.
Citation: Kurt Metzmeier. Review of Trotti, Michael Ayers, _The Body in
the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South_. Jhistory, H-Net
Reviews. July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24987
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
--
Antoinette G. van Zelm
Historian
Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area Center for Historic
Preservation MTSU Box 80 Murfreesboro, TN 37132
615-217-8013
Fax 615-898-5614
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http://histpres.mtsu.edu/tncivwar
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