Liberal Studies Professor James Polchin compares a case from the 1920s tabloids to today’s “true crime” narratives
Josephine Baker, a singer, dancer, and actor who was emblematic of the Jazz Age-a romanticized and much-troubled era in American history. Collection of the Smithsonian ³Ô¹ÏÍøÕ¾ Museum of African American History and Culture, gift from Jean-Claude Baker, ca. 1926.
Last year, attorney Alex Murdaugh, whose family members had formed a South Carolina legal dynasty over generations, was convicted of killing his wife and son. He received consecutive life sentences for his crimes-after prosecutors decided to not pursue the death penalty.
“Over the past century, your family-including you-have been prosecuting people here in this courtroom, and many have received the death penalty, probably for lesser conduct,” Judge Clifton Newman in handing down the sentence.
The reckoning continued this spring when Murdaugh was sentenced to for stealing from his clients and his law firm.
The case has already spawned -on Dateline, 48 Hours, Discovery+, and Netflix, among others.
This was, of course, only the latest “Trial of the Century” to capture the public’s . Precedents include the OJ Simpson and Phil Spector trials, with earlier examples stretching back a century or more. But the way we talk about crime and punishment has shifted over the years.
“I do think that today there is a kind of re-evaluation of true crime as a story,” says , a clinical professor in Liberal Studies whose book, traces the origins of this American obsession back to the 1920s. “Whereas in the past followers of a case were fascinated by the killer and the motivations of the killer, or perhaps the particulars of the crime scene itself, I think increasingly there’s a thread of true crime now that’s looking more at questions about the criminal justice system and trying to reopen cases in which there may have been a wrongful conviction.”
Polchin’s latest work, , is set in the post-World War I period when social tensions simmered around class privilege, criminality, and the growing power of the mass media. The book examines the 1922 Westchester County killing of Clarence Peters, a working-class former sailor, by Walter Ward, the scion of a family that owned a chain of bread factories in the US and who claimed he acted in self-defense against a violent gang of “shadow men.”
The case drew international attention, with even Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle weighing in.
He “told reporters the police should enlist the help of a psychic to uncover the truth of the case, and added it would be an ‘ideal Sherlock mystery,’ ” Polchin writes. “And the New York press agreed, turning the murder into a sensational detective story.”
NYU News spoke with Polchin about how the Ward-Peters case was emblematic of its time, and why the story still resonates today.
The Jazz Age, which brings to mind Josephine Baker (above), Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway, is often romanticized through literature and film. What parts of the period does popular culture tend to overlook?
It’s true that we have this glamorized image of the 1920s-the speakeasies and parties in The Great Gatsby image. And of course a lot of that is true. But it was also a very repressive time. You have a and some of the worst at factories and mines and, in 1920, that killed more than 30 people and injured over 140. This propelled the federal government into a pretty extensive crackdown on civil liberties and on different organizations-socialist and communist organizations-in this country, including some women’s rights organizations. You had a crackdown on queer venues, and a more concentrated effort to police queer people in public. One of the first Gay Rights organizations in the US-the Society for Human Rights-started in Chicago in 1924 by a man named Henry Gerber, lasted only a year, as police raided the organization and arrested Gerber under the Comstock Act.
This was the period when the was founded out of a group of different organizations forming a single organization to fight for civil liberties in this country. There was also a big push of nativism in the country, which culminated in 1924 with the , severely limiting immigration from eastern and southern Europe, as well as basically ending any immigration from Asia. And of course you had Prohibition itself, which was a very coordinated effort between states and the federal government to regulate alcohol, especially in New York State.
How did the changes that came about during the Progressive Era-just prior to the period that you write about-shape the 1920s and the Ward-Peters case in particular?
I think we sometimes forget about the Progressive Era, which really established the government’s role in regulating businesses. This is an era when we get labor laws and workplace safety laws. It’s when we get the Food and Drug Administration, with the federal government beginning to investigate the purity of foods that Americans were consuming.
Ward Bakery Advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 8, 1911.
The Ward family had one of the largest bakeries in the country. They made their fortune industrializing bread making in factories from Chicago to Boston and down to Philadelphia. And they were constantly fighting some of these governmental regulations around their product. There were many additives to industrialized bread that were very suspicious at the time-chemicals that were used to create a whitening effect.
One of the big elements of the Progressive Era as it related to the Ward-Peters case was New York Governor , who won election in 1922, defeating incumbent Nathan Miller. He had this iconic quality to him. He was from a working-class family and born in the Lower East Side. He worked his way through the Tammany political machine of New York City and got elected to the New York State Assembly.
In 1911, Smith was appointed as a co-commissioner on what was called the -a commission that was a result of the tragedy of the in Greenwich Village that killed nearly 150 workers. He was co-chair, along with a state senator and a future US senator, . The director of that commission was , who would go on to become FDR’s secretary of labor-the first female cabinet secretary. These three people were really committed to the Progressive Era idea that it was the government’s role to make sure workplace safety was a priority for businesses.
When Al Smith became governor, the Ward-Peters case was just getting dismissed at the local county level and, in fact, Peters’s mother met the governor to plead her case to have the governor reopen the investigation, which he did, and to find some justice for her son. So, it was through that education of the Progressive Era that Smith really saw a role for the government to make people’s lives better.
The New York Daily News launched in 1919-just a few years before the murder. How was its coverage different from that of local competitors?
The New York Daily News is seen, and rightfully so, as the first real tabloid in the US. It was started by Joe Patterson, who came from a wealthy, well-established Chicago family. His grandfather was one of the founders of the Chicago Tribune. So Joe Patterson grew up in wealth, but he really rejected that world in many respects, and he considered himself a socialist, which I think drove his family crazy. Eventually, he comes up with this idea for a tabloid modeled on the London tabloids that he became familiar with when he served in World War I. So, with a loan from the Tribune, he launches the New York Daily News in 1919. He really sees this newspaper as a working man’s newspaper. He focuses on photographs, on big headlines, short stories-and not a lot of writing. The broadsheets were text heavy, but he wanted this to be much more of an eye-catching kind of newspaper-the kind of tabloid that we recognize today.
Front page of the New York Daily News after Ward’s confession, with photo diagram of shooting (Daily News, May 23, 1922).
The other newspapers left the case behind once the initial charges against Walter Ward were dropped in January of 1923. But that actually propelled Patterson and the Daily News to turn it into their own crusade to bring justice to the Peters family. They would have this question on the editorial page for several months, and it read: “Can a rich man kill a poor man in New York and not be tried for it?” So the Daily News found in this case something to promote that aligned with its own ideology-about the power of the wealthy and the disempowered working class.
Patterson was also a very savvy businessman. He saw in this case both something that aligned with his ideas, but he also saw it really useful in promoting circulation. These kinds of cases boosted the Daily News’s circulation, and it was very quickly competing against the New York Times and the New York Herald, becoming one of the most important voices in New York in a very short time.
You write that these true crimes are echoed in The Great Gatsby, which F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing in the summer of 1922. Peters’s murder was receiving significant attention from the New York press at the time. Is there evidence that Fitzgerald drew from the Ward-Peters case for his novel?
We have very little evidence from Fitzgerald in terms of the Ward case having any influence on that novel. He didn’t keep journals about the writing process, other than some letters between him and the editor, so it is speculation.
In fact, one of the more famous cases of 1922 happened just a few months after Clarence Peters was murdered. This was the , in which the bodies of a New Jersey reverend and a member of his choir were found shot to death in a field that September. That case became a sensation because there was a big mystery about how they were killed. There were different theories around this case, and to this day there’s no real answer to what happened to those two people. That’s often looked at as a big inspiration for Fitzgerald as he moved his family in the fall of 1922 to Long Island and was working on the beginnings of The Great Gatsby.
Much of the Ward-Peters case has been lost to history, but I do think that there are so many elements in it that Fitzgerald would have been reading because it was being reported on alongside the Hall-Mills murder by the fall of 1922 and into 1923.
It would have been very hard for Fitzgerald, who loved to read the newspapers, to miss this case. And so I wouldn’t say this case really informed The Great Gatsby, but there are so many elements that resonate in the book.
In Shadow Men I write about my feeling that Tom and Daisy Buchanan are kind of images of Walter Ward and his wife, Beryl-these young, pretty celebrities, which is what they become in the press through this crime. And they are also without any moral center. In all my research for this book, I found very few people who seemed to have any moral center.
Which aspects of the Ward-Peters case feel tied to the specific moment of the 1920s, and which remind you of something that could’ve happened today? Would Ward be treated the same way now?
The investigation of this crime was very rudimentary. There weren’t the resources to really investigate the crime scene. Even the Westchester County coroner was an appointed position at that time, and you didn’t need to be a doctor. You just appointed someone who is loyal to the political machine for that role. And the coroner for this case was not a doctor. The law changed in 1923 and the position then required a medical degree and had a new title: medical examiner. And so the coroner for the Ward-Peters case was forever known as the last coroner of Westchester County.
Westchester County Court House, White Plains, N.Y. , ca. 1917. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
What felt really familiar to me in terms of a contemporary parallel was in the coverage of this case. The one question that kept coming up throughout the press was: Is Ward above the law? He was able to avoid a trial in 1922 and he was able to have the charges dismissed, though he would eventually sit in front of a jury. But the editorials of the 1920s around this case were very focused on “No one is above the law, and Ward needs to stand trial.”
This moment of the 1920s feels like it set in place a kind of modern American culture, from the tabloids to questions about what constitutes justice here. This case raised questions that we keep asking and debating today.
