Читать книгу WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME - Lise Pearlman - Страница 8

This book looks back at riveting early 20th century criminal “trials of the century” as a cultural backdrop for divisive issues we face as a nation today. What can we learn from these trials? Plenty. We start with a remarkable speech two years ago by a public servant then basking in bipartisan praise. In February 2015, former FBI Director James Comey was not the center of controversy that he became just a year and a half later. That month, it was racial prejudice, not his conclusions about the use of Hillary Clinton’s email server or the tumult surrounding his dismissal by President Donald Trump that loomed large in Comey’s mind. Then only in his second year as head of our nation’s chief law enforcement agency, the former Deputy Attorney General eagerly accepted an invitation from Georgetown University to speak on Lincoln’s birthday about the highly-charged topic of race bias.

Georgetown’s early history included profiting from the slave trade (for which it has recently issued a formal apology). Yet less than a decade after the Civil War, Georgetown embraced emancipation by appointing the nation’s first African-American university president, the son of a former slave. When Comey took the podium on Lincoln’s birthday in February 2015, the new FBI head took the opportunity to confess his own agency’s past sins. He candidly admitted what no one in his position had ever owned up to – an ugly truth about the office long identified with J. Edgar Hoover. Comey conceded the historic bias of both his agency and state and local police: “All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo . . . that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” The FBI director’s remarks were particularly forceful because Comey had served as U.S. Attorney and later Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush, years before Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, named him to head the FBI. So it was a transcendent moment when Comey chose this special platform during Black History month to invite all Americans to reexamine our “cultural inheritance” with fresh eyes.¹

The next day a federal judge in Mississippi provided a stunning example of the changing times when he sentenced three young white men for a spate of hate crimes committed in 2011. Just the year before those crimes, Judge Carlton Reeves was sworn in as only the second African-American federal trial judge ever appointed in a state with a population historically more than one-third black. Explaining the lengthy sentences he imposed, Judge Reeves detailed in graphic terms how the white defendants appearing before him gleefully recruited others to join them in “a 2011 version of the nigger hunts” that, in the decades from the 1880s to the 1960s, resulted in the deaths of over 4700 blacks – a figure that includes “legal lynchings” (patently unfair speedy trials followed by too hasty executions) as well as torture killings and hangings at the hands of mobs.

Judge Reeves observed that in Mississippi’s past, even if a grand jury were convened to investigate a lynching by white supremacists, and even in cases where they openly carried out the murders, the official inquiry would likely be dropped with the notation “died at the hands of persons unknown.” He concluded: “The legal and criminal justice system operated with ruthless efficiency in upholding what these defendants would call White Power . . . Today . . . black and white, male and female . . . work together to advance the rule of law [for a] criminal justice system [which] must operate without regard to race, creed or color.”²

Before deciding on the appropriate prison sentences for the young men in his courtroom, Justice Reeves considered letters submitted by family and friends to show the youths’ general good character apart from the horrific crime they had committed. He then posed this question: “How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers?”³ But it was not just God-fearing White Southerners who tried to justify their inhumane conduct towards their fellow man, nor solely African-Americans who were victims of domestic terrorists. As FBI Director Comey pointed out in his 2015 speech, his own Irish-American ancestors also faced mistreatment at the hands of the criminal justice system. Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Italian and German immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and islanders in American territories often endured appalling abuse.

Historically, Catholics and Jews were also among those often shunned, stigmatized and oppressed. Sometimes the stigma stemmed from political activity such as that of militant union organizers and strikers, anarchists and other radicals. Both sides might engage in lawless behavior only to wind up in court where company owners, captains of industry and government officials could usually count on the prosecutors and judges they put in office to ignore their own misconduct while meting out harsh sentences to opponents labeled subversive.

In many instances, publishing giant William Randolph Hearst played a pivotal role – creating or feeding a public appetite for scandalous headlines with little or no regard for the truth or for the lives at stake. One telling example was how Hearst helped ruin the career of silent movie megastar Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, of “Keystone Kops” fame. By the 1920s, the Hearst newspapers boasted a circulation of twenty million people in eighteen cities – almost a fifth of the country’s total population. In the first year of Prohibition the obese comedian signed an unprecedented million-dollar contract which he celebrated over Labor Day 1921 with friends at a three-day drinking party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A young actress named Virginia Rappe attended the party, fell violently ill and died a few days later. An ambitious prosecutor pursued false but headline-grabbing charges that Arbuckle had raped Virginia Rappe and ruptured her bladder.

Hearst papers made Arbuckle the face of Hollywood’s loose morals that appalled so many conservative church-goers. (At the time, rumors were rampant that Hearst himself, a married father of five, was keeping Hollywood leading lady Marion Davies as his own mistress.) Arbuckle endured three sensationalized trials before being acquitted. The truth was that Virginia Rappe was already feeling poorly when she arrived at the party and never accused Arbuckle of any untoward conduct, and the doctors who examined her concluded she died of natural causes.⁴ The third jury met just long enough to pen a rare written apology for the great injustice done in besmirching Arbuckle’s name without “the slightest proof . . . to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.”⁵

Source: File: Roscoe Arbuckle Trial - 1921.jpg from Wikimedia Commons

On Sept. 17, 1921, Hearst-owned papers trumpeted the Hollywood star’s likely execution.

Starkly different headlines before the first criminal trial of Hollywood megastar Fatty Arbuckle in September 1921 and after the third trial in March 1922. Arbuckle never actually faced the death penalty. The charge was manslaughter, for which he was ultimately exonerated.

Source: http://www.chcemywiedziec.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Roscoe-Arbuckle-Exonerated-Creative-Commons-CC-SA1.jpg

April 18, 1922, news bulletin after a third trial ended in acquittal and an apology from the jury. Six days later, new movie czar Will Hays banned Arbuckle from appearing in any films. Publisher William Randolph Hearst boasted that he sold more papers by his lurid coverage of the Arbuckle trials than the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915 that helped prompt the United States to join World War I.

Source: Wikipedia Keystone Kops file

The Keystone Kops

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle stands furthest right as a star member of the Keystone Kops – a silent slapstick comedy series popular in movie theaters from 1912 into the 1920s. Arbuckle joined the cast in 1913.

Source: Wikipedia Brewster’s Millions file

Arbuckle starred in “Brewster’s Millions” in 1921, a year after he signed his record-setting million-dollar contract with Paramount Pictures (roughly $17 million today).

Source: Wikipedia Roscoe Arbuckle file

what Arbuckle’s San Francisco hotel suite looked like after a 3-day binge over Labor Day weekend 1921 (shortly after Prohibition took effect). Among the party’s attendees was an out-of-work actress in poor health named Virginia Rappe, who died just days later, triggering the headline trial that ruined Arbuckle’s career.

While the trials against Arbuckle remained pending, Hearst’s sensationalized coverage of the rape and manslaughter prosecutions fanned the church-going public’s animosity toward Hollywood’s corrupt morals. Local boards of censors across the country had already created headaches for Hollywood moguls; their distributors sometimes had to edit films heavily for showing in culturally conservative venues or see them banned outright. The studio heads responded to the mounting pressure by opting for self-censorship. They formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and paid President Harding’s former campaign manager, Postmaster General Will Hays, a hefty salary to leave the administration to head the new organization.

Within a week of Arbuckle’s acquittal, Hays barred the Hollywood star permanently from the movies. The dramatic action mirrored that of baseball’s new czar the summer before – banning eight White Sox players for life for fixing the 1919 World Series (see Chapter 6). Just as Shoeless Joe Jackson became the scapegoat for vice-ridden professional baseball, Arbuckle stood in for the sins of Hollywood. Perhaps not coincidentally Hays took that bold action just days after The Wall Street Journal broke the Teapot Dome bribery scandal in which Hays later turned out to be a key figure, secretly taking oil company contributions to pay off campaign debts when chair of the Republican Party.

After making an example of the industry’s biggest star, Hays later blacklisted nearly two hundred other actors and imposed a new morality code by which Hollywood endeavored to censor its public image for decades. Among the “Working Principles” of The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, it specified that “no picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”⁶ The voluntary code expressly prohibited a film from ridiculing or belittling natural or divine law in any way or creating sympathy for violators. Instead, filmmakers were urged to “stress proper behavior, respect for government and ‘Christian values’.”⁷ (Today, its successor organization is in charge of film ratings).

Unrepentant at his role in ruining Arbuckle’s livelihood, Hearst boasted that his coverage of the three unwarranted trials “sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the Lusitania”⁸ – the British ocean liner torpedoed by Germans off the Irish coast in May 1915. (The nearly 1200 casualties of that act of war included 198 Americans. The sinking of the Lusitania helped convince the United States to join World War I on the side of the British and French.)

Once in a while, over-reaching tactics backfired by prompting heroic responses that helped precipitate major reforms. As explored in the chapters that follow, a few courageous policemen, prosecutors, judges and other elected officials in these early decades of the 20th century stood out for their adherence to constitutional ideals despite strong pressure to do otherwise. Some paid a high price. Alabama Sheriff Matt Wann was murdered in May 1932, reportedly while attempting to make a late-night house arrest of a husband for failure to pay support. The sheriff had been accompanied by three deputies, but, somehow, the shooter fled and was never prosecuted. Rumors began spreading shortly after the sheriff’s death that it was a KKK hit job in collusion with his deputies in retaliation for Wann’s successful efforts the preceding year to prevent a lynch mob from stringing up prisoners in his custody – the Scottsboro Boys. At the time of Sheriff Wann’s death, eight of the defendants remained on death row awaiting Supreme Court review of their group trial. Back when the nine had originally been arrested on rape charges, Sheriff Wann had provoked the Klan’s ire by threatening to kill anyone who interfered with his prisoners and calling in the National Guard to protect them. Had the Scottsboro Boys never stood trial – like so many victims of vigilante “justice” before them – there would have been no record for the Supreme Court to review to issue two landmark rulings establishing basic, now widely accepted, procedural rights for criminal defendants.

In light of recently revived interest in the Scottsboro Boys case, a blogger detailed the suspicious circumstances surrounding the murder of Sheriff Wann and concluded that county records did not support the official story. He pressed for the murder to be reinvestigated, urging that “the truth must be revealed for justice to occur.”⁹ That assumption reflects the premise of this book as well. Getting at the truth in all the cases in this book includes evaluation of key details sometimes revealed long after the trials ended. We also benefit from the passage of time allowing us to assess the societal factors at play more clearly. Many cases where the system fell woefully short of justice have belatedly been reinvestigated. One such case involved a handyman named Ed Johnson, the victim of a kangaroo trial for rape, who was lynched while seeking to establish the right to federal review of state criminal trials for fairness (see Chapter 4). Ten years of research at the end of the 20th century by lawyer Leroy Phillips, Jr., and investigative reporter Mark Curriden convinced a Tennessee judge to conduct a posthumous retrial and clear Johnson’s name. Their efforts spawned, just last year, an eponymous memorial project in Chattanooga aimed at promoting racial harmony.

Reviewing other early 20th century cases, we also see examples of men whose principled insistence on affording disadvantaged defendants their rights ultimately helped them achieve high office. Two such heroes profiled in this book – Judge Frank Murphy of Detroit (see Chapter 10 on the 1925–26 Sweet trials) and police officer John Burns of Oahu (see Chapter 12 on the 1932–33 Massie trials) – deserve enormous credit for helping institute major policy changes toward a more inclusive and just society.

By revisiting several high-stakes criminal trials of the early 20th century we can gain a better understanding of the extent to which cultural bias has permeated the fabric of our culture – and a better premise from which to move forward as a nation than the whitewashed history so many of us were taught in school. In One Man’s Freedom, Washington super lawyer Edward Bennett Williams described how the individual civil liberties we so cherish in the United States evolved in our criminal courtrooms, where the government often prosecutes “the weak and friendless, the scorned and degraded, or the nonconformist and the unorthodox.”¹⁰ Cases guaranteeing civil liberties emerged because so many innocents were wrongly convicted without such protections and too often paid with their lives. Mark Curriden, who co-authored an acclaimed book on the Ed Johnson case and its impact on state criminal defendants’ constitutional rights, restates Williams’ observation more graphically: “the liberties and prerogatives we so frequently take for granted were written in blood.”¹¹

The lack of concern for minority defendants’ rights that characterized the swift rush to judgment in so many early century trials contrasted dramatically with the handling of the most widely watched trial of the late 20th century – that of African-American football legend O. J. Simpson. When the professional athlete turned actor was charged with the stabbing deaths of Simpson’s blonde ex-wife and her Caucasian friend Ronald Goldman, Simpson had the luxury to afford a Dream Team of lawyers to defend him.

An estimated 100 million people followed some part of the marathon reality soap opera that prompted nightly analysis on the television news by legal experts hired to explain the intricacies of constitutional law and criminal procedure. Before a riveted audience of viewers around the world, Simpson’s lawyers claimed that their client was framed by the Los Angeles Police Department with evidence that clearly would have condemned to death a defendant lacking Simpson’s celebrity status and resources. When the long-awaited verdict was announced, Simpson was acquitted by the jury of ten women and two men, nine of whom were black. All viewers had the opportunity to be exposed to the same testimony, evidence and legal arguments. Yet posttrial polls revealed that more whites disagreed with the verdict exonerating Simpson than accepted it, while the vast majority of African-Americans interviewed shortly after the verdict issued endorsed his acquittal.¹² Today, looking back, more than half of the nation’s African-Americans believe Simpson was in fact guilty of murder.¹³

In Lessons From the Trial: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Dream Team member Prof. Gerald Uelmen noted that “The most remarkable aspect of every ‘trial of the century’ . . . has been the insight it provides into the tenor of the times in which it occurred. It is as though each of these trials was responding to some public appetite or civic need of the era in which it took place.”¹⁴ Decades, sometimes even a century, later investigative journalists and historians have unearthed far more evidence of what really happened in the events that made banner headlines in the early 20th century.

Back then, segregation of African-Americans was reinforced by rule of law. Other disfavored minorities often received similar treatment to the descendants of slaves. Police, prosecutors and judges were almost all white men, who also largely monopolized panels of a “jury of one’s peers.” Poor men of color accused of rape and murder were often executed with little regard for fair process – with or without a trial. Yet rapists and murderers with money might walk free, never so much as arrested. Even if prosecuted, the wealthy and privileged sometimes obtained startlingly lenient punishment – as Clarence Darrow engineered for four clients in Honolulu in 1933, three of whom were caught about to dump the body of their victim in the ocean, the fourth arrested while cleaning up the site of the killing.

Politics and power routinely trumped the requirements of due process. Details that were overlooked, underreported or purposely distorted in times past can now be placed in the more balanced perspective that FBI Director James Comey suggested. Just after the November 2016 election, documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson made an observation similar to Comey’s. As the acclaimed African-American director received a lifetime achievement award, he observed that the biggest reason for the bitter divide we see today is because “we have failed to tell the whole American story . . . creat[ing] a fear and a longing for a past that never existed.”¹⁵ So here, in this book, is a baker’s dozen of the most famous headliners of the early 20th century for us to reexamine in the rearview mirror – trials involving charges of murder, rape, kidnapping, class warfare, fraud on the public, evolution versus Creationism, and abuse of power.

At the same time as prosecutors in these famous trials claimed to take the moral high ground, lynching remained tacitly condoned by the federal government. State legislatures monopolized by white men authorized involuntary sterilization of thousands of the poor, minorities and other groups presumed to have inferior genes. Politicians also incited their constituents to scorn “hyphenated-Americans.” Today, despite our nation of immigrants’ history as a melting pot, some politicians still gain traction fanning contempt for “the other.” Hate crimes are again on the rise. In 2009, then FBI Director Robert Mueller and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano informed a Senate committee that they remained as concerned about “homegrown” terrorists as those from overseas.¹⁶

In 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that a “dramatic resurgence” of hate groups dated from President Obama’s 2008 election.¹⁷ In its spring 2017 report it sounded even greater alarm at a “wave of hate crimes and other bias-related incidents that swept the country” following the 2016 election. The SPLC report attributed the dramatic increase in hate crimes to inclusion of white nationalists in setting the White House agenda by advisors apparently “set on rolling back decades of progress.” That objective was no secret. Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke boasted in writing that “our people played a HUGE role in electing Trump!” [emphasis in original].¹⁸

Millions of Trump voters disagree with the objectives of the KKK and disavow racism. Many who voted for Hillary Clinton or other candidates harbor their own prejudices, whether conscious of them or not. There are also underlying truths to the dissatisfaction felt by large numbers of Trump supporters that Democrats failed to address sufficiently: American labor has been displaced (though more often by technological advances than by foreign workers) and white Americans are often worse off than their parents, including noticeably shorter life spans than in the past (due in part to record levels of addiction to pain killers). What has gone largely unremarked upon by the mainstream media until recently is an observation made by financial analyst Jeff Guo in the Washington Post in early April 2017: “Black Americans have long been dying faster than white Americans. They’ve long been less happy than white Americans. Now, though, the two groups are starting to look more and more alike. Particularly among those on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, class has become equally – if not more important – than race as a predictor of people’s health and emotional well-being.”¹⁹

Why is that so many people emphasize their differences rather than their shared experiences? Americans as a whole have absorbed a skewed cultural legacy. This book is meant to promote dialogue between those with nostalgia for the good old days of white Protestant supremacy and those who view those days less fondly or have only hazy ideas about what America was like in past generations.

Many who pine for the time when they believed America was greater than now apparently mean the 1950s and early 1960s – when white men still held near monopoly power in government and industry. Those who view that era with fondness recall it as a time when the middle class was developing with greater opportunities than their parents – the product of heavy federal investment improving the lives of average Americans with historic educational opportunities through the G.I. Bill, suburban housing developments and massive investment in interstate highways. For others, the 1950s were a time of suppression and fear, including political witch hunts, persecution of gays, back alley abortions, impenetrable glass ceilings, and brazen lynching in the South. As the new TV sitcom “Leave It to Beaver” enchanted viewers across the country with the wholesome values of white suburbia, widespread publication of gruesome photos of the mutilated corpse of fourteen-year-old Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, had already launched the Civil Rights Era.

The socioeconomic gains for the average American in the 1950s were only made possible by dramatic gains in two prior eras of the 20th century. That earlier history is particularly relevant now. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in his 2013 book, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divide Endangers Our Future, compared the record-setting disparity between the richest one percent and the overwhelming majority of Americans in the first years of the 21st century to both the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the Roaring Twenties. “In both of these instances, the country pulled back from the brink. Our democratic processes worked. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, which curbed monopoly power. The Roaring Twenties was followed by the important social and economic legislation of the New Deal, which strengthened the rights of workers, provided greater social protection for all Americans, and introduced Social Security, which almost completely eliminated poverty among the elderly.”²⁰

Both eras of reform were triggered by widespread revulsion at the misery endured by so many have-nots as the wealthy few wielded increased power and privilege. Yet throughout these early eras, those with inordinate clout masked their almost insatiable greed and undue influence with misdirected blame against racial and religious minorities, workers striking for decent pay and living conditions, the influx of immigrant labor, and Americans with unorthodox political views. While often living dissolute, amoral lives themselves, key players wrapped themselves in piety and patriotism, making scapegoats to draw the ire of those in the white majority who felt threatened by changing times and expanded rights for women and minorities.

Professor Stiglitz sees the nation today at a perilous crossroads with a crying need for bipartisan action. “Traditionally, persons in both parties have understood that a nation divided cannot stand – and the divisions today are greater than they have been in generations, threatening basic values, including our conception of ourselves as a land of opportunity. Will we once again pull back from the brink?”²¹

It might help all of us who wish to address that question to look back at America as the Gilded Age grudgingly gave way to the Progressive Era and, two decades later, as the Roaring Twenties laid the groundwork for the New Deal: when the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in the 20th century, unions gained clout, women got the vote and major reforms were enacted. And what better window into society at those pivotal times than to have ringside seats at headline trials that riveted Americans and shaped their reactions? Before television and the Internet, folks got their news from traveling lecturers, newspapers and radio programs wielding similar power to influence and manipulate public opinion. Taking this journey back in time with fresh eyes, perhaps we can achieve far greater insight into the tenor of American society in those earlier decades, how far we have come in this democratic republic founded by immigrants, and how far we still have to go to achieve “one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” Progress has never been linear.