Reading Helen Jewett’s Murder: The Historiographical Problems and Promises of Journalism

Abstract

Historians’ frequent use of a nineteenth-century murder case as a pivotal moment in histories of American journalism and sexuality reveals historiographical complications arising from the co-constitution of journalism and history. The journalistic constitution of the “facts” of this story—and any news story—can be viewed as both shaping and reflecting contemporary understandings of the case. Analyzing the ways in which historians use and contextualize the journalism surrounding the murder complicates many received notions of journalism history, regarding such issues as objectivity and sensationalism. By reading journalism texts as evidence of professional, political, and socioeconomic practices, critical historians can better elaborate the social and cultural construction of many historical subjects, focusing less on what happened and more on how sense was made of what happened.

Notes

1 James Gordon Bennett, “The Recent Tragedy,” New York Herald, April 11, 1836.

2 Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-century New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

3 Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

4 Sara L. Knox, Murder: A Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

5 William E. Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation: Two Major Crime Stories in Antebellum New York,” in Sensationalism: Murder, Mayhem, Mudslinging, Scandals, and Disasters in 19th-Century Reporting, edited by David B. Sachsman and David W. Bulla (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2013).

6 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett.

7 Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

8 Kelly Dennis, “The Hegelian Implications of the Museum of Sex; or, Does Mosex Mean No Sex?” Art Journal 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 8–23.

9 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A Show of Wax-figures,” in True Crime: An American Anthology, edited by Harold Schechter (New York: Library of America, 2008, 69–71). Originally written in 1838.

10 Hanna Herzog, Smadar Sharon, and Ina Leykin, “Racism and the Politics of Signification: Israeli Public Discourse on Racism towards Palestinian Citizens,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 6 (September 2008): 1091–1109.

11 The terms journalism, journalist, reporting, and journalism institutions are used for clarity, even though these terms were not used precisely in this way during the period under consideration. Journalism and reporting can refer to the act of producing news, or to the texts that constitute the news. A journalist is one who produces such news. Journalism institutions include the publications that produce news. Journalism is also viewed, here, as a cultural institution, the norms of which were fluid and still nascent in this period.

12 Barbie Zelizer, “When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-terms: On Journalism’s Uneasy Place in Cultural Studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2004): 103.

13 Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media, edited by Gail Dines and Jean McMahon Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995), 90–91. Originally written in 1981.

14 Carolyn Kitch, “Making Things Matter: The Material Value of Old Media,” American Journalism 32, no. 3 (July 2015): 355. Emphasis added.

15 Zelizer, “When Facts,” 103.

16 E.g., Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Macmillan, 1978); James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); John Hartley and Martin Montgomery, “Representations and Relations: Ideology and Power in Press and TV News,” in Discourse and Communication: New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media Discourse and Communication, edited by Teun Adrianus van Dijk (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 233–269.

17 John Nerone, “History, Journalism, and the Problem of Truth,” in Assessing Evidence in a Postmodern World, edited by Bonnie Brennen (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2013), 11.

18 Ibid., 12. Emphasis added.

19 Michael Schudson, “The Sociology of News Production,” Media, Culture, & Society 11, no. 3 (July 1989): 263–282.

20 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

21 Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding, edited by Brain Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 123.

22 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), xii. For more on Mink and White, see Samuel James, “Louis Mink, ‘Postmodernism,’ and the Vocation of Historiography.” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 1 (2010): 151–184.

23 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

24 Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation,” 201.

25 Ibid., 203.

26 The journalistic text, then, plays a key role in determining, in Hayden White’s terms, the “complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition” on which historical narratives are built. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse, 88.

27 Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide extensive historical context about the penny press era outside of the Jewett–Robinson reporting, the essay elaborates how each historian in this study’s sample addresses that context. Michael Schudson’s Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978) provides a fuller account of this era in American journalism history.

28 John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 43.

29 Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 10–11.

30 Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 96.

31 Ibid., 96.

32 Cultural studies scholars address this epistemological conundrum, often seeing journalists as both “the producers…and re/producers of public discourse.” For those scholars who interrogate the transformational nature of journalism, this is less of a methodological dilemma than for those who try to reconstruct a broader social or historical reality. Herzog, Sharon, and Leykin, “Racism and the Politics of Signification,” 1093.

33 Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press, 43.

34 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 28–29.

35 Ibid., 22.

36 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “Comment: Generational Turns,” American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (June 2012): 808.

37 Brian Creech, “A Poststructuralist Approach to Theory and History: Toward a Genealogical Understanding of Media Texts and Artifacts,” American Journalism 30, no. 2 (June 2013): 273–274. For historians of more recent eras, this may mean the pages of “Editor and Publisher, the Columbia Journalism Review, Ad Age, and Variety,” as Creech suggests, but for earlier periods the printed reporting itself may need to stand in as evidence for not only journalistic practice but also the sense-making schemes of the journalists and editors conducting that practice.

38 Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation,” 203.

39 See Nils Gunnar Nilsson, “The Origin of the Interview,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1971): 707–713.

40 Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press, 48.

41 Mitchell Stephens, A History of News: From the Drum to the Satellite (New York: Viking, 1988), 247.

42 Andie Tucher, Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 35. By giving more attention to Bennett’s biography than many other historians of this case, Tucher argues that Bennett’s relatively low social standing may have been the source of his willingness to contradict the more staid reporting norms of the partisan press era.

43 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett.

44 Tucher, Froth & Scum, 26.

45 Importantly, Tucher addresses this question with an understanding that the commercial nature of the penny press influenced the practical decisions of editors in their quest for the related ends of legitimacy and profit.

46 Tucher, Froth & Scum, 33.

47 Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press, 47.

48 Creech, “A Poststructuralist Approach,” 274.

49 Matt Carlson, “Metajournalistic Discourse and the Meanings of Journalism: Definitional Control, Boundary Work, and Legitimation,” Communication Theory 26, no. 4 (November 2015): 2.

50 Tucher, Froth & Scum; Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

51 Edwin Emery and Michael Emery, The Press and America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978).

52 Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 58.

53 Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-bats in Nineteenth-century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

54 Tucher, Froth & Scum, 2.

55 Tucher further contextualizes the moon hoax and the Jewett–Robinson sensation among the cultural rituals of the “bunkum” of the era, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s playfulness with fact and fiction and P. T. Barnum’s commercialization of the con. She asks, “If the penny press of the 1830s was not presenting objective facts…then what on earth was it doing? What was its purpose? Was all its talk about ‘effecting the march of intelligence’ and ‘editors on public duty’ sheer bunkum? That judgment does not at first sound too far wrong.” Tucher, Froth & Scum, 46.

56 E.g., Carey, Communication as Culture, 1989; Robert E. Park, “Reflections on Communication and Culture,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 2 (September 1938): 187–205; Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

57 See, for example, Robert McChesney, The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008); Victor W. Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

58 For example, Emery and Emery, The Press and America.

59 Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press.

60 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett.

61 David Anthony, “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 69, no. 3 (September 1997): 487–514.

62 Tucher, Froth & Scum.

63 Frank Michael O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York: 1833–1928 (New York: D. Appleton, 1928); Gerald J. Baldasty, “The Nineteenth-century Origins of Modern American Journalism,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 100, no. 2 (January 1991): 407–419.

64 Schiller, Objectivity and the News, 67.

65 Ibid., 66–67. These institutional commitments, Schiller finds, rely on an understanding of crime reporting as an important act of revealing how Paineian individual rights may be compromised by violence and injustice, thereby justifying Bennett’s focus on the murder and the ensuing trial.

66 Ibid., 66.

67 Ibid., 65.

68 Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation,” 205–206.

69 Huntzicker, in particular, provides ample context for understanding commercial journalism during this period in his The Popular Press, 1833–1865. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

70 Tucher, Froth & Scum, 75.

71 However, more contemporary journalists have been resistant to the idea that institutional, political, or economic forces help determine the way they produce stories. For more on this, see Brian McNair, The Sociology of Journalism (London: Arnold, 1998).

72 Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation,” 207.

73 In many histories, much of the social context of Robinson’s trial is sourced from either the contemporary press or the diaries of Philip Hone, a former mayor of the city.

74 See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).

75 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 112.

76 Huntzicker, “Sex, Sin, and Sensation,” 204.

77 The interplay between the courts and the press here might deserve its own essay. The Jewett–Robinson trial might also be one of the first cases where this interaction is so important and constitutive of both the judicial verdict and the historical interpretation. Media influence on courts remains a contentious aspect of journalism to this day.

78 Schiller derives his interpretation of these sermons from Ronald A. Bosco, “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon,” American Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 156–176.

79 Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 26.

80 Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 17.

81 Ibid., 15.

82 Prominent examples include Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Tim P. Vos and Teri Finneman, “The Early Historical Construction of Journalism’s Gatekeeping Role,” Journalism 18, no. 3 (2017): 265–280.