Cable address: LENIENT

[bloodygranuaile]

 Despite how much it hurt me to not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, I was disciplined and did not go to the latest Harvard Book Store warehouse sale, partly because I am moving and have so many books to pack up and possibly get rid of, but also partly because I have an absolute shitton of books acquired at previous warehouse sales that I have not yet read. Most of them are history books but I do have a book of T.S. Eliot's cat poems (it is the one illustrated by Edward Gorey, because I am extremely on-brand). 

 

One of these books, which I picked up like three years ago, is Cait Murphy's Scoundrels in Law: The Trials of Howe & Hummel, Lawyers to the Gangsters, Cops, Starlets, and Rakes Who Made the Gilded Age. I had never heard of Howe & Hummel before I spotted this book in the warehouse, but the lengthy subtitle indicated strongly that this was likely to be something extremely Up My Alley. 

 

Turns out: It was! Howe and Hummel were exactly the sort of wacky, corrupt mob-lawyer type weirdos that make reading about the Gilded Age so fun. They defended on cases that were ahead of their time on issues like free speech and obscenity; they also covered for a lot of absolute garbage fire humans doing garbage fire things. They knew everybody. They had all kinds of organized and disorganized crime ties. They ripped off their clients shamefully, except for the rich ones, whom they ripped off shamelessly, because the Gilded Age rich sucked and I don't feel bad for them. 

 

One of the best parts of the book was the coverage of the anarchist trials. Howe & Hummel defended numerous anarchists, generally quite skillfully on political freedom grounds, drawing upon the jury's self-images as patriotic Americans who should defend their fellow Americans' right to have odd and possibly misguided political ideas. They got no help from their clients on this, who apparently could not be arsed to keep a lid on their insurrectionary leanings even for the duration of one cross-questioning while on trial for inciting riots that they didn't even incite. Hummel & Howe ended up defending self- and explosives-obsessed gasbag Johann Most, father of the "propaganda of the deed" (i.e., blowing stuff up and calling it theory) when he got hauled in on incitement to violence charges for like the one speech he gave in his life that actually wasn't  about how great blowing stuff up is. (There are many anarchist theorists that I have respect for even though I am not personally an anarchist; Johann Most is emphatically not one of them.)

 

The other best parts of the book are obviously the chapter on theater scandals, complete with burly cops attempting to "demonstrate" belly-dancing in court, and the chapter on gangs, including the most legendarily successful fence I'd never heard of, Marm Mandelbaum. I need an overproduced Netflix or Showtime show about Marm Mandelbaum's life and career, yesterday.

 

The worst part of the book was the bit where Murphy talks about the Pinkertons in relation to their doing private-eyeing in some bank robberies and never mentioning their strikebreaking activities even once. How do you even do that? Even though this case was about something completely different, how do you introduce the Pinkertons and be like "The Pinkertons, who were famously honest" instead of like "The Pinkertons, who were famous for strikebreaking." I know the author is a Wall Street Journal reporter, but Jesus. Like I'm sure some of them had some detective skill since they did ID and catch the Dunlap gang but they're really most famous in history for being nasty thugs and cracking strikers' heads. It was weird and jarring to read.

 

Anyway, apart from that, as far as I could tell all the other weird and jarring things were in fact because history is full of goddamn weirdos, like the "animal welfare" zealots whose concern for animal welfare consisted solely of chloroforming cats. 

 

The book also does a pretty good job of sketching out the disparities, contradictions, and miseries of Gilded Age New York. Some of this historical background was at least vaguely familiar to me--no one who likes gang shit as much as I do could grow up an hour outside of New York and not know at least the outlines of the Five Points neighborhood--but I also learned about the Tombs, an incarnation of which still stands today, and Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island, which was basically the precursor to Rikers. (There's a new book about Blackwell's called Damnation Island, if that gives you any idea of how miserable a place it was.)

 

I finished this book a week ago and it's been the longest week in the world, so I don't have the most coherent thoughts (as is becoming increasingly common for these reviews) on what this book does and does not accomplish and what it illustrates about our legal system and how it compares and contrasts to modern law (contrast: going to law school was apparently quite optional). I could probably come up with some thoughts if anyone wants to give this lovely book a good home and then we can talk about it and I'd be incentivized to try and not look stupid, but otherwise I'm going to go with "It entertained me with true stories about how wacky people were back in the day," which is honestly all I'm looking for in most of the history I read these days.