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Book Review
| Jeffrey S. Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875–1920, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 367. $35.00 (ISBN 0-674-02149-5).
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| Will our fascination with murder ever diminish? Unlikely, and Jeffrey S. Adler's exploration of homicide in Chicago from 1875–1920 continues to whet our appetite for news, conclusions, speculations, and stories about homicides. First, let's get one thing straight. This is a book about lives, not about deaths. One reason why we—the movie-going public, the readers of detective fiction and popular novels, criminologists, historians, and legal scholars—all love homicide, read about it, write about it, is because homicide reveals so much about people's lives: homicides tell us about the lives of the victims, as split open by the event as their heads; the lives of the defendants, whose confessions or denials are accompanied by incriminating background information and speculation about who they were and why they did it; even the family members and the investigators are stripped naked for the gawking. This being said, this is not a salacious book, or an exploitative book. It is a scholarly treatment of homicide as one source, often the only source, of data about how people lived and died in a very interesting time and place, Chicago from 1875–1920. |
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The analysis is based upon a data set of 5,645 homicides culled from an extraordinarily rich set of 11,439 homicide records kept without interruption by the Chicago police from 1870–1930. All 11,439 homicides, along with contemporaneous government reports, other contextual materials and historical photographs, are available for downloading on the Chicago Historical Homicide web site (homicide.northwestern.edu). As Adler describes his research methods, it is very instructive for historians, criminologists, and the generally curious to see how the police records of 100 years ago lead to other sources, scholarly and nonacademic, which in turn allow him to build a series of arguments about what was important to the people living in that society at that time, about why and how they killed, and how it is different from now. It is the contemporaneous newspapers—today newspapers still prop up circulation by reporting murders—which are the best source for how people lived. What will we do without them? The bloggers and the tv reporters aren't preserving the daily record of what was news on this day at this time and place. A good companion to this book is Michael Lesy's Murder City (2007) which picks up the same set of police records where Adler's research left off. Murder City is a meditative chronicle on homicidal violence occasioned by a series of murders in Chicago in the 1920s. |
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As a historian Adler is interested in questions such as: Do men and women, husbands and wives, kill each other for the same or similar reasons as they do today? What was the impact on the homicide rate in Chicago of the large emigration of African Americans from the American South after 1900? Race is ever present in studies of homicide. Were certain immigrant populations, e.g., Italians, more homicidal than others? (The answer is, yes.) And, was there something new about the character of robbery homicides that he found to surge just before the end of his period? (Again, for Adler, the answer is, yes.) This book is well suited for undergraduates and graduate students learning the craft of historical research. The footnotes are fulsome, although for me the absence of an Annotated Bibliography is a serious omission. Adler weaves the story of individual homicides together with information reflecting the character of the society drawn from newspapers, official records, contemporaneous accounts, theories of violence and other commentary. The result is the ordering of a variety of material around criminological themes, such as, the documentation and explanation for increases or fluctuations in certain kinds of homicide. |
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This book is a welcome relief from the kind of criminology that is short on factual background and long on statistics, work so attenuated that any conclusions are abstractions. The benefit of Adler's approach is that the descriptions rise above the chronicling of individual cases, or the lumping together of cases around a time period, or watershed event, such as the Haymarket bombing. The disadvantage, to my mind, is the tenuousness of some of the hypotheses and generalizations. We can never know what long dead "young people" thought or felt about gender relations in 1890. But we do have a measure of the large proportion of unmarried men in the population, as he points out, and that is certainly relevant to homicide rates. |
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On the other hand, the hypotheses provide much grist for the discussion mill of the classroom. Did women kill their children for the same reason in 1890 as they do in 1990? There is plenty of commentary and opinion from scholars and others about the hypotheses put forward here. Along the way to the conclusions the narrative is lively and coherent, the inclusion of secondary and tertiary sources is ample, and a good read is to be had—not a trivial achievement. |
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| Leigh B. Bienen
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| Northwestern University |
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