Latest / Political Junkie Podcast / Episode 46: Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation

Transcript

Episode 46: Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking last night about this case and their theory and how it didn't make any sense and how it didn't fit and how something is wrong.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It occurred to me how they were going to come here and stand up here and tell you how O.J.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson was going to disguise himself.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: He was going to put on a knit cap and some dark clothes and he was going to get in his white Bronco and this recognizable person and go over
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: from two blocks away is still O.J.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Simpson.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's no disguise.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's no disguise.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't fit.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: If you are my age, you remember exactly where you were when defense attorney Johnny Cochran delivered his closing statement in the People v. O.J.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Simpson, a 1994 murder trial that captured the nation's imagination.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Simpson, a former star National Football League running back, actor, and celebrity, was on trial for the gruesome murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Eventually judged not guilty, Simpson was later successfully sued in civil court by Goldman's parents and, in a bizarre twist, went to jail in Nevada for armed robbery.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: As it was being investigated and tried in criminal court, however, the Simpson case became something else, moving to the center of American culture.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: It is credited by some with launching the genre of reality TV.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Here's how that started.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: When attorney Robert Kardashian, maybe you've heard of his wife and daughters, notified Simpson on June 17, 1994 that he had been charged and would have to surrender to the police, Simpson famously ran instead.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: A tragic celebrity double murder suddenly became a sensational media event.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: The police chase was filmed by nine news helicopters.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: MSNBC anchor Katie Tour's mother, Zoe, broadcast live from one of them.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: Millions of shocked Americans watched as regular programming was interrupted to watch Simpson's white Bronco drive down a Los Angeles freeway tailed by police cars.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: The trial itself received more nightly coverage from the three legacy networks than the war in Bosnia did.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Court TV, a now defunct cable channel, broadcast the Simpson proceedings live from arraignment to verdict.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: And because attorney Johnny Cochran was able to cast doubt on the ability of the Los Angeles police to investigate a black man fairly, something that wasn't hard to do in a city where the police routinely brutalized Angelenos of color in the name of the war on drugs, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the Simpson case is only one in a long American history of sensational murder trials, crimes that are simultaneously tried in court and in the public square, yet never fully resolved.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: There are common elements in many of them, a troubled romance, conclusions drawn from gossip, an especially violent death,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: contests over expertise, jealousy, or blackmail, shredded reputations, and what seems to be an obviously guilty culprit claiming to be innocent.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Most importantly, these trials inflame the public imagination because they capture the zeitgeist, larger political tensions, social inequalities, and cultural preoccupations that we disagree about as a nation.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: which is why I asked Bruce Dorsey, a professor of history at Swarthmore College and the author of Murder in a Milltown, Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation to come talk to me about America's first great sensational trial.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: In December 1832, pregnant mill girl Sarah Maria Cornell was found apparently hanged from a fence post in Tiverton, Rhode Island.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Or perhaps she was strangled or had killed herself.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: Numerous mysteries surrounded the death of a girl who had been born into the property-owning middle classes but gradually fallen into poverty and unemployment as she sought to preserve her freedom and respectability as a working girl in New England's mills.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, the police and the community had a mystery on its hands.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Did Cornell commit suicide out of shame for her condition?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Was she murdered by her lover?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Cornell's reputation in the mill towns that dotted New England and in the Methodist church community of Fall River, Massachusetts, just north of Tiverton, suggested both possibilities.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: But when a local doctor told the inquest jury that Cornell's minister, the handsome, married Ephraim Avery,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Had forced sex on the girl at a camp meeting the previous summer, Avery was arrested and put on trial for killing Cornell, presumably to silence her about the rape and the child that she had conceived.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: To find out what happened next, join Bruce and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History Emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: This is Episode 46, Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Bruce Dorsey, welcome to the show.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Claire.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm sitting here with Murder in a Milltown, Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just a ripping story.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think for those of our listeners who aren't even historians, they're going to want to read this as a whodunit.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell our listeners the story arc without spoilers?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you can sometimes tell a story without, even with some spoilers, and people don't always remember those parts of it.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a mystery from the start.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: A farmer, one December morning, walked out of his farmhouse.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: He aligns his team of horses, he heads down towards the river on a normal kind of day, and he discovers that a woman is hanging dead from a fence post inside his haystack yard, and he doesn't know why.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: But the circumstances are that this farmer lives just a quarter mile from a bustling new industrial town, Fall River, Massachusetts.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then the mystery is the woman who had been living there for just a short period of time, we discover her name is Maria Cornell.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: She was pregnant when she was found dead.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: She spoke to a doctor prior to that in Fall River and confided in him that she suspected the father was a Methodist preacher named Ephraim Avery.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that begins a particular sort of mystery around the lives of these two people who are also characters that are major figures in that time, an evangelical preacher and the new wave of women workers, factory workers, and their life story.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Almost a year time in which the nation cannot get enough of reading about this case, arguing about it, fighting about it, and even sometimes dying over it as well.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I want to remind our listeners that there are actually two possible crimes at stake.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: One is murder and the other is suicide.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: So one question is, did Maria Cornell commit suicide, which was of course a crime and still is in many places today,
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: But there's also much bigger context that you're gesturing to.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to start with Maria, which is the world of the mill towns in early national New England.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that and how they produce a figure like Maria Cornell?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Within a short period of time, these mills pop up all over southern New England to produce cotton cloth.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Most of that cotton almost entirely comes from the labor of enslaved people in the South, and they proceed to produce this into cloth.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: But they rely upon, principally, young women as the labor force of this.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: She works in a number of these industrial towns over a 10-year period, starting when she's about age 20 until her life ends at age 30.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And in that process, she's seeking this as a means of her own survival, a means for her to have an independence, an autonomy, a life of her own, one where she might be in control of who it is, and maybe perhaps also to find companionship and whether that companionship would be a partner in her life
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: finds that that is the place where she oftentimes wishes to fully express who she is, to find love and companionship, but also it's the place that excommunicates her, pushes her out at different times.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: The irony of this story is she claims that the person who excommunicated, kicked her out of the church in Lowell, Massachusetts, also because she had sex with men, that's the argument, what they would call fornication at that time,
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: He coerces her to have sex with him based on exploiting the confession letter she's written to him.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I want to get back to Methodism and Ephraim Avery in a minute.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: One of the interesting things to me about Maria Cornell is she's not just a fallen woman in the sense that she either uses sex as a means for survival or gets pulled into sexual liaisons for reasons that she can't quite control, or maybe she really likes sex.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: We really don't know.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing that's really interesting about her is that she comes from a well-to-do family.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: So she's fallen in another sense.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: She's lost her class status.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: And how does this leave her vulnerable to Methodism and to men who don't have her best interests at heart?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this combines to be both an economic and a personal matter for her and a religious one as well.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: She is, ironically, the granddaughter of one of the pioneering builders of factories in Connecticut.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Christopher Leffingwell is her grandfather.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Her mother, Lucretia Leffingwell, she made maybe not the best decision to marry the boss's apprentice, a poor hat maker.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: A man on the rise who then takes her away to Vermont and then abandons the family.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in this process, Maria's mother and her children are essentially left out of the will and of the estate of this wealthy manufacturer.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: So she has to work to survive, to live.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: But her family
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: doesn't like the idea of her being a factory girl, as they called the women who worked in factories.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: This was thought to be jeopardizing her reputation and the family's reputation, and they look down upon this.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: They exclude her in certain ways.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: They make her feel as if she's not welcome, and so she seeks out a family elsewhere.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: The Mill Girl is, of course, a figure in popular culture as much as anything else.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And some of our listeners may be acquainted with the Lowell Mill Girls who had a newspaper and who came off the farm to make money for their dowries and so on.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: But Cornell's story is a sadder one than that and possibly a more realistic one than we know about the Lowell Mill Girls.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think we oftentimes have fallen into a sense of generalizing about those women and assuming they all fit into that stereotype that they were, they left their farms, they worked for a while, they saved up some money and then returned back to a domestic life of marriage and motherhood.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: But side by side with them were many other women for whom this was a
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Means of Survival
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it sits in between either one of those choices, where she both needs the work to meet her everyday needs, but she also sought out the most lucrative of that work.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: She was attracted to the items that she could buy, the goods, the consumer goods that that life would lead to her.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And she worked side by side with some of the women who also
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: went to the factories for a brief period of time, wanted to maintain their reputations and return back to their farm towns.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And those women were her Methodist sisters, they were her co-workers alongside her in the factory.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I've discovered in looking through the factory records, especially the disciplinary records of the overseers, the ways in which many more women were like Maria Cornell, that they were disciplined for their independence, that that independence was often seen as being morally suspect, that they were
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: More than anything else, that she had ambition, she had some sense of her place in the world was something more than just the dependent one of a farm woman.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'll leave it to the listeners to go and buy this book and see the skillful ways in which you show ideas about gender being projected on Maria.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: But there's also this other, shall we say, liminal figure, which is the Methodist preacher.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: And that is, of course, what Ephraim is.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: And he starts off as a traveling preacher, which most Methodist preachers were.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about Methodism, which you at least portray in this book as a particularly intimate religion, and one that had these very handsome single men dropping in and out of communities and giving fiery sermons that worked people up?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: In the early years of the nation, picture a population that's moving fairly rapidly, looking for jobs in industrial towns, seeking out the new opportunities that might be in the western or northern frontiers for new places.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Churches couldn't keep up with that kind of movement, but one church came up with the method
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: of using a lot of traveling preachers to cover a great deal of ground.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't settled in one town only as the minister of that town, but they did a circuit, so they were called circuit riders, and they traveled around in multiple locations, and they needed to be young, vital, healthy men who could travel hundreds of miles in a given year, could survive on minimal amount of money, didn't have many times wives and children to pay for, and as a result,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: They also preached a new kind of message that Methodism was preaching in that day, a new kind of democratic theology.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: As Emerson said, the era of the first person singular, a faith that was based on I and me, and I can have a personal relationship with God.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a matter of the old Calvinist ways of seeing God in control of everything, but people were starting to be in control of their own spiritual destinies.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: So they preached this attractive message in an emotional way, in a way that could be easily communicated to anyone.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, many of these men became quite attractive, charismatic figures.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And not surprisingly, the large attraction they might have had to female parishioners who followed them went and spent weeks in camp meetings in the woods to hear them preach.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: also projected this image of them as particularly charismatic, sexualized creatures.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then on top of that, Methodism already had this intimate, familial sort of language in which it talked about the deep and intimate love that they had for each other.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: They called the gatherings when they spoke about their lives, told their faith stories as love feasts.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: I thought this was going to be a loving, intimate communication where they called each other brothers and sisters and they knew each other personally.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It both attracted many people and it scared many people for exactly those same reasons.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was a highly emotional religion and it was a highly sexualized and erotic religion at the same time.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: One of the reasons that Cornell is in some way such an empathetic character is she is trying to make a life and actually the chief barrier is that she's poor.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's poor and the other chief barrier is that this faith community that she thinks is going to assist her in becoming, and this is a crucial part of it, that women knew that if they were respectable members of a church like the Methodist, they could ensure that they could be well hired, they could find their way into a boarding house in those factory towns.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when she gets closed off from this world, it begins to shut off all of those opportunities and she can't remain in certain factory towns and so she cannot pursue that
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: She arrived first in Lowell, Massachusetts, America's premier industrial city in its burgeoning era, and she was doing well as a factory laborer, and he emerged as the new preacher in that town, a great post for a Methodist.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: He no longer had to travel around.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: He was in a place where the
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: People seem to be coming to him rather than him traveling to them.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he also wanted to build his reputation as being a disciplinarian, one who could maintain that the church was on the straight and narrow.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, he heard rumors that one of his parishioners was guilty of having sexual liaisons with men in the community and he brings forth the charges and she's accused of fornication and lying and excommunicated from the
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: That evidence will show up in the trial, the people who heard all her stories, but more than that, she claims that Avery then, at a camp meeting in Thompson, Connecticut, in the northeast corner of Connecticut, four months before her death, that he used the fact that he had these confession letters to extort her into having sex that results in her pregnancy.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: This is something that actually a number of people testify that she told them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, Maria Cornell told a lot of people a lot of things.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's a little difficult to tease apart.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to move to the trial because the trial is a great spectacle.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_02: It becomes an artifact in popular culture almost immediately, pushes this right into the news.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: How do historians use trials as evidence?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case, there wasn't one single transcript.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's not a stenographer sitting in a courtroom keeping the exact evidence.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: But six to eight lawyers and journalists appeared on the first day of the trial and asked permission to sit in and take their notes for it.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And they were given permission on the promise that they wouldn't publish any of their
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: One of the challenges was to find the closest place where the transcripts agree with each other and then sometimes to make judgments about what seemed to be the most detailed and accepted or perhaps make clear to readers that we don't know for sure if that's the testimony that takes place.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But another part of what I do with the trial transcript is I imagined that a trial was part of the nature of storytelling that a big drama like this would produce anyway.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: Many times,
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Defense attorneys, prosecutors felt as though they could control a narrative of a trial once they set up, brought forward witnesses, told their opening and closing arguments.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: But instead, that's not true.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: They lost control of it as soon as everyone stood to the witness stand and began to tell their own personal stories.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And in this case, this was an amazing, extraordinary trial.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: A typical trial in those days would have lasted a day, maybe two days at the most.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: This one lasts an entire month.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's 250 witnesses who come to the witness stand.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: It takes longer to pick a jury in this case.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: It takes longer for the closing arguments than it would take for a typical trial.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I imagined was that these stories that people were telling in this jam-packed courtroom, they had told once before, that they had stood around in coffee houses, or they told to their neighbors, or they told in their religious meetings.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: This was not the first time they had said those things.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what was fascinating is to imagine the storytelling beforehand, and how that was different once they become
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why do they know so much?
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: How did they ask these questions?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Where were they about?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: So a major part of the trial is a couple of scenes that have the provocative titles of sex talk and bad stories.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they're really about the kind of stories that these women heard and told to each other.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And why were they so interested in listening?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's circled back to their faith beliefs.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: They were interested in the story of people who had fallen and might have found a savior, some sense of salvation, but they were also
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Curious in the sort of sense of the choices and autonomy and decisions that young women would make, and they also felt their own role as the arbiters and surveillers of what was called at the time the moral police.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: So all parts of this come about in the trial by looking at those stories.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things listeners are going to find is that you very skillfully talk about the nature of evidence as it's being presented in the trial and the nature of testimony.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: And there are a number of bigger tensions that emerge in the context of this trial, one of which is the authority of women
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: were the ones who saw her in the entirety without her clothes on, with a full sense of what was there.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they thought they saw evidence of physical violence.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: And readers can find out how they saw this, but it was part of their traditional knowledge that these were experienced women.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, some of these women had seen more dead bodies, more people who had come into the world and come out of the world than the doctors who were going to eventually criticize them.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So they were knowledgeable women.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And they come into this courtroom and they have to testify
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: ...a large group of medical professionals to criticize their ability to come to judgment about women's bodies.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: That included long-established professional men but also young doctors on the make, and that included a professor of obstetrics from Harvard named Walter Channing.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: There are all sorts of minor characters who are actually major figures who make an appearance in this book.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wilbur Fisk, the president of Wesleyan University.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_02: And this trial really becomes a kind of nexus for what counts as
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Expertise and professional knowledge.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the kind of thing one normally found in a 19th century trial in this period?
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, but it's not the only case in which this would happen.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: So not every murder case, not every violent crime becomes something bigger than the crime itself.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: But if it does expand onto that level, it's usually because it becomes an argument over who has the authority to know what constitutes the truth here.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the truth being in who can measure evidence, who can see it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: And there've been famous cases that revolve around similar types of things.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Simon Schama's book called Dead Certainties and a number of other trials, including a trial I mentioned in which one of my key witnesses ends up being tried
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_02: We historians usually think of Southerners as incredibly violent and New Englanders had a lot of spunk in them too, shall we say.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: There were these sort of bursts of emotion that ended up becoming tragic.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: But there's also a pretty big audience for this kind of story that's emerging in a more literate America.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: So why does this trial seize the imagination of the public?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it starts with two of the figures that people are quite aware of.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: The mill girl, as you point out, and the circuit writing preacher.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: So people are already fascinated by those characters and their stories.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: But even more than this, there's a growing appetite for the sensational
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's emerging in a period in which new communication and print technologies are making that possible.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Aligned with this is the sort of captivating sense that people are seeing their own world is changing, they're seeing characters that look a lot like their family members and friends, but at the same time they're also increasingly interested
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: in stories of the strange and the odd and the gothic that are starting to emerge in this period and this trial feeds those before there's even a new forms of technology for it so oftentimes historians have looked and said oh it begins when the tabloid newspapers start to make up the importance of crime and so on the penny press papers
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: They're responding in emotional and violent ways.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is the only case I know where there's at least two murders associated with arguments over reading this trial transcript.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a demand for that kind of sensational literature and reading in popular culture before there starts to be the forms of it to satisfy that desire.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and as a former English major, I can't help but note that the fascination with this sort of precedes the immense popularity of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin or the slave narratives, some of which are being written by abolitionists, but some of which are being written by black people who have freed themselves.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: This kind of fascination both with
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: People you don't know that you can come into intimate contact with in the pages of a book, but also people who exemplify an emerging national dilemma.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: What are the changes that Americans are grappling with through the story?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we'll start with Avery.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is a man who, if he hadn't made the choices that he made to become a Methodist preacher, would probably have been a poor farmer that scraped by barely with enough means, became a tenant, landless man who might have then sought his way west or north to find some means of surviving and lived a hard life.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is an era in which becoming a landed farmer had no real sort of possibilities of advancement.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: But instead, he saw that there was a chance to be something else.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: A professional man, without any university education or seminary training, he just had to have that work of the spirit happening within him and to be able to convince others that he could communicate that.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so, this is a moment in the era of emerging possibilities for some men to
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: Episode 46 Sex, Death, and the Eyes of a Nation
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: I would venture to say she wasn't a very respectable woman.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that is part of what's interesting about her, both to us and to her contemporary audience.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: I am going to ask our listeners to read this book to find out whether Avery is convicted of the murder or not.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think we should withhold that information.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: But Bruce, why should our listeners read this book now?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: There are many reasons, but let me speak to two in particular.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: One is that this case speaks to the central question of who's to be believed in cases of sexual violence, sexual crimes, and such.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Before there was a Me Too movement, before there was a host of other forms in which modern day feminism have challenged those notions of the legitimacy of women's voices,
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: This case makes us think about do we listen to Maria Cornell and the story she told or why didn't people tend to listen to that?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's a central question that everyone needs to sort of address.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: The second is this case ends up being in an age of emerging, growing popular democracy with a
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: A number of populist movements, including a group of people who think in terms of conspiracy theories in a host of ways.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: And this book points to the question of, can we do criminal justice in a popular democracy?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: What does it mean when the true judge and jury is the people, when the people tend sometimes to make the wrong decisions to be violent in their actions?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Who's to be held accountable and can judges, juries, courts be relied upon to hold someone accountable for their actions?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Those are issues I think we're in this present day as equally concerned about.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that's usually my last question, Bruce, but I can't help asking you this because you've been enmeshed in this world for a long time.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think he did it?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I do think he did.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And that's it for today's show.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: You can subscribe to Why Now on your favorite podcast platform.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: Please leave a rating and a comment so that other listeners can find us.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Go to thepoliticaljunkiesubstack at clairepotter.substack.com for show notes, to listen to more episodes, or leave a comment.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: You can subscribe for free or you can support my work for as little as $5 a month and get every podcast and every newsletter delivered straight to your desktop.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: Share this podcast with a friend who loves history, politics, and smart conversation.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you can follow me on Threads, Blue Sky, or Instagram.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers to Political Junkie.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: My opening theme is by Galaxy News and my closing theme is by Avocado Junkie.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's all for now.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time!