Today’s Lasting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1700 the governor and Council of Maryland considered the fate of two men sentenced to death for burglary. It was the first offense for both. “What they have Stollen is but a Trifle,” the governor noted, in suggesting that clemency might be appropriate. The Council disagreed. Members urged the governor to inquire whether the two were guilty of “any other evil Practices” that might allow him, in good conscience, to let the execution proceed. “So many Burglarys are Dayly comitted in this Province,” the Council concluded, “that it is absolutely necessary some publiq Example should be made to deterr others from the like Crimes for the future.”
Criminologists would likewise call it deterrence, but eighteenth-century Americans usually had blunter words for the primary purpose they ascribed to capital punishment. “There are but few who are made without fear,” explained James Dana a few hours before Joseph Mountain’s execution in Connecticut for rape. The punishment that awaited Mountain was “calculated and designed to put the lawless in fear.” The Virginia Gazette observed that capital punishment was a way of “counterbalancing Temptation by Terror, and alarming the Vicious by the Prospect of Misery.” An executed criminal was “an Example and Warning, to prevent others from those Courses that lead to so fatal and ignominious a Conclusion:—and thus those Men whose Lives are no longer of any Use in the World, are made of some Service to it by their Deaths.” Fear, terror, warning—whatever one called it, the main purpose of the death penalty was conceived to be its deterrent effect, its power to prevent prospective criminals from committing crimes. “Suppose our ministers of justice, in their superabounding mercy, should spare the vilest criminals,” the minister Aaron Hutchinson imagined. “Vice would be daring, and the wicked walk on all hands.”
To convey that message of terror to the greatest number required careful management of the process by which criminals were put to death. Most clearly, an execution had to be a public event, open to anyone wishing to attend. “A principal design of public executions is, that others may fear,” argued Noah Hobart before an audience gathered in Fairfield, Connecticut, to see Isaac Frasier hanged for burglary. “One end of the law,” the minister Nathanial Fisher proclaimed at a similar occasion, “in ordering him to suffer, in this public and ignominious manner, is to alarm and deter others.” By locating executions in open spaces affording views to large numbers of people, and by scheduling them in the daytime to maximize visibility and convenience for spectators, officials sought to broadcast terror as widely as possible. Death “should be publicly inflicted on the wicked,” Nathan Strong declared, so “that others may see and fear.”
The message was conveyed in several ways simultaneously. Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries knew in the abstract, even if they had not witnessed any actual executions, that death was the consequence of serious crime. Executions were reported in newspapers and discussed in sermons and were the talk of any county where one occurred, so the public would have been well informed about capital punishment even without the opportunity to see it put into practice. But there was something uniquely terrifying about seeing an execution. One could usefully meditate on the death of the burglar Philip Kennison, for instance, but it was only “the Sight of this unhappy Criminal” actually dying that could “give an Edge to these Meditations, and fix them with lasting Impressions on all our hearts.” Those who saw Samuel Smith, another burglar, dropped from the scaffold would never forget that the “connection between crime and gibbet, is much nearer and more natural, than many suppose.” Condemned criminals were well aware that their role at an execution was to be seen by as many as possible. Valentine Dukett was said to have pondered “the awful spectacle which this body of mine will in a short time exhibit.” The burglar Levi Ames is supposed to have rhymed on the morning of his execution:
Ah! what a Spectacle I soon shall be,
A Corps suspended from yon shameful Tree.
The death penalty was understood as something that had to be seen in order to have its maximum effect.
Culled from: The Death Penalty: An American History
Vintage Prisoners Du Jour!
ABORTIONISTS
October 12, 1936
Photographer: Fred Morgan
Abortion Hospital, Newark, N.J. Nurse Anne Green and Dr. G. E. Harley. — photographer’s caption.
Dr. George E. Harley, 66, and his nurse Anna Green, 28, were arrested October 9, 1936, on charges of performing illegal operations. It was alleged that they ran Newark’s “Anti-Stork Club,” a sort of co-op for illegal abortions, and that as many as eight hundred young women had paid $1 to $2 a month for “membership.” Records seized at their offices indicated that the doctor might have performed as may as 5,800 abortions.
Culled from: New York Noir
I totally need an “Anti-Stork Club” t-shirt!
And also, here’s an article with additional details from the February 22, 1937 issue of Time magazine:
Just about a year ago, according to the testimony she last week swore to in a Newark court, a wayward New Jersey girl named Anna Bartholomeo found herself pregnant and speedily learned about “Dr. Harley’s place.” This was an eleven-room house in a respectable Newark neighborhood where one George E. Harley, a genteel little malpractitioner, conducted an anti-birth insurance business. For $2 a month, paid in advance, “Dr.” Harley guaranteed that no customer need have a baby. For contraceptive he dispensed a “Magic Oil.” In case of pregnancy he stood ready to perform an abortion.
More than 2,000 women in Newark, New York City and neighboring communities subscribed to the system of this abortionist whose name echoed London’s famed Harley Street where England’s most honorable doctors have their offices.
Newark’s “Dr.” Harley was called both an osteopath and a chiropractor last week. According to an imposing certificate on his office wall, issued by a diploma mill called the “American Academy of Medicine & Surgery,” he is a “Doctor of Medicine & Master Diagnostician.” Subscribers to his anti-birth plan submitted photographs of themselves in street clothes and in the nude, and received numbered identification cards.
“Dr.” Harley’s assistant, a strapping brunette of 33 named Anna Green, carefully filed the photographs, especially the nudes, which few women rebelled against posing for, in big leather-bound scrapbooks.
Police exulted over those tell-tale photographs when they raided this abortorium last autumn. But prosecutors did not need to subpoena any of the women as witnesses, for Anna Bartholomeo, 20, inmate of the North Jersey Training School for Girls, testified willingly. This young woman went to the Harley establishment last spring, when she was three months pregnant. Because she had neglected to take out a Harley anti-birth policy, “Dr.” Harley wanted to charge her $150 for the abortion. Her “friend,” who accompanied her, haggled the charge down to $125, whereupon Anna Bartholomeo was promptly delivered of her embryo.
Last week a Newark jury decided that “Dr.” Harley and Assistant Green were criminals. A judge prepared to sentence them to from seven to 15 years in a penitentiary. This jeopardized the prepayments made by women who expected to require abortions. As for their nude photographs, the county prosecutor guaranteed to protect their reputations by impounding the scrapbooks.