Saturday, August 30, 2014

Murder among the Shantyboats.


Colonies of shantyboats around cities the on the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers provided cheap housing for low income workers and unemployed transients. Shantyboats were just what the name suggests, handmade one-room shacks floating in the river. The colonies were densely populated, the boats were crowded, and they were often the homes of unsavory characters—conditions ripe for violence and murder.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Inartistic Murder.

Inartistic Murder.
 
A marked difference between science and art, that has escaped the attention of writers upon intellectual development as manifested in human handiwork, is that while science is all embracing, art confines itself largely to trivialities. Science is continually announcing endeavors and successes so vast that the ordinary eye needs to be about as far distant as the moon in order to take them in, whereas art is often satisfied with efforts so tiny and vague that only the feeblest mind can see anything in them. We have artistic door knobs, fire shovels and spittoons in bewildering abundance, but he who yearns to see art reach forth in a grandly sympathetic way and supplement human action in the greater phases of live must take it out in yearning. For instance, there is murder. No one will deny that taking of human life is a deed of momentous import to the killer and the killed; yet what has modern art done for murder? Nothing, except to make sickening and inaccurate pictures of an occasional sanguinary taking off. After twenty-five centuries of art development there is no absolutely new method of slaughter except that of shooting, and of two murders reported yesterday one was committed with a bedpost and the other with a poker! To the truly artistic mind many sightly substitutes for these commonplace weapons suggest themselves. The persons whose lives were doomed might have been killed with equal success and almost as much celerity by being compelled to stare at blue china, or listen to certain musical compositions, or try to make themselves comfortable in artistic chairs, or be confined in a room decorated entirely of Japanese fans, but these means are not at the command of every one. Art will not have done its duty by murder until it has devised tasteful and cheap appliances with which to help a man out of the world. An aesthetic flatiron, or a decorative bootjack, or a gracefully turned club with a tasteful obituary suggestion engraved upon it in early English letter might be made cheap enough to be within the means of the poorest, and any public spirited rumseller should be willing to have within reach of his customers an antique dagger with “Hark, from the Tombs!” etched upon its blade. Let art awake to a sense of its responsibilities to the more important departments of human effort.

"Inartistic Murder." New York Herald 4 Jan 1882.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

The Courthouse Riots.


When William Berner was tried in 1884 for the cold-blooded murder of his boss, William Kirk, the people of Cincinnati expected a hanging. When the verdict returned was only manslaughter, the city was outraged. It was the last straw, breaching the limits of tolerance after years of political corruption, driving an angry populace into the streets for three days of violence that took fifty-four lives and left public buildings in rubble -- an uprising known as The Courthouse Riots.