Fiend (14 page)

The modern-day outrage with the closest parallels to the Horace Millen slaying was the 1993 torture-murder of three-year-old James Bulger by a pair of preteen thrill-killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Indeed, the two crimes bear astonishing similarities. In each case, a little boy, hardly older than a toddler, was lured from a public place in broad daylight (in Bulger’s case, from a crowded shopping center just outside Liverpool; in Millen’s, from the bustling streets of his South Boston neighborhood). The juvenile abductors then led their little victims by the hand on a meandering trek, pausing occasionally to speak to other people (at one point, Venables and Thompson asked an elderly woman for directions, while Jesse exchanged a few words with a young clam digger on the beach). The victims were eventually brought to isolated locales (Bulger to the verge of a railroad line, Millen to a remote stretch of marshland), where they were tortured and slain. Afterward, the underage killers returned to their homes and families, acting with such perfect nonchalance that they might have been guilty of nothing worse than a day of playing hooky.

In both cases, public reaction was similar, too. Like the people of Great Britain—who were plunged into a state of anguished soul-searching by the Bulger atrocity—the citizens of Boston struggled to make sense of the Millen slaying and of the motives that had (as one reporter put it) “prompted the inhuman wretch, Pomeroy, to deprive the little child of life.”

The communal outrage and distress aroused by the crime were summed up by a front-page story that appeared in Saturday’s
Boston Herald:

It is many a day since anything has happened in Boston which has so wrought upon the feelings and sympathies of the public, as the late terrible tragedy on the beach at the foot of Crescent Avenue. Murder, committed in a heat of passion or when the perpetrator of this greatest of crimes is unmanned by an excessive use of intoxicants, is horrible enough. But when, as in the present instance, a child of less than five years is seduced away by a lad of fourteen and tortured until the little life can no longer dwell within its earthly tenement, and that so inhumanly, what shall be said? The moral sentiment of the community is shocked, confounded, and everyone ponders in vain search for a rational solution of the causes which could have brought about the death of the little boy, Millen, at the hand of his supposed youthful murderer.

Various theories were advanced to account for the crime. Pomeroy’s “mental makeup”—a subject that would generate a great deal of heated debate in the months to come—was analyzed by a number of commentators, who concluded that, despite the extreme depravity of his behavior, Jesse was apparently sane. The writer for the
Herald
offered a typical appraisal: “He does not look like a youth actuated by the spirit of a fiend, and, with the exception of a peculiarity about the eyes, he has no marked expression in his face from which one might read the spirit within. The idea that he is insane is not supported, except by the extraordinary character of his conduct.”

Nor could his family circumstances account for his appalling behavior. “There was not, so far as is known, any insanity among his progenitors, so he could not have inherited it,” the
Herald
reported. True, there were some questionable factors in Jesse’s background. Probing into his ancestry, the
Boston Globe
discovered a history of family instability that was highly unusual in the mid-nineteenth century.

At a time when couples rarely split up, the marriages of both Jesse’s parents
and
his paternal grandparents had ended in divorce. (In the era just before and after the Civil War—when the nation included over fourteen million married couples—there were only about 10,000 divorces per year in America.) According to the
Globe,
the “union of Pomeroy’s grandparents was not a happy one, and as the current report has it, the fault was with the man, not the woman. In some subsequent divorce proceedings, it appeared that the husband ill-treated his wife in various harsh ways.” Following in the old man’s footsteps, Jesse’s own father, Thomas, had also been abusive to his wife. “In consequence of their continual quarrels,” the
Globe
reported, Jesse’s parents had separated, “leaving the boy to drift pretty much at his own will. Thus, there seems to have been nothing in the relations
of his home which was calculated to counteract the natural weaknesses of his moral character.”

Still, even the “lack of elevating influences” in Jesse’s home life could not—in the opinion of most observers—explain the staggering brutality of his crimes. Desperate to construe the horror in rational (or at least comprehensible) terms, the public grasped at increasingly tenuous straws. As soon as it became known, for example, that Thomas Pomeroy worked in the Faneuil Hall meat market, some journalists began proposing that Jesse’s bloodthirsty propensities derived from his childhood exposure to butchering.

It wasn’t long, however, before a number of commentators came up with another—and, in the minds of many people, far more persuasive—theory. And here, too, the Pomeroy case served as a striking forerunner of contemporary issues. Virtually every notorious case of juvenile murder in recent years has been blamed, at least partly, on media violence. At the height of the Bulger affair, for example, much was made of the fact that one of the young killers, Jon Venables, had reportedly watched the horror video
Child’s Play 3
right before the murder. And when a fifteen-year-old New Jersey teenager was arrested in October 1997 for the strangulation-murder of an eleven-year-old neighbor, New York City tabloids ran front-page stories trumpeting the suspect’s “violent obsessions with Smashing Pumpkins and Beavis & Butthead.”

Within days of the Horace Millen murder, similar accusations were circulating about Jesse Pomeroy. In the pre-electronic era of 1870s America, however, the medium that came under attack was not television, film, gangsta rap, or Nintendo. It was the dime novel.

*  *  *

The dime novel was born in the summer of 1860, when the New York publishing firm of Beadle and Adams put out a cheaply made, paperbound adventure story—Ann Sophia Stephens’s
Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter
—and priced it at ten cents. (“A dollar book for a dime!” was Beadle’s advertising slogan.) Within a few weeks of its appearance, Mrs. Stephens’s novel had sold more than sixty-five thousand copies. Beadle immediately followed up with other crudely printed page-turners, published at the rate of two per month. When the eighth title in the series—Edward S. Ellis’s
Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier
—
appeared in October 1860, the American public snapped up half a million copies.

Before long—as other publishers began churning out scores of these throwaway publications—the marketplace became flooded with them. During the Civil War, they were shipped by the freight-car load to Union soldiers, who—starved for escapism—devoured countless works like
Fugitives of the Border, The Phantom Horseman,
and
Bald-Eagle Bob, the Boy Buccanneer.
The product of underpaid and largely talentless hacks, these outlandish fantasies might not have offered much in the way of convincing characters, credible stories, plausible dialogue, or anything resembling literary merit. But—with their extravagant tales of heroic frontiersman, savage “redskins,” swashbuckling pirates, and romantic desperadoes—they did offer the kind of easy, fast-paced thrills that, in a subsequent era, would be supplied by superhero comics, television westerns, and action movies. And like those later forms of pop entertainment, they soon came under attack by assorted moral watchdogs—politicians, religious leaders, educators, and the like.

Denunciations of the dime novel’s supposedly corrupting effects on young minds began appearing everywhere, from the pulpit to newspaper editorial pages to such venerable publications as
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic Monthly.
Writing in the late 1870s, for example, a critic named W. H. Bishop blamed everything from school truancy to petty thievery to parricide on the “sensational romances” peddled in “cheap dime fiction.” And in a famous editorial cartoon of the time, a dime novel publisher is shown giving away a free loaded pistol to every young subscriber. The implication was clear: Beadle and his ilk were little more than merchants of death, turning innocent children into cold-blooded killers.

To be sure, there were other commentators who came to the defense of dime novels, most notably a critic named William Everett, who—writing in the distinguished cultural journal
The North American Review
—declared that these crude, wildly popular books “were unobjectionable morally, whatever fault be found with their literary style and composition. They do not even obscurely pander to vice, or excite the passions.” Similarly, Edmund Pearson—an early historian of the genre—scoffed at the notion that dime novels were responsible for polluting the morals of the young. To Pearson, the dime novel merely served as a scapegoat, a simple explanation for the troubling complexities
of human behavior (and—for young delinquents and their parents alike—a handy way of shirking blame).

“Parents who had shamefully neglected a son and allowed him to stray into mischief,” he wryly observed, “found it very convenient to stand in a police court and lay all the blame on dime novels. Inherent deviltry; neglect; selfishness; cruel egotism—oh, dear, no. It was nothing but wicked dime novels. Willy was such a good boy until he began to read them. . . . Judges and teachers and clergymen and Sunday-school superintendents and even police chiefs began to denounce dime novels. It was the most useful explanation of crime, and the easiest excuse for the offender.”

Erastus Beadle himself insisted on the purity of his publications, issuing a set of guidelines to his authors that prohibited “all things offensive to good taste,” forbade any “subjects or characters that carry an immoral taint,” and warned against stories that “cannot be read with satisfaction by every right-minded person, young and old alike.” And it was certainly true that readers would have been hard-pressed to find anything even remotely suggestive in a work like
Antelope Abe, the Boy Guide
or
Mohawk Nat: A Tale of the Great Northwest.

Violence, however—of the ostensibly wholesome, red-blooded, all-American variety—was another matter. As cultural historian Russel Nye has written, the Beadle books were crammed with “blood, bullets, and constant frantic action.” According to Nye’s estimate, the typical dime novel averaged about twenty killings per book. And the situation became even more extreme as other publishers entered the field and began issuing ever more graphic and sensationalistic stories. To keep up with competitors like George P. Munro, the Beadles were forced to boost the bloodshed in their own publications—“to kill a few more Indians,” as Erastus Beadle put it. Before long, the level of violence in books like
Redplume the Renegade, Rangers of the Mohawk,
and
Rattlesnake Ned’s Revenge
had reached a dizzying pitch.

In his attack on “cheap dime fiction,” W. H. Bishop estimated that among the dozens of books he had purchased while researching his study, “there were not less than ten thousand slain.” He then goes on to describe the carnage in one of the most popular dime novels of all time, Edward L. Wheeler’s
Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, The Heroine of Whoop-Up:

In the first chapter, seventy road-agents come riding into town. They slay eighteen of the residents and are slain themselves—all but one, who is, by the orders of a leader named Old Bull-whacker, immediately strung up to a tree and pays the earthly penalty for his crimes. And in the next chapter, we find a young man named Charley Davis dashing around a bend, bestriding his horse backwards, and firing at five mounted pursuers. They were twelve originally, but he has gradually picked off the rest. He is joined by Calamity Jane, a beautiful young woman who carries a sixteen-shot Winchester rifle, a brace of pistols in her belt, and another in her holsters, and between the two the pursuing five are easily disposed of. Here are a hundred dead in two chapters only!

In a similar vein, Russell Nye cites a typical passage from one of the later Beadle novels in which the hero—having stumbled upon “the swollen, mutilated corpse of a man, covered with blood and clotted gore”—notes how “the distorted countenance was rendered doubly repulsive by the red streaks where mingled blood and brains had oozed from the shattered skull.”

Clearly, the media violence so often deplored by contemporary critics pales by comparison to the slaughter commonly found in dime novels—those immensely popular, escapist entertainments of the pre- and post-Civil era, whose primary audience was young boys.

*  *  *

Given the profuse and extremely graphic violence in dime novels—and the long-standing tendency of moral reformers to blame juvenile aggression on the sensationalistic fantasies of popular culture—it is no surprise that, within days of his arrest, stories began to circulate that Jesse Pomeroy was addicted to these blood-and-thunder publications. “There is plenty of evidence,” declared the
Boston Globe,
“to show that the reading of dime novels . . . constituted a good share of the boy’s mental nourishment, and herein he was not restricted but commended rather for his studious literary disposition.”

As a particularly incriminating bit of “evidence,” the
Globe
cited the testimony of a boy named George Thompson, supposedly a “chum” of Jesse’s, who revealed that the latter “always had a brick-colored ‘Beadle’ or a white-covered ‘Munro’ in his pocket or hand. In school, he used to keep a novel in back of his
history, grammar, or geography book and devour it while pretending to study his lessons.”

To be sure the interviewee himself—along with the rest of his pals—was an equally avid consumer of dime novels, who loved playing games of violent frontier make-believe. “I always insisted on playing Wild Bill, because he had killed thirty-nine men,” the young man cheerfully asserted. Other boys in the group preferred such two-fisted, all-American characters as Buffalo Bill, Dashing Charlie Emmett, Texas Jack, Wrestling Joe, and Rattlesnake Ned.