True-crime storytelling began in Victorian America. Newspapers eager to captivate their audiences relied on the same tools TV shows and podcasts still use today: sex, suggestion, and fright. By the 1920s, true-crime narratives had begun to incorporate gay panic as well. James Polchin’s new book Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall (Counterpoint Press) explores some of these early writings and the paranoia they inspired—which continues today.
Describing the suspect’s social class and race incited the same brazen xenophobia as Harding’s unexpectedly successful presidential campaign that had included rhetoric against working-class immigrants, criminality, and sexual vice. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “This was clearly the work of a person with an abnormal mind.” When a white sailor from Milwaukee finally came forward as Waters’s killer, the media concluded the tale with a final twist: he’d only killed Waters after the wealthy man insulted him. The insult, too ghastly for the paper to print, left their audience to speculate what one man might’ve said to another in the privacy of a hotel room. The sailor was found not guilty.
By James Polchin (Counterpoint Press)
