The Crimes of the Century is part of an interactive website about the history of Homicide in Chicago from 1870-1930, which is a site hosted and funded in part by Northwestern University School of Law, among others.
Leigh B. Bienen, a criminal defense attorney, and Director of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project and co-author of Crimes of the Century,¹ and her colleagues reviewed and analyzed more than 11,000 homicides chronicled by the Chicago Police Department from 1870-1930. From these handwritten records she and her colleagues created a sequential text file and a quantitative database which they made available to academic audiences and to the public through the History of Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930 interactive website. Bienen and her colleagues have also provided 25 cases in full historical detail, that are billed as “Crimes of the Century” cases, for the public to explore.
To get to the site, I used the link provided by Professor Bush on her website and it took me directly to the Crime of the Century web page quickly and without error.
Aesthetically, my first impression was that I thought the website design, with its somber black and amber color scheme, to be a little distracting to the eye. I also thought the text font was too small as were some of the photographs. My second impression was that the site contains a massive amount of information that is accessible through several tabs and links.
But I was disappointed to find that quite a few of the links were broken, and many of the photographs are used for aesthetic purposes only, i.e., under the “Historical Context” tab, “People and Events” sub-tab, there are fourteen photographs, but there is no text or captions that identify the persons or the subjects of the photographs, and clicking on the photograph returns a 404 Error message. On the right side of the error message page, however, there are two links—one link is to “Case of the Day,” and the other link will take you to a companion website about the life and times of Florence Kelley.² Unfortunately, neither link appears on the Peoples and Events page, where one would expect to find them, so without first going to the Error message page one won’t know that either link exists.
There are other pages that also contain photographs, which may have been useful to peruse, but these too were used only as icons, e.g., the Timeline of the City’s History tab takes you to a static timeline page that provides milestones in the City’s history. Preceding each milestone entry is a photograph, e.g., “1871 – The Great Chicago Fire,” has before the entry what appears to be a map, which I presumed would show the entire area burned during the fire, but when you click on the “map” you get a 404 Error message.
Moreover, the selection of milestones illustrated in the timeline are arbitrary and most have no connection to Crimes committed in Chicago, e.g., for the first year reported, 1871, the milestone entry is the Great Chicago Fire, followed on the second line by “Montgomery Ward founded,” and on the third line by “Selected cases from this year, 2403.” Naturally, I presumed the case pertained to the year 1871 and was related somehow to either the Great Chicago Fire or Montgomery Ward, but when I clicked on the case number link, I was directed to a page that provided the details of a murder that occurred on June 21st, 1870, not 1871, and it had no correlation to either Montgomery Ward’s founding or the Great Fire.
Timelines can be extremely useful in placing historical events in context to a particular project, but the events must be relevant to the subject, e.g., the Illinois Homicide Act passed in 1871, which is hidden under the Legal Context tab, and the Laws sub-tab, is more relevant to the Chicago Crimes project than the founding of Montgomery Ward.
Alternatively, I would have preferred to see a chart showing the demographics of Chicago, broken down by total population, gender and race, from 1870 to 1930, along with an entry from the homicide interactive database that shows the number of homicides that were recorded in each year, broken down by the same demographics. Unfortunately, however, the timeline in its present state is not helpful and adds nothing to the overall project.
The interactive database containing information on 11,000 cases is impressive in that is provides several searchable fields to narrow down or refine search parameters, e.g., one can perform a broad search by year, location, or type of crime; or, alternatively, perform a narrow search by the name of the defendant or the victim. The results from the data fields search are provided in a summary format, with an option to click on another link for more details about the case. The case details page, however, does not provide a link to actual documents or archival sources, nevertheless, it provides enough useful data that can be used to track down the actual case file if needed.
The list of 25 highlighted cases (found under the Crimes of the Century tab) is interesting. On the one hand, the fact that the site provides primary and secondary sources so one can explore the historical context of these 25 highlighted cases is impressive, that is—only if one remembers that there are differences between exploring historical context and undertaking objective analyses. On the other hand, the selection of these 25 cases by the projects participants, which, as the website says, “were selected for their emphasis on the rule of law, ” were included to support the conclusions made by them and the rule of law theory that they are advocating. Therefore, one must bear in mind that the chosen cases and the sources presented are subjectively biased.
Indeed, one cannot form an objective conclusion unless one has analyzed all other documents, information, and data that may be available from other primary and secondary sources. An undertaking that is, clearly not for the lazy, but thanks to the efforts of Professor Leigh Bienen and her colleagues, the Crimes of the Century website provides a reasonable place to start.
Despite the exceptions and limitations noted above, I think the Chicago Homicide Project is a fascinating project, and I was very excited to explore the website and dive into one or more of the 25 highlighted cases.
¹Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen, Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O.J. Simpson, (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1998). The Authors analyzed five cases: Leopold and Loeb; The Lindbergh Kidnapping; the Alger Hiss case; The Scottsboro cases; and the O.J. Simpson case, which griped public interest, for better or worse, during their trials. The full text of the book is available via the Crimes of the Century website at URL: https://homicide.northwestern.edu/pubs/crimes/.
²Florence Molthrop Kelley, (born Sept. 12, 1859, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died Feb. 17, 1932, Philadelphia), was a social reformer and political activist who contributed to the development of state and federal labor and social welfare legislation in the United States. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and law degree of Northwestern University. She was appointed special investigatory by the Illinois General Assembly to investigate sweatshops. For more information about her accomplishments and her life see the companion website, Florence Kelley in Chicago 1891 to 1899.
