The Trial of Lizzie Borden(8)

But despite her good Yankee name, Lizzie Borden stood in peculiar relationship to the social structure of Fall River. The most prominent Borden in Fall River assured the public: “No true Borden has ever placed a stumbling block in the way of the law and no member of my family will in any way hamper the police in their investigation.” Lizzie Borden may have been a Borden but she was a lesser Borden. Lizzie Borden’s great-grandfather, Richard Borden, inherited less money than his brother Thomas and his line did not thrive. The descendants of Thomas Borden distinguished themselves as entrepreneurs and established themselves in the elite; Richard Borden left a mere four hundred dollars to his son Abraham, Lizzie Borden’s grandfather. Abraham Borden improved his lot by peddling fish, earning enough to support his family. But his only legacy to his son was the freehold in a house on Ferry Street. And while much was made of Andrew Borden’s fortune at his death, his wealth paled beside that of his cousin Colonel Richard Borden, whose heirs inherited stock worth between three and four million dollars. Richard Borden’s son Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden was even richer and grander, consolidating his own business empire with print-and ironworks in Fall River and his place in New York society with a private box in “the Golden Horseshoe” at the Metropolitan Opera. At his death, he had more than doubled his father’s fortune.

Andrew Borden was, as he liked to remark, a self-made man. As a result, he was temperamentally unsuited to assume “his rightful place” in the social life of Fall River. He was far more interested in accumulating money than spending it, preferring to accrue interest rather than gain social recognition. A journalist described his pleasure as confined to “piling up dollars.” His daughters, particularly Lizzie, may have wanted more—to live, as Alice Russell had remarked, “as other people lived.” Lizzie and Emma chose, for example, to attend the “society church,” the Central Congregational Church, rather than patronize the more modest house of worship where Andrew Borden rented a pew. Andrew had once belonged to the Central Congregational Church but left following a dispute over a real estate transaction. The church did not agree to his price for a tract of land he owned; he showed his displeasure by voting with his feet. By contrast, Lizzie and Emma continued to worship there. Lizzie sought to ingratiate herself among the Central Congregational Church leadership, even volunteering to teach the children of Chinese immigrants at Sunday school.

Lizzie Borden threw herself into such charitable works to improve her social position and because they were the only culturally sanctioned activities for women of her class. In addition to teaching Sunday school, she was secretary-treasurer of the local Christian Endeavor Society, a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and a dabbler in the Ladies Fruit and Flower Mission. But there is little evidence that she found these activities satisfying. Too old to attend one of the new women’s colleges and too wealthy for the mills, Lizzie Borden, like other middle-class women of her generation, was relegated to unproductive marginality, free to enjoy her leisure in the presumed comforts of her home. Unlike most other women of her generation, however, Lizzie Borden never married. The average age of marriage in the 1890s was twenty-two; at thirty-two, Lizzie Borden was a spinster. While her parents lived, she would always be a houseguest in her father’s home. And who would own the house after he died? Insecure about her place in Fall River society, Lizzie Borden remained equally unsure about her position in the family. In the words of a contemporary journalist, Julian Ralph, her situation exemplified “a peculiar phase of life in New England—a wretched phase” suffered by “the daughters of a class of well-to-do New England men who seem never to have money enough no matter how rich they become, whose houses are little more cheerful than jails, and whose women folk had, from a human point of view, better be dead than to be born to these fortunes.” “Crime,” he said, “seems to attend that phase and point it out as relentlessly as the knife of a surgeon is aimed at a cancerous growth.”





EVERY MAN TURNED DETECTIVE




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In this era, America derived its vision of the criminal classes from European models in criminology, especially those of Cesare Lombroso, the leading proponent of the Italian school of criminology. Lombroso had challenged earlier assumptions—linking criminality with a simple inability to resist temptation—in favor of a model of difference. Criminals, he believed, were born, not made. He characterized the criminal as a primitive throwback, an atavistic specimen born for evil deeds. Drawing upon contemporary anthropological studies of “other races,” he believed the physical structures of their bodies displayed their criminal natures—ranging from asymmetrical physiognomy to other bodily stigmata. In all cases, the born criminal’s physical traits were seen as less evolved, more apelike. In a series of reviews of criminological literature published in the American Journal of Psychology, Dr. Arthur MacDonald summarized the latest thinking: “The true criminal has something of the incompleteness of the beast; he is like a man who has remained animalized.”

Americans found independent confirmation of Lombroso’s theories in their own criminal classes. Richard L. Dugdale, for example, famously described a series of blood relatives, the “Juke” family, languishing in a New York prison for assorted offenses and concluded that eugenics, intended to eliminate further generations of such degenerate specimens, offered the best solution. The larger environment merely triggered their underlying atavistic criminal nature. By contrast, the reform-minded Charles Loring Brace, author of The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them, used explicitly evolutionary language in his theory of the inherited degeneracy. Though he lamented the likely transmission to future generations of the dangerous classes’ appetite for liquor, sexual licentiousness, and laziness, he hoped to mold them in the image of his more moral and fortunate class. For many, it was clear that the “dangerous classes” largely arrived from foreign shores. In one of her popular lectures, the prominent suffragist and temperance advocate Mary Ashton Rice Livermore contended: “An invasion of migrating peoples, outnumbering the Goths and Vandals that overran the south of Europe, has brought to our shores a host of undesirable aliens . . . Unlike the earlier and desirable immigrants, who have helped the republic retain its present greatness, these hinder its developments. They are discharged convicts, paupers, lunatics, imbeciles, peoples suffering from loathsome and contagious diseases, incapables, illiterates, defectives, contract laborers, who are smuggled hither to work for reduced wages, and who crowd out our native working men and women. Our jails, houses of corrections, prisons, poor-houses, and insane asylums are crowded with these aliens.”