People seem to find author Michael Lesy hard to categorize. He was recently described as an “artist” by an organization that funds artists and their work. When he was hired by Hampshire College in 1990, the school labeled him a “literary journalist.”
“I didn’t know what that was,” he said in an interview. Until he began teaching at Hampshire, he said, “I never had a job. The stuff I do is too strange.”
It does have a tendency toward the macabre. Lesy’s first and best-known book is “Wisconsin Death Trip” (New York: Random House, 1973), an account of life and death in a small Wisconsin town from 1890 to 1910. A combination of archival photographs, local newspaper accounts and Lesy’s narrative, the book documented the gruesome stories of the town, whose people were driven to murder, mayhem and insanity by, among other things, a diphtheria epidemic and an economic depression.
Lesy stumbled on the photographic archives that eventually became part of “Wisconsin Death Trip” while studying American history at the University of Wisconsin, where he went following his graduation from Columbia University in 1967. He said he was not satisfied with the commonly held characterizations of the “gay ’90s” as prosperous and carefree. “It was a period weighted down by cliches,” he said.
“Wisconsin Death Trip,” originally Lesy’s Ph.D. thesis at Rutgers, was lauded as a new way to look at history, letting the contemporaneous images and news accounts tell their own story. “This book is an exercise in historical actuality, but it has only as much to do with history as the heat and spectrum of the light that makes it visible, or the retina and optical nerve of your eye,” he wrote in his introduction.
To Lesy, newspaper stories are not just collections of facts. “They are fables,” he said. “To hell with the truth. They’re really forms of literary narrative, archetypes. You know, ‘Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters….’ “
Lesy, who recently turned 61, has produced a dozen books so far, including “The Forbidden Zone” (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1987), an examination of the lives of undertakers, homicide detectives and others who deal with death on a daily basis, and “Dreamland” (W.W. Norton, 1997), a compilation of postcards from the first years of the 20th Century.
For his latest book, “Murder City” (W.W. Norton, 2007), which will be published in February, Lesy returned to newspaper archives, this time examining the homicide wave that gripped Chicago in the 1920s. He came upon the subject in 2003 while tracking down online photographic archives for one of his classes.
When he found an extensive archive of photographs from Chicago, he did a search for “murder” that produced a surprisingly large number of hits. His original idea was a collection of murder photographs from Chicago in the 1920s.
“I thought it would be simple,” he said, but once he got deeper into the subject it became more complicated, “but it became like something out of Alice in Wonderland, much deeper and stranger than I’d anticipated.”
Over the next three years, he spent much of his time in the Chicago Public Library poring over microfilm of the Chicago Daily News and the newspaper’s photo archives.
Lesy described the new book as “an opened-up version of ‘Wisconsin Death Trip.'” While the earlier book contained “laconic, very compact” newpaper accounts of violence and insanity, in “Murder City” Lesy has pieced together details from contemporaneous accounts to create his own narratives of 17 homicide cases that dominated public attention in the 1920s. (He omitted the Loeb-Leopold case and the Valentine’s Day Massacre, which he believes have been covered thoroughly and in other historical accounts.)
Lesy pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, only a small percentage of the murders that took place in Chicago in the 1920s involved organized crime. He believes that there is a collective fear about exposing the fact that “the vast majority was just civilians killing other civilians.”
The culture of violence even permeated the circulation wars that raged between the city’s competing newspapers. Two rival publications, the Chicago American and the Tribune, he wrote in his afterword, “hired thugs to threaten newsboys, newsdealers, and even subscribers who read one newspaper instead of the other.” Between 1913 and 1917, at least 27 people died in newspaper-related violence.
Lesy does not seek to explain the violence, whether in rural Wisconsin or Chicago. “It’s a puzzle,” he said. He pointed to possible sources of turmoil, such as the end of World War I and the shrinking of the commodities markets on which Chicago had prospered. He also cited the presence of the stockyards and the influx of immigrants, including African-Americans moving up from the South. But he prefers to let the records speak for themselves.
Asked about his interest in violence and death, he replied, “Is there something wrong with that?”
Lesy, who is Jewish, said that except for his father, who left Europe in 1921, his entire family died in the Holocaust. Looking at death, he said, “is like looking into the abyss. The abyss looks back at you.”
But, he added, the history of homicide is not just about death. “It’s like a slit trench that anthropologists dig through … It’s a way into our history.”
