Probably a 3.5, but I'm rounding up, mostly because I learned about a part of history that I didn't know much about.
In Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution, author Katherine Grandjean
combines two of my areas of interest--true crime and early American
history. Brothers Wiley and Micajah Harp went on a killing spree in
Tennessee and Kentucky at the end of the 18th century, killing almost
indiscriminately in what was then the country's frontier. The story of
the brothers, who might be America's first serial killers, remained
ensconced in the lore of that part of country, though many of the
details are sketchy. Grandjean goes beyond the passed-down stories to go
after the facts of the killings, while also connecting the murder spree
to the mindset of America during George Washington's Presidency.
Grandjean
dug through the records to find the historical Harp brothers--court
cases, legal documents. She inserts herself throughout the narrative,
which I have mixed feelings about; as a history major, I enjoy learning
about her process. At the same time, though, I don't necessarily want
that in the story; that's what introductions or afterwords are for.
Ultimately,
though, I got frustrated at Grandjean coming up a hypothesis for why
the Harps did what they did and then state motivations as given: "The
Harps were just the sort of men who Kentucky's gentry feared were coming
for their share. And maybe that was the point" (loc. 2047).
Rampage killing, almost always, is about revenge. It isn't about savoring violence. It isn't about any of the perverse, sadistic pleasures that we associate with modern serial killers. It isn't usually about worldly or material things to be gained once the victims are dead. The gains are mostly psychological: It is about having the last word, about vengeance against those who have caused the killer's unhappiness. Others must be made to suffer "as he has in the past," criminologist James Alan Fox writes of the typical offender. (loc. 2261)
Her theory is that the Harps tried to do things right--buy land, get married--but that they lost what they had due to much larger forces than their own actions. In response, they killed a bunch of people. Brutally. She writes about them as America's losers (in a way that makes me think of Sondheim's Assassins), about how the Revolution turned the world upside down and made men think they were equal and get upset when they don't realize the American dream:
In ways that historians have not quite grasped, some of the murders of Wiley Harp's era are tied to the very core meanings of the American Revolution--the defining features of the republic itself. Appalachia's disease may only have been a more severe case of something that infected men across the United States in the wake of the American Revolution. Everywhere, in the new republic, men struggled. Shaken free of traditional safety nets, loosed into new places without family, and drunk on a giddy cocktail of new markets and new expectations, they stumbled. Then they fell. (loc. 1404)
(I also don't love the "In way that historians have not quite grasped" here.)
It's
not that I don't think she's right; losing everything does drive people
to extreme acts of violence. It's the connections to the ethos of the
American Revolution that I'm not sure of: "In America, men compete. That
is the basic ethos. To be American is to cherish the idea of material
success, which, you understand, will be chased by everyone,
competitively. But what happens when men fail to realize the dream? Or
worse, when they feel it has been robbed from them, or withheld
unfairly?" (loc. 1500).
Murder was its own kind of treason. An affront to the state itself. An affront to the people, as it tore at the very foundations of society. That was how it stood in American law and in American minds, and that is how best to understand Wiley and Micajah Harp. American society--with all its promises--had not worked for them. . . . So in 1798, he decided to step out of society and levy his own little war on its people. . . . Murder, in the end, is social protest. (loc. 2745)
Grandjean is honing on something that is still very much talked about
today, with the talk of the male loneliness epidemic and similar. I
think she's right, in that the Harps saw their dreams of owning land and
living presumably quiet lives with their families being taken away from
them. And I'll say that I really appreciated Grandjean going into
details about the fickleness of land ownership and deeds at the time,
and the relations with Native Americans and their relationships
with early American governments, and that while the Revolution may have
changed how men saw each other, that didn't particularly change how
women were treated. There's a lot of detail and narrative about the
early United States that was really interesting and is why I rated this
book as high as I did.
I guess it comes down to whether the
various storylines in the early American period percolating in the
background really affected the Harps. Grandjean mentions at one point a
study that showed violence increasing during times of political turmoil
in the country, so maybe people are affected. I guess the question for
me is, how much of "The world screwed me over, so I'm going to go on a
killing spree?" is actually political? And I don't know that it is. In
that vein, how political are the murders of Sweeney Todd?
I will say that this book provided a lot of food for thought.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced reader copy of this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment