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Volume 16, Number 3 (1992) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum The LAW IN SPOON RIVER JOHN V. ORTH University of North Carolina School of Law* River Anthology by "Webster Ford," the pseudonym of Chicago attorney Edgar Lee Masters.1 The following year the serialized poems, rearranged and aug- mented by fifty others, appeared between hard covers, bearing the author's right name.2 Its title was a learned allusion to the Greek Anthology, a medieval miscellany of ancient epigrams and poems, then in vogue among the classically educated.3 The place name "Spoon River," with its mundane and even comic connotations, was not meant to invite mocking comparisons with Greek city- states but was simply the name of Masters' fictional small town, a composite of Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois, where he grew up, near an actual stream of that name.4 The classic reference was not, however, misplaced: in his poems Masters wanted to write about life in general while describing one small town, or as he put it, in words that were almost Greek, to "draw the macrocosm by portraying the microcosm."5 To this end, he selected a huge cast of characters, more even than in a Russian novel: over 243 in number, all drawn from the town cemetery.6 Speaking from beyond the grave, each in a single brief poem reflects on the meaning of life. As rearranged for publication in book form, the epitaphs were placed in ascending order: "the fools, the drunkards, and the failures came first, the people of one-birth minds got second place, and the heroes and the enlightened spirits came last"; Masters himself called it "a sort of Divine Comedy."7 The somber dignity and sense of cosmic fatality in many of the poems do lend a classic air; even the occasional examples of posthumous gaiety seem poignant. Yet death has not brought resignation to those "sleeping on the hill."8 Furious passions rage through many of the poems, setting up tensions that still vivify the book. Beneath the classic surface lie intense emotions, pathos, vio- lence, and morbidity - preoccupations of romanticism, classicism's antithesis. So raw and heartfelt are these emotions that they must express the author's own deepest feelings. Neither has death conferred omniscience on the "under tenants of the earth."9 Only the reader, connecting poem and poem, can see the whole, a theatric device that imparts considerable momentum. From their necropolis on the hill the deceased citizens of Spoon River, wittingly and unwittingly, present a stark picture of small-town America as it was late in the nineteenth century. With little change, one could apply to the Anthology the line that Sinclair Lewis used only a few years later to be in Main Street: "This is America - a town of a few thousand, in a region of wheat and corn and dairies and little groves."" 10 Masters himself thought the First World War "destroyed the era out of which Spoon River came."11 In historical perspective, other and earlier forces such as urbanization and industrialism appear more active agents of destruction. Chicago, which had been smaller than Spoon River in 1833, had a population of over a million when Masters arrived there in 1892.12 More searing to many Americans than war and social change was the collapse of small-town values as the basis of American culture. By 1920 only an ironist would describe America as "a town of a thousand," when it was plainly a city of a million. While the urban professional classes, to which Masters belonged, were busily engaged in creating a new American ethos,13 the reading public was ready for literary reas- sessments of small-town life. "The Republic thunders past," as Whitman pro- claimed, leaving Americans looking over their shoulders, trying to understand what they had left behind. Spoon River was an instant best-seller, but it did not satisfy the public's appetite for fictional re-creations and send-ups of small towns. Winesburg, Ohio in 1919, as Sherwood Anderson recalled, was triggered by Spoon River,14 and Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, immortalized in Main Street in 1920, was on the same part of the map. By the time Thornton Wilder pro- duced Our Town in 1938, during the Depression and on the eve of the Second World War, turn-of-the-century, small towns, this time epitomized by Grover's Corners, New Hampshire (complete with its cemetery on the hill), were bathed in a nostalgic sunset glow. It is not surprising that law and lawyers figure in reconstructions of small-town America. Since colonial days Americans had been known for litigiousness, and law was the chosen career of many sons of the farm, as it had been for Masters' father. As expected, lawyers are among those sleeping on the hill above Spoon River. In fact, they are thick on the ground: eight practicing lawyers and five judges out of a spirit population of about 250. The number of legal professionals may be even higher since careers are not identified in all epitaphs.15 Of course, law was still a man's job in Spoon River, so only half the population was eligible. (Actually less than a quarter of the poems are about women, and the percentage of women falls significantly the "higher" one rises.16) Illinois had in fact admitted its first woman to practice in 1873, but the number of female lawyers remained negligible.17 The strength of the legal community in Spoon River emerges clearly by comparison with the numbers in other professions (also all male): three doctors18 and six clergymen.19 Compared to Spoon River, Winesburg, Ohio is almost innocent of lawyers. Joe Welling, the man of ideas," is the son of a deceased lawyer who had served in the state legislature in Columbus.20 Tom Foster, who got drunk one night, rooms in a little frame building owned by Old Rufus Whiting who had used it as a law office but who is now "too feeble and forgetful for the practice of his profession."21 George Willard, the hero of the piece, once soliloquized vaguely about law: There is a law for armies and for men too .... The law begins withLaw in Winesburg is a cloudy concept, charged with metaphysics, and lawyers are relegated to the margins, dead or decrepit. Much the same is true of Main Street. Carol Kennicott's deceased father, "the smiling and shabby, the learned and teasingly kind," had been a judge;23 he puts in a brief posthumous appearance late in the novel, not as an angry wraith, but as "the gray reticent judge who was divine love, perfect under- standing."24 Carol herself, whose unhappy marriage to Doctor Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie is the theme of the novel, rejected her first suitor Steward Snyder who planned to be "a big lawyer, maybe a judge."25 As if to underline the turn away from law, there was also an unnamed "young lawyer" at the gathering where Carol first met her future husband.26 While the doctor boost- ed his hometown, the narrator even asked parenthetically: "(Why was she thinking about Stewart Snyder?).27 Once settled in Gopher Prairie, Carol has a brief flirtation with Guy Pollock, a colorless lawyer - he was once observed in the Bon Ton Store "tentatively buying a modest gray scarf"28 - who is said to write "regular poetry."29 Pollock seems to share the town's legal business with the old Yankee Julius Flickerbaugh, "who handled more real estate than law, and more law than justice,"30 and the once-mentioned A. Tennyson O'Hearn, "the shyster lawyer."31 Gopher Prairie's lawyers are literally invisi- ble from Main Street. In Carol's ten-minute tour of downtown she saw an assortment of stores, the post office, the school, and a couple of banks; she saw the sign for her husband's second-story office, but she saw no indication of any law offices.32 Guy Pollock's chambers, we come to learn, are above the gro- cery store.33 As Carol quickly realized, Gopher Praire is not even the county seat.34 (Nor, it might be added, is Winesburg.35) Authors may of course include or exclude lawyers from their fiction for many reasons: personal background, the demands of the story, sheer happen- stance. A considerable number of works of fiction exploit the dramatic possi- bilities of trials; Masters himself later varied the usual approach in his long dramatic poem Domesday Book (1920), confining the action to the inquest conducted by a coroner and six Crime, its detection, prosecution and punishment, is the subject of a specialized body of literature, both highbrow and lowbrow. Points of law occasionally enter into the plots of novels and plays.36 Yet law is more central to some artistic visions than others. While it may be idealized as the rneans to social harmony, it probably appeals more to writers for whom conflict and the social need to resolve or at least contain it are uppermost. If law is associated with conflict, it may also explain its absence from certain works. Can it be an accident that law and lawyers are missing altogether from Our Town?37 Masters' background helps to explain why law would figure prominent- ly in his art. "In his canon, in fact," as Charles E. Burgess has observed, "the law is perhaps second only in weight of influence to the locale of his boyhood and young manhood in central Illinois."38 Masters was the son of a lawyer, was destined by his parents to a career in law, read law in his father's law office, even formed a brief partnership with his father in Lewistown.39 In Chicago he practiced law for over twenty years, during eight of which he was Clarence Darrow's law partner.40 While famous for defending social underdogs like strikers and anarchists, the firm of Darrow, Masters and Wilson was one of the most successful in town, clearing from $25,000 to $35,000 a year for each partner. Generally Masters wrote the briefs and organized the cases while Darrow presented the oral arguments, but in at least one notable case concern- ing free speech Masters himself argued before the US. Supreme Court.41 Even after the breakup of the firm, Masters continued to prosper as a lawyer. His eldest son Hardin recalled his parents' bourgeois life-style: a comfortable house on Chicago's South Side with a full complement of servants, a cook and second maid, yardman, and chauffeur.42 Masters was active in the Democratic Party, being drawn to its populist and anti-imperialist wing. His hero was Thomas Jefferson and his enemies, Jef- ferson's enemies: Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall. He published an article attacking Chief Justice Marshal43 who, he later explained, "was then being much celebrated since he had expounded the implied powers of the Constitution and thus paved the way for America to seize the Philippines" in the Spanish-American War of 1898.44 In 1901 the centenary of Marshall's appointment to the chief justiceship was observed - in orthodox quarters by the publication of laudatory sketches and the reprinting of famous decisions.45 Masters was personally acquainted with William Jennings Bryan, whom he supported while the Peerless Leader was "athletic and radical" and not yet theological and dour,"46 and on Woodrow Wilson's election to the presidency in 1912 was actively considered for a federal court of appeals judgeship.47 When Masters was passed over, he was, as.he recollected, "freed to write Spoon River."48 Although the partnership with Darrow had broken up, Masters continued to represent labor unions. In 1914 thousands of Chicago waitresses had gone on strike. Their employers sought an injunction against picketing, and Masters was hired to defend them - at a "satisfactory fee," he later compla- cently recalled.49 Spoon River was written "all in the midst of the case for the waitresses."50 The book's subsequent success freed Masters from his law prac- tice - and gave him the opportunity to break out of his unhappy marriage. Hilary Masters, his son by his second wife, recently speculated about his fa- ther's career: If the lightning had not struck, if there had been no epitaphs in a Masters' career affected his poetry in many ways, from the superficial to the profound. Although many of the names in the Anthology are compound- ed of boyhood memories, he confessed that he had devised some of the "curi- ous" ones by recombining names he found "in lists of signers of the consti- tution of Illinois and in other places."52 Reminiscing about his boyhood in Lewistown, he recalled: "The courtroom was my drama and my movie the- ater."53 Law and particularly the common law with its ingrained adversarial process entered into his view of life: "My law studies, my natural cast of mind made me see both sides of everything . . . ."54 Indeed, there is a sense in which Spoon River reads more like a volume of the Illinois Reports than the Greek Anthology: a vivid glimpse of life, often confronted by an opposing view, then 'with the turn of a page a glimpse of another aspect of life - all stereotyped within a rigid form. Hilary's memoirs reveal how lawyerlike his father remained, long after the active practice of law was over. The first view of the poet is in a nursing home. "How are you doing?" Hilary asks. "Better. Much better," his father replies sternly; the son's impression: "Masters, the lawyer, advising a client, briefing a jury."55 Hilary, himself a writer, likened his father's poetry to "law briefs in blank verse."56 He guessed that some of his father's many female companions thought their intimate confidences would be looked on with a poet's compassionate eye when actually they were recorded by "an attorney's cool mind."57 In old age the poet even passed the time "making notes on some of his old law cases."58 In another memory of his father, somewhat earlier, Hilary remembers him repeating himself "like a patient attorney leading a dull Witness."59 Law marked the man; it also scarred him. Law was not Masters' chosen career; it was chosen for him. From boyhood he had favored literature, so his legal education was later recalled as those "hard days when I was leaving my beloved studies for the law."60 His years in Chicago were occupied in "doing that in a business which destroyed every imaginative impulse, and took all my strength and all my time."61 In short, "the law business tortured me."62 Mas- ters still cherished the Horatian ideal of literary retreat, long a common refuge of American lawyer-poets, but in Chicago he found himself "not pursuing the life of a contemplating poet, but the life of a drudging lawyer."63 He learned the hard way that his high school teacher "spoke truth when she wrote me that the law and literature were oil and water."64 Later reflecting on his life - and unintentionally perhaps punning on his name - he concluded: "I feel that I twisted my genius, my nature when I went into the law, and set my will to master the law, and did master it."65 Throughout his career as a lawyer, perhaps throughout his long life as a poet, Masters' response to his profession was a mixture of submission and rebellion. As a student in Lewistown, he was "all day in the law office reading Chitty on Pleading and Greenleaf on Evidence."66 As a lawyer in Chicago, he composed a long (unpublished) digest of Illinois cases on torts.67 So discrimi- nating a critic as Darrow admired Masters objective legal mind and piercing briefs.68 Yet the poet struggled to assert himself. Aware that his literary ambitions disturbed his father, young Masters resorted to subterfuge: "In the office, especially when I really began to read law under his tutorship, I often had behind a lawbook some work of poetry or fiction or philosophy; so that if he entered the office suddenly he would not catch me with Locke or Shel- ley."69 The poet-behind-the-law-book was one strategy. At other times the young Masters sought an acceptable compromise: "Somewhere I saw that Byron had read Blackstone; and I thought I might do so, if Byron did, as a matter of general culture. So I took to Blackstone, and enjoyed the Commen- taries immensely. I then bought an abridged Blackstone, and finally committed to memory all the definitions found in the full text."70 Perhaps by a special alchemy oil and water could be made to mix. In Chicago the poet adopted a different mentor: "I expected to write along the way, consoling myself with Walter Scott's example, who wrote under a pseudonym while he was a lawyer and a sheriff."71 Thus Webster Ford owed something to the author of Waver- ley. The small-town lawyers of Lewistown and Petersburg, of Spoon River in other words, who practiced law alone or in ephemeral partnerships, were waning with the small towns they served. Masters remarked on their passing in a memorial he wrote at the time of his father's death in 1925: An era of the law business passed with him. It is not stories now, and box of twelve men; but it is a system in legal mechanics, as a part ofAlthough still only a fraction of the profession, big-town lawyers organized in rapidly growing law firms or employed in legal departments of corporations represented the future. The sea change began during Masters' active career. At the turn of the century, Chicago's largest law firms - both of them - had seven lawyers apiece.73 Again Masters' response was mixed, at once boastful and secretly envious. "I met the hard, shrewd, money-grabbing corporation and business lawyers on their own ground, and fought them toe to toe."74 While representing society's underdogs and campaigning for Bryan and populism, Masters was drawn to the rich and powerful. In his autobiography he almost admits that he married his first wife in hopes that her father, a Republican and president of a local railroad, would find him lucrative preferment.75 He was certainly bitterly disappointed when his father-in-law failed him, and lost his own place to boot. In a revealing passage, Masters confessed: "I did not ap- prove of what the corporations were doing, or what they required their lawyers to do at times. Yet I thought I could work for one as a lawyer and retain my integrity. I meant to do that, I think I could have done it; but I never had the chance to work for one at all. They didn't want me."76 For all his efforts to submit and succeed, Masters never quenched the fire of his rebellion. Oil and water would not mix after all. In an extraordi- nary passage in his autobiography, Masters describes himself as he was in the spring of 1911 - in pain, the victim of violence, tortured, deformed, and also full of self-pity. The passage must be set out in full: Far back in the Lewistown days when I was reading Plato and Shelley The pain and barely repressed anger made the poet a difficult man and a handicapped lawyer. He could not charm a jury. Darrow's biographer described his subject's experience with Masters as "the only tragic relationship of his life."78 Masters in his autobiography refused even to name his famous partner; -while listing sixteen love affairs -with women identified by first name; Masters referred to Darrow only as "a criminal lawyer,"79 "the head of our firm,"80 my former law partner."81 Personal relations too were difficult Hilary Masters thought his father harbored a lasting grudge against his parents, especially his mother, for frustrating his literary career and forcing him into law practice.82 The lawyers of Spoon River reflect Masters' own experiences and resentments. First comes Judge Somers. Despite what appears to be a judicial title, Somers figures only as a lawyer.83 He singles out his achievement in writing "a brief that won the praise of Justice Breese." (Despite a name that seems too good to be true, Justice Sidney Breese was a real-life and respected member of the Illinois Supreme Court.84) For present purposes the point is that a brief is the characteristic product of a practicing lawyer, not a sitting judge. Penniwit, the Artist, Spoon River's photographer, later tells an equally revealing anecdote about Judge Somers, whom he calls "attorney at law." Peniwi prided himself on penetrating to the soul of his sitters, seeing perhaps with a Cyclopean eye. One of Somers' natural eyes was crossed, and in order to catch him as he truly was, Penniwit had to resort to stratagem. The photog- rapher waited until the "Judge" got his cross-eye straight, then yelled "over- ruled" (a truly judicial prerogative) and Somers' eye "turned up" in surprise. Penniwit exulted: it was "the very best picture I ever took .... I caught him just as he used to look / When saying 'I except"' - the latter, a lawyer's phrase. Without pursuing the collateral issue of whether Penniwit's camera was really penetrating to the soul or only recording the surface, one is reinforced in the conviction that Somers is no more than a lawyer, a judge in name only, not unlike another judge manque, Masters himself. Aside from the ambiguity of his career, Somers is most notable for erudition coupled with neglect. His library, as we learn from the later epitaph of Imanuel Ehrenhardt, was well stocked with philosophical works: Sir Wil- liam Hamilton's lectures, Dugald Stewart, John Locke on the Understanding, Descartes, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Schopenhauer. In addition to philoso- phy, Somers had mastered the legal classics: he "knew Blackstone and Coke / Almost by heart." One is reminded of the young Masters who sat in his father's law office hiding Locke behind his lawbook and memorized all the definition in Blackstone. Like Masters, too, Somers for all his learning is unappreciated. From beyond the grave his querulous voice is heard asking why Chase Henry, the town drunk, has a more elaborate tombstone than he does. could Masters, before the success of Spoon River Antbology, have expected any more in the way of funerary monument? Next to Somers lies Kinsey Keene who expresses his rage and contempt for the powers that be in forceful terms. As with the "Judge," Keene's profes- sion is subject to initial uncertainty. In his own epitaph he says nothing about his career, yet a later poem places it beyond doubt. Jack McGuire was tried for murdering Logan, the Town Marshal, while drunk and his defense attorney was Kinsey Keene. As McGuire tells it, Keene struck an unethical deal with the presiding judge to secure a lesser sentence for his client: My lawyer, Kinsey Keene, was helping to landThe deal was done and may help to explain Keene's lordly contempt for Spoon River. Masters prided himself on knowing how things worked in the real world. In a corrupt system the best one could do was to secure a just result by corrupt means, but in the process one dirtied oneself. Dirt is certainly what Keene flings at the leading figures in town: the president of the bank, the editor of the principal paper, the pastor of the leading church, the Prohibitionist mayor, the members of the "Social Purity Club." In an elaborate insult, the lawyer recalls for them the last stand of the Old Guard at Waterloo; he reminds them of the English colonel's gentlemanly call, "Surrender, brave Frenchmen!"; then he takes his stand with the heroic remnant of Napoleon's army. What Cambronne replied to the offer of surren- der, "ere the English fire made smooth the brow of the hill / Against the sinking light of day," Keene says "to you, and all of you, / And to you, 0 world." He wanted le mot de Cambronne to be carved on his tombstone. With contempt, he disdains even to mention it: Merde! Shit!86 If Judge Somers' earthly achievements were neglected after his death, the lawyer in the next grave was denied even that transitory success. Unlike the indomitable Kinsey Keene, hurling epithets from beyond the grave, Benja- min Pantier died a defeated man, "broken, indifferent." He had enjoyed youth- ful promise: "In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory," but was then snared (like Masters) by an unhappy marriage. Mrs. Benjamin Pantier, buried by his side, recalled his earlier high spirits, expressed by constant quota- tions of jingling verse.(ironically, the example given was from William Knox's popular poem "Mortality": "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"87) Mrs. Pantier, a self-described lady of "delicate tastes," found her husband repul- sive, physically as well as spiritually. Although she confessed to thinking of "the marital relation" every time she saw him - indeed, as we shall see she thought of it even when she saw a studhorse - the idea of having relations with him filled her "with disgust." In terms of poetic taste, her superiority was expressed in her preference for Wordsworth's "Ode." (The full title of the poem is not given, just as Knox's poem is unnamed, yet the "Ode to Immortali- ty" and "Mortality" form a neat contrast and generate multiple ironies in the graveyard context.) So Pantier ended up living in a dingy room back of his dingy office, in partnership with Nig, his faithful dog, with whom he is buried "Our story," he says, "is lost in silence." While Kinsey Keene curses the leading citizens of Spoon River including the Social Purity Club (of which Mrs. Pantier was president88), Benjamin Pantier seeks only oblivion: "Go by, mad world!,, Another lawyer and broken man in Spoon River is State's Attorney Fallas. While Kinsey Keene was a defense attorney, Fallas was a prosecutor, self-identified as nemesis: I, the scourge-wielder, balance-wrecker,He recalls one of Spoon River's sensational murder trials in which he prosecut- ed Barry Holden, for the hatchet slaying of his pregnant wife. Justice miscar- ried in People v. Holden, as Fallas later learns, because he drove the jury to hang one who was really not guilty by reason of insanity. A higher justice caught up with the State's Attorney though, through the malpractice of another professional: "Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor's hand / Against my boy's head as he entered life / Made him an idiot." The experience led Fallas to study the science of mental illness and to abandon his former career: "the world of those whose minds are sick / Became my work in life, and all my world." In conclusion Fallas attributes to his son, "poor ruined boy," all his "deeds of charity." So far the legal community in Spoon River is cast in the traditional mold: solo practitioners, so far as we can see, whose business is the familiar one of prosecuting and defending criminals. With John M. Church the first example of the new style corporate lawyer appears, and the legal business shifts from the criminal to the civil side. Church characteristically represented a railroad and an insurance company; the railroad, the principal means of trans- portation in the nineteenth century and the "most powerful single initiator" of industrial development,89 and insurance, the means by which corporations converted damages caused by their wrongs into a predictable cost of doing business. Church's client insured the owners of a mine at which some unde- scribed catastrophe maimed or killed many miners. On behalf of his client, the lawyer "pulled the wires with judge and jury / And the upper courts, to beat the claims / Of the crippled, the widow and orphan" - the latter, of course, the special care of the church in another sense. There is no indication whether the wire-pulling in question involved corrupt means, such as tampering with judge and jury, or simply pro-business legal doctrines, with which contempo- rary American law was well stocked. Masters, labor lawyer and tort law specialist, was professionally aware of all the possibilities. By whatever means Church won, it earned him, he claimed, a personal fortune as well as the praise of the bar association. But fate caught up with corporate-lawyer Church as it had caught up with State's Attorney Fallas. The deceased reported that figura- tively, as well apparently as literally, "the rats devoured my heart / And a snake made a nest in my skull!" It was this fate, of course, that Masters knew awaited "the hard, shrewd, money-grabbing, corporation and business lawyers," a fate he thought he could have avoided if he had been in their place. Jefferson Howard is another of Spoon River's lawyers whose career is not obvious from his epitaph. Thanks only to Judge Selah Lively is Howard's place at the bar made known. Howard suffers the fate of other legal profession- als in Spoon River: neglect and abandonment. Named after Jefferson, Masters' populist hero, he is a native of Virginia whom fate brought to Spoon River. It is difficult to resist the idea that the poet is sympathetic to lawyer Howard. He fights Masters' enemies: "Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers;" he is the "foe of the church with its charnel dankness," the "friend of the human touch of the tavern." And in the end he is betrayed by everyone, family included. Like Benjamin Pantier, Howard is left "facing the silence - facing the prospect / That no one would know of the fight I made" - the very pros- pect Masters himself faced before the lightning struck and the success of Spoon River Anthology freed him from marriage and career. W. Lloyd Garrison Standard, named for the famous abolitionist, was a believer in causes. In a parody of nineteenth-century enthusiasms, Standard lurched from one extreme to another: Vegetarian, non-resistant, free-thinker, in ethics a Christian . . .Using an image reminiscent of corporate lawyer Church, whose heart was devoured by rats and whose skull was a snake's nest, Standard confessed to having a "heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair." Yet a mysterious epiphany was reserved for him, associated with his practice of law. In an obscure episode, some "patriot scamps" including one with a telltale name, Silas Demerit, burned down the old courthouse so that a new and presumably modern one would have to be built. Standard who represented the arsonists pleaded them guilty, and Demerit, at least, spent time in the state penitentiary at Joliet. In some undisclosed connection with that case, the profane Kinsey Keene, Standard's fellow lawyer, "drove through / The card-board mask of life with a spear of light." After this revelation, whatever it was, Standard was forced to admit the truth about himself. "The pyramid of my life was nought but a dune, / Barren and formless, spoiled at last by the storm." The final lawyer in Spoon River, Harmon Whitney, repeats and rein- forces many of the characteristics already seen. Like Benjamin Pantier, Whit- ney blames his marriage for his unhappy life, his soul's "wound gangrened / By love for a wife who made the wound, / With her cold white bosom, treason- ous, pure and hard, / Relentless to the last . . . ." A lover of poetry like Pantier, Whitney is left "spouting to gaping yokels pages of verse, / Out of the lore of golden years." Filled with self-pity, he sees himself "gifted with tongues and wisdom, / Sunk here to the dust of the justice court, / A picker of rags in the rubbage of spites and wrongs." A curious insight into the "rubbage" is provided in a later epitaph. Felix Schmidt began with a two-room house and five acres of land to shelter and support his large family. One day lawyer Whitney came alongIn court it was proved, notwithstanding what lawyer Whitney had "proved" to Schmidt, that Dallman's title under the tax deed was good, and a survey showed that the deed even covered the five acres on which Schmidt lived. Humbly and without recrimination, Schmidt accepted dispossession ("It served me right for stirring him up.") and went to work as Dallman's tenant. In his own epitaph Whitney makes no mention of Schmidt v. Dallman. (Indeed, if the "justice court" to which he had sunk was the court of the justice of the peace, then the case was probably not among the rubbage picked over there: jurisdiction was limited to what we would now call small claims.) Pursuing instead his theme of great literature, the lawyer regrets that his soul could not react to his marital unhappiness "like Byron's did, in song, in some- thing noble." Masters, who had earlier followed Byron's example in reading Blackstone, was transmuting his own unhappiness, marital and professional, into the bitter songs of the Anthology. Whitney's final image, recalling his fellow lawyers Church and Standard, as well as Masters' own horrific image of animals deformed by X rays, is of his soul "turned on itself like a tortured snake." The lawyers of Spoon River are so many facets of Edgar Lee Masters' own experience in his profession. They are alter egos created out of distinct emotions and given a poetic life of their own. Their most remarkable charac- teristic is the confusion surrounding their career. Is Judge Somers a judge? With Kinsey Keene and Jefferson Howard one must look elsewhere to learn their roles. Neither Garrison Standard nor Harmon Whitney are unequivocally identified as lawyers in their own epitaphs. Clarity is reserved only for the defeated Benjamin Pantier, the humbled State's Attorney Fallas, and the despica- ble John M. Church. The lawyers of Spoon River are largely fools, drunkards, or failures, buried together in the first third of the cemetery. The practice of law is contaminating, preventing those engaged in it from aspiring to higher, spiritual levels; inevitably involved with crime and corruption, lawyers are weighed down, "of the earth, earthy." Few are endowed with even "one-birth minds," meriting burial in the second third of the cemetery. While Masters' comparison of Spoon River with the Divine Comedy should not be pushed too far, it suggests that Jefferson Howard, Garrison Standard, and Harmon Whitney rose the highest. But the latter two - one with a worm-eaten heart, the other with a soul like a tortured snake - surely do not belong above the middle rounds of purgatory, if not actually down below. The Spoon River judges are no better than the lawyers they presided over. Justice Arnett is the first to speak, and he describes his death in a re- markable courtroom accident. The iron-bound docket book, kept on a shelf above his head, was jarred loose and dealt him the fatal blow. What jarred it loose was an explosion at the canning works, which (as we shall see) led to a lawsuit by an injured workman, Butch Weldy. The suit was lost because of one of those pro-business rules that insurance lawyer Church may have relied on, so the judge's death in what he calls "the seat of justice" may be a form of poetic retaliation, if not justice. The judge himself, of course, could not make the moral connection, only the causal one. As he lay dying, he was aware of the leaves of the docket fluttering around him. Those are not leaves [he said],In the context of the poem Arnett's plea may arouse sympathy, but in the larger context of Spoon River it is patently ironic. Arnett was probably a justice of the peace, his court the "justice court" to which lawyer Whitney had sunk. Its jurisdiction included minor criminal cases - the "rubbage of spites and wrongs" - such as Curl Trenary's case against Knowlt Hoheimer for the theft of hogs and the repeated prosecutions of Daisy Fraser, the town prosti- tute. Daisy provided her own comment on the quality of justice in Spoon River. Comparing her situation with the hypocrisy and compromises of the town's leading citizens, she contrasted their stinginess in supporting the town with her own forced contributions: she "never was taken before Justice Arnett / Without contributing ten dollars and costs / To the school fund of Spoon River!" The docket book recorded such judgments, yet in a larger sense the "little entries" in the death-dealing docket included cases like Schmidt v. Dall- man, Butch Weldy's case, the claims of "the crippled, the widow and orphan", beaten by lawyer Church, and the murder trials like People v. McGuire and People v. Holden. Justice Arnett was not the only person in Spoon River to be tortured with the leaves of the docket. It was the nameless Circuit Judge who heard the case filed by Butch Weldy. After he "got religion and steadied down," Butch was hired by the Spoon River Canning Company; he later sued his employer in tort for injuries caused by an industrial accident. The defendant company was part of Thomas Rhodes' financial empire, which included the water works, the store, and the wagon works, in addition to the bank. Henry Phipps, the Sunday school superintendent, was the "dummy president" of the Canning Company, but it was Rhodes' son, Ralph, who was the prime mover. Butch states the facts of his case succinctly: ... every morning I had to fillToday Weldy's injuries would be covered by a state workers' compensation statute; indeed, as Masters wrote, Illinois was moving to such a system,91 but under the ancien regime of tort liability Weldy had to prove the company's fault in order to recover. Since the first half of the nineteenth century, in other words since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in America, the legal doctrine of corn- mon employment had blocked efforts by workers to make their masters pay the costs of injuries incurred in their service. First enunciated in the leading English case of Priestley v. Fowler (1837)92 and popularized in America by Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw in Farwell v. Boston and Worcester R.R. (1842),93 the doctrine meant that an employer was not liable to an em- ployee for injuries caused by the fault of a fellow employee engaged in the common employment. Closely associated was the doctrine of assumption of the risk; employees were presumed to accept the ordinary risks of their employ- ment. Between them, the two doctrines were potent in preventing the victims of industrial accidents from reducing corporate profits. John M. Church probably used one or both of them on behalf of the insurance company to beat the claims of "the crippled, the widow and orphan." In Weldy v. Canning Co. the Circuit Judge ruled that whoever left the blow-fire going was Butch's "fellow-servant," so."Old Rhodes's son didn't have to pay." Butch records his own feeble protest: I sat on the witness stand as blindIn the poetic universe of Spoon River the worker got this much revenge on the law: Justice Arnett had been sitting in the "seat of justice" when the shock waves from the explosion dislodged the iron-bound docket book that killed him. With a vision posthumously cleared, the Circuit judge confesses that he earned "the anger of the wronged, / The curses of the poor" by "deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored, / Not on the right of the matter." Like State's Attorney Fallas, he was a "legalist." Voicing his regret he instances, however, not the injustices he did to the maimed, the widows and orphans, but the death sentence he passed on the murderer Hod Putt. Since Putt is buried in the first grave in Spoon River, we know something of the particulars of his crime. "Grown tired of toll and poverty," particularly as others grew rich from ill-gotten gains, Putt "robbed a traveler one night near Proctor's Grove, Killing him unwittingly while doing so." Putt seems resigned to his fate, yet the man who presided over People v. Putt is tortured by the feeling that the murderer "was innocent in soul compared with me." Is this any more than a legal version of Calvinist breast-beating over sin and unworthiness? Would any self-respecting legal system want to exonerate Hod Putt, however hard put upon he was, for robbing and killing an innocent traveler? Far better to lament the actual miscarriages of justice. So confused is the moral universe of Spoon River's judges that when one has any qualms of conscience at all, he strains at g nats while swallowing camels. Legalist that he is, he cannot draw the distinc- tions necessary for practical justice. Unlike the Circuit Judge, County Judge Selah Lively is unrepentant even after death. He is the archetypal self-made man, triumphant and vengeful. He had begun as a grocery clerk who studied law at night. He was regular, and doubtless ostentatious, in church attendance and became the personal attorney of Thomas Rhodes, the bank president whose malfeasances were later pursued - up to a point - by Kinsey Keene. The crowning achievement of Lively's career was his election as County Judge, presumably with support from Rhodes. It is indeed likely that he was the unnamed judge, "a friend of Rhodes," who did the deal with Keene concerning Jack McGuire. For Judge Lively, his personal success was all the sweeter because he stood only five feet two inches tall. From his perspective, "all the giants," like Jefferson Howard, Kinsey Keene, and Harmon Whitney, had jeered at his size; now they were "forced to stand / Before the bar and say 'Your Honor."' His soul as cramped as his body, Judge Lively gloated: "Well, don't you think it was natural that I made it hard for them?" Brief mention may suffice for Hamilton Greene, who added judicial office to his other attainments: "judge, member of Congress, leader in the State." Given Masters' enmity for Alexander Hamilton,"94 Thomas Jefferson's archenemy, it was only to be expected that the poet would reserve some horri- ble fate for his namesake in Spoon River. In fact, Greene is assigned the mild punishment of complacent self-delusion. With filial piety he attributes all his good qualities to his parents: From my mother I inheritedThe irony is that Hamilton Greene like the greater Hamilton before him was in fact illegitimate; Spoon River's Hamilton being the bastard son of Thomas Greene and Elsa Wertman, the Greene's German-born maid. Mrs. Greene helped her husband to conceal the fact and quietly adopted the child; as Elsa with peasant bluntness put it: "He gave her a farm to be still." Elsa herself got nothing, except the thrill of watching her unacknowledged son climb the ladder of success. Unknown to Hamilton, he lies in the grave next to his natural mother. The last legal figure to speak in Spoon River, Granville Calhoun, is like the first, Judge Somers, a judge manque. Calhoun had indeed long been the County Judge, "But my friends left me and joined my enemies, / And they elected a new man," apparently the obnoxious Selah Lively. So intent on revenge was ex-Judge Calhoun that he raised his sons to desire only power and money, a fate that one at least, Henry C. Calhoun, buried next to his father, came to regret. The elder Calhoun, made speechless by a stroke, spent his declining years at his bedroom window, "looking at the court-house window / Of the county judge's room." Masters, who had himself been passed over for judgeship, narrowly avoided a comparable fate. Spoon River's judiciary are no better than the members of the bar appearing before them. Legalistic, vengeful, and obsessive at worst, they are doddering and deluded at best. Not fools or drunkards so far as we can see and by definition not failures in career terms, the judges of Spoon River are no more than "one-birth minds"; none rises to the second tier - lawyer Masters' revenge on the judiciary. When they do not actually corrupt the system, they merely administer it: a system of rules for punishing the innocent, like the insane Barry Holden, and for denying justice to the wronged and the poor. Lawyers and judges are overrepresented among those sleeping on the hill, and their life stories illustrate the seamy side of the law. Much the same can be said about the legal issues that appear in the Anthology. Not limited to legal biographies, law and its abuse form a consistent theme of the work. Hod Putt, the murderer sentenced to death by the Circuit Judge, is the first character to speak.95 His very first words implicate law and crime and the confusion of the two: Here I lie close to the graveSince the epitaphs are undated, one cannot be sure which "bankrupt law" Old Bill took. There were short-lived laws adopted in 1800 and 1841, but the prime candidates would be the bankruptcy act of 1867 (repealed in 1878) and its successor in 1898, which forms the basis of modern law.96 Masters, who began his legal career in Chicago as a bill collector for the Edison Company, 97 would doubtless have been familiar with the subject. Generally regarded as a humane and efficient measure, permitting individuals as well as corporations to petition for relief from a hopeless accumulation of debt, the bankruptcy act figures in the opening line of Spoon River's first epitaph as a shield for wrongdoing. Piersol seems to have used the law to shuck off rightful claims, only to emerge "richer than ever." Anterior to taking the bankrupt law was, of course, Old Bill's ill-gotten gains "trading with the Indians." The unequal bargains made with North America's aboriginal inhabitants have haunted the literary conscience. In The Pioneers (1823) James Fenimore Cooper imagined a past in which the Indians voluntarily gave away their land to a white man, while in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne described a deed from Indian sachems for the vast tract of land in Maine claimed by the Pyncheons.98 A desperate need to forge - in both senses of the word - the first link in the chain of title to America lies behind such imaginings. Actually Masters' archenemy Chief Justice John Marshall was far more candid about the source of title. In Johnson v. McIntosh, decided the very year Cooper published The Pioneers, Marshall wrote in the United States Reports: "Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny. . . ."99 Shady deals with the Indians are a persis- tent mark of moral turpitude in American fiction. Marian Forrester, the "lost lady" of Willa Cather's 1923 novel, plumbs the depths when in a desperate attempt to regain economic independence she entrusts what little money she has to the despicable Ivy Peters to invest for her in Wyoming land. "He gets splendid land from the Indians some way, for next to nothing." "I've no doubt it's crooked,"100 she confesses. Old Bill Piersol merely reenacted on a small scale the history of America, growing rich trading with the Indians, but when Hod Putt tried to follow the precedent of primordial wrong, he was con- demned. His own wry comment is far more apt than the Circuit Judge's misplaced moralizing: "That was my way of going into bankruptcy." Two graves away from Hod Putt lies the hardware store owner and inventor, Robert Fulton Tanner. His invention of a better mousetrap proves his undoing: "I was bitten by a rat / While demonstrating my patent trap." Tanner goes on to turn his invention into a bitter metaphor of the human condition. A man is lured by some bait, "a woman with money you want to marry, / Prestige, place, or power in the world," then caught in the trap set by the monstrous ogre Life," who torments the victim "until your misery bores him." Tanner's property in the design of his trap, his patent, is a creature of statute. As with the bankrupt law, so with patents: a generally benign provi- sion is shown to work hardship. Not only did Bill Piersol escape his lawful creditors, but Hod Putt in trying to follow his example killed an innocent traveler and is himself hanged. Tanner's death-dealing invention is literally a trap: he himself is killed and his design becomes a figure of malign fate. The federal Constitution puts in only one sorry appearance in the Anthology. At the time of writing, long before the "due process revolution," the expansive powers of the organic law were exploited most often in the interests of business. Ida Chicken, meek student of the French language, encountered the Constitution twice in one day. In Peoria to secure a passport, she was required to swear to support and defend the Constitution. That very morning The Rhodes in question was Thomas Rhodes, bank president and Spoon River's leading citizen, father of Ralph Rhodes who ran the canning works. Ida had seen him on the train that morning. The ground on which Rhodes was ex- empted from taxes is not expressed but was probably that he had secured a provision in the water works' corporate charter exempting it from state taxes. Such provisions were not uncommon in the last half of the nineteenth centu- ry.101 Intended to promote desirable improvements, they were subject to obvious abuse in an era of corrupt legislatures, documented elsewhere in Spoon River. When the state attempted to revoke its favor, the beneficiary could claim the protection of the Contracts Clause: "No State shall.... pass any ... Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts."102 Years earlier in the famous Dart- mouth College Case,103 Chief Justice Marshall had equated corporate charters with contracts, thus making them unalterable. just as Old Bill Piersol "took the bankrupt law," so Old Rhodes "took" the Constitution, and both came out "richer than ever." Legal personalities and issues are pervasive in Spoon River. Lawyers and judges are thick on the ground, and legal issues appear in numerous poems. Law cases, both civil and criminal frequently crop up. An unusual number of homicides are reported. As we have seen, Hod Putt and Barry Holden were convicted of murder and executed, while Jack McGuire got only fourteen years because of Kinsey Keene's corrupt deal with the judge. Rosie Roberts wrote the Chief of Police in Peoria and confessed to murdering the son of a "mer- chant prince" in a brothel. The crime would otherwise have gone unpunished because the newspapers "lied like the devil to hush up scandal, / For the bribe of advertising": they reported that "he killed himself / In his home while cleaning a hunting gun." In Spoon River itself Searcy Foote murdered his rich Aunt Persis and got away with it: "the coroner / Said she died of heart failure A joke on you, Spoon River?" Mrs. Merritt and her teenage lover Elmer Karr were convicted of murdering Tom Merritt. Elmer got fourteen years like Jack McGuire, and Mrs. Merritt (apparently judged the guiltier of the two) died in Joliet penitentiary after serving thirty years, although she main- tained her innocence even in the grave. The detection and punishment of crime in Spoon River were haphazard affairs. While there was a police chief in Peoria and presumably an organized constabulary to back him up, the village still relied on such antediluvian officers as the Night Watch and the Town Marshal,104 as well as on the small town's resources of private detection. Clarence Fawcett, a clerk in Thomas Rhodes' store, stole blankets in order to raise money "to pay a doctor's bill for my little girl." Rhodes suspected and offered mercy in return for a confession, then had Fawcett arrested. "And every paper, except the Clarion, / Wrote me up as a thief / Because old Rhodes was an advertiser / And wanted to make an example of me." Petty larceny by a necessitous thief was ruthlessly punished, while the grander larcenies of the town's leading citizen were ignored. Kinsey Keene, as we have seen, while defending Jack McGuire, "was helping to land / Old Thomas Rhodes for wrecking the bank, / And the judge [Selah Lively?] was a friend of Rhodes / And wanted him to escape." Keene "quit on Rhodes" in return for fourteen years for McGuire. Nicholas Bindle later recalled that the pipe-organ he had given the church "played its christening songs when Deacon Rhodes, / Who broke the bank and all but ruined me, / Worshipped for the first time after his acquittal." (George Reece, although only the cashier, was sent to jail.) With Old Rhodes' undeserved acquittal may be compared the ironic result in the prosecution of Roy Butler for the rape of Mrs. Richard Bandle. The truth in People v. Butler was that the defendant was innocent: Richard Bandle and I had trouble over a fence,In the local trial court, however, Butler was convicted: "A jury, of neighbors mostly, with 'Butch' Weldy / As foreman, found me guilty in ten minutes And two ballots." Casting Butch Weldy, the cannery workman, as foreman of the jury in a rape case suggests the first set of ironies. The Butler Case, al- though reported later, was clearly before Weldy's injury. Back then, Butch was one of the town toughs and was himself guilty of an unreported rape. (His victim, Minerva Jones, later died during an abortion performed by Doctor Meyers, who was promptly indicted.) Butch's feelings during the trial are not reported. Did he vote against the accused rapist because he knew the ways of the world and what kind of stories would be told? Or did he vote to convict Butler in order to protect himself from suspicion? Or had Butch already "got religion" in the Spoon River sense of the word and, now pharisaically pure, was ready to cast the first stone? In any event, his role shifts the equities somewhat in his own subsequent suit against the Canning Company. The final irony in People v. Butler is that Roy's conviction was reversed on appeal, apparently because the Supreme Court did not believe Mrs. Bandle's testimony: "neither the Supreme Court nor my wife / Believed a word she said." Ordinarily the credibility of a witness is left to the jury, and facts found at trial are not reviewable on appeal. But, as Masters well knew, it is always possible to find some technical defect as a basis for reversal and that may have been what happened here. Even Roy marveled at his acquittal: If the learned Supreme Court of IllinoisBecause in the context of the Anthology we must believe Roy's testimony, we are faced with a legal judgment that is just but inadequately explained. To Roy's contemporaries lacking our posthumous perspective, it must have seemed as if just another rapist got off. In People v. Butler the legal forms may have been manipulated to pro- duce a just result, but in People v. Bloyd the manipulation had a sinister pur- pose. Wendell P. Bloyd was a thorn in the side of Spoon River's Christian population. He preached an anti-Gospel of a malevolent God: I said God lied to Adam, and destined himTo the pious it seemed that there ought to be a law against such scandalous utterances; so Bloyd was charged with the catchall offense of disorderly con- duct,105 "there being no statute on blasphemy." Even this seems to have failed - he only reports being charged not convicted - so the powers that be fell back on the perennial favorite in dealing with dissidents and locked him up as "insane." In a twist that is in keeping with the moral economy of Spoon River, Bloyd was finally "beaten to death by a Catholic guard." Informal justice - or, rather injustice in this case - is meted out in disregard of the legal forms. It is furthermore a "guard," one legally charged with the safekeeping of inmates, who is the cause of his death. Trials are exercises in finding facts, but the criminal trials in Spoon River inspire no confidence. The truly insane Barry Holden was convicted of first degree murder, a result even the State's Attorney came to see was unjust. Thomas Rhodes was acquitted with help from the judge. Neither Mrs. Merritt nor Roy Butler could convince a jury of their innocence, although the latter got off on a dubious technicality. Wendell Bloyd was civilly committed when his criminal prosecution failed. Yet part of the feeling of dissatisfaction is caused by the literary technique of the Anthology itself. Since the vantage point is a cemetery, the trials are necessarily in the past. The "facts" are presented in juxtaposition with the trials, not as their products. Given this approach, it is almost inevitable that the fact-finding process will look bad. The only question will be how close it can get to "reality." A similar effect is produced in Theo- dore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), in which Clyde Griffith's murder of Roberta Alden is portrayed as inevitable, making his subsequent trial seem merely vindictive. Unless Clyde's whole life can be introduced into evidence, judgment is rendered on an incomplete record.106 For an omniscient narrator, even one without a determinist outlook, to describe a trial is inevitably to make it look like a mere approximation. Unless an author is prepared to exercise the rigorous self-restraint of Henry James, confining himself to a single viewpoint, there are always other "facts," unknown or unproven in court, to contaminate the result.107 Only by limiting one's perspective to that of the fact finder, confronted by a host of conflicting claims, can one hope to do justice to the process, as James Gould Cozzens did in his legal novel The Just and the Unjust (1942).108 Civil suits too are common in Spoon River and equally unsatisfying. The bankrupt law and the fellow-servant rule we have already seen, and Schmidt v. Dallman, stirred up by lawyer Whitney, turned on the effect of a tax deed. In addition, one old-fashioned suit for breach of promise of matrimony is reported. Ida Frickey, penniless and newly arrived in Spoon River, had a hunger-induced vision as she stared at the McNeely mansion: "I saw a giant pair of scissors / Dip from the sky, like the beam of a dredge, / And cut the house in two like a curtain." Later at the hotel where she went seeking work, Ida was "winked at" by Wash McNeely's son: "He proved the link in the chain of title / To half my ownership of the mansion, / Through a breach of promise suit. Law pervades Spoon River in a deeper sense as well. When Ida Frickey first saw the McNeely mansion, she saw the visible marks of ownership: long- continued possession - not only was the house "old," it appeared to her of venerable antiquity, "a castle of stone 'mid walks and gardens"; and the inten- tion to exclude others - "with workmen about the place on guard." But she sensed something deeper as well, an invisible aspect of ownership: "the County ind State upholding it / For its lordly owner." Here Ida penetrated to the essence. " Property, legally speaking, is not a thing, not even a person's relation- ship to a thing, but a person's relationship to other persons in respect to a thing. In legal analysis, the mansion was McNeely's not because of possession and intention to exclude but because of title, a uniquely legal abstraction. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes so forcefully put it while Spoon River was still on the best-seller list: "for legal purposes, a right is only the hypostasis of a prophecy - the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things said to contravene it .... 109 From this positivist perspective, law does not enforce or even rein- force a right, it creates it by an act of legal imagination. Just as Robert Fulton Tanner held the patent on his trap, so McNeely held title to his mansion - until the legal scissors appeared and cut the house in two. Spoon River is itself a product of the legal imagination, in a sense other than the obvious one. Unlike European villages or even older New England towns, Spoon River is not an organic community; it is a legal artifact. When Mrs. Benjamin Pantier as head of the Social Purity Club objected to keeping a studhorse in town - in the McNeely barn, to be exact - she went to the "Village trustees" and asked them to order Jim Brown to remove the stud to a barn "outside the corporation." Just as McNeely's claim to his mansion is up- held by the County and State, so too Spoon River is a village only by lawful authority. Just as the water works exists by virtue of its corporate charter, so too the Village of Spoon River is a municipal corporation chartered by the State. And th'is legal description is apt: the village is no more than an accumu- lation of immigrants from other regions, not unlike shareholders bound togeth- er only by a temporary economic motive. The "dominant forces" were "drawn from New England, / Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers," - the forces abominated by Jefferson Howard (and by Edgar Lee Masters) - but to these were added many from other towns, like Ida Frickey from Summum (an actual Illinois town); other regions, like Howard himself from Virginia; even other countries, like Elsa Wertman, Hamilton Greene's unacknowledged moth- er, from Germany. In this regard Spoon River resembles Gopher Prairie where the original New England settlers, still the social elite, were later outnumbered by newcomers from elsewhere.110 Spoon River is a legal community, and it is precisely because the legal order is bad that Spoon River is bad. In one sense the law in Spoon River does not constitute an order at all; in fact practicing law is not once but twice equated with gambling: I never saw any difference Practicing law, banking, or anything elseBut if law is a game in Spoon River, it is likely to be a crooked one. Harry Carey Goodhue charged "the bank and the courthouse ring" with "pocketing the interest on public funds" and fought the water works - protected by the Constitution from paying taxes - "for stealing streets and raising rates." Daisy Fraser asked rhetorically: "Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge / Helping anyone except the Q railroad, / Or the bankers?" Sexsmith the Dentist asked in turn: Do you think that Daisy FraserAdam Weirauch, Spoon River's representative in the state legislature, sold his vote to Charles T. Yerkes, the real-life financier whose career provided Theo- dore Dreiser with material,111 while Lambert Hutchins, Spoon River's repre- sentative in Congress, chose the railroad as his paymaster. Rosie Roberts confessed to a murder because she was "mad / At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life." Henry Phipps, Sunday school superintendant and "dummy president" of the canning factory, contemplating the bankrupt bank, imagined he saw a wrecked machine and, among the wreckage "only the hopper for souls fit to be used again / In a new devourer of life, when newspapers, judges and money-magicians / Build over again." The very last mention of lawyers in Spoon River comes in a heartfelt sermon preached by Aaron Hat- field, modeled on Masters' beloved grandfather,112 reminding the congregation of "the peasant youth / Of Galilee who went to the city / And was killed by bankers and lawyers." That blind chance would be better than the blind goddess of justice was made graphically - even disgustingly - plain in Spoon River's one honest newspaper, the Clarion, edited by Carl Hamblin. On the day the anarchists were hanged in Chicago for their part in the Haymarket Riot - on November 11, 1887, in other words113 - the editor published the following vision: I saw a beautiful woman with bandaged eyesJudge Somers is only cross-eyed; Justice herself is worse than blind. Hamblin's revelation suggests a grim retribution for Butch Weldy's eyes, "burned crisp as a couple of eggs." In its association of violence and vision it recalls Masters' own revelation of the "Cyclopean eye" burned in his forehead by the law. As a piece of imaginative literature, Spoon River Anthology lives by the law, just as Edgar Lee Masters lived by it while writing. The energy that still surges though these Todeslieder was unleashed in the torture chambers of the poet's professional career. Paradoxically it is precisely because of its death- dealing character that law evoked so vital a response in its practitioner and victim. For all his attempts at a classic air of fatalistic repose, it is Masters' heroic and romantic rebellion against his personal fate that continues to vivify the Anthology. Though he suffered as an individual, the poet is in some sense Representative Man. His anguished cries rise above the particularities of his own case and reach us across the years. The Anthology is very much a lawyer's view of Spoon River. Legal professionals abound, legal issues are numerous, legal terms are handled with confidence. One need only contrast the lawyers with the doctors and clergy- men to see the difference. Medical malpractice is limited to forms known to laymen: a bungled delivery, a fatal abortion. The detail brought to Dr. Will Kennicott's Main Street practice (not to mention Arrowsmith later on) is strik- ingly absent. What is true of medicine is true also of religion. While "The Church in Spoon River" could be the subject of another study, it would not be so long as this one. Clerical life is not presented with any more particularity than informs the portrayal of the medical profession. A clergyman counsels against divorce, rails against intemperance and impurity, occasionally preaches an inspiring sermon. But the lawyer's life - and, worse, corruption - is time and again shown in graphic detail. Spoon River is full of crime: murder, rape, arson (of the courthouse, no less!); as well as of civil litigation: bankruptcy, personal injury, even breach of promise. Far more than abuse of religion, it is abuse of. law that expresses the sinfulness of Spoon River. Spoon River Anthology would not have been the stunning success it was if it had not appealed to its audience's sense of something wrong. America was ready for its vivisection of small-town verities, and the law, too, was ripe for radical scrutiny. The legal system fit for an America of small towns was inadequate to cope with the urban industrial state; it was too easily exploited by crafty lawyers on behalf of their corporate clients. Populism, Masters' political heritage, perceived the problem only darkly and offered no way forward. Before the Progressives with their faith in bureaucratic solutions, before the New Deal and its legal Brain Trust, before the civil rights revolution, it was hard to idealize American law. It was this macrocosmic reality that Masters caught forever in the microcosm of Spoon River. |
