Thrice-Told Tale

Nobody knows who first dubbed the Wilkes-Barre, Pa. murder the "American Tragedy." Philadelphia Record editors said it was their reporter Andrew MacLain ("Mac") Parker. City Editor Charles Israel of the Philadelphia Bulletin said it was himself. The city editor of the Scranton Times credited a United Press man. Possibly all three, and many another newshawk, swooped at once on the catch-phrase the moment they heard, two months ago. that Robert Allan Edwards, 21, was accused of bashing his pregnant girl over the head in a lake so he could marry his other girl. That was exactly the plot of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The comparison put last week's trial on the front page of practically every newspaper in the land.

Editors thanked the Providence which gave them a Morro Castle sensation when Strike news turned stale; a Hauptmann when the ship story petered out; and now a juicy murder just as the Hauptmann case seemed to head downhill. But they also should have offered a grateful word to Cinema. For it was the millions who had seen the film of An American Tragedy, not the thousands who had plugged through Dreiser's two-volume novel, that lifted the Wilkes-Barre story from a cheap, provincial homicide to a seven-day sensation.

Some 50 crack reporters, sob-sisters, cameramen, ranging from the august New York Times to the Polish Everybody's Record jammed the press tables in Luzerne County Courthouse at Wilkes-Barre. Most conspicuous of all was the hulking, white-crowned figure of Author Dreiser. Rip-snorting Publisher Julius David Stern, who has been trying to transform the ancient New York Post into a wild-&-woolly liberal sheet, had hired Dreiser to cover the trial for the Post, the Philadelphia Record, and a syndicate string. Author Dreiser was also covering for Mystery Magazine.*

The parallel really lay between the Edwards case and that of Chester E. Gillette; of Cortland, N. Y. which Author Dreiser had drably copied into his book, even to giving his hero the same initials--Clyde Griffith. It was 28 years ago that Chester Gillette, raised in a sternly religious atmosphere, got a job as foreman in a rich relative's collar factory. He took up with a pretty factory girl, Grace Brown, but, by the time she became pregnant, Gillette, socially ambitious, had been taken up by another girl, an "heiress." He took Grace Brown to Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, ostensibly to marry her. They went for a boat ride from which Gillette swam to shore alone. Days later Grace Brown's body was dragged from the lake. Gillette said she had died accidentally when the boat overturned, and he had fled because the circumstances looked suspicious. But Grace Brown's wistful letters to Gillette, begging him to marry her, convinced the jury of deliberate murder. He had clubbed the girl with a tennis racket. He was electrocuted.

"Bobby" Edwards, son of devout Congregationalist parents, was a clerk with ambitions to be a minister. He became intimate with his next-door neighbor, a telephone operator named Freda McKechnie, whose father worked in the same coal company as Edwards' father. Both families attended the Bethesda Church. Three years ago Bobby Edwards went off to school at East Aurora, N. Y., fell in love with a plain-looking teacher named Margaret Grain. Their unusual romance was revealed to the jury of anthracite miners in terms of 172 letters written by Edwards to Miss Grain after he returned to Edwardsville. Mostly too hot for even sexational newspapers to handle, the letters described a physical attachment so feverish and inordinate that Edwards' father felt obliged to leave the courtroom while the assistant district attorney was sonorously reading them. As for Edwards, he offered to plead guilty and throw himself on the court's mercy if the letter-reading ordeal could be stopped.

But it all went into the record, and helped make the jury believe that Edwards must have been determined to escape his obligation to pregnant Freda McKechnie. On the night of July 30 he drove with her to Harvey's Lake. Although it was raining, they slipped into their bathing suits in the automobile and went for a swim. Freda did not return home. Edwards told police a half-dozen stories of accidental death and incriminating circumstances. The last version, which he gave firmly from the witness stand last week, was that Freda had slipped while stepping from the dock into a rowboat, had cracked her head on the boat. Fearing she was dead, he hit her with his blackjack, he said, because "it occurred to me that if there were only some mark on Freda's body it would look like an accident and leave me out of it."

In reporting the Gillette case as An American Tragedy (the second volume is almost a stenographic record of the trial) Author Dreiser made Society the villain for having endowed Clyde Griffiths with a sordid background and for tormenting him with emotional stresses with which he was not equipped to deal. (The film version, starring Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, angered Dreiser to the point of trying to keep it off the screen because, he complained, it slighted the Dreiser sociology.)

Dreiser's report of the Wilkes-Barre trial last week likewise was an indictment of the "system." And, like the novel, his accounts were turgid, myopic, verbose, sorely needing the astringent blue pencil of a copy desk. He seemed to be arguing that had the boy had more money, he would not have got himself or his girl into trouble. Clearest point: "I am inclined to agree with the French that crimes which concern love and passion and the ambition of youth are nothing which the law, in its cold, calculating and in the main commercial mood, should have anything to do with. . . ."

The judge was moved to warn Author Dreiser to cease making faces at the jury.

The jury convicted Robert Edwards of first degree murder, sentenced him to death in the electric chair.

*A Tower Magazine, sold in Woolworth stores. Tower's gumchewers' magazines are headed by able Publisher Catherine McNelis, who also publishes the intellectualist American Spectator, of which Dreiser was a onetime editor.

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