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Full Description
Examining the case that inspired a pop culture phenomenon
In 1924 Beulah Annan was arrested and incarcerated for killing her lover, Harry Kalsted. Six weeks later, a jury acquitted her of murder. Inspired by the sordid event, trial, and acquittal, Maurine Watkins, a reporter at the time, wrote the play Chicago, a Broadway hit that was adapted several times. Through a fresh retelling of the story of Annan and of Watkins's play, Charles H. Cosgrove provides the first critical examination of the criminal case, and an initial exploration of the era's social assumptions that made the message of the play so plausible in its own time. His careful historical research challenges the received portrait of Annan as a killer who got away with murder, and of Watkins as a savvy cub reporter and precocious playwright.
In They Both Reached for the Gun, Charles H. Cosgrove expertly combines inquest and police records, and interviews with Annan's relatives, to analyze the participants, the trial, and the subsequent play. Although no one will ever know what really happened in the Kenwood apartment on Chicago's south side one hundred years ago, Cosgrove's interrogation shows how sensationalized Watkins's writing was. Her reporting on the Annan case perpetuated falsehoods about Annan's so-called "confession," and her play gave an inaccurate portrayal of Chicago's criminal justice system. Despite Watkins's insistence that her drama revealed the truth about its subjects without any exaggeration, her play depicted police, prosecutors, and judges as the only "good guys" in the story, ignoring those who lied, misled, and used brutal methods to obtain forced confessions.
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
A Note on Names
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Beulah Mae
2. A Shooting
3. An Alleged Confession
4. Police and Prosecutors Shape the Narrative
5. Inquest into the Death of Harry Kalsted
6. Finding Beulah behind the Press's Tropes and Paraquotations
7. Maurine Watkins's News with Wit
8. Back in Owensboro
9. Popular Opinions about Jury Bias in Favor of Women
10. Beulah Annan Goes to Trial
11. Watkins's Tendentious Reporting on the Annan Trial
12. A Play Is Born
13. The Truth about Chicago's Criminal Justice System
14. The Short Unhappy Finish to Beulah's Life
15. Beulah Remembered as Roxie
16. Bob Fosse's Musical Remake of Maurine Watkins's Play
Postscript
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
