1875 - Crime

Crime

The Jukes, a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity by English-born sociologist Richard Louis Dugdale, 33, purports to be an extensive criminal-genealogical study of seven generations of a depraved U.S. family descended from a mid-18th century Dutch tavern keeper. A functionary of the Prison Association of New York, Dugdale has plowed through arrest records and interviewed prisoners, wardens, and inmates of asylums and poorhouses. He concludes that the Jukes have cost the public $1.3 million and that their immorality is hereditary (see Kallikaks, 1912).

Brooklyn, New York, Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher wins acquittal July 2 when a sensational 6-month adultery trial ends in a hung jury. Now 62, Beecher has clearly been guilty of having sex with a parishioner's wife in the late 1860s, and while his older sisters Catharine and Harriet have staunchly defended his innocence in the affair, his younger half-sister Isabella Beecher Hooker has publicly questioned it.

New York authorities release onetime political boss William M. "Boss" Tweed from prison after he has served a brief term for larceny and forgery (see 1873). They rearrest him in a civil action brought by the state to recover his loot, but he escapes from jail in December, flees to Cuba, and proceeds to Spain disguised as a sailor. Recognized from a Thomas Nast cartoon, he is apprehended and returned to New York, where he will die in prison in 1878 at age 55.