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.