Review by Mack Hassler
Recently I flew from O’Hare in Chicago to a conference at Moline, Illinois, and got a good look at the empty prairie West of the Windy City—wide open and empty like the UP. Two very big cities full of mob violence and major crime are the gateways to the UP. This important and carefully-constructed history by Frederick Stonehouse is written with the strong implication that Chicago and Detroit are located as the pillars “below” the Bridge. Stonehouse’s narrative is less about UP crime, although he is very good on some crime Above the Bridge, than it is about crime at the busy entry points on each side that teem with mob violence and violent crime. He does not theorize about this fact. But there is always the Freudian hint of close and crowded living evincing our worst character traits such as Oedipus-like stories and the shifty deceptions of the horse dragged into Troy. The original brothers Cain and Abel are potential murderers even in open country.
The cesspool of Chicago, of course, lies at the footpad of the West, hardly more corrupt than Detroit in the East. Stonehouse devotes a few more than sixty pages of narrative to the former (his chapter titled “Chicago, Gotham of Crime”) and then a fewer number of pages to “motor city” in the East, 400 miles below the Bridge. A final major crime outside these two footpad major cities is the kidnapping and trial horror over the Lindbergh baby. I searched and searched in his End Notes and in his bibliographic lists but found nothing about the Lindberghs. My own theory about the methodology of Stonehouse in this fairly late book of his is that it is rather a “catchall” from his major professional interest, which is maritime history. He has taught that speciality at Northern Michigan University and is President of the Board of the Marquette Maritime Museum. For this work, he has won many Awards: “2007 Historian of the Year” from the Marine Historical Society of Detroit and, also, Northern Michigan University’s Distinguished Alum Award in 2014. The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, 40th Anniversary Edition, is among the ten other books of his, all on ship mysteries and on crime, listed from the same publisher as this 2024 volume. He has been a very busy writer. I suspect my interest in the Lindbergh story with a Stonehouse interpretation is buried somewhere in all those pages.
I do know that he prefers the older historical classics such as the book by Frederick Lewis Allen, It Was Only Yesterday (1931) and Thomas Byrnes, Rogue’s Gallery, 247 Professional Criminals of 19th Century America (1886) and Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904). But Stonehouse, also, lists in his bibliographies more recent work that dares to be interpretive from authors like Erick Larson who did a fine interpretation The Devil in the White City (2003) whom I like a lot. So the historical practice of Stonehouse seems to be spread widely among his many books. Reading and knowing all of his work is more than I can handle.
The Stonehouse narrative style is rapid, machinegun-like hammer blows. In addition to the gateway cities of crime, he sets up major chapters on “Murder” and on “Lynching.” On the latter, he writes, “The term lynching probably derived from Charles Lynch (1736-1796), a Virginia Justice of the Peace who dispensed rough justice in his backwoods court.” p. 35. In the chapter on “Murder” he pulls no punches in his tales about John Dillinger. Even though at times his End Notes do not give page number references back to the chapter, one of his hard-hitting notes claims that “The more proper term ‘interned’ is too good for a bum like Dillinger.” p. 205. So even though this 2024 volume is one of the later Stonehouse history research projects, with somewhat puzzling historiography and some apparently missing topics (see his other books), it is a lively and exciting read. The many fine and gruesome photographs are worth the price of the book
The Dark Side of the Great Lakes, by Frederick Stonehouse (Avery Color Studios, Inc, Gwinn, Michigan 49841, 2024), 220 pages, pbk, n.p.
