'Smart Dinner Jacket and Patent Leather Pumps'

I was never strictly a crime reporter but several times I covered the cops-and-courts beat, which was more genteel and less interesting than it sounds. Reading the police blotter each morning or scanning new filings in the county clerk’s office left this reporter feeling less disillusioned with humanity than bored. The number of ways to behave badly is finite. 

Like politics, journalism tends to invite second-raters, people otherwise unemployable. Most can’t write and are stubbornly indifferent to language. Master the clichés, internalize the formulas, and you can retire after thirty-seven years.

 

A few journalists have entered the literary mainstream – H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Murray Kempton. Another name less well-known though deserving of readers is Meyer Berger (1898-1959), who wrote for the New York Times for more than thirty years. The book to find is the posthumously published Meyer Berger’s New York (Random House, 1960). The volume collects samples of his column, “About New York,” published in the Times between 1953 and 1959. Berger was a good American writer who never stopped being a good reporter. He was by nature a features writer, more interested in human beings than in sociological trends or gaseous “think-pieces” dear to editors.

 

In 1935, Berger published an article, “Gentleman Racketeers,” in Current History, a magazine supplement to the Times. Berger traces the changing nature of crime and criminals – the birth of “organized crime” -- to the “great liquor flood” of the Prohibition years:

 

“The tough mug with the turtleneck sweater and thick-soled boots is a thing of the past. He has degenerated into the smart man-about-town, forsaken his quaint habiliments for smart dinner jacket and patent leather pumps and is hard to distinguish from any other tired businessman.”

 

Berger’s prose is amusing and colorful without being cheap or jokey. He assumes the voice of a mock tour director, showing us the sights, explaining the new, more sophisticated underworld: “The 1935 racketeer boss proceeds about the business of murder with true executive gravity and dignity.” At the conclusion of his article, Berger pokes fun at the naïveté of prosecutors who claim they can “reach over the shoulders of the outer racket guards and grab the big shots.” The healthily skeptical Berger continues:

 

“Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey in New York is trying out that plan now. If he fails there seems to be only one other solution—with a vigilante committee. Legal gentlemen will cry ‘anarchy’ and flap the Bill of Rights in your face if you suggest anything so crude, but so far they have not done anything to remedy the condition.”

 

You’ll recall that a mere thirteen years later, Dewey was the subject of the most mistaken headline in the history of American journalism.