They Both Reached for the Gun
Beulah Annan, Maurine Watkins, and the Trial That Became Chicago

Charles H. Cosgrove (Author)

9780809339389

Paperback / softback, published 7 June 2024

240 pages, 39 illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.399 kg

“Cosgrove shines a dazzling spotlight on the historical distortions behind the musical Chicago and its source material. With authority and clarity, he argues there never was a Jazz Age Chicago where beautiful women routinely got away with murder. On trial here: the pushback against American women’s social progress.” - Marcia Biederman, author of The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England

“They Both Reached for the Gun is a fascinating exploration of the history behind Chicago, the musical based loosely on the 1924 conviction of Beulah Annan for her lover's murder. Through a careful reexamination of the case, the sensational press coverage, and the transformation of the actual events into entertainment, Cosgrove investigates the sometimes-unhealthy relationship between crime news and entertainment.” - Ann Durkin Keating, North Central College

“In a smooth and flowing style, Cosgrove’s rich insight into a troubled woman’s existence culminating in a questionable indictment and ‘trial-by-press’ presumption of guilt, provides readers with a sobering reassessment of the case, with a glimpse into the era and tabloid culture of the Roaring Twenties.” - Richard C. Lindberg, author of Tales of Forgotten Chicago

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.

• 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