Killing the Poormaster: A Saga of Poverty, Corruption, and Murder in the Great Depression
True-crime works often promise that the examination of one crime serves as a lens for examining a wide range of social ills, but too often they deliver only a reworking of a crime, with merely a gloss of critique. Journalist Metz’s recounting of a famous Depression-era crime, however, does a great deal to deepen our understanding of those desperate times. During the Depression, the poormaster of each community was in charge of handing out public aid, in the form of money or bread tickets. Poormasters were, literally, masters of the poor—in total control of which supplicants in their offices would receive aid. Metz focuses on the 1938 killing of Hoboken, New Jersey, poormaster Harry Barck in his office by one rejected supplicant. In a detail worthy of Dickens, the spike that held rejected applications on the poormaster’s desk impaled him. Whether the applicant stabbed Barck with his own spike or whether Barck fell onto it during an altercation was the central issue of much media speculation and trial testimony. This well-constructed work of historical nonfiction is heart-wrenching and thoroughly absorbing. --Connie Fletcher