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Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (review)

cated by the book’s relatively thin sense of the ways race and materiality functioned in the nineteenth-century American legal system—ground explored by scholars like Paul Finkelman, Ariela Gross, and Jeannine Marie DeLombard. Smith-Pryor, like Lewis and Ardizzone before her, is also too quick in considering the hour after the moment. While Rhinelander died only a decade after losing the trial and Jones’s long later life seems to have been almost hermetic, the seemingly endless legal maneuvers after the trial—such as Rhinelander’s attempts to obtain an “easy” Nevada divorce; the events leading to a settlement allowing that divorce to be finalized; Jones’s suits and threats of suits against Rhinelander, his father, his father’s estate, and so forth, in reference to both the trial and the settlement—offer rich but still untapped potential for more extended conversation about race, class, property, and gender in the twentieth-century American legal system. The brief comparison between Property Rites and Love on Trial above will likely be only one of many that readers draw, given similarities in not only subject matter and basic argument but also coverage and gaps. They will likely find that Smith-Pryor’s book is more “academic”: its writing is a bit drier, its theoretical arguments a bit denser, and its notation much fuller. But these differences are not nearly as important as those tied to the sources and approach of Property Rites. Smith-Pryor’s account relies on a much richer archival base than does Love on Trial; specifically, she located the full “Cases and Points: Records and Briefs” of the trial, which offers not only trial transcripts, but also texts of various documents filed by both sides. Where Love on Trial relies almost completely on the voluminous press coverage of the trial (and reads such skillfully), Property Rites places that coverage in dialogue with trial documents and a host of other sources. Smith-Pryor thus also regularly examines discrepancies between sources. As a former attorney, Smith-Pryor also brings a lawyer’s sensibility to her work as a historian—and so probes questions of legal strategy with acumen. One would expect these qualities to lead Property Rites toward emphases and conclusions different from those in Love on Trial—and sometimes they do. Property Rites offers much more detail, for example, on the ways in which legal structures shaped how the case was, and could be, argued; there are also several more subtle differences in how the works treat race, racial labels, and passing. But one of the most frustrating pieces of Property Rites is its failure to point out such differences and to engage Love on Trial directly. Ardizzone and Lewis each appear only once in the index, and their book is briefly and obliquely referred to only a handful of times in the text. Property Rites would have been much richer if Smith-Pryor had more directly inserted herself into a dialogue—if she had consciously demonstrated what her sources and approach force students of the period, and readers of Love on Trial, to reconsider and reevaluate. Without that dialogue, readers will still want to and still have to read both books and think hard about the next steps in researching this fascinating web of events.