WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME (2nd Edition). Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century That Helped Shape Today's America - Lise Pearlman

 This 250th Anniversary Edition of With Justice for Some: Politically Charged Criminal Trials in the Early 20th Century That Helped Shape Today's America compares our fragile democracy under threat in 2026 to the context of headline-grabbing criminal trials from the early 1900s. Pearlman's book opens with a remarkable admission by former FBI Chief James Comey in a speech on Lincoln's birthday in February 2015: "All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo . . . that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups." He invited all Americans to re-examine our "cultural inheritance" with fresh eyes. That is what Pearlman's book seeks to do as the second Trump administration threatens the future of our democratic republic. She reaches out to readers on both sides of the current political divide in hopes we can all gain a better understanding of the extent cultural bias has permeated the fabric of our nation by revisiting the country a century and more ago under white supremacist control. As the Trump administration seeks to dismantle our democracy, Pearlman offers readers a better premise from which to move forward as a nation than the whitewashed history so many of us were taught in school and the government is seeking to forcefeed us today. 

AUTHOR'S Note to reviewers:

Why now for a second edition of With Justice for Some? In 2017, the inaugural year of Trump's presidency, the first edition of this book focused on what we could learn as a democracy from the context of headline events in the early 20th century. Both then and nine years ago the nation exhibited ominous fracture lines. The 20th century began with super-wealthy robber barons controlling an economy fueled by an influx of immigrant labor. White supremacists added "hyphenated-Americans" from select parts of the world to the minorities and women they already treated as second-class citizens. But the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, followed by the Roaring Twenties and the New Deal. Much has transpired since 2017 to make today's situation more dire than when an oligarchy controlled the nation in 1900.

From day one of Trump's second term his administration openly began implementing Project 2025 and transforming our democratic republic into a dictatorship built in no small part on the support of white supremacists. This year also marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The American Revolution created one country from separate colonies; the Civil War preserved it as one nation. Our current circumstances present what many of us see as another existential threat to our democracy. This second edition of With Justice for Some is my effort to join those emphasizing the urgent need to safeguard the future of our government "of the people, by the people, for the people."  

Lise Pearlman

March 20. 2026