AMERICAN NOTEBOOK: POPULAR TASTE AND THE ACONIES OF THE YOUNG
Swados, Harvey
Within recent months the Leopold-Loeb murder case has served as the theme of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, novels by Meyer Levin, James Yaffe and MaryCarter Roberts, a paperback case...
...and finally the parents hand over their inner selves to the ministration of the community church, not because they believe, or because they expect the act of capitulation will help them, but because they think the children must have 'something" in which to believe, even if they themselves need not...
...The question of politics...
...There was no felt need in the 20s to deny that Sacco and Vanzetti were committed and dedicated anarchists...
...But thirty-three years have elapsed since the kidnap-murder, and we are surely entitled to wonder why the novelists of the 20's, the 30's, or the 40's did not seize on this drama...
...The face of each is eloquent of the tormenting discontent of an American youth for which everything is being done, to which everything is being given...
...glancing at the frightened newspapers, one cannot but be struck by the enormous emphasis placed on the dress, the doings, the designs for living of the young...
...Nor was there a concomitant necessity for either defense counsel or the var ious defense committees to proclaim the loyal Jewishness or Italian-ness of the defendants of the 20s, as was done with such nauseating thoroughness in the case of the Rosenbergs...
...Nor was there a concomitant necessity for the defense to portray the two as innocent liberals who preferred not to spell out their beliefs because the climate was currently somewhat unfavorable to anarchists, because nobody had the right to ask them such personal ques tins, and because they weren't anar chists at all but just patriotic liberty loving Americans...
...Is IT NOT extraordinary that during the very period when immigration to the United States slowed to a trickle, during the very period when the last immigrant generation was frantically assimilating itself to the American way, it should have been the immigrant attitude toward children which triumphed over the traditional Yankee attitude...
...In an age which prides itself on its sophistication, its appreciation of complexity, even, at times, on its impotence, it is only natural that Sacco-Vanzetti should be scanted in favor of LeopoldLoeb as a key to understanding the 20s...
...The sullen sulkiness of the speed-hungry Presleyan, whose motorcycle is his religion...
...What has happened in the intervening thirty years is that the country has been turned over not to the wives, the widows, and the moms, but to the young...
...Superficially, it would seem obvious that this terrible murder and its aftermath— a sensational courtroom trial involving two wealthy, brilliant, wayward boys, the most successful criminal lawyer in the country, and a battery of conflicting psychiatrists—should prove magnetically attractive to writers...
...One broke one's back, burned out one's eyes, even yielded up one's ideals, in order that the children might have the chance at a college education, a firm grip on the success ladder...
...Is it any wonder that the terrible story of Leopold and Loeb should return to challenge us more potently today than ever before, a ghost returned to haunt our uneasy consciences...
...The youngsters were busy, as always, having fun...
...Today those qualities could be described as almost typical of a substantial segment of American youth...
...One came to America in the first place for the children...
...The parents move from city to suburb not for themselves but for the sake of the chil 176 dren (I speak now of explicit justifications and rationalizations which may not always coincide with actual reasons...
...The Sacco-Vanzetti trial was an ending...
...I refer to the fact that Nathan Leopold and Robert Loeb were what we call in the 50s teenagers...
...In the 20s, Leopold-Loeb were exceptional: their comfortable situation, their college cleverness, their social ease, were in themselves so striking as to aggravate the passions directed against the boys and their crime...
...It is interesting to observe in passing how stolidly the audiences of the 50s gaze upon the spectacle of a thick-waisted Tyrone Power and a wrinkled Errol Flynn earnestly and capably portraying those doomed young comedians of The Sun Also Rises, in contrast to the enthusiasm with which they greet movies of, by and about teenagers...
...the father commutes to work not from choice but so that his children can grow up in the fresh air...
...The kind of children emerging from school, church, and station wagon in the 50s would seem best exemplified by their heroes and the heroes of their parents too: Elvis Presley, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, even James MacArthur, and—the apotheosis of the entire generation— the late James Dean...
...It is not just that Sacco and Vanzetti were in all likelihood completely innocent and were revered as martyrs throughout the civilized world, while Leopold and Loeb were admittedly guilty and were the universal objects of fascinated loathing—although that is not irrelevant...
...It is understandable that manufacturers and distributors should concentrate on the fastest-growing market in the coun try...
...IT IS JUST this ambiguity, just this reaIization— indeed, at times this reveling in the fact—that there are no simple answers, that has proved so appealing to readers and writers of the 50s...
...the LeopoldLoeb case a beginning...
...More than disturbance, domination of the American scene...
...seeing the movies of the 50s, from the big-screen technicolor jobs like Rebel Without A Cause to the modest black and white films like The Young Stranger...
...And if numerous writers and their publics are currently intrigued with that era (for reasons beyond the scope of this brief discusion), the fastening on one sensational trial rather than on the other should be 'fairly clear to us in the 50's...
...Reading Life magazine and the slicks, from Woman's Day of the A&P to McCall's, The Magazine of Togetherness...
...The issues were as clouded as the motives of the boys, the trial— heard by a single judge—an admission of the inadequacy of jury democracy, the judge's verdict an uncomfortable compromise between revenge and therapy dictated by psychiatric testimony...
...The issues were clearcut, the verdict appalling...
...Perhaps one day our bolder novelists will see in the Rosenberg case the usable tragedy of still another famous pair whose travail illuminates certain aspects of American life not revealed by the two earlier trials, each of which might be said to expose one side of the Rosenberg coin, counterfeit as it was for both accusers and accused...
...A special kind of lost teenagers, in fact: juvenile delinquents...
...So today the first article of faith is that everything that carries contemporary sanction, from togetherness to religious revivalism, is being done for the sake of the children...
...The immigrant faith, often the first article of that faith, was that one must sacrifice all for the children...
...There was no felt need in the 20s to prosecute Loeb-Leopold with Jewish lawyers, or Sacco-Vanzetti with Italian lawyers, or to hear the trial of either pair with a Jewish or an Italian judge...
...one labored in sweat shops, coal mines, steel mills, in order that the children might have the American opportunity...
...It is not even that Sacco and Vanzetti were poor and Leopold and Loeb were rich—although that too bears on the problem...
...Inevitably too a parallel question arises: why now the Leopold-Loeb case rather than the Sacco-Vanzetti case...
...The face of each is one facet of the composite faces of the rich, handsome, gifted, doomed Leopold and Loeb...
...The lost souls whom the readers, the general public, of the 20s cared about were the Jake Barneses and Lady Bretts, the Jay Gatsbys and Daisy Buchanans...
...Levin's most successful and fascinating Compulsion...
...What is somewhat more worthy of consideration is why in the 50s the one big problem whose existence is universally admitted and discussed in United States is that of adolescent disturbance...
...For many of us both Leopold-Loeb and Sacco-Vanzetti have now come to represent two crucial illuminations of American life in the 20s...
...177...
...Just so, the Leopold-Loeb case may be viewed as one of the first instances in contemporary American history in which official cognizance was taken of the vast murky areas beyond such de• 174 ceptively simple words as guilt and insanity...
...and the astonishingly tortured and griefridden countenance of the Dean of them all, dead in his Porsche at 24— these speak more eloquently of the essential quality of American life in the 50s than once did Andy Hardy, Harold Teen, Our Gang or Shirley Temple for their day...
...the bouncy emptiness of Natalie Wood, who would die like Joan if there were an ideal worth dying for...
...The answers to these questions are interrelated...
...it was the adults who were in deep trouble...
...except a reason for living and for building a socially useful life...
...It is, most importantly, it seems to me, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case is the last instance in recent history in which the American people were stirred in great numbers to protest an apparent and gross miscarriage of justice...
...I mean by this that questions accepted as given, or at least questions accepted by both parties in the America of the Leopold-Loeb and SaccoVanzetti trials, became—in the America of the Rosenberg trial—public relations materials, to be manipulated by counsel for both the accused and the State: The question of race and religion...
...The hypocrisy—or the counterfeit, as I have called it— of all sides in the Rosenberg case, from the sanctimonious judge who heaped on the heads of the wretched couple the onus for Korea and World War III, to the advisors of the de fense show, insistent on portraying the two (with their solemn approval) as flag-waving, Sabbath-observing innocents who had never heard of international Stalinism, was so horrifying as to make the Leopold-Loeb case seem in retrospect a model of wellbalanced jurisprudence and honest grappling with presently insoluble problems...
...the cleancut loneliness of the unloved MacArthur, whose Dad has a closetful of suits but no time for Son...
...ma AMERICAN MASS public however is not currently intrigued with Meyer Levin's presentation of the LeopoldLoeb case solely because of the honest bewilderment of the judge, or the impassioned humanitarianism of old Clarence Darrow...
...the liquid-eyed wretchedness of Mineo the immigrant's son, who cannot belong...
...Within recent months the Leopold-Loeb murder case has served as the theme of a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, novels by Meyer Levin, James Yaffe and MaryCarter Roberts, a paperback case history, and a Broadway dramatization of Mr...
...If the symbolic attitudes of these men, and the fathomless depths they attempted to plumb, help to account for intellectuals' fas 175 cination with Leopold-Loeb, there is another aspect, not so far touched upon in the preceding paragraphs, that may possibly explain the rapt attention given by a wider audience to productions like Compulsion...
...the mother becomes a chauffeur not to fulfill a secret desire but because there is no other way, even with the car pools, for the children to get to and from public school, Sunday school, ballet school, music school...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
