The Navy announces that “20 Negro stewards and mess attendants” at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis are being dismissed for “acts of moral perversion among themselves.”
According to the Navy’s spokesman, the stewards and attendants fell under the suspicion of a Navy officer, who called in naval intelligence to aid in the investigation.
The ousted men were among some 200 to 300 African-Americans assigned to work in officers’ quarters and elsewhere in the academy. Ten were given “undesirable discharges” immediately, and the other ten were expected to be given similar discharges in the next few days when the investigations by the Severn River Naval Command is completed.
A Navy spokesman stressed that no Midshipmen were involved in the scandal.
Headlines: East St. Louis schools integrate without incident. Boston City Council turn away 14 members of Japanese Diet who are touring to see “democracy in action.” Congressional pressure increases on Truman to give the go-ahead to develop a hydrogen bomb. Wildcat coal strike spreads, defying United Mine Workers union orders. To protect its dollar reserves, Britain extends its dollar oil embargo to the rest of the Commonwealth. Britain, Sweden, Norway and Denmark pledge closer economic cooperation; France and West Germany set aside their dispute over the Saar and sign an enlarged trade pact.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley.
Currently in theaters: Gun Crazy, starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, but credited to Millard Kaufman because Trumbo is on the blacklist.
On the radio:Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
On Thursday afternoon, January 26, 1950, police in Modesto, California, arrested John Oscar Allen, a seventeen-year-old Modesto High School student, and charged him with indecent exposure. Two women reported that he had exposed himself in the Lucky Market parking lot at the corner of Tenth and L. Streets. Police picked him up and questioned him in Juvenile Hall. He quickly confessed to the crime, and under police questioning, began confessing to others.
One of those crimes, according to Allen, was when he committed “a perverse act” with Charles Lloyd Martin, 23 and a Navy veteran. Martin taught history and English at a school in Turlock, fifteen miles (25 km) southeast of Modesto. Police arrested Martin at the school that very day. Robert Lee, superintendent of Turlock schools was shocked. Martin came to Turlock with the highest recommendations, he said, and his conduct at school was above reproach. He said Martin “appeared cultured and refined.”
Police investigators followed a routine practice with Allen that they used whenever they picked up someone on morals charges, especially where homosexuality was concerned. They grilled Allen, and he coughed up a name. They grilled him some more, and he soon offered up more names. Those people were brought in and they offered names. Within a couple of days, nine gay men were rounded up in Modesto. Acting police chief William Coulson said, “The operations of these people have been under observation for some time. We finally got some definite proof,” thanks to Allen’s confession. Coulson said that the “acts” were all separate and unrelated, although most of the defendants were acquainted with each other. Cash bail was set at an astronomical $20,000 (about $225,000 today). The nine men caught up in the dragnet were:
John Oscar Allen, 17, the Modesto High school student whose arrest started it all. He was charged in juvenile court with what the Modesto Bee called “a crime against nature.” This was a euphemism for California’s sodomy statute, found in Chapter 286 of California’s penal code. I’ve found no further mention of Allen’s case in the Modesto Bee, probably because his was a juvenile case.
From the Modesto High School 1950 yearbook.
Alfred Raymond Benjamin, 19, described as a “special student”(perhaps because of his age) at Modesto High. He was charged with two counts of “crimes against nature” (sodomy). As an adult, he would have been subject to punishment of up to twenty years’ imprisonment, based on a harsher penalty set by the state legislature just three weeks ago. He lucked out. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served thirty days in jail before going on three years’ probation.
Charles Ernest (Chick) Fanning, 24, an unemployed beauty shop operator. He was charged with “sex perversion,” which may have been the Modesto Bee’s euphemism for having sex with one of the seventeen-year-olds. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. He was released early on July 14.
Vernon Edward Jenson, 20, a florist. He was charged with “sex perversion.” He pleaded guilty and was given three years’ probation after he was examined by a Dr. Ralph Gladen, head of Modesto State Hospital. Gladen said Jenson was not a homosexual but a highly penitent “foolish kid.”
H. Edgar Leeser, 38, a radio and TV repairman. He was charged with “a crime against nature” (sodomy). He pleaded not guilty. He was released on bail after the judge lowered it to $5,000 (about $55,500 today). I haven’t found any more information about this case.
Charles Lloyd Martin, 23, the Turlock school teacher. He was charged with “sex perversion.” He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three months in jail, but was released on May 9 and placed on probation so he could enroll in a college in Kansas.
From the Modesto High School 1950 yearbook.
Rolla Hargiss Nuckles, 37, a teacher of public speaking at Modesto High. He was charged with “sex perversion.” Nuckles, also a Navy veteran and war hero, was in his second year as a teacher at Modesto High. Principal Wesley Berry said he was “shocked” at Nuckles’s arrest. Nuckles was “a man with a lot of talent and has been doing an excellent job.” Berry then pointed out the obvious, that of course a conviction of “this type” would revoke Nuckles’s teaching credentials automatically. Nuckles dodged a bullet on February 20 when the charges against him were dismissed by Judge Stanton Helsley for lack of evidence. He had been held in jail for three weeks until then.
Vernon L. Stevens, 17, unemployed. He was charged in juvenile court with indecent exposure. I’ve found no further mention of Allen in the Modesto Bee, probably due to it being a juvenile case.
Burner Gene Work, 23, a window trimmer. He was charged with “a crime against nature” (sodomy). He pleaded not guilty after his lawyer argued that the charges against him should be thrown out due to lack of evidence. He was convicted in September and sentenced to two months in the county jail and three years’ probation.
California’s age of consent was (and still is) eighteen years old, which made Allen and Stevens minors as far as consensual sex was conserned. Most states had (and still have) what are called “Romeo and Juliet” exemptions, where statutory rape laws don’t apply if the adult is within five to ten years of the minor. California had no such exemption at the time. But in 1950, age of consent laws were often overlooked where males were concerned. The old “boys will be boys” adage was very much in force, even if it also meant “perverts will be perverts.” Some level of consent appears to have been assumed, even if California law did not, strictly speaking, see it that way.
Ample evidence of that attitude can be found in the stories published by the Modesto Bee, in which no one cast the younger men as “boys” or as innocent victims, nor were any of the older men accused of “molesting” anyone. That’s probably because another dynamic was in play. In 1950, society had a very elastic view of what it meant to be a “youth,” which appears to have benefited many of the adults who were arrested. The Modesto Bee reflected those attitudes when it, in keeping with the common practice of the day, referred to all but Leeser and Nuckles as “youths” in one story or another.
Epilogue:
When I see these names in the papers, I invariably wonder what happened to them. Whenever people were arrested on a “morals charge” or for “lewd vagrancy,” their names, addresses and places of employment were typically printed in the paper. That publicity — that public shaming — only added to the sentences handed down in the courts. Teachers automatically lost their jobs. Others may have as well, or found obtaining work difficult. Some may have been shunned by their families and neighbors. It must have been an extraordinarily humiliating experience for each of these men.
But seventy years later, those very details — the names, address, employers, and so forth — are sometimes the only thing which can truly remind us that these were real people, suffering from this kind of official oppression, and not just characters in long-forgotten newspaper clippings.
Searching around the web’s vast archives yielded just scattered bits of information about most of these men. Some married, others apparently didn’t. Some apparently stayed in Modesto, as evidenced by their names appearing in city directories for many years to come. Others moved away. Burner Gene Work, who appears to have been born in Oklahoma, returned there to live out the rest of his life. Vernon Edward Jenson moved to Sacramento and married in 1954. But most just quietly, very quietly, faded from view.
One notable exception, however, is Rolla Hargiss Nuckles, the Modesto High School teacher against whom the charges were dropped.
His photo appeared in the 1950 Modesto High School yearbook, The Sycamore. He taught public speaking. “Public speaking classes take part in regional and state competition,” explained The Sycamore, “and produce a radio program over KTRB every Wednesday.” Even though Nuckles saw his charges dismissed, he was no longer teaching at Modesto in 1951. Instead, we find him back at Kansas City by April 1950, assisting in the preparations of a local theater production while there “for a visit with his mother.”
Westport High School yearbook, 1928.
Theater was very much in his blood. According to information I was able to dig up at Ancestry.com, Rolla Hargiss Nuckles was born on July 8, 1911 in Creighton, Missouri, about sixty miles (100 km) southeast of Kansas City. He attended Westport High School in Kansas City, where he was very active in school theater, speech club, and student government. He graduated in 1928, when was voted the most “ladylike boy.” (His quote: “Gayly bedight, a gallant knight.”)
After high school, he attended junior college in Kansas City but left to go on the road with a stock company. After a spell at that, he became a barker for a carnival touring Nebraska, before landing at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There, he joined the Dramatic Club, and was president of the local chapter of the National Collegiate Players (“one of the many units in all nation-wide dramatic movements”). In 1933, his senior year, he appeared on the Dramatic Club’s performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” where, according to the college yearbook, “Elizabeth Crafton stole the show and Rolla Nuckles wore lace.” Nuckles appears to have been quite the performer. As a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, he was described as “perhaps the most delectable tap dancer to nauseate the Hill in some years.”
Jayhawker magazine, May 1939.
After graduating, he joined Eva LeGalluenne’s company in New York City, then jumped to the Pasadena Playhouse, then jumped back again to New York’s American Children’s Theater. By 1936, he was back at K.U., now teaching “radio speaking” for students at the university’s radio station, KFKU, and directing radio dramas and theatrical plays. The 1939 Jayhawker yearbook says he’s the “youngest member of the dramatics department.” We also learn that “His hobbies are traveling (spends part of every simmer in Mexico and the remainder working on his master’s degree at Northwestern), his bachelor apartment, and, of all things, prize fights!”
Top: Kansas City Star, July 19, 1943. Bottom: Life, August 23, 1943.
By 1940, Nuckles found himself in Tucson, Arizona, working at the Tucson Little Theater. It’s in Tucson where he filled out his draft registration card. The next thing we know, he’s in the Navy, where he wound up becoming something of a minor war hero. Nuckles was serving in the Pacific, where he was credited with directing the rescue of 161 survivors of the Cruiser U.S.S. Helena on July 16, 1943. The Helena was sunk by the Japanese in the battle of Kula Gulf. Most of its 600 to 800 crew had been picked up at sea, but another 157 survivors eventually drifted to a Japanese-held island. The Navy sent an expedition to retrieve all 157 survivors in an operation that took place right under the Japanese’s noses. “A chief rescuer was Ensign Rolla Nuckles of Kansas City, boat officer aboard one of the destroyer-transports,” reported Life magazine. “He directed successful operations of the landing boats.” Those exploits earned him an Associated Press writeup that landed on the front-page of the hometown Kansas City Star. “The pre-dawn rescue was one of the most magnificent maneuvers in the Pacific war to date,” reported the A.P. writer, “and the audacity of going into the enemy’s own backyard through waters thick with submarines made its signal success the more remarkable.”
Old Dominion College yearbook, 1968.
After the war, Nuckles hosted the radio program “Navy Reporter” for Armed Forces Radio. He wound up in Modesto in 1948 for that ill-fated teaching job. His arrest appears to have been little more than a blip in his biography. And because of the charges were dropped, it failed to interrupt his teaching career, even if he was no longer teaching in Modesto. By 1961, he was teaching English back at his old Kansas City alma mater, Westport High. He also taught drama at the State University of New York in Morrisville, Old Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, where he maintained a near-constant presence in the South Texas theater scene for three decades. He died in San Antonio in 2000.
Jan 26, 1950: Police in Modesto, California, round up nine men on “morals charges.”
Periscope:
For January 26, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3%
(Annual)
3.0%
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
Headlines: President Truman approves the master defense plan for the North Atlantic defense pact against Russian attack. The U.S., Britain and France invite West Germany to send consuls to Washington, London, Paris; formal ambassadorships must wait until a formal peace treaty is signed. The Soviets erect new roadblocks on highways connecting Berlin and West Germany; U.S. threatens retaliation. Four senators (three Republicans and one Democrat) offer competing proposals for a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley.
Opening today in theaters: Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, Millard Mitchell, Dean Jagger.
On the radio:Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“Eight are under arrest here on morals charges.” Modesto Bee (January 28, 1950): 1, 2.
Associated Press. “Eight are jailed on student’s story of sex perversion.” Sacramento Bee (January 28, 1950): 26.
“Seven men are arraigned on sex charges.” Modesto Bee (January 30, 1950): 1, 10.
“Modestan admits sex perversion charge in court” (Vernon Edward Jensen). Modesto Bee (February 7, 1950): 25.
“Sex perversion is admitted by Modesto youth” (Alfred Raymond Benjamin, H. Edgar Leeser, Charles Lloyd Martin, Burner Gene Work). Modesto Bee (February 9, 1950): 6.
“Sex perversion charge against high school teacher is dropped” (Rolla H. Nuckles). Modesto Bee (February 20, 1950): 1.
“Youth jailed on morals charge gets probation” (Vernon Edward Jensen). Modesto Bee (February 22, 1950): 13.
“Youth gets jail term on sex perversion charges” (Alfred Raymond Benjamin). Modesto Bee (March 3, 1950): 4.
Note: Ancestry.com may require a subscription for access.
Ancestry.com FisherFamily1 Family Tree. Available online at Ancestry.com (retrieved November 28, 2020).
Modesto High School. The Sycamore yearbook. (Modesto, CA: 1950). Photo and writeup of Rolla Nuckles is on page 70. Available online at Ancestry.com. Photo of Alfred Benjamin is on page 20. John Oscar Allen does not appear in this yearbook.
Old Dominion College. The Troubadour yearbook. (Norfolk, VA: 1968): p75. Available online at Ancestry.com.
State University of New York, Morrisville. Arcadian yearbook. (Morrisville, NY: 1967): 32. Available online at Ancestry.com.
University of Kansas. Jayhawker yearbook. (Lawrence, KS: 1933): 65. Available online at Ancestry.com. “Rolla Nuckles wore lace” is on page 197.
University of Kansas. Jayhawker magazine. (Lawrence, KS, May 1939): 301, 323. Available online at Ancestry.com.
Westport High School. The Herald yearbook. (Kansas City, MO: 1928): 31. Available online at Ancestry.com. The Senior ballots are on page 60.
Westport High School. The Herald yearbook. (Kansas City, MO: 1961): 8. Available online at Ancestry.com.
On January 6, 1950, California doubled its maximum penalty for sodomy from ten years imprisonment to twenty, all because heterosexual men kept abducting, raping and killing very young girls. Three heterosexual men in particular, two in California and one, believe it or not, in Idaho. Here’s how it happened.
The murder of Linda Joyce Glucoft
The Daily News of Los Angeles, November 15, 1949.
It all began on November 14, 1949, when the frantic parents of six-year-old Linda Joyce Glucoft called Los Angeles Police to report their daughter was missing. She was last seen at the home of a playmate, across the street and three doors down from her Crescent Heights Blvd. home. She had gone there to play with her friend, but her playmate had gone to a birthday party with her mother. Linda never made it back home. The next morning, police found her battered body, rapped in a blanket near the trash incinerator in her playmate’s back yard. Linda had been strangled and her head had been bashed in with an ax. Her panties were in the incinerator. The distinctive brightly-colored Indian blanket came from the playmate’s home, where the friend’s grandfather, Fred Stroble, had been staying.
Stroble, a 67-year-old retired baker and known sex offender, was missing. Police feared he had made a break for Tijuana where he was known to have friends. Stroble had already jumped bail for another sex offense the previous July when he was accused of molesting a ten-year-old girl. Prosecutors downgraded those felony charges to a misdemeanor because they didn’t think they could get a felony conviction on the testimony of a juvenile. When Stroble jumped bail, authorities thought that he had fled to Mexico City, but it turns out that he had been staying with his daughter for the past two weeks. Neighbors had no idea he was a wanted man. They said all of the children in the neighborhood liked him because he often gave them candy and ice cream.
The Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1949, page 3.
With little Linda’s brutal muder, another international manhunt, this time far more intensive, was on all over southern California and northern Mexico. Tijuana police flooded the streets, checking every motel, auto court, ranch and bar. In Los Angeles and San Diego, roadblocks were everywere. Television screens flashed with his image. Radio broadcast his description every hour. Stroble’s photo was in the hands of every customs border agent, in front of every bus driver and behind every bar. It was in one of those bars in downtown Los Angeles that someone recognized Stroble, went out and got a traffic cop’s attention, who promptly arrested Stroble and took him to headquarters.
This murder came just two years after two other shocking murders in Los Angeles. In January of 1947, police found the body of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in a vacant lot in Leimert Park. Her naked body was cut in half at the waist and drained of blood. Newspapers quickly dubbed her the “Black Dahlia,” and the sensational case fed headlines for months to come. Police investigated over 150 suspects, but no arrests were ever made and the case went cold. And just a week before Linda Glucoft’s murder, Los Angeles police had arrested a suspect in the 1946 murder of six-year-old Rochelle Gluskoter. Her skeletal were found in an Orange County ravine in late 1947. That suspect was released due to a lack of evidence on the day Linda’s body was found.
Two more child rape/murders in the same week
Linda Glucroft’s case made the front pages of newspapers nationwide. The day after her body was found, newspapers found that they had to make room for another tragic story coming out of the small community of Burley, Idaho, where Neale Butterfield, 16, was arrested and confessed to kidnapping and murdering seven-year-old Glenda Joyce Brisbois. The autopsy showed that she was also raped, although Butterfield refused to confess to that.
The Evening Press of Santa Rosa, November 21, 1949.
And then not even a week later, seventeen-month-old Jospehine Yanez was kidnaped from her parents car near Huron, California, a small farming community near Fresno. Her parents, migrant farm workers from Mexico, had parked their car in front of a dance hall and were away for only a few minutes when their daughter was snatched. Her body was found later that night, her head jammed into a muddy field. She had been raped before she died. Police arrest Paul Guttierez, 25, a migrant farmworker who had been accused six years earlier of raping a fourteen-year-old girl under a grandstand in Fresno.
California, along with the rest of the nation, quickly found itself in the midst of a full-blown sex crime panic. The Sacramento Bee, one of many newspapers demanding that lawmakers to do something about it, found these murders “so unnecessary”:
It should be apparent by now that short term imprisonment does not rehabilitate a sex offender. The records of this state and of others are full of instances in which sex criminals have been released from jails and prisons only to repeat their crimes or commit worse ones. Until these persons can be made harmless to society, they should be kept in custody, even if that means for life. Certainly the freedom of a sex offender is no more precious than the life of an innocent 6 year old child or any other individual.
The sensationalist Long Beach Independent offered its solution:
There should be no second chance given to a proven sex pervert who molests children. … The first time a person is proven to be a sex pervert who has molested a child, that person should have the choice of submitting to an operation to remove his or her sex organs, or refusing, he or she should be permanently confined to an institution for the insane. There would be some injustices committed by such a lway but not many. The principle that it is better to let ten guilty persons go free rather than punish one innocent person does not apply to child molesters.
And nationally, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover lent his voice to the rising chorus:
The depraved sex criminal has replaced the kidnaper as a threat to the peace of mind of the parents of America. The steady rise in vicious assaults on women and children cannot continue. The time has come to call a halt. Feindish sex criminals must be treated as such. It is better to prevent brutal assaults than to later launch widespread manhunts after a child has been murdered.
The women and children of this nation can never be secure until we face one fundamental fact. There are only two satisfactory courses of action once a sex offender is identified — cure through medical attention or the more drastic alternative — incarceration fo the offender.
“Sex degenerates” were too long defended by “sob sisters.”
The Long Beach Independent, November 25, 1949.
Under pressure from the Independent and other Los Angeles-area newspapers, L.A. and Long Beach launched massive roundups of alleged child molesters and other “perverts”. According to the Independent, “tensions are such that a stranger does not pat a child on its head for fear of someone calling him a pervert.” But, it warned, “then the tension eases, and we wait for another Linda Glucoft case to again shock us.”
Dragnets went up everywhere. San Bernardino police went into action when someone reported that a man was trying to lure two small girls into his car. Police set up roadblocks throughout the city until that the “dangerous sex fiend” was just a family friend who had just stopped to chat with the youngsters for a few minutes.
California Gov. Earl Warren initially resisted calling a special session of the state Legislature to enact stronger sex crime laws. What was needed, he said, was a “down-the-line” co-operation between parents, teachers, police and parole boards to enforce the laws already on the books. He pointed to one law passed two and a half years ago requiring everyone convicted of a sex crime to register with local police. “I find now,” said Warren, “that in all that time, about only 719 persons have registered throughout the state.” This despite there being, every year, about 4,750 people who are convicted of sex crimes. “So far as we know,” said Warren, “there has never been a conviction” for anyone who failed to register.
But as pressure mounted across the state, Warren did an about face and called the Legislature back to Sacramento. Suggestions for new sex crime laws came from all directions. A conference of law enforcement officers called for the death penalty for sex crimes against children. Assemblyman James G. Chrichton (D-Fresno) proposed surgical emasculation for those convicted of sex crimes. On the first offense, the decision to castrate would be up to the judge. On the second offense, the operation would be mandatory.
A group of ten psychiatrists opposed that in a hearing before a special Assembly Committee to Investigate Sex Crimes. They urged that all sex criminals be tested “for correction and treatment” until they are rehabilitated, which many acknowledged meant they’d be locked up for life, regardless of the severity or nature of the particular crime. Consensual sodomy among adults, for instance, would be one such crime. Dr. Marcus Crahan, consulting psychiatrist for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and the most hardline member of the group, called for building “mental prisons,” and for naming them as such instead of as hospitals. He estimated that it would take four prisons with a capacity of 2,500 inmates to handle everyone.
Homosexuals become collateral damage
But what do homosexuals have to do with any of this? After all, the sex crime panic gripping the state was caused by three men raping and killing girls. Dr. Marcus Cragan, who had urged the construction of “mental prisons,” was just one of many psychiatrist who connected the dots. At one of Fred Stroble’s preliminary hearings, Cragan testified that he had examined Stroble and found:
This man, I believe, is an endocrine type of potential homosexual. By that I mean he, like many men, evidences homosexual tendencies, but don’t know they exist. … and while he says his married life was normal, I find evidence he may have been abnormal before that, a potential sex variant. Possibly he was homosexual and didn’t know it. … It is up to us — all of us — to see that such a deed is never repeated. We can only do this by understanding what manner of man commits such a crime.
Many leading psychiatrists seemed to apply a rather simple-minded transitive law that school kids learn in mathematics: If a=c and b=c, then a=b. If child molesters are perverts and homosexuals are perverts, then there is fundamentally no difference between child molesters and homosexuals. In this regard, psychiatrists were only slightly more sophisticated in understanding the nature of gay people than math students. They just had the benefit of university degrees and professional pedigrees, and the prestige and the jargon that came with them, to buttress their arguments.
And so when Dr. J. Paul DeRiver, Los Angeles police department psychiatrist, recommended brain surgery — in other words, lobotomy — and electroshock therapy for sex offenders, he added that among those being lobotomized and shocked should include “notably, homosexuals.” He claimed that most of other sex offenders could simply be “educated out of their condition” through talking and praying with them. But homosexuals defied easy treatment because most of them were “happy in their perversion.”
Relatively cooler heads prevailed and DeRiver’s suggestion went nowhere. But Dr. George Tarjan, superintendent of Pacific Colony State Hospital in Pomona, reminded the Assembly committee that the problem that remained was enormous. He estimated that for every twenty convictions for sodomy and other homosexual acts, there were six million more acts that go unpunished.
Something needed to be done, and Assemblyman H. Allen Smith (R-Los Angeles County), a former FBI agent and a particularly notable homophobe even for 1950, was just the man to do it. He introduced several bills into the California Assembly, including one which would raise the maximum penalty for sodomy. As it stood, California’s sodomy law bore a glaring inconsistency: the maximum penalty for attempted sodomy was twenty years’ imprisonment, but completing the crime brought a maxumum of ten.
Of course, one easy fix would have been to reduce the penalty for attempted sodomy. But under the sex crime panic then sweeping the state, such a suggestion would have been impossible to consider, even if Smith had been so inclined. But of course, he wasn’t. In fact, two years later, he pushed through another bill that eliminated the maximum punishment for sodomy altogether, making it possible for a California judge to send someone so convicted to prison for life.
Smith’s bill, along with a few others, raced to passage by the full house just one day after they were introduced. Assemblyman Thomas Doyle (R-Los Angeles County) congratulated his fellow legislators. “Sex degenerates,” he said, have been defended long enough by “sob sisters.” “The sooner we put into effect stricter laws, the better. If we had whipping posts for these people, by golly, I think we would have less of it.” The Senate acted with similar haste, and passed its version the very next day, apparently with little discussion.
On January 6, 1950, Gov. Warren signed five sex crime bills into law. All of the bills were deemed emergency measures, which meant that they took effect immediately upon the governor’s signature. The bills signed included:
raising the maximum penalty for sodomy from ten years’ imprisonment to twenty;
making the killing of a child during a sex attack a first degree offense, which is punishable by death or lifetime imprisonment without parole;
making child molestation a felony if the sex offender had previously been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child;
requiring anyone convicted of sex crimes after July 1, 1944 to register with the sheriff of the county of residence;
requiring law enforcement agencies to forward fingerprints to the California Bureau of Criminal Identification for all persons arrested for sex offenses, whether they were convicted or not.
That last bill would also have profound consequences for thousands gay people. It had the effect of creating a statewide database of information about accused and convicted homosexuals, and that data was shared with the FBI, which was already assembling a national database of known sex offenders and homosexuals. That database would prove essential in the U.S. government’s drive to purge thousands of men and women accused of homosexuality from the government payroll.
Epilogue:
On signing the five bills into law, Gov. Warren said he regretted the Legislature’s failure to pass any measure taking a psychiatric approach to sex crimes. “To my mind this is the most important field for legislation because up to the present time there has been very little done so far as the study of these warped minds and their treatment is concerned,” he said. “I believe if we are to make any real progress we should enact legislation in this field.” He Included this in a special call for a March session of the Legislature. The Legislature responded with a $100,000 (about $1.1 million today) sex crime study to be conducted by the state-run Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco.
The Legislature, at the same time, also amended the state’s oral copulation law, which banned all acts of oral sex, including private consensual acts between adults, and also even including consensual acts between married couples. That law made it a felony with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence. The amendment added an alternate misdemeanor, punishable with “up to one year in jail.” As Assemblyman Smith, the bill’s sponsor, explained, “If two men of lawful age are living together, … when (the authorities) attempt to prosecute them under (the oral copulation felony law) they find that juries in many instances are not interested in returning a guilty verdict. Further, that to sentence the subject and, in some instances, the victim, to the penitentiary only acts as a ‘quarantine’ of the individual for a period of time, and does not help in the over-all solution of the sex crime.”
In 1952, the California Legislature revisited the state’s sex crimes statutes. Assemblyman Smith sponsored another bill to eliminate the maximum penalties for rape and sodomy, allowing a lifetime sentence to be imposed for either crime. Gov. Warren signed it into law on April 17.
Meanwhile, the nation continued to follow the trials of the three men accused in the rapes and murders of the three girls that started this panic. Fred Stroble was convicted of killing Linda Joyce Glucoft and sentenced to death. He was executed in the gas chamber on July 25, 1952.
Paul Gutierrez, the twenty-five-year-old migrant farmer, was found guilty of first degree murder of seventeen-month-old Josephine Yanez. He had blamed the murder on having “blacked out” after smoking a couple of marijuana joints. The judge didn’t buy it and sentenced him to death. He was executed on December 1, 1950.
Neale Butterfield, the sixteen-year-old high school football star who kidnapped, raped and killed seven-year-old Glenda Joyce Brisbois in Burly, Idaho, pleaded guilty of first degree murder. To the astonishment of everyone in the courtroom, Judge Hugh A. Baker rejected the prosecutor’s call for the death and gave Butterfield a sentence of life imprisonment. Judge Baker cited Butterfield’s age as a factor in his decision. “It may be a mistake has been made,” said Judge Baker. “It may be it should have been held that Neale Butterfield, although but sixteen years of age, has forfeited his right to live and that justice required that forfeiture. Only time will furnish the answer and perhaps that answer will not be clear or certain.”
Fortunately, Judge Baker’s judgment proved sound. Under Idaho law, Butterfield would have been eligible for parole in 1960. He was paroled in 1962, married two years later, and lived out the rest of his life with no further apparent conflict with the law. He died in 2000.
In 1975, Gov. Edmund D. Brown, Jr., (D) signed a bill that finally legalized all private sex acts between consenting adults. The bill was the culmination of a lengthy and heated three-year battle to get the sodomy statute off of the books.
The day before, Chrysler debuted its 1950 lineup in dealer showrooms.
Headlines: Several jurors in the Fred Stroble trial nearly faint when shown fifteen photos of Linda Joyce Glucoft’s body. Congressman from Kentucky proposes federalizing sex crime laws. Britain, Norway, Denmark, and Ceylon extend diplomatic recognition to Communist China. President Truman says the U.S. will not intervene to save Chinese Nationalists on Formosa (Taiwan). U.S government warns that the continuing coal strike may force further cutbacks in rail service by coal-burning trains. Sleet and freezing rain shuts down roadways from Central Texas to Eastern Ohio; Rising floodwaters break through levees in Indiana.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: On the Town, starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller. This film features Sinatra’s hit, “New York, New York.”
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“Child murderer seen near border.” Daily News (Los Angeles, November 15, 1949): 1, 2.
“Find Stroble fugitive from sex warrant.” Daily News (Los Angeles, November 15, 1949): 2.
“Mexico-U.S. hunt on for girl’s slayer.” Los Angeles Times (November 16, 1949): 1, 2.
“Man held in Gluskoter murder freed due to lack of evidence.” Los Angeles Times (November 16, 1949): 2.
Jack Cook. “Body of slain girl found in irrigation ditch. Glenda Joyce Brisbois, 7, believed victim of sex killer; police spread net.” Burley (ID) Herald (November 17, 1949): 1, 2.
“17-year-old [sic] youth nabbed in Idaho girl’s kidnap-murder.” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, November 18, 1949): A-1, A-2.
Associated Press. “Longer jail terms in sex cases proposed by Gordon.” Oakland Tribune (November 17, 1949): 4.
Sidney Lawrence Neale, a thirty-one storekeeper of 73 Barfoot Road, Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester, England, was found guilty in Nottingham Quarter Sessions of blackmailing an unnamed man, referred to as “Mr. A.” The Nottingham Evening Post that night reported the following:
Two medical reports, read in court by Neal’s [sic] counsel, described him as a homosexual, and said that he showed almost complete feminine characteristics. The identity of the victim was not given, but it was stated that he denied absolutely the grave allegations made against him by Neal [sic].
It was, of course, absolutely essential that Mr. A deny those “grave allegations.” A conviction under Britain’s sodomy law might mean a life sentence. That was a remote possibility; convictions for sodomy were practically nonexistent because the burden of proof was so high.
But another law, enacted in 1881, prohibited the commission or attempted commission “by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with an other male person.” The gross indecency law provided up to two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor.
And where sodomy convictions were exceeding rare, gross indecency convictions were frightfully common. Playwright Oscar Wilde was perhaps the law’s most famous victim. In 1952, mathematician Alan Turing will go to police to complain someone had broken into his home. During the investigation, Turing will acknowledge a sexual relationship with the suspect. Even though Turing is a crime victim — his home was burgled — he became ensnared with the gross indecency law, and the consequences will bring his career and life to a catastrophic end.
Which is why, despite being a blackmail victim, it was absolutely essential that Mr. A deny the “grave allegations” against him.
The trial took place at Nottingham Shire Hall on December 19. The magistrates agreed to protect Mr. A’s anonymity because, it was reasoned, victims like Mr. A wouldn’t come forward if their names were going to be dragged through the press. As the Evening Post explained during the trial:
(Prosecutor F.B. Pierce) said that blackmail was a dirty and despicable crime. Not only did it aim at the pocket of the victim but often at the mind as well. Often the victim was bled almost white before the case came to the notice of the authorities, but fortunately in this case the victim had the sense to go to a solicitor before handing over any money.
Mr. A explained what happened. He met Neale in September and they became quick friends. On October 1, they met up in Leicester, and after running some errands for Neale, they decided to go to Mr. A’s house in Nottingham for the evening. Apparently, Neale was a reasonably accomplished piano player, so Mr. A invited him in to “play the piano.” One thing led to another, and soon they realized that the last bus back to Nottingham had left Leicester for the evening. So Mr. A invited Neale to spend the night. The Evening News reported that “they slept in the same bed, wich was the only one available. The next day he took Neale back to Leicester, and had not seen him since.”
On October 29, Mr. A. received a letter from “Sid”, addressed to “My darling.” According to court evidence, the letter read:
You have had your fun and you must pay for it. It was a lousy week-end, the most boring I have ever spent … I need money badly, so naturally I turn to you. You will not miss the measly sum of £25 (about £350 today). I trust you will oblige for your sake. If not, there will be an anonymous letter in Notts police station on Wednesday morning telling them all about our little escapade, and I am sure you would not like that.
Mr. A. didn’t reply, and on November 4, he received another letter. It read: “I will give you a little longer. I am sure you would not want any scandal. A man in your position could not afford it.” It also said that the writer wasn’t afraid of prison. It also warned that the writer had written to Mr. A’s next door neighbor and to the police, telling them that Mr. A used his home for immoral purposes.
If indeed Neale had sent the letters to Mr. A’s neighbors and police, then it appears that Mr. A felt he had no choice but to go to police and lodge a complaint, which he apparently did in December. And given the law at the time, of course, Mr. A would have had to deny having committed “gross indecency” with Neale. But Neale’s defense counsel wasn’t prepared to accept that bit of fiction:
Mr. Cotes-Preedy said the fact that Neal [sic] felt strong anger that a relationship which had started satisfactorily, had been broken off, might have prompted him to write the letters in the hope of seeing this man again.
Neale was found guilty of blackmail and sentenced to for years in prison. In passing sentence, Judge A.C. Caporn urged the public to “go straight to the police or to a legal adviser” if they find themselves in a similar situation.
On the Timeline:
Jan 2, 1950: Leicester man sentenced to four years for blackmail.
Periscope:
For January 2, 1950:
Sovereign:
King George VI
Prime Minister:
Clement Attlee (Lab)
Commons:
392 (Lab)
203 (Con)
11 (Lib)
34 (Other)
Headlines: Nottingham residents find “astonishing” reception of new BBC TV signal at Sutton Coldfield. Parliament vacancies created when five Labour M.P.s are elevated to peerages in New Years Honours list; Cabinet meets to consider early general elections. Trades Union Congress set prepare to set wage stabilization policy for 1950 amid economic emergency. Minister of Fuel and Power congratulates coal miners for beating the 1949 target of 202 million tons; calls it “greatest effort since Dunkirk.” Thirteen-year-old boy arrested for shooting a doctor in Brighton.
Sources:
“Demanded money by menaces allegation.” Nottingham Evening Post (December 9, 1949): 6.
On November 27, 1949, the Palladium-Item of Richmond, Indiana, reported the following:
Prosecutor William H. Reller said he may invoke Indiana’s new Sex Crimes law in a sodomy case filed Saturday in Wayne Circuit court. John Catron, who said he lived at 40 Fort Wayne Avenue, is charged with sodomy in the affidavit filed by he prosecutor and Detective Sergeant John B. Murphy. Prosecutor Reller said he is investigating the case to determine whether the Sex Crimes law should be used.
Catron was arrested on a vagrancy charge Friday night after he admitted homosexual activities with two other men, police said. He was questioned after he came to police headquarters to make an inquiry, police reported.
Homosexuality was a very delicate topic, making it extremely difficult to figure out what was going on from sketchy newspaper reports like this. These articles tend to leave open far more questions than answers. First of all, what led Catron to go to the police station? What “inquiries” did he make? Was he a crime victim who wound up getting charged with a different crime? This wasn’t at all unusual. Many a gay man had found himself locked up after complaining that a sex partner stole something or beat him up.
And in this news report — and in all of those that follow — nowhere is there even a suggestion that Catron was having sex with minors. Newspapers of the day were not at all shy about trumpeting that sensational allegation in their pages. Nor is there any suggestion that there was any coercion, blackmail, use of force or threat of bodily harm. In fact, three days later, the Palladium-Item added this tidbit in another article:
Catron, Prosecutor Reller says, has admitted homosexual acts with two men with whom he lived.
Which, of course, brings up more questions: Who were these two men? Why weren’t they arrested? The Palladium-Item was strangely silent about all of that.
Indiana’s new Sex Crimes Law
In March of 1949, Indiana’s governor approved a brand new Sex Crimes law, and prosecutors across the state were itching to use it. The Indiana General Assembly enacted the statute while the state was gripped with a sex crime panic. The main impetus for the law sprang from the brutal rape and murder on November 13, 1947 of Mary Lois Burney, a prominent north Indianapolis suburban housewife, by Robert Watts, an African-American truck driver employed by the city. Watts, who had a criminal record stretching back to 1941, was out on a $250 bond (about $2,800 today) for an attempted rape, and yet he kept his job with the city. Watts was suspected of, but never tried for, perhaps a dozen other attacks, including the murder of Mabel Merrifield two weeks earlier.
The Watts arrest brought out all kinds of fears, not just of black men, but also that perverts were running loose in the city. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to die. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out that conviction because his confession came after a marathon six-day interrogation in which he was held without an arraignment and denied an attorney. He was tried and convicted again, and died in the electric chair in 1951.
Press reaction was only somewhat calmer when police arrested Ralph A. Williams, a mild-mannered (white) hearing-aid salesman who kidnapped and raped an eight-year-old girl. As the African-American weekly Indianapolis Recorder noticed, “So far as we have learned, there have been no community mass meetings on the question; householders have not taken to closing their doors on salesmen (any more than before); and nobody is driving around town and assaulting white pedestrians because of it.” But at least now everyone was on notice that nobody was safe and everyone was a potential suspect, no matter how ordinary or respectable they may appear to be.
Then in October, police arrested Orville Wiley, a married father of two and a former hospital orderly. He stood accused of molesting 42 children, some in hospitals, but most of them at thirteen grade schools in Hancock, Madison, and Marion counties, including four schools in east Indianapolis. He had been accused of similar crimes in 1943, but those charges were quickly forgotten after Wiley’s parents agreed to have him “submit to an operation.” There is no evidence that any kind of “operation” took place, and the case “just died, finally” without follow-up, according to the Hancock County prosecutor at the time. Judge Alex Clark spoke for many when he expressed his frustration at the maximum sentence he could give Wiley: six months in jail and a $500 fine (about $5,400 today). “There is nothing I can do about it,” complained the judge. “There must be some change in the laws and there is a definite need for some intermediate institution to take care of these cases.”
The General Assembly answered the call in 1949 with its new Sex Crimes Law. Modeled after similar sexual psychopath laws in Michigan and Illinois, it allowed for the indeterminate detention in a state mental institution of anyone deemed a “sexual psychopath.” Once committed, they would remain there “until such person shall have fully and permanently recovered from such criminal psychopathy.” To fall under this statute, a person need only be charged with a sexual crime (as long as it doesn’t involve “crime of murder or manslaughter, or rape on a female child under the age of twelve”) — he doesn’t need to be found guilty. Once charged, the defendant or the prosecutor can petition the court to proceed under the sexual psychopath statute. The court can then ask two physicians — neither of them are required to be psychiatrists — to examine the defendant. If both physicians agree that the defendant is a “sexual psychopath” (and what that means is not defined, either in the law or in psychiatry or medicine), the original charge is dropped and the defendant is locked away. For how long? Nobody can say.
The law, as written, invited abuse. A 1969 Indiana Law Review observed:
First, prosecutors can proceed against a defendant under the sexual psychopath statute even though they do not have sufficient evidence for a criminal conviction. This can occur either when there is a lack of evidence of guilt or when evidence of guilt is present, but inadmissible at a criminal trial. Second, prosecutors may threaten misdemeanor defendants with a sexual psychopathy proceeding in order to secure a guilty plea. While neither practice is illegal, both have a potential for abuse.
We will never know whether Richmond prosecutor William H. Reller had the evidence to convict John Catron because he immediately petitioned the court to invoke the sexual psychopath statute. The law wasn’t even a year old, but Reller already had some practice with it. In May 1949, Reller used it to send Enos Wicks to the state hospital in Michigan city. Wicks was accused — but not tried or convicted — of having committed sodomy. Again, the circumstances are obscure but, as with John Catron, the Palladium-Item never mentioned coercion or underage males as being a factor in Wicks’s arrest.
Indiana Hospital for Insane Criminals in Michigan City.
Catron’s case followed the same path as Wicks’s. Judge G.H. Hoelscher, the same judge who oversaw the Wicks case, named two local physicians, Drs. Louis F. Ross and Paul S. Johnson to examine Catron. (Johnson had also been called upon to examine Wicks.) Two weeks later, they came back with their verdict: Catron was, in their opinion, a “criminal psychopathic person.” After a break for the Christmas and New Years holidays, Catron was brought before Judge Hoelscher and committed to the state hospital for the criminally insane at Michigan City.
And all of that took place without the need to go through a bothersome and messy trial, with its due process and rules of evidence to get in the way.
Epilogue:
Under Indiana law, the penalty for sodomy was two to fourteen years’ imprisonment with a possible fine of $100 to $1,000 (about $1,110 to $11,100 today). In March 1952, when Catron would have been more than two years into a sentence for sodomy, he petitioned for a rehearing of his case. The same judge who sent him to Michigan city denied his petition. After that, the trail goes cold.
The case of John Catron, and Enos Wicks before him, is far from unusual. In 1957, the Indiana Law Review published a review of all of the sexual psychopath cases to date, and found sixty men were committed for sodomy. As many as thirty-two of them appear to have involved consensual relationships with adults. In the same period, only thirty-six men and three women were sent to the state prison or reformatory for sodomy.
On the Timeline:
Jan 4, 1950: Indiana’s Sexual Psychopath law ensnares a gay man.
Periscope:
For January 4, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3 %
(Annual)
3.0 %
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
Headlines: In President Truman’s State of the Union Address, he asks Congress to extend rent controls and other emergency measures to deal with the post-war housing shortage. The U.S. State Department, angry at Hungary’s treatment of American citizens, orders the closure of Hungary’s consulates in New York and Cleveland. Coal strike forces cancellation of one-third of railroad passenger service. The New York Sun publishes its last edition. Major flooding on the Ohio River and its tributaries close sixteen main highways in Indiana and isolate two towns.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: Samson and Delilah, starring Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Henry Wilcoxon.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
Newspapers and magazines (in chronological order):
Leo M. Litz. “Indignant citizens want answer to crime wave” Indianapolis News (November 13, 1947): 1.
Charles S. Preston. “Undue hysteria aroused by late crime outbreak.” Indianapolis Recorder (November 22, 1947): 1, 2. The Indianapolis Recorder was a prominent weekly newspaper serving Indiana’s African-American communities.
“Child rapist confesses. Police hold executive in assault.” Indianapolis Star (April 14, 1948): 1, 10.
Editorial: “What, no crime wave?” Indianapolis Recorder (October 24, 1948): 10. “Readers have called to our attention the comparative calm with which the daily press, radio and general public have taken the case of Ralph Aran Williams… We have even been urged to give the Williams case the ‘Watts treatment’ — that is, to describe the prisoner as a ‘burly white man,’ etc.”
“Hospital molester has record of abuse.” Indianapolis Star (October 12, 1942): 1.
“Confesses molesting 42. Fortville man bares misconduct.” Indianapolis News (October 19, 1948): 1, 18.
“Judge hits sex law weakness.” Indianapolis News (October 21, 1948): 1, 8.
“Sex criminal to be sent to state mental institution.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: May 25, 1949): 2.
“Watts: Court rules for fair hearing; new trial set for October 3.” Indianapolis Recorder (July 2, 1949): 1.
“May use new sex law in sodomy case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 27, 1949): 1.
“To use sex crimes law in local case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 29, 1949): 1.
“Two physicians to report in sodomy case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 30, 1949): 1.
“Sex criminal report filed by 2 physicians.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: December 14, 1949): 1.
“Sex criminal will be sent to hospital.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: January 4, 1950): 2.
“Convicts’ peas for new hearings denied by judge.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: March 3, 1952): 2.
journal articles:
Elias S. Cohen. “Administration of the Criminal Sexual Psychopath Statute in Indiana.” Indiana Law Review 32, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 450-466. Available online here.
Anthony Granucci, Sisan Jamart Granucci. “Indiana’s Sexual Psychopath Act in operation.” Indiana Law Review 44, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 555-594. Available online here.
For almost three weeks, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) has engaged in a public feud with the U.S. State Department, which McCarthy claimed, without evidence, is riddled with Communists. In a floor speech last week, McCarthy expanded his crusade by charging that eighty-one Communists or “fellow travelers” occupy top positions in the Truman White House. According to McCarthy, those “fellow travelers” include two homosexuals. He acknowledged that the two weren’t Communists, but he claimed that they shared “peculiar mental twists” that tie them “with some of the Communist organizations.” McCarthy equated homosexuality and Communism this way:
Also it is confirmation of what I believe I mentioned earlier this evening when I was talking about one of the top investigators in Washington. I said to him, “Why do you find so many people fanatic about communism? Is there something that is so inviting about it? Is there something mentally wrong?” He said, “You will find if you search deep enough that there is something mentally or physically wrong with every one of them.” There is certainly something wrong with this group (homosexuals). I might say that the new security officer has recommended that they get rid of all that type of individuals regardless of whether they are shown to have any communistic connection or not.
Since, in McCarthy’s view, it no longer matters whether homosexuals have shown any “communistic connection,” the search was on for homosexuals, as well as Communists. What’s more, that search was expanding beyond the halls of the State Department. McCarthy cited a case of a “security risk” who was let go from the State Department and who landed a new job at the C.I.A. This now placed every department, agency and office in the Federal government under the microscope.
L-R: Bernard L. Gladieux, Rep. John J. Rooney (R-NY)
On February 27, Bernard L. Gladieux, executive assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, appeared before a House appropriations subcommittee to testify about the department’s security program. When one thinks of classified government work, thoughts mainly turn to areas of defense, diplomacy, and intelligence. But in fact, just about every department had classified work going on under its jurisdiction, and the Commerce Department was no different. The Bureau of Standards had a hand in atomic energy, jet propulsion and guided missile research, and was about to unveil the world’s fastest computer in June. A spy in the Weather Bureau could give an invading army detailed insight into weather patterns in the U.S. The Civil Aeronautics Administration had access to classified aircraft designs and air controller systems. The Census Bureau, the Patent Office, the Office of International Trade, all of which fell under the Commerce Department, possessed detailed information that would be useful to an foreign adversary.
This was supposed to be a routine budget hearing. But budget hearings before subcommittee chairman Rep. John J. Rooney (D-NY) were never routine where increased appropriations requests were concerned. Rooney’s nickname, “The Great Needler from Brooklyn,” reflected his reputation for mercilessly badgering witnesses, especially when they’re asking for budget increases.
The hearing begins cordially enough. Since 1947, says Gladieux, the Commerce department has investigated 369 loyalty cases since March 21, 1947. Of these 273 individuals were cleared, 71 were either fired or resigned, and 25 were still under investigation. Gladieux however pointed out that of the 273 acquitted of disloyalty, 26 have nevertheless been designated as security risks but are still on the payroll, in jobs that do not involve classified material. Another six of the 25 under investigation have been designated as interim security risks. “Even if the adjudication process were to clear those people, we may still continue the security-risk designation on them,” explained Gladieux.
After going over these figures, Rooney suddenly changed the topic: “What is the policy of the Department of Commerce with regard to homosexuals?”
“If we were advised of a case of that kind we would take steps to eliminate him from the service,” said Gladieux. “We would probably first attempt to obtain his resignation, because those kinds of cases are very difficult to find the facts about; they are disagreeable, embarrassing to everyone concerned, and we would therefor attempt to get his resignation as the quickest way to dispose of the case.”
“Do you have any homosexuals employed in classified areas?” asked Rooney.
“Not that I know of,” replied Gladieux. He explained that the only way the department would come across that kind of information would be through an FBI report.
“Has anybody ever sent out a directive addressed to the heads of the various bureaus, all the way down the line, calling for the names of any people suspected of being homosexuals?”
“No,” replied Gladieux. “We have never done that.”
“Do you not think it should be done?”
“I just never thought of it.”
Rooney was incredulous. “If you have 46,000 employees, sitting at the pinnacle as you are, it is very unlikely that there would come to your attention many of these homosexuals, is that not so?”
Gladieux was now about to dig his grave. “Those things are hushed up and handled at the lowest level at which they can be handled. In all my Federal experience…”
Hushed up. Rooney exploded. “Have any been dismissed in the past three years, let us say, because it was discovered they were homosexuals?”
“Not that I know of.”
Rooney was incredulous. “Not one?”
“Not that I know of,” repeated Gladieux.
“In the whole Department?”
“No; there have been some, I believe, for other sexual delinquencies, however.”
“That is incredible, in an organization of 46,000 people!”
Gladieux tried to backtrack. “There may have been. I think you will find in most cases of that kind if information comes to the attention of a personnel officer or bureau chief, the first thing they do is to get the man in and demand his resignation. Usually it is forthcoming. I have not had experience with this subject in the Department of Commerce.”
The grilling only got worse from there. Rooney insisted that Gladieux launch a series of investigations aimed at finding those hidden homosexuals. Gladieux however complained that “we are not staffed or equipped to do it.”
“Are you not in control of your organization to the extend where you can get the word around that you wanted turned up any people who were so inclined? … Is it your idea that nothing should be done about it? … Nothing has been done it up to now, isn’t that so?”
Rooney continued: “If (the State Department) has been able to weed out similar cases — and such cases may be very dangerous as far as security is concerned … then why can you not do it in the Department of Commerce?”
Replied Gladieux, “I do not know, Congressman Rooney. I would want to discuss that at length with our personnel people to see how we could get at it. I do not minimize the problem.”
Rooney wasn’t convinced.
“The story this year is that the Department of Commerce has taken the place of the State Department; that the Department of Commerce is the outfit in Government with people honeycombed with people belonging to the Communist party.” Note the switch: until now, the testimony was focused on homosexuals, not communists. But for Rooney and many of his contemporaries, communism and homosexuality were fully conflated. Rooney continued: “And the danger is that these people will meet other people who might satisfy their desires and, in return, divulge information with regard to the security of the nation.”
Gladieux was eager to get this grilling behind him. “There is no question about it,” he agreed, “that a homosexual or, I would say, any other sexually promiscuous person is at least a potential security risk and we ought to know about it, if there is any way we can find it out.”
The fireworks were more or less over. The hearing continued, with other congressmen peppering Gladieux with questions about the Commerce Department’s security program. When Gladieux’s testimony finally drew to a close, it was Rooney’s turn to sum it all up. He wasn’t happy.
“That is all so much nice language,” said Rep. Rooney. “To me it does not mean a thing. You have come up here this afternoon to acquaint us with the situation in the Department of Commerce. The results have been nil. We have not had the cooperation from you that we have had from the Department of State. You refused to take us into your confidence with regard to these things, and I have tried to handle it in an amicable way so that if questions were raised on the floor we might have the answers to them. You have reacted in the other direction, away from us. So, now we are far apart, and we will have to stay that way. There is nothing that I can see that we can do about it.”
Epilogue:
This hearing was held in executive session, and the details didn’t become public until March 20. The headline news was that since 1947, seventy-one people had been fired or forced to quit on disloyalty charges — presumably mostly dealing with allegations of membership with communist or other “subversive” organizations. Thirty-two have been branded as security risks. They’re still on the job although they are no longer allowed access to classified information. Under Civil Service regulations, the Commerce Department is “seriously handicapped” in its ability to dismiss them. Many press reports will note Rep. Rooney’s displeasure at the department’s performance against homosexual, particlarly when compared to the State Department. United Press reports:
Rooney also accused the Commerce Department of laxity in weeding out homosexuals, and praised the State Department for vigilance in that regard. …Noting that the State Department has weeded out 91 homosexuals under its security program, Rooney said it was “incredible” that none have been found among the Commerce Department’s 46,000 employees. He suggested the department issue a special directive calling for greater alertness in the matter “all the way down the line.”
Since 1946, Congress had attached a special provision to appropriations bills for the State and Defense Departments giving those department heads “absolute discretion” to fire any government employee if it was “deemed necessary in the interest of National Security.” Known as the McCarran Rider, after Sen. Pat McCarran (D-NV), it was specifically designed to allow the State and Defense Departments to dismiss homosexuals. In the summer of 1950, Congress attached the same rider to appropriations bills for eleven federal agencies, and authorized the President to extend these dismissal powers to the entire federal government.
On the Timeline:
Previously:
Jan 25, 1950: Secretary of State Dean Acheson tells reporters, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
Feb 9, 1950: McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, WV, that he has a list of 205 Communists in the State Department.
Feb 10, 1950: McCarthy tells a Salt Lake City radio station that he has the names of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department.
Feb 11, 1950: McCarthy releases a letter to Truman charging that the State Department is lax in dismissing “certified” security risks.
Feb 13, 1950: Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy denies there are any known Communists in the State Department, but says that 202 employees identified as “security risks” have left the department since 1947.
Headlines: Secretary of State Dean Acheson defends his loyalty to the U.S. and his remarks about Alger Hiss. Two Klansmen are arrested for killing a retired storekeeper near Birmingham, Alabama. A month-long strike by coal miners brings supplies to the nation’s homes, schools, hospitals, factories and railroads to dangerously low levels. An escaped cougar from the Oklahoma City zoo terrorizes neighborhoods for three days before being captured; twelve hours later he’s found dead in his cage.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “There’s No Tomorrow, by Tony Martin, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Bing Crosby with Vic Schoen & His Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: The Accused, starring Loretta Young and Robert Cummings
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
United Press. “Commerce’s probe counts 27 ‘bad risks’.” New York Daily News (Mar 20, 1950): 2.
Government documents:
Departments of Commerce Appropriations for 1951. 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. Hearings beforet he Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives. Monday, February 27, 1950: 2335-2342. Available online here.
Springfield. That’s shorthand for Springfield, Missouri, home of the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. It opened in 1933 as the U.S. Hospital for Defective Delinquents and quickly became the primary medical center for the entire federal prison system. It’s where prisoners with all kinds of medical problems, including those deemed to be mentally ill, were (and are, still) sent for longer-term treatment and convalescence.
During the national sex crime panic of the Forties and Fifties, an aroused public demanded that authorities round up “sex perverts” and lock them away. City names became stand-ins for places to send these crazy people. “Send them to Lima,” they’d say in Ohio. Or, “Send them to Big Spring,” in Texas. Whether anyone actually benefitted from being sent to wherever they were sent — that was a different question entirely and few bothered to ask. The important thing was that they weren’t here anymore. They were safely locked away at Ionia or Mount Pleasant or Chattahoochee.
Or Springfield.
On January 13, 1950, the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce and the Federal Judiciary was going over the Justice Department’s proposed budget for 1951. That morning, they examined budgets for the Anti-Trust Division, States Attorneys, U.S. Marshals, the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization — all before lunch.
When the subcommittee resumed its session at two o’clock that afternoon, it turned to the proposed budget for the Federal Prison System. Director James V. Bennett, a well-known penal reformer, defended the proposed $2.14 million increase ($23 million today) over the previous year’s budget. About midway through Bennett’s testimony, Rep. Daniel J. Flood (D-PA), grilled Bennett over the Federal Prison System’s handling of so-called “sexual psychopaths,” which, in Flood’s mind, mainly meant homosexuals. Flood posed a hypothetical situation: say there are ten check forgers. Nine are normal, but the tenth says he’s a homosexual. The nine are put on probation, but obviously not the tenth. He’s sent to Springfield. Why? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a homosexual.
Flood’s example illustrates how completely interchangeable the terms “sexual psychopath” and “homosexual” really were. The homosexual man before the judge wasn’t accused of a sex offense. He didn’t even admit to having had any particular sexual relations, let alone violent or non-consensual ones. All he did, in Flood’s example, was simply say, “I’m a homo.” And that alone, in Flood’s mind, gave the judge no other choice but to send him to Springfield.
Now, in reality, the law didn’t work that way. There were procedures in place that had to be followed before anyone could be sent away anywhere. In some jurisdictions, the procedures were very strict. But in others, it was largely left to the discretion of the judge. But not even in the loosey-goosiest jurisdiction would a forged check be a triggering offense that would endanger someone to be sent away to a psychiatric hospital. So right away, Flood’s hypothetical setup had little bearing on what could actually happen to a gay man standing before a Federal judge. But it does show what Flood thought should happen. And if anyone else in the room thought differently, they kept their peace.
And besides, that wasn’t the point of Flood’s question. What he was really trying to find out was whether the money being shipped off to Springfield was doing anybody any good.
Director Bennett’s reply that should have horrified everyone in the room. But of course, it didn’t, not any more than Flood’s hypothetical that started it all. Bennett acknowledged, more or less, that they really had no idea what they were doing. But he did suggest that having all of those these homosexuals in one place would make a good supply of subjects for medical experiments. In fact, they already conducted one experiment. It involved injecting hormones into homosexual men.
Here is the entire exchange:
Federal Prisons director James V. Bennett and Rep. Daniel J. Flood (D-PA).
Rep. Flood: Here is a refinement of the question I asked you last year. You may not remember, so we will put it altogether in one. There is a male prisoner arrested for forging a Government check. First offense; fine family, good record; comes before the judge, takes a plea. Ordinarily he would be given a suspended sentence and place on a year’s probation.
Dir. Bennett: I would think that would be likely.
Rep. Flood: Probably that would follow in 9 cases out of 10. This is the tenth case. In the course of the presentence investigation, it is developed he is a homosexual; he admits it, and there is no question about it. The judge says, “Are you?” He says, “Yes.”
It is a crime. The judge cannot give him a year on probation. The fellow is a criminal in something else. So he sends him to you and you recommend Springfield, Mo., for a year.
What are you going to do with him in Springfield, or anyplace else? He is sentenced, not for the crime to which he plead, for which he would ordinarily get a suspended sentence, but your pretrial people, presentence people, find out the fellow is a “homo.” He said he was. There is no debate about it and there is the judge and he does not know what to do, so he gives him a year, and he wonders what he will do with him. You say, “Send him to Springfield.” So he is there. What happens to him a Springfield?
Dir. Bennett: Let me, first of all, Mr. Congressman, point out that many people are in Federal court technically for one thing, for income-tax violation, say like Mr. Al Capone, but is given a 10-year sentence, not because of the flagrancy of the income-tax violation, but because he is a gangster.
Rep. Flood: That is not my case. They wanted to send Capone to jail. But they cannot do anything out it in this case. He tells them something which makes it mandatory. In other words, the judge cannot turn him loose.
Dir. Bennett: What do we do about the sex psychopath; Mr. Congressman, is that what you mean?
Rep. Flood: That is the next question that I am going to ask you. You have two psychiatrists going into Springfield, Mo., and I certainly think you need four down there.
Dir. Bennett: We need more.
Rep. Flood: What are you doing? Do you have an institution — do you consider Springfield, Mo., your special institution for homosexuals, or sexual psychopaths?
Dir. Bennett: We have been sending a considerable number of confirmed sexual psychopaths to Springfield.
Rep. Flood: Nothing is happening. It is a bad job. They are not being treated properly. Nothing is coming out. There is not much difference there than anyplace else. What are you going to do about sexual psychopaths in Federal prisons? You have a lot of them, do you not?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir.
Rep. Flood: Are you doing anything?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir. Everything possible is being done. We have been treating them by psychiatric methods to the limit of our ability.
Rep. Flood: Do you think you are curing them?
Dir. Bennett: Some of them we are helping.
Rep. Flood: So at the end of the year he is right where he was, a sexual psychopath. That is not your fault, is it?
Dir. Bennett: There isn’t much more known, Mr. Congressman, about how to treat and improve the sexual psychopath than there is how to treat cancer.
Rep. Flood: Now we are getting some place.
Dir. Bennett: We do know that in a few cases, by psychoanalytical methods, we can sometimes get to the root of an individual person’s case and troubles, but as you well know, that is an extra-ordinarily expensive method, and it takes a long time for the psychiatrist to get to the root of the evil.
Rep. Flood: Let me ask you, are you doing everything under the circumstances of medial and penological theories that can be done with sexual psychopaths in view of the money you are getting?
Dir. Bennett: No, we are not doing everything we can do, because we don’t have the personnel.
Rep. Flood: Why not?
Dir. Bennett: We simply don’t have the funds for it.
Rep. Flood: That is why I asked you. Out of the money you are getting then.
Dir. Bennett: We are doing everything we can with the funds we are getting.
Rep. Flood: You are not doing very much?
Dir. Bennett: We are not doing as much as we would like, no sir; but we are doing more than any other correctional system, or anybody else.
Rep. Flood: Are you segregating in Springfield your sexual psychopaths in the institution?
Dir. Bennett: Within the institution?
Rep. Flood: Are you segregating them within the institution?
Dir. Bennett: Yes sir. We have a special building and special psychiatrists assigned to them. Let me tell you one of the things we tried out there.
We thought that injection of hormones into the so-called passive homosexual would be helpful. We tried that, and spent quite a lot of time and effort on the matter. Some helpful results were obtained in some cases, but in other cases where the cause of sexual psychopathy was entirely mental, had no physical base, why it wasn’t very helpful. We think, Mr. Congressman, and I have recommended on several occasions, that some money be given to us for research in this problem of sex psychopathy. We have a large laboratory. We have more cases of people of that kind in our institutions than in any other one place. We could utilize these opportunities for research purposes, and this advance the knowledge of this extremely difficult affliction.
We have had, out of the Army, a large number of men who were committed to our institutions for rape, for sodomy, and other sex offenses. We have not been able to organize a research program because we have not had psychiatric assistance. There is no use, gentlemen, of talking about trying to stop abnormal sex crimes through punitive methods. It is basically a disease and we might as well recognize it as a disease, and see if we can’t find a cure.
Rep. Flood: Is it hereditary or acquired?
Dir. Bennett: I don’t know. Sometimes, at least, a person seems to be born that way.
Rep. Flood: Both?
Dir. Bennett: Yes. There are certain well-known types of so-called hermaphrodites, and some others are born that way, but the number is relatively small.
Rep. Flood: You seem to be very unhappy about the whole thing.
Dir. Bennett: I’m very unhappy about the amount of research that is being done in the field of sex psychopathy.
Rep. Flood: It is a major criminological problem in the Federal penal institutions today?
Dir. Bennett: I can think of nothing where we could make a greater contribution to law enforcement than trying to find the basis of this mental and physical affliction. Yes, it is a major problem.
Rep. Flood: That is all.
Dir. Bennett: I will, if you will permit me, Mr. Flood, send you a copy of my annual report, in which I go into the question of the sex psychopath, the number of them, and the problems they rpesent and what I think is a constructive program for their improvement.
Rep. Flood: Did you ask the Budget for money to execute your program?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir.
Rep. Flood: What did they do?
Dir. Bennett: It was not allowed.
Rep. Flood: The first time you asked for it?
Dir. Bennett: Well, it was the first time we asked for it in that particular form, but we have asked for money before.
Rep. Flood: Did you say please, when you presented it, or did you just make a pass at it?
Dir. Bennett: We pressed it; yes sir.
Rep. Flood: That is all.
Dir. Bennett: I would like to give you that report. The public is aroused about this problem, as you well know, and you can’t tell anything about these fellows that seem to you perfectly normal until you get them in some sort of a controlled environment where you can expose these situations, and then perhaps you can help them.
Epilogue:
I haven’t found any published papers based on the Springfield experiments. But doctors had long suspected that hormones were responsible for homosexuality in some — namely, the “constitutional” homosexuals, as opposed to those who supposedly picked it up like a cigarette habit. A lack of testosterone was at first thought to be the cause. After all, most of those homosexuals who came to the doctors’ attention were rather girly. But injecting them with testosterone only made them hornier — more homosexual, as it were.
So instead of increasing homosexuals’ sex drive, why not just decrease it instead? That’s where trying synthetic estrogen came in. That didn’t work very well either. Just a few months before Bennett’s testimony, Dr. William H. Perloff, of the Philadelphia General Hospital, published the effects of hormone treatments for all kinds of maladies. His experiments with gay men and women came to naught:
In our experience, no patient, either male or female, has shown any consistent reversal of the endocrine pattern to explain homosexual tendencies. We have never observed any correlation between the choice of the sex object and the levels of hormonal excretion. Estrogenic substances administered to homosexual females do not alter either the sexual drive or the sex object. In no patient studied in our clinic was heterosexuality produced with this type of therapy. Large doses of estrogens administered to male homosexuals will occasionally succeed in reducing their sexual drive but will not influence their sex object.
Across the pond, Dr. R.E. Hemphill at the University of Bristol reviewed the literature in 1955 and found the same results: “The direction of homosexual or heterosexual drives cannot be altered with sex hormones; but the force of sexual drive in males can be reduced by treatment with female sex hormones.” Even in cases where hormones caused an “almost complete testicular atrophy,” it still didn’t result in a “total suppression of the abnormal sex drives.”
Turning a homosexual into a heterosexual proved impossible. But turning a homosexual into a eunuch, in the eyes of the authorities at least, might just be the next best thing. There were, however, side effects. British mathematician Alan Turing, who was treated with Stilboestrol, a synthetic estrogen, after his conviction for homosexuality, suffered many of them. Impotency, mainly, which was the whole point of the treatment. But also, perhaps most startling, was gynecomastia — he grew breasts, before he killed himself in 1954.
On the Timeline:
Jan 13, 1950: The judge says “Send him to Springfield.” So he is there. Then what?
Periscope:
For JANUARY 13, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3 %
(Annual)
3.0 %
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
“This is a mucho gay day for corn…”
Headlines: The U.N. Security Council again refuses to oust the Nationalists from the Chinese seat and hand it over to Communist representatives. Rumors persist that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Chinese Communist leader Mao Tze Tung are negotiating a military and economic alliance. Southern Democrats and Republicans team up in the House to try to block President Truman’s Fair Deal program. Seventy thousand coal miners vow to ignore union orders to return to work on Monday. An Air Force glider crashes while landing near Columbus, Georgia, killing eleven paratrooper trainees, an instructor, and the pilot. The British Admiralty confirms that 64 men aboard the submarine HMS Truculent have died following its sinking in the Thames Estuary.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Don’t Cry, Joe” by Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes.
Currently in theaters: The Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne, John Agar, Forrest Tucker, and Adele Mara.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy(CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on the Department of Justice. Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Eighty-First Congress, Second Session (Washington, 1950). Available online here. The exchange between Bennett and Flood concerning “treatment of psychopaths” begins on page 323.
R.E. Hemphill. “Endochrine treatment in psychiatry.” British Medical Journal no. 4912, vol 1 (February 26, 1955): 501-504. Available online here.
William H. Perloff. “Role of the hormones in human sexuality.” Psychosomatic Medicine 11, no. 3 (May 1949): 133-139.
Here it is. The sensational tour of the dark underbelly of our nation’s Capital: “its avenues, its alleyways, its cat-houses, its dumps, its mansions, its hotels, its police stations, its jails, its courts, its clubs, its closets and its catacombs.”
Your tour guides are Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. Lait was the editor of the gossipy New York Daily Mirror. Mortimer worked for him, writing a noirish gossip column called New York Confidential. Together, with gossiper Walter Winchell and muckraking columnist Drew Pearson, they had turned the morning tabloid into America’s second-largest daily in terms of circulation.
Lait and Mortimer had already collaborated on two very successful books: New York Confidential (1948) and Chicago Confidential (1950). But D.C., was something else. “It was our toughest task of digging, but we turned up plenty. We think we have X-rayed the dizziest — and this will amaze you, as it did us, the dirtiest — community in America.”
Their digging resulted in their third great opus, Washington Confidential, where they found “a cesspool of drunkenness, debauchery, whoring, homosexuality, municipal corruption and public apathy, protected crime under criminal protection, hoodlumism, racketeering, pandering, and plundering, among anomalous situations found nowhere else on earth.”
According to Lait and Mortimer, Georgetown was mostly “rich, red or queer. . . . The women wore flat-heeled shoes and batik blouses, and went in for New Thought. The men, if you can call some of them that, wore their hair longer than we do…” Northwest was crowded with “the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy … where they rub shoulders with the lowly and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem, the colored.” There were three skid rows. “One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the third is exclusively for sailors.”
As with their other books, Lait and Mortimer packed Washington Confidential with tons of salacious gossip. Starting with insatiable “G-Girls” — government office workers — living in boarding houses and run down hotels: “They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally like spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine tasks and their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys their looks. … One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with harlots, who violently resent them and call them ‘scabs.'”
“Washington drinks more than any U.S. city,” they claimed. Despite that, they decided that the city’s respectable social scene was deader than a door nail. They blamed Eleanor Roosevelt. “She choked the last breath out of social tradition with her Negro friends, her boondoggling, sweaty indigents, her professional Socialists, her dedicated slum-house guardians of gutter garbage, and her antics as the militant apostle of democracy and equality.”
As for Mrs. Roosevelt’s Negro friends: “If Washington got home rule, its first mayor would be a gentleman affectionately known to his constituency as Puddin’ Head Jones. And Mr. Jones is a Negro. We will tell you what no one else has dared to publish — there are more Negroes than whites in Washington. … It is not uncommon to see white women living with colored men, especially jazz band musicians… Many Negro madams and pimps employ white girls for their colored trade. In some New Deal left-wing circles, it is considered chi chi to meet socially and even sexually with Negroes.”
So yeah. Washington Confidential is both racist and misogynistic. And it’s xenophobic and rabidly anti-New Dealer. By the way, it’s also homophobic, which more or less goes without saying. Mortimer and Lait dedicate an entire chapter to the pansies. Here it is:
Chapter Fifteen: Garden of Pansies
The more sensational paperback cover.
If you’re wondering whether your wandering semi-boy is tonight, he’s probably in Washington.
The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State Department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags, whimsy with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. We pursued this subject and we found that there are at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a fraction fo the total of their kind in the city.
The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other fairies. They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately, and they are intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear to be queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated. But they all know one another and they have a grapevine of intercommunication as swift and sure as that in any girls’ boarding-school. Since they have no use for women in the main, and are uneasy with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even beyond the call of the physical, for each other’s society. They have their own hangouts, visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of interests and behavior.
Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their realm. Your reporters, after years around show business, are familiar with those of their breed, unembarrassed in their presence. But, with the exception of crude male prostitutes whom they have encountered in police courts and on the sidewalks of New York’s Lexington Avenue and in Harlem, they still had a whisper of an illusion left: they got the idea, because they had met so many with marked talents, that by a pathological compensation many of them possessed artistic traits.
In Washington they found this false. The exceptional ones do drift to Broadway and to Hollywood. But they are no more representative of their numbers than are the gifted men and women who find their places in the arts of the great mass of people from whom they become detached to follow the livelier professions.
Now we have found out that where the dull, dumb deviates go. We had assumed that, as they grew up in small communities where they soon become obvious and odious, they took flight for the stage, the screen, interior decorating, exotic literature, and other fields centered in the metropolitan market places. That is not true. Only a few can and do enter the avenues where their talents make them equal, often superior.
So, what becomes of the marked twilight sex, unwelcome at home, pariahs afar? We might ask what becomes of the clubfooted or pockmarked girl similarly situated. She is in a panic about the present, still more so about the future, and she searches for security. Where can that be captured? Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes — all four of them — are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications. There is no color line, no social selectivity; not even citizenship is always a prerequisite. Once the precious appointment is filed in a machine which knows no discrimination, there it stays for life.
Like immigrants from foreign lands, for these people are aliens in their own, they attract — more often send for and finance — those who speak their language and live their kind of lives. Congressman A.L. Miller, of Nebraska, a physician, author of the District’s new bill to regulate the homos, enunciated with an oratorical flourish the deathless statement that “birds of a feather flock together.” William Jennings Bran came from Nebraska, too.
The 6,000 who made the perennial payroll drew many more thousands who flunked it. Like pug-nosed, freckle-faced girls of no distinction, who became waitresses and car-hops, these inverts who are washed in with the tide and beached in the mud become clerks in shops, hairdressers, waiters, bartenders, most often in places habitually patronized by those of their own stripe.
The Washington vice squad had listed 5,200 known deviates. Dr. Ben Karpen, psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, believes they are in the tens of thousands.
Their chief meeting-place is in leafy Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They make love under the equestrian statue of rugged Andrew Jackson, who must be whirling on his heavenly horse every time he sees what is going on around his monument. Lafayette Square is no bohemian section, like Washington Square in New York. The three sides other than the White House have such buildings as the Cosmos Club, formerly the home of Dolly Madison; the national headquarters of the League for Political Education of the American Federation of Labor; the Hay-Adams House, one of Washington’s finer hotels, and other dignified structures.
How the fairies happened to pick this place for their rendezvous, and how the cops let them get away with it, no one can trace.
The police keep making arrests, but it does not deter the homos from hanging out around the square. They make pickups there and quite often engage in immoral acts practically under the eyes of the sparrow cops.
They also foregather in Franklin Park, a few blocks away, in the center of the business district.
There is no geographic section where degenerates generally live. That is part of the general picture, everything, everywhere, in Washington.
Many rich fairies and lesbians live in expensive remodeled Georgetown homes, the nearest thing to a left-bank neighborhood. This is also a left-wing center.
Some parties which take place in Washington pervert sets are orgies beyond description and imagination. Every invention of Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade had been added to and improved upon, and is in daily use. Week-ends find the pansies and lady-lovers in broad, baronial estates of wealthy perverts in near-by Virginia and Maryland. Many of the third sex journey regularly to New York, where they have friends in esoteric circles.
Washington has its transvestites, who get their thrills from appearing in the clothes of the opposite sex. Some of the ritzier dress shops on Connecticut Avenue couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fairies that buy French imports. Many dress in drag on Thanksgiving day and mingle in the holiday crowds with the costumed young folk.
While these lines were being typed, a member of the staff of Democratic Senator Edwin G. Johnson, of Colorado, who recently made front pages when he attacked the morals of the movie industry, was arrested by two vice-squad officers in the men’s room in Lafayette Square and charged with committing indecent acts. Booked in $500 bail, he pleaded not guilty. He and Senator Johnson, who appeared with him in the preliminary hearing before the United States Attorney, made no statements. He was later acquitted by a jury.
The same day, Assistant U.S. Attorney Warren Wilson asked for the night closing of public comfort stations, calling them breeding places of perversion. Commenting on the increase of such cases, Wilson said, “Ninety percent of these offenses are committed in men’s rooms operated by the federal government.”
Wilson mentioned Lafayette Square, Stanton Park, Dupont Circle, and Franklin Park. He recommended that all these comfort stations be closed after 4 P.M. as policemen on the 4-12 shift could do so, and be kept closed until 8 A.M.
“These stations were constructed when there were no other facilities in downtown Washington,” Wilson said. “Today, hundreds of restaurants are required to have toilet facilities by law. Many hotels have been constructed since the comfort stations.
“Public place are becoming cesspools of perversion.”
Many cocktail lounges and restaurants cater to irregulars. Most of them are near the Mayflower Hotel. The most popular resort is the Jewel Box, near 16th and L, NW, formerly known as the Maystat. It is a cocktail lounge with entertainment by a piano player, who sings semi-risqué lyrics.
The waiters are obvious fairies. Most customers seem to fit the pattern. The night we went there, a police car, with sirens screaming, pulled up. We figured it was a pinch. After the cop threw out two customers, a waiter told us everything was okay.
“Those boys got fresh,” he said. “They tried to flirt with those two women sitting there. We don’t tolerate flirting — anyway not with women.”
Then he minced off, hand on hip.
Fags also like the restaurant known as Mickey’s, behind the Mayflower. They patronize the second floor of a place in the 1700 block of H Street. One night two Congressmen, a couple of army officers, and two young servicemen were mixing beer and gin there, and kissing each other. They also swish around the Sand Bar in Thomas Circle.
A favorite meeting-place for keeping appointments is the lobby of the Franklin Park Hotel. The Riggs Turkish Bath, the only one in town, under Keith’s Theatre, was closed up because these undesirables took it over. Its license has since been restored.
Black Washington has its share of deviates, too.
There is free crossing of racial lines among fairies and lesbians. We have seen aristocratic Southerners, on the bias, hunt down Negro men for dalliance. We bumped into a gal to show business, who we know is queer, sitting with two mannish-looking women at the Jewel Box. She invited us to a party in Black Town, an inter-racial, inter-middle-sex mélange, with long-haired, made-up Negro and white boys simpering with females of both races mingled in unmistakable exaltation.
During the summer, groups of colored fairies make up “yachting” parties and cruise the Potomac in the steamer Robert E. Lee. One Saturday night, last summer, over 100 cops were dispatched to the docks when the “Society of Female Impersonators” was to have a midnight sail. They found 1,700 Negro men, all dressed as women, on the boat, and as many more trying to get on. A riot was in the making, but the cops busted it up and kept it quiet when they hauled away two wagon-loads. The ship finally got off at 2 A.M.
Two weeks later, in another melee on the same boat, a colored man was fatally shot by a police detective after he jumped into the water. Another Negro, who pleaded guilty to having started the riot, was fined $200 for having endangered the lives of 600 persons. Some months later, Washingtonians were mystified by an ad in a daily paper which read as follows: S.S. Mt. Vernon — moonlight cruise — 8:30 p.m. — beer — stag or drag.
No one knows how many lesbians there are, because the female — or is it the male — of the pervert species is seldom spoken about and is much less obvious. Psychiatrists and sociologists who have made a study of the problem in Washington think there are at least twice as many Sapphic lovers as fairies. A large incidence of lesbianism is concomitant with the shortage of men, where women work together, live together, play together, and love together.
Some display themselves, strut around in fairy joints; all queers are in rapport with all others. You will see theim also in some of the late bottle-clubs, on the make for the same girls the he-wolves are chasing.
The mannish women used to hang out oat the Show Boat Bar, H and 15th, until the management drove them out. Many lesbians frequent Kavakos’ Grill, in the SE section, though this is not any joint so specializing. The club, owned by Bill Kavakos, a rich Greek who likes to gamble, is near the Navy Yard. It caters to sailors and slummers.
A breakdown of occupations in one group of 543 perverts who were arrested showed some interesting sidelights. Among them was only one actor, but 92 students. There were 58 Army personnel and 28 from the Navy. Even the rugged Marines appeared. Among the deviates were one bartender, one barber, and one baker. There were four attorneys, only two doctors, and only one embalmer. This is the record.
Accountant
7
Marines, U.S.
2
Actor
1
Minister
3
Airport employee
3
Musician
5
Army
Navy
Commissioned
9
Commissioned
1
Noncommissioned
49
Noncommissioned
27
Attorney
4
Page boy
1
Baker
1
Pharmacist
4
Barber
1
Porter
6
Bartender
1
Radio personnel
3
Businessman
7
Realtor
2
Butcher
1
Reporter
2
Cabdriver
2
Restaurant personnel
27
Clerk
48
Salesman
10
Diplomat
1
Sculptor
2
Doctor
2
Servant
10
Embalmer
1
Service-station operator
2
Embassy personnel
1
Skilled laborer
17
Government employee
57
Stenographer and sec’y
4
Guard
9
Student
92
Historian
1
Teacher and professor
12
Horse breeder
1
Technician
8
Interior decorator
3
Unemployed
50
Jeweler
1
Unskilled laborer
31
Laundryman
6
Writer
2
Librarian
3
TOTAL:
543
With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life.
Foreign chancelleries long ago learned that homos are of value in espionage work. The German Röhm, and later Göring, established divisions of such in the Foreign Office. That was aped by Soviet Russia, which has a flourishing desk now in Moscow. According to Congressman Miller, who made a comprehensive study of the subject, young students are indoctrinated and given a course in homosexuality, then taught to infiltrate in perverted circles in other countries. Congressman Miller said:
“These espionage agents have found it rather easy to send their homosexuals here and contact their kind in sensitive departments of our Government. Blackmail and many other schemes are used to gather secret information.
“The homosexual is often a man of considerable intellect and ability. It is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires follow the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be 3 or 4 days in each month that this homosexual’s instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice. Under large doses of sedatives during this sensitive cycle, that he may escape such acts.
“The problem of sexual maladjustments are most urgent and still far from a solution. In the Army, several thousand men were discharged. When caught in the act, they are generally discharged without honor, which means loss of citizenship. Many failed to survive the rigors of warfare and intimate association with men. The majority were unable to conceal their tendencies, and were eventually eliminated with disgrace.
“Never is the bond which unites two friends such that the acquisition of a new friend by one is regarded angrily by the other; but quite otherwise is the life among homosexuals. Here jealousy reigns supreme. Male homosexuals will not share their fairy with anybody.
“The sexual attraction exercised by a man on another male may be apparent in many ways. The homosexual will become excited by the mere presence of some man in a public place. A taxi driver finds fares making indiscreet advances. The homosexual has no sensation in the presence of the most beautiful and seductive female. Her amorous advances to him may even be repulsive.”
Until the recent purges in the State Department, there was a gag around Washington that you had to speak with a British accent, wear a Homburg hat, or have a queer quirk if you wanted to get by the guards at the door.
One high State Department official was a notorious homo who preferred young Negro boys. He was detected in a Pullman car of the Southern Railroad — on the funeral train to bury Speaker Bankhead, father of Tallulah — making immoral advances to a porter. The story reached newspaper offices, but before it could be printed the State Department sent out an urgent appeal to editors to “kill,” because it might imperil the war effort. When this official’s misdeeds were placed before President Roosevelt, it was said he refused to replace him because they both “wore the same school tie.” After resigning from the government, this official almost died of exposure when a Negro farm hand, jealous because of his attention to another, slugged him.
Aware of the seriousness of the problem, the State Department has a highly hush-hush Homosexual Bureau, manned by trained investigators and former counter-espionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies in Foggy Bottom.
But the department cannot free itself of boondoggling tendencies, for at the same time it retains a personable and intelligent young lady to prepare a treatise on homosexualism, the purpose being to see if it’s possible to cure or contain the deviates who remain on the rolls. Her assignment requires her to visit faggot dives, observe the queers in action, and ask them how they got that way.
The following will be denied, but whenever possible the YMCA is vetoing the use of its facilities, especially the swimming-pool, to all State Department employees, just to be on the safe side.
A man of almost cabinet rank in the Defense Department is also a pervert, with bivalent tendencies, a two-way performer.
These are no isolated incidents. The government is honeycombed in high places with people you wouldn’t let in your garbage wagons.
David K. Eichler, a brilliant 37-year-old Harvard post-graduate who was a top policy-maker in the State department as Deputy Secretary General of the Far Eastern Commission until a couple of months ago, was arrested by Park Police on the Ellipse, charged with committing an unspeakable act with a Negro man He put up $25 “forfeit,” a Washington variation of cash bail, about which more in another chapter. The next day, at the hearing, the colored man pleaded guilty, but when Eichler didn’t appear the judge told the prisoner he might have to change his plea, inasmuch as his co-defendant wasn’t there.
The black fairy said, “Never mind, judge. I had a good time.”
Shortly after his arrest, Eichler went on a vacation trip to the South. After learning about the pinch, security officials instituted a search for him and summoned him back to Washington. Eichler admitted nothing, but resigned his $9,000-a-year job. He wasn’t asked to stay.
On the other hand, the Grand Jury voted a no-bill when Eugene Desvernine, 34, acting officer-in-charge of Caribbean affairs in the State Department, was arrested for an alleged sex offense against a 13-year-old boy. Desvernine, suspended from the department after his arrested in East Potomac Park, has been restored to duty.
The original charges against fairies in the State Department listed only 91, but considerably more than a hundred have been discharged from it since. More are asked to withdraw. And there are believed to be hundreds not yet shown up.
Republicans who tried to get a special “pervert squad” formed were voted down on straight party lines by Democrats, who found themselves having to protect strange bedfellows. When you read of a fag being fired or quitting, don’t think Washington’s homosexual population is reduced that much. It isn’t. Odds are the discharged degenerate is shifted onto some other government payroll. At least eight were transferred from the State Department to Agriculture. Hundreds of others driven from one department minced into others.
At the end of 1950, State said they were all gone. But on the first day of 1951, the Washington papers carried this brief item under the heading: Two men Face Sex Charges.
“Alan A. Wakefield, 26, State Department employee, was released under $300 bond pending a hearing on a disorderly conduct charge. Vice Squad detectives arrested him in the men’s room of a downtown hotel.” He was since convicted of disorderly conduct.
Dr. Kinsey wasn’t appalled by the 6,000 fags in government jobs. According to his calculations, 56,787 federal workers are congenital homosexuals. He includes 21 Congressmen and says 192 others are bad behavior risks.
We still favor the two-party system.
Epilogue:
The Pullman car incident that Lait and Mortimer referred to occurred in September 1940, on a special train returning to Washington from House Speaker William Bankhead’s funeral in Alabama. Sumner Welles, a senior State Department diplomat and FDR confidante, was on board, along with Roosevelt and other cabinet members. Welles’s had a reputation for being one of the most thoughtful and wisest foreign policy advisers, but when he was drinking, his sexual appetites, which cut across all gender and racial lines, got the better of him. At around 4 a.m., drunk and tired, Welles solicited Pullman car porters for sex. The incident was reported to the Secret Service, the railroad President, and, eventually, to Roosevelt himself. Roosevelt protected Welles for the next three years, until he let him go in 1943 following intense pressure from the State Department.
Lait and Mortimer declined to name Welles in Washington Confidential. Welles was still a well-respected speaker, author, and media adviser on foreign relations. Welles will be outed in 1956 in the May issue of Confidential. The scandal magazine was unrelated to the Lait and Mortimer books, although its owner, Robert Harrison, would later say that he was inspired by the books’ popularity.
Washington Confidential was an instant success. Within three week, more than 150,000 copies were sold, 40,000 in Washington alone. Critics weren’t so enraptured. The Washington Star called the book a “compendium of half-truths, distortion and inaccuracy which would make the average busy-body gossip sound like a judicial paragon.” It also said that the authors’ claim of being reporters was “a libel on every accurate reporter in the country.”
A young Washington Post critic by the name of Ben Bradlee called it “the sloppiest reporting ever put between two covers.” The errors were numerous, and somewhat comical: There is no Cleveland Parkway. They give the wrong address for the Chinese embassy. They get the names of one prominent doctor and two well-known criminal lawyers wrong. They give the wrong film title and wrong opening date for a theater. And what they claimed to be hard-to-get facts had already been published by the Washington papers long before the book hit the stands.
Lait and Mortimer candidly admitted in their first chapter, “We have nothing to sell except books.” That was supposed to be their way of saying they had no particular axe to grind. In fact, it was probably the only honest sentence in the entire book. But whatever the critics had to say about it, the public lapped it up. Washington Confidential shot up to the top of the New York Times best-seller list just three weeks after its debut, and it which went on to become the best-selling non-fiction title for all of 1951.
March 5, 1951: Washington Confidential tours a garden of pansies.
Periscope:
For March 5, 1951:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
234 (D)
199 (R)
1 (Other)
1 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
49 (D)
47 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
9.2%
(Annual)
1.7%
(Quarterly)
Inflation:
9.3%
Unemployment:
3.4%
US killed in action,
993
(This month)
Korean conflict:
18,541
(Since Jun 28, 1950)
Headlines: U.N troops continue to slowly push North Korean and Chinese troops northward through South Korea toward the 38th parallel. Reports from China indicate growing friction between Chinese communists and Soviet officials. A top American scientist says that American atomic weaponry can “destroy Russia” if the Soviets start a war in Europe. The Senate approves a bill to lower the draft age from nineteen to eighteen. General Motors reports a profit of $834 million (about $8.2 billion today), a world record. At least nineteen are dead following a severe winter snowstorm in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and parts of Iowa and northern Wisconsin.
In the record stores: “Be My Love” by Mario Lanza, “If” by Perry Como, “My Heart Cries for You” by Guy Mitchell, “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page, “Aba Daba Honeymoon” by Debbie Reynolds, “You’re Just In Love” by Perry Como, “Mockin’ Bird Hill” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Would I Love You” by Patti Page, “Roving Kind” by Guy Mitchell, “I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat” by Mel Blanc.
On the radio:Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), People Are Funny (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Fibber McGee & Molly (NBC), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Bob Hawk Show (CBS), Life With Luigi (CBS).
Currently in theaters: Operation Pacific, starring John Wayne and Patricia Neal.
On television: Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Fireside Theatre (NBC), Philco Television Playhouse (NBC), Your Show of Shows/Sid Ceasar & Imogene Coca (NBC), Colgate Comedy Hour (NBC), Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (NBC), The Lone Ranger (ABC), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Mama (CBS).
Dr. James M. Reinhardt’s obituary tells us that the nationally-renowned criminologist was a “personal friend of the late J. Edgar Hoover.” That may have had something to do with his gigs as a guest lecturer at the FBI’s National Academy in Washington, D.C. Reinhardt’s home base was in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he taught criminology and sociology at the University of Nebraska.
Much of his work was in high profile murder cases. But with the sex crime panic in full swing, Reinhardt adopted the mantle of a sex crime expert and published this article in the February 1950 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. I would imagine that it gives us a good idea as to what he taught the nation’s best police detectives and state and federal investigators. An abridged version of the article appears below. You can read the entire article here.
The Sex Pervert
by DR. JAMES M. REINHARDT, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Nebraska
…The unique personality traits of the potentially most dangerous types of sex perverts do not ordinarily stand open to the world. The simple exhibitionist, nuisance that he is, invariably attracts attention, while the lust murderer may slip through the crowd undetected. The feminism of the “passive” homosexual male arouses quick resentment and he is avoided by the normal male. Oftentimes, the far more dangerous “aggressive” homosexual works out his designs on young boys in the community while moving with innocent appearance among respectable people.
Even where sexually perverted individuals exhibit similar tendencies, they may differ widely in the ways to which these perverse cravings dominate the personality. Satyriasis, or even a mildly sex dominated hyperaesthesia may produce a Don Juan or a rapist. Moreover, the life histories of sex perverts, even of the same general “type,” do not always follow a common pattern. There are marked differences in the environmental and hereditary backgrounds as in the behavior of homosexuals, exhibitionists, and sadimasochists [sic] of all degrees. Nevertheless, perversion of whatever sort tends to generate new desires through a sex-fused imagination, until the individual becomes absorbed by his own perversions and can find only partial, or no satisfactions in other directions.
It is important to recognize that not all individual who engage in sexual perversions are “true” sex perverts. Very often men — and sometimes women — with low moral standards, and with exaggerated lustful dispositions will satisfy their sexual passions in whatever ways that are available. Such person, removed from restricted circumstance, will engage in normal sexuality; whereas the “true” sex pervert can find sexual gratification only in a perverted manner regardless of the circumstance. The more degenerate and brutish the perverted nature, the more it tends to dominate the whole personality. Some cases of sexual parapathy with a sadistic tinge employ an outward show of excessive kindness in the beginning approaches and turn toward brutalities as the object is won over or in the face of resistance.
The disposition of the sexually perverted individual may not tell us to what ends he will go to satisfy his lustful craving, but it may reveal the nature and direction of the perversion itself. In other words, we do not have to wait until a ex murder is committed to know that a potential sex murderer is in the field. Certain warning traits of personality are there if society is organized to be on the “look-out” for them.
Perversions are not necessarily associated with other offenses though perverts are often guilty of a variety of crimes. This is so partly because the degenerative processes predispose the individual to other criminalities, and also, the perversions push the individual into criminal situations.
Four major types of perversion give society the most concern. They are homosexuality, exhibitionism, pedophilia (perverted sex interest in children), and sadi-masochism [sic]. Rape and other serious offenses may be due to such abnormalities as satyriasis or nymphomania (women). Sex perversions are not mutually exclusive and it is this fact which complicates the problem of control. As for instance, when a homosexual manifestation is coupled with a strong sadistic compulsion.
The homosexual is distinguishable not alone by a marked attraction toward members of his own sex, but by a sexual aversion to persons of the opposite sex. There are many varieties of homosexuals, but for the most part these may be classified according to two personality types: the “passive” and the “aggressive.”
The “passive” homosexual male exhibits a decided feminine manner in his language, dress and walk. He is the least dangerous of all homosexuals because he is easily distinguishable and because he is retiring and ordinarily satisfied with one “lover.” The “aggressive type” in the male, on the other hand, may show strong masculine characteristics, is more difficult to discern, is more brutal in his designs. He often preys on young boys, and may have wealth and “family background” at his disposal. The female homosexuals show the same two types but usually in less exaggerated form.
The unsatisfactory social and sexual relations of the homosexual often tend to bring about rapid psychological and moral degeneration, which contribute to various forms of criminality, alcoholism, and other escapes.
…
The belief held by some people that all sex perverts are suffering from a sex psychopathy is, in my opinion, erroneous. The psychopathic personality, whether he is driven by sex cravings, is a blundering, irresponsible individual, and where the psychopathy has progressed, this applies to the whole range of his personality. Such a person is no more responsible and calculating in his sex conduct than in other phases of his behavior. A characteristic of the psychopath is irresponsibility in his language and his behavior. He is devoid of a fixed purpose in life, and is unable to follow or really to develop a plan of action. He seems “… always to be stumbling along without direction along the road to self-destruction,” and is unable to do anything about it. If sex gets in his way, he uses it with no regard for the stimulating object, or no consideration of the consequences. Such a one is often called a sexual psychopath. From my point of view, a “true” sexual psychopath is pulled irresistibly in the direction of pervertive sexual behavior. His whole life pattern of stupidity and degeneracy is colored by his sexually perverted nature.
On the other hand, many sex perverts, even those with brutality tendencies, are able to carry on for a considerable time without revealing openly their sexual abnormalities. They do for a time, at least, exercise judgment, hold jobs, and show some consideration for the loyalties of other people. While this lasts, such individuals could hardly be called sexual psychopaths.
It is my contention that any form of sex perversion tends to bring about the degeneration of the personality of the pervert. The sex pervert operates alone. His victims are innocent and helpless people, often mere infants or children. The sex craving of the pervert commands the whole personality. He heeds no warnings and is insensitive to consequences. The pervert who has reached the compulsive, sadistic level finds overwhelming delights in the infliction of cruel sufferings and death. The bank robber, embezzler, the forger, even the hired murderer, hopes to enhance his social security and prestige with the fruits of his crime. Not so the perverted sex criminal. His fiendish craving is devoid of any social “link.” He is the most sordidly selfish of all criminals and inherently the most intolerable.
Epilogue:
In other writings by him and about him, Dr. Reinhardt appears quite progressive. For example, in 1945 he joined forces with the Lincoln, Nebraska, Urban League, a local civil rights organization headed by Clyde Malone, to oppose efforts to block FHA housing for African-Americans on Lincoln’s north side. When residents circulated a petition against the housing project, Reinhardt pointed out that the prospective residents, as U.S. citizens, were guaranteed equal rights under the constitution. That, he said, made this petition “a strange request in a democratic community.”
When Malone died in 1951, Reinhardt wrote a letter to the local newspapers about his old friend’s passing. “Rarely have I seen, in this city, a funeral attended by so many loving and sorrowful friends. They came from all walks of life… unable to find seating room in the church sanctuary or basement, stood reverently throughout the funeral service, which lasted two hours. … The faithful heart of Clyde Malone has found a resting place beyond the reach of human prejudices. No more will doors be closed to him, nor seats be denied him, because of the color of his skin. The people of Lincoln have bowed reverently over his grave. Now what?”
A dozen years later, following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Reinhardt expressed his alarm at a new kind of political hatred he saw rising in the country. “If you don’t agree with a person, call him a Communist and people will hate him,” he told a reporter. “The trend has been to make a Communist out of everybody you disagree with.” He recalled the McCarthy hearings: “I saw respected doctors, scientists and professors called communists during those hearings. What’s worse, people believed the unfounded charges because they wanted to. It was a growing feeling of hate toward something and McCarthy gave them something to hate.”
And yet, Reinhardt wasn’t entirely ahead of his time. He still had prejudices where LGBT people were concerned. And like most “experts” of his day, his “data” amounted to little more than recasting common bigotries in scientific language.
In 1957, Reinhardt revisited his FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article for his book, Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes. Here he acknowledged that half of the forty cases he had “examined in detail” up to that point were “referred to me by police, district criminal courts, and district attorneys.” Many of them “were at the time serving sentences in reformatories or penitentiaries for crimes quite removed from sex” Based on that sample, he wrote this:
Again, my cases tend to confirm the belief that most, but not all, sexual perverts suffer a great deal from a keen sense of inadequacy. The reason, however, I am convinced, lies not primarily in the nature of the perverts anomalous sexuality per se but rather in the cultural role assigned the pervert in the social order, and in his interpretation of that role.
After seven years’ passage, he now saw “perverts” as having low self-esteem, which he traced to society’s opinion of them. That’s progress, I suppose.
One chapter of his 1957 book appears to have been a genuine attempt to understand gay people from as dispassionate a viewpoint as he could muster. His third chapter studied gay people in “what may be called a ‘natural setting'” — a private gay club set up in someone’s home, presumably somewhere in Lincoln. Reinhardt sought out two gay University of Nebraska students to guide him — his “interpreters,” he called them. He also provided a very interesting “‘gay’ glossary,” obviously with the help of his two interpreters.
And yet, his observations did little to change his biases against LGBT people. At best, he softened a few of the rougher edges of his more extreme prejudices, making them appear more nuanced and “reasonable.” More common were passages like this:
The plea for compassionate understanding and tolerance so often made by homosexuals on the ground that one’s own brother, daughter, sister, or son may become a homosexual loses force when one realizes that, as in crime and tuberculosis, the statistical chances that one’s own brother or son bay become a homosexual increases with the number of homosexuals in the community. The dangers are further multiplied if, as is shown, a considerable portion of homosexuals in any large community are preoccupied with attempts to convert young boys to homosexuality.
So what does that tell us? For one thing, it says that sensitivities to prejudices in one realm doesn’t necessarily translate to other realms. It also tells us that for some people — even for those who are very aware of the nature and operation of bigotry — their own entrenched prejudices will nevertheless remain impervious to contrary evidence.
Reinhardt continued teaching at the University of Nebraska until he retired in 1963. He died on April 23, 1974. His obituary mentions that, among other honors, he was given the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice Award. A graduate student research fellowship in criminology and delinquency has been established in his name.
On the Timeline:
This Story:
Feb 1950: The FBI’s monthly Bulletin indulges its “sex-fused imagination.”
Headlines: The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China sign a mutual defense treaty. Secretary of State Dean Acheson defends his loyalty to the U.S. and his support for Alger Hiss. The Regents of the University of California vote 12-6 to require all employees in the university system to sign a loyalty oath disavowing support for Communism. Two Klansmen are arrested for killing a retired storekeeper near Birmingham, Alabama. A month-long strike by coal miners brings supplies to the nation’s homes, schools, hospitals, factories and railroads to dangerously low levels.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “There’s No Tomorrow,” by Tony Martin, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Rag Mop” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, and Millard Mitchell.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“James Reinhardt, criminologist, dies.” Lincoln Star (April 24, 1974): 5.
Government documents:
James M. Reinhardt. “The Sex Pervert.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 19, no. 2 (February 1950): 2-4. Available online here.
Books:
James M. Reinhardt. Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes. A monograph in the Police Science Series, V.A. Leonard, Ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957). Available online here.
Click to download the article in PDF format (1.5 MB)
Coronet, was a general-interest digest magazine owned by Esquire. Similar to Readers Digest, it ran from 1936 to 1971. It shared its name with Coronet Films, which was a leading producer of education films shown in elementary, junior high, and high schools. While the films covered a wide range of school topics, the company is best remembered today for its social guidance films — dating, manners, good citizenship, how to be popular, and the like.
Coronet was very much a middle-to-conservative publication, aimed squarely at the typical middle-America of backyard barbecues and booming families. Which is why this article by Ralph H. Major, Jr., which appeared in the September 1950 issue of Coronet, makes for an excellent time capsule. It embodies all of the fears, prejudices, ignorance and disgust that the typical American had for homosexuals. Among the common beliefs Major echoed were:
That homosexuals are male. The term “homosexual” is never defined anywhere in the article. Nevertheless, all of the pronouns are male, as are all of the names and descriptions. Lesbians aren’t mentioned at all, not even in passing.
That there is “an alarming increase in the incidence of homosexuality.” Alfred Kinsey had only published his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male two years earlier. For most Americans, the “Kinsey Reports” were their first exposure to the very concept of homosexuality, let alone the numbers. This increased attention fueled the perception that homosexuality was something new and growing, rather than something that always existed but was never mentioned.
That homosexuality can be “brought back under control.” Implicit in the belief that homosexuality is a growing phenomenon is the assumption that whatever went wrong can be made right. If homosexuality didn’t exist before, it can be made to not exist again.
That homosexuals seduce “the young of both sexes.” Pedophilia was largely an unknown concept. It was just “perversion,” just like homosexuality was a “perversion.” If homosexuals were perverts, and perverts molested children, then homosexuals molested children, so the skewed logic went. That homosexuals would molest children of either gender just shows how far this fallacy can go.
That homosexuals seduce “the youth.” Americans’ notion of “youth” was highly elastic in 1950. Anyone under the age of twenty-one might be considered “youth,” depending on the topic. (Major mentions “youngsters … of college age,” for example.) At the same time, men marrying girls of fifteen or sixteen wasn’t terribly uncommon. And if there was a whiff of scandal behind it, it was because people would just assume that he had gotten the girl pregnant. Gay men didn’t benefit from this attitudinal elasticity. Furthermore, gay men, by “seducing” the “youth,” create more homosexuals in the next generation, according to the assumptions at the time.
The homosexuality typically leads to other criminal activity. Homosexuality is a crime in every state of the union in 1950. In many states, it’s a felony. And so the thinking went: “Why would they stop at breaking just one law?” By 1950, homosexuals were already being hounded out of the State Department because of their alleged propensity for giving away government secrets. Major follows the same flawed logic: homosexuals “descend through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism and even murder. Once a man assumes the role of homosexual, he often throws off all moral restraints.”
That homosexuals are hidden all around us. Actually, this one’s true. While “some homosexuals have rather obvious characteristics of the opposite sex” and others possess a “craving for self-expression carried to bizarre extremes,” at least they’re easy to spot. “Other sex aberrants look, act, and dress like anyone else,” warns Major. “It is they who are the real threat. “
Ads appearing in newspapers Aug 23-25, 1950. Top: Asheville Citizen, Philadelphia Inquirer. Bottom: Minneapolis Star, Chicago Tribune.
Because homosexuals and “other sex aberrants” were much in the news over the past year, Coronet’s publisher capitalized on the headlines by placing ads for the September issue in major newspapers across the U.S. Ads like those you see here appeared in such papers as the Boston Globe and the Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star and the Morning Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, the Oregonian (Portland), and the Seattle Daily Times.
New Moral Menace to Our Youth
by Ralph H. Major, Jr.
In printing this article, CORONET seeks to demolish a long-standing taboo against a frank and factual discussion of homosexuality. Qualified editors and researchers spent six months collecting material, interviewing authorities, and evaluating information. The result is a significant survey of the entire subject as it endangers the youth of American — the most comprehensive such survey ever to be published in a national magazine.
— THE EDITORS
Behind a wall erected by apathy, ignorance, and a reluctance to face facts, a sinister threat to American youth is fast developing. Unlike disease and crime, this threat, until very recently, was seldom discussed in public; its existence was acknowledged only in whispers – and in sordid police and prison records. Not since the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil attitude toward syphilis has there been such an example of public refusal to grapple with a serious problem — in this case, the problem of homosexuality.
Although more than 8,000,000 Americans today are actual or potential homosexuals, it took a ballyhooed Congressional investigation to put homosexuality in the headlines, however inadequately. In words spoken more to alarm than to inform, Senator Joseph McCarthy last spring charged the State Department with employing a large number of homosexuals. In fact, subsequent findings disclosed that 91 such persons had been fired from the Department. But never was a sober attempt made to analyze the nature of these men who, because of sexual deviations, were labeled “bad security risks.”
Usually, homosexuals rate mention in the press only when they are involved in crimes. And yet, psychiatrists point out, they become the concern of the law only in extreme cases. Despite the awareness of doctors and social workers to this danger to American youth, prejudice and prudery have conspired to keep the truth from the public.
Unfortunately, in the case of this menace, it is difficult to arrive at the truth. For example, to assemble the facts in this article, CORONET interviewed sociologists, psychiatrists, clergymen, educators and prison officers — and homosexuals themselves. During this process one important and basic fact emerged; so little has been written about this subject that many people are unaware a danger exists, or even more significantly, that homosexuality is rapidly increasing throughout American today.
Amazingly, few surveys have ever been made of this growing segment of our population. Yet each successive report, however inadequate, shows an alarming increase in the incidence of homosexuality. The figures, scientists admit, are fantastically high; but for that very reason they demand public attention.
In the most recent and widespread survey, conducted by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey and published in his celebrated work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it is reported that “37 per cent of the total male population has had at least some overt homosexual experience … between adolescence and old age.”
Moreover, Kinsey was astonished at his own figures. “We ourselves,” he wrote, “were totally unprepared to find such data when this research was undertaken.”
While a scientist like Dr. Kinsey was understandably surprised at the results of his survey, pitifully few laymen have echoed his sentiments. Most Americans assume either a scornful or a tolerant attitude toward these perverts. On one hand, the hip-swinging, falsetto-voiced man can excite such fury in other men as to provoke brutal attacks. Disgust and gutter humor thus characterize the reactions of the majority toward the “fairy.” On the other hand, many are inclined to regard the sex pervert merely as a “Queer” who never harms anyone but himself.
This is an extremely dangerous and shortsighted attitude, according to those who have studied the problem. For instance, Eugene D. Williams, Special Attorney General of the State of California declares: “All too often, we lose sight of the fact that the homosexual is an inveterate seducer of the young of both sexes, and that he presents a social problem because he is not content with being degenerate himself; he must have degenerate companions, and is ever seeking younger victims.”
Therein lurks the hidden danger of homosexuality. No degenerate can indulge his unnatural practices alone. He demands a partner. And the partner, more often than not, must come from the ranks of the young and innocent.
Each year, literally thousands of youngsters of high-school and college age are introduced to unnatural practices by inveterate seducers. Their stories, taken from psychiatrists’ notebooks, are lurid in detail and sordid in implications for the future. And they are sufficiently “close to home” to disturb every American parent.
After one year at an Eastern prep school, John T. came home last summer to spend his vacation. Two weeks later his father received a phone call from police headquarters.
“Your boy’s in trouble,” he was told. “Come down right away!”
John’s mother and father were shocked by what they discovered. Their son had been discovered in a warehouse with a delivery boy. Where had John picked up this abnormal habit? “One of the teachers at school taught me,” he admitted shamefacedly.
A short lad, John had not made friends easily at school. When he failed to win membership in an exclusive school club, he ran tearfully to a faculty member. This instructor, as it turned out, was more than solicitous. He persuaded John to forget his disappointment in a whirl of new thrills — thrills which made John feel far superior to his untutored classmates.
Fortunately, John’s parents were able to rescue him in time to prevent his complete conversion to the unfortunate cult.
Mark M. was not so lucky. Now in his late twenties, he lives in a tenement on the fringe of New York’s Harlem. Sharing his dingy flat is a lanky, unshaven derelict who peddles dope or books racing bets. When his provider is away from home, Mark hangs around neighborhood bars, killing with alcohol his memories of a happy youth. For Mark is the son of a prominent business leader whose name is familiar to millions. Eight years ago, Mark’s college record was excellent and wily society matrons were setting traps for this handsome bachelor.
But Mark decided to “take off a year” before settling down. He moved to Manhattan, where curiosity led him to seek out homosexuals such as he had heard about in fraternity “bull sessions.” One night, befuddled with liquor, he decided to experiment. His companion was the bookie. When they youth sobered up, he found himself ensnarled in a web from which escape was impossible. For the bookie, a long-time pervert, read society columns as well as racing forms. To him, Mark was not only a willing partner, but a potential meal ticket.
Faced with the facts, Mark grudgingly increased his demands on his father. After several months, when the checks stopped coming, the bookie told Mark:
“Either the old man coughs up or I tell him about us!”
In desperation, Mark begged his father for more money. Mr. M. asked a detective agency to find out about his son. He paled when he read the confidential report, and promptly cut off all ties, family as well as financial, with young Mark. Now the forsaken youth knows he is spiritually dead. But he continues to wander through Harlem, because he fears suicide if he stays alone in his apartment.
Mark is only one of many pathetic cases. And not all cases involve just an individual alone. Not long ago, police in a Southern state broke into an isolated beach cottage. What they found threw consternation into homes of a dozen families. For months, their teen-age sons had succumbed to the blandishments of a 40-year-old male pervert. After stuffing them with ice-cream sodas, he took them to his cottage. There he invited his bewildered guests into a “secret society” whose basic ritual involved perversion.
The youths had one sincere defense: ignorance. Their sinister host, however, was convicted on charges of contributing to the delinquency of minors.
After a disclosure of sex crimes alarmed St. Louis earlier this year, officials reported that 20 per cent of the victims were boys who been seduced by adult perverts. A juvenile court on the West Coast recently was faced with the problem of what to do with a 16-year-old homosexual. Instructed by an older comrade in the grosser points of perversion, the lad had gone on to organize a “clientele” of his own, composed of boys his own age.
“I’m a male prostitute,” he boasted. “These fellows pay me to play around with them.”
The shock and mental confusion suffered by youthful victims of such sordid experiences cannot be over-exaggerated. Psychiatric case histories bear eloquent testimony to the thousands of warped lives that follow in in the wake of associations with perverts.
A Philadelphia doctor, for example, furnished this dramatic excerpt from his files:
A young mother burst into his office one afternoon and cried, “I need help quickly!” The she sobbed out her story.
For several months, her 11-year-old son acted strangely. He seldom spoke at meals and shut himself in his room for hours at a time. As weeks went by, he lost his appetite — an odd phenomenon in a growing boy — and even shrugged off her good-night kisses. Finally, the youngster blurted out the whole chilling tale.
“A man used to hang around the playground and give us candy,” he told his mother. “One day he told me that if I’d take a ride in his car he’d but me a whole box of candy. I went along and then — and then it happened!”
The psychiatrist nodded knowingly, for the story is not a new one. The innocent boy had been enticed into perverted acts. For some deep-rooted reason he could not understand, the experience revolted him. But he had the candy, and the man promised him more. Thus, for weeks, the terrified lad had continued to spend nightmarish hours with his seducer.
It took the combined efforts of the boy’s sympathetic parents and the psychiatrist to rid the lad of what was fast developing into an incurable guilt complex.
Irreparable mental and psychological damage is only one side of the story. The other is even more reprehensible. Some male sex deviants do not stop with infecting the often-innocent partners: they descend through perversions to other forms of depravity, such as drug addiction, burglary, sadism and even murder.
Once a man assumes the role of homosexual, he often throws off all moral restraints. While thumbing his nose at society through his sexual perversions, at the same time he indulges in other vices that society brands as immoral.
Last year, a 19-year-old youth was arrested for holding up a restaurant. When police asked why he had committed the crime, the prisoner replied: “I wanted to prove to Maurice that I loved him enough to steal for him.”
Maurice, it developed, was his “boy friend,” a tough ex-convict who had teased the lad by telling him he lacked the guts to “do something daring.”
Such incidents of violence appear with alarming frequency in police records, Yet in CORONET’S survey, an astonishing fact was revealed: in few municipal police department or in FBI files are homosexual criminals identified. Even the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports lumps offenses by them and all other perverts under the heading of “sex offenses.” Thus, it is impossible to estimate the number of crimes committed yearly by homosexuals in the U.S.!
Nor is the wave of criminal homosexuality likely to subside in the future, despite medical, legal, and social attacks on the problem. Last year, State Senator Thomas C. Desmond of New York conducted a survey on the subject among 25 top State police officials. He announced that “two out of three police chiefs report that known perverts are roaming the streets and that effective surveillance of these potential menaces is impossible.”
What can be done about this new menace to American youth? Plenty, say the experts. First, the public must be educated to recognize this form of perversion and its cohorts. “For far too long,” a recent psychiatric survey reported, “the sex deviation themes have remained screened behind the curtain of propriety — as venereal disease was a generation ago. For too long, the subject has been relegated to backstairs gossip and naughty literature.”
And Dr. William C. Menninger, one of the world’s top psychiatrists and director of Menninger Clinic, thus condemns public prejudice: “As one commonly hears the word (homosexual) used, it refers only to an adult who is variously described as ‘unbalanced,’ ‘criminal,’ and very often is regarded as just too low a form of scum of humanity to talk about.”
In some people, homosexuality may represent a passing phase in emotional development — a temporary protest against conservative morals or a craving for self-expression carried to bizarre extremes. In other cases, it eventually becomes a way of life, a fraternal comradeship which, to its zealots, is infinitely superior to normal human relations. To these members of a publicly scorned inner circle, homosexuality offers a refuge from the rigid pattern of normal society.
While the appearance of most of these unfortunates may betray them to watchful persons, other sex aberrants look, act, and dress like anyone else. It is they who are the real threat. For, until an overt action is committed, their victims sense no danger.
“Despite the fact that some homosexuals have rather obvious characteristics of the opposite sex,” says the Journal of the American Medical Association, “the majority of psychiatrists and sexologists believe that homosexuality is an acquired condition.”
Acquired? From whom? And how? These questions are asked by millions of Americans.
Actually, doctors do not know all the answers. Because society chooses to regard homosexuality as a moral abomination rather than as a medical problem, scientific research has progressed slowly. Even the AMA Journal has admitted frankly that “surprisingly little quantitative laboratory work has been reported in the study of homosexuality…”
From the best psychiatric evidence available however, these are the main reasons for developing homosexuality.
Parental cultivation of infantilism in adolescents.
Distortion of values produced by high-tension city life.
Increasingly complicated economic conditions, causing reversion to homosexuality as an escape.
Glandular disbalance.
Henry J.’s case history illustrates Reason No. 1. Only child of a middle-class family, Henry was educated at home until he was 17. Then he enrolled in a near-by university, commuting each day form his mother’s home.
Until his graduation at 21, the youth never dated a girl, participated in student activities, or attended a dance — because every night Mother demanded his presence at home. Even after graduation, she insisted that he live at home to save money.
Then Henry broadened his narrow horizon to include a position in a department store. Not long ago, a salesman invited Henry to dinner. Afterwards, he suggested Henry join him for a nightcap in his hotel room. When he found himself alone with the salesman, Henry felt strange yearnings. Suddenly he embraced his host.
Next day, Henry experienced two sensations: a feeling of guilt and an appetite for love. His desire to love and be loved, diverted by his mother from normal expression toward a woman, had found response in the young salesman. But Henry’s new-found joy in the unnatural relationship with another man soon burned itself out.
Today, although he has vainly tried to break out the alliance, he still sees his friend. And Henry has become a haggard neurotic. He knows there is no turning back. He knows, too, that there is no future in his homosexual activity. Yet he is doomed as surely as a fly caught in a spider web.
“There is a widespread among psychologists and psychiatrists,” writes Dr. Kinsey, “that the homosexual is a product of an effete and over-organized urban civilization. The failure to make (normal male-female adjustments is supposed to be consequent on the complexities of life in modern cities.”
Psychiatrists explain the city phenomenon this way: relationships in metropolitan areas tend to minimize family life in favor of business life. Office associates, fellow-workers, and friends of the same sex assume exaggerated emotional influence. Likewise, most large cities boast taverns, night clubs, and restaurants which cater almost exclusively to perverts and thereby become scenes of conversation for innocents seeking companionship. Moreover, Dr. Kinsey reports, this “city group” exhibits mannerisms which would appear out-of-place elsewhere but which, in urban centers, are ignored or tolerated.
Linked to urban life as a dominant cause of homosexuality is the fast-paced 20th-century economic struggle. This super-pressure frequently drives sensitive, introverted men and women to seek refuge in sexual aberrations. To many, perversion means security, an emotional relationship devoid of responsibilities.
Alan S., for instance, is a would-be composer who, while an undergraduate in college, developed a phobia against competitive business. Economic courses filled him with horror. So Alan finally buried himself in literature, where he found escape and nourishment.
Soon he began to notice that latent emotions were fired by what he read. He learned, too, that some of his classic literary heroes were avowed homosexuals. It wasn’t long before Alan discovered soul mates among his classmates. Soon he plunged with abandon into active homosexuality.
Alan has found his refuge but he has also found his personal hell. For now he realizes he cannot desert the human race; he cannot become a modern hermit. So he sits, lonely and miserable, in his boardinghouse and tries to compose music. Like others before him, he has learned that homosexuality is a jealous mistress; those whose affection it cannot keep, it kills.
Apart from mental and environmental reasons for homosexuality, another largely unexplored cause deserves study. Some men may suffer from a hormone deficiency that robs them of virility while, at the same time, endowing them with female characteristics. This disbalance in glandular functions sets them on the distaff side of the dividing line between sexes.
Unfortunately, little clinical research has been accomplished in this vital field of physiology. But in 1942, Drs. Abraham Myerson and Rudolph Neustadt reported that of a group of sex aberrants examined by them, endocrine disturbance was indicated in 83 per cent. In a group of non-homosexuals studied, the figure was only 2.5 per cent.
While medicine is making progress in solving the riddle of homosexuality, chief responsibility for preventive action rests with the public. Homosexuality may be a disease, a condition, a criminal offense of a mortal sin. Nevertheless, steps must be taken now to protect American youth from an ever-growing peril.
Every psychologist, sociologist and educator queried in CORONET’S survey stressed one point: “More than anyone else, parents are responsible for erasing the threat of homosexuality.” since parental attitudes and home environment are fundamental to healthy adolescent development, mothers and fathers should combat homosexuality and sympathetic understanding.
“I have met very few perverts who come from happy homes,” a famous doctor told CORONET.
Here are some suggestions from experts on how parents may protect their children against homosexuality and its converts:
Sex education begins at home. Instruct boys and girls as early as possible in the knowledge of normal sex practices.
Encourage your children to bring their sex problems and questions to you.
Know your children’s friends; have them invited to your home where you can observe their conduct and personalities.
Urge children to exercise caution in speaking to strangers; especially, instruct them never to accompany strangers anywhere without your permission.
Investigate your children’s schools, camps, social clubs, and athletic organizations. Do not be afraid to ask frank questions of the adult leaders in charge. Bring to their attention any reports you may have heard of homosexuality within such a group.
In the history of modern society, there have been few menaces that frank and open discussion, coupled with intelligent action, have failed to eliminate. Once venereal disease was finally placed under the spotlight of public scrutiny, doctors found their task easier; today the dread evil is on the way to extinction. Likewise, national awareness to the problem of sex crimes resulted in t adoption of legal measures to stamp out this threat.
Now a new menace — homosexuality — has arisen. And again, the primary challenge is to mothers and fathers. Through knowledge of the facts, plus a concerted attack, the sinister shadow of sexual perversion can be removed from the pathway of America’s youth.
September 1950: Coronet magazine warns of a “new moral menace to our youth.”
Periscope:
For September 1950:
President:
Harry S Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
260 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
6 (Vacant)
Southern states:
101 (D)
2 (R)
2 (Vacant)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
13.4%
(Annual)
1.9%
(Quarterly)
Inflation:
2.1%
Unemployment:
4.4%
US killed in action,
3,453
(This month)
Korean conflict:
8,182
(Since Jun 28, 1950)
From the inside cover of Coronet, September 1950.
Headlines: President Truman nationalizes the railroads to head of a nationwide strike. North Korean army lays siege to Taegu, South Korea’s temporary capital. Mao Tse Tung warns that China will intervene if North Korean territory is invaded. South Korean, U.S. and U.N. troops push North Korean army back north. Congress passes Internal Security Act (McCarran Act), which sets up Subversive Activities Control Board and gives the President broad powers to round up subversives into concentration camps. Actress Jean Muir is the first to fall victim to the Hollywood Blacklist when General Foods, sponsor and producer of the upcoming NBC sitcom The Aldrich Family, drops her from the program.
In the record stores: “Goodnight, Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers, “Mona Lisa” by Nat “King” Cole, “Simple Melody” by Bing Crosby, “Bonaparte’s Retreat” by Kay Starr, “Can Anyone Explain?” by the Ames Brothers, “No Other Love” by Jo Stafford, “Nola” by Less Paul, “Count Every Star” by the Hugo Winterhalter Orchestra, “Our Lady of Fatima” by Richard Hayes and Kitty Kallen,”I’ll Never Be Free” by Kay Starr and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
“Coronet recommends… The Men. Because: this is the story of a soldier who is paralyzed from the waist down, and of his bitter, seemingly hopeless struggle to live a normal life. Told with compassion and restraint, The Men is a postscript to war, a study of veterans — wounded or sound — and their attitude toward the peace. Dramatically acted by Marlon Brando and Teresa Wright, it marks a triumph for United Artists and producer Stanley Kramer.” Featuring Brando’s film debut, The Men bombs at the box office despite wide critical acclaim.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life w/Groucho Marx (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS)
On television:Texaco Star Theater w/Milton Berle (NBC), Fireside Theatre (NBC), The Philco Television Playhouse (NBC), Your Show of Shows w/Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca (NBC), The Colgate Comedy Hour (NBC), Gillette Cavalcade of Sports (NBC), The Lone Ranger (ABC), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Mama (CBS).
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The Navy announces that “20 Negro stewards and mess attendants” at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis are being dismissed for “acts of moral perversion among themselves.”
Jan 30, 1950: Navy dismisses 20 African-Americans over “moral perversion”.
Headlines: East St. Louis schools integrate without incident. Boston City Council turn away 14 members of Japanese Diet who are touring to see “democracy in action.” Congressional pressure increases on Truman to give the go-ahead to develop a hydrogen bomb. Wildcat coal strike spreads, defying United Mine Workers union orders. To protect its dollar reserves, Britain extends its dollar oil embargo to the rest of the Commonwealth. Britain, Sweden, Norway and Denmark pledge closer economic cooperation; France and West Germany set aside their dispute over the Saar and sign an enlarged trade pact.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “There’s No Tomorrow, by Tony Martin, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Bing Crosby with Vic Schoen & His Orchestra.
Springfield. That’s shorthand for Springfield, Missouri, home of the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. It opened in 1933 as the U.S. Hospital for Defective Delinquents and quickly became the primary medical center for the entire federal prison system. It’s where prisoners with all kinds of medical problems, including those deemed to be mentally ill, were (and are, still) sent for longer-term treatment and convalescence.
In the record stores: “Be My Love” by Mario Lanza, “If” by Perry Como, “My Heart Cries for You” by Guy Mitchell, “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page, “Aba Daba Honeymoon” by Debbie Reynolds, “You’re Just In Love” by Perry Como, “Mockin’ Bird Hill” by Les Paul and Mary Ford, “Would I Love You” by Patti Page, “Roving Kind” by Guy Mitchell, “I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat” by Mel Blanc.
…The unique personality traits of the potentially most dangerous types of sex perverts do not ordinarily stand open to the world. The simple exhibitionist, nuisance that he is, invariably attracts attention, while the lust murderer may slip through the crowd undetected. The feminism of the “passive” homosexual male arouses quick resentment and he is avoided by the normal male. Oftentimes, the far more dangerous “aggressive” homosexual works out his designs on young boys in the community while moving with innocent appearance among respectable people.
In other writings by him and about him, Dr. Reinhardt appears quite progressive. For example, in 1945 he joined forces with the Lincoln, Nebraska, Urban League, a local civil rights organization headed by Clyde Malone, to oppose efforts to block FHA housing for African-Americans on Lincoln’s north side. When residents circulated a petition against the housing project, Reinhardt pointed out that the prospective residents, as U.S. citizens, were guaranteed equal rights under the constitution. That, he said, made this petition “a strange request in a democratic community.”
In the record stores: “Goodnight, Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and the Weavers, “Mona Lisa” by Nat “King” Cole, “Simple Melody” by Bing Crosby, “Bonaparte’s Retreat” by Kay Starr, “Can Anyone Explain?” by the Ames Brothers, “No Other Love” by Jo Stafford, “Nola” by Less Paul, “Count Every Star” by the Hugo Winterhalter Orchestra, “Our Lady of Fatima” by Richard Hayes and Kitty Kallen,”I’ll Never Be Free” by Kay Starr and Tennessee Ernie Ford.