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Newsworthy
The Supreme Court Battle Over Privacy and Press Freedom
By Samantha Barbas STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0083-6
CHAPTER 1
The Whitemarsh Incident
On the morning of September 11, 1952, James and Elizabeth Hill got up around six, got dressed, went downstairs, and had breakfast with their five children, as they usually did. The Hills lived in a rented home in the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Whitemarsh Township, in a huge, ivy-covered stone mansion on a 90-acre lot. There were about twenty rooms in the three-story building and a barn in the back that was almost as large as the house. The home was appointed with expensive furniture, and two brand-new Pontiacs sat in the garage.
Through diligence and hard work, James Hill had achieved a comfortable life for his family. Born to a working-class household in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1908, James had been a star scholar and athlete from elementary school all the way through to the University of Kansas, where he was captain of the baseball team and the basketball team, and was elected to an honor society based on his "character, leadership, scholarship, unselfish service, and breadth of interest." His grades were so high that he got into Harvard Law School; he started in 1929 but dropped out in his second year. After playing basketball for several semiprofessional teams in New England, he enrolled in an executive training program at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. During this time he began dating Elizabeth Selfridge, an occupational therapist.
Elizabeth McFie Selfridge, born in 1910, was a Denver native and a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder. A psychology major, she had been a member of the Delta Gamma sorority and won a national bathing beauty contest in 1928. After college Elizabeth moved to Boston and took a job at a hospital. In the early 1930s, James and Elizabeth married; their oldest daughter, Susan, was born in 1935, and another daughter, Elizabeth, in 1937. A son, James Jr., came in 1941, and twin sons, Clyde and Robert, in 1948.
James was sales manager at the Dexdale Hosiery Company, which had its mills in Lansdale, about a ten minute drive from Whitemarsh. He organized the company's sales force, coordinated the production of the mills, and worked with major department store clients. Because of job transfers, the family had moved over a dozen times in a decade; they had arrived in Whitemarsh only a year earlier. Whitemarsh was one of Philadelphia's growing suburbs, made possible by rising automobile ownership and low-interest home loans after the war.
In 1952, Elizabeth was a "vivacious housewife," as a local newspaper described her, with a pretty smile and wavy brown hair that was beginning to gray. A fulltime mother and wife, she was responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, chauffeuring, and caregiving for the family. She was a loving and responsible parent, a good friend to many, a member of the PTA, and an efficient homemaker who impressed everyone with her enthusiasm and dedication to her family. Though Elizabeth enjoyed her full life, the burden of her responsibilities weighed on her. The family's moves were especially difficult. Half her time was spent packing, she joked, and the other unpacking.
* * *
The Hills were symbols and beneficiaries of major social changes that swept the country after World War II. Between 1946 and 1960, America became an affluent society. The gross national product increased about 250 percent, and family incomes almost doubled. White-collar career opportunities multiplied with the expansion of corporations, and in 1956, the number of white-collar jobs outnumbered blue-collar jobs for the first time. Americans went on a shopping spree. Between 1946 and 1950, manufacturers sold 21.4 million automobiles, and by 1960, in a population of fewer than 50 million families, almost 60 million cars were registered. During the 1950s, Americans spent $18 billion annually on recreational pursuits, including books, magazines, and newspapers. Once luxuries, electric appliances and telephones became standard features of the middle-class home.
One of the most stunning consequences of prosperity was the rise of home ownership. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of homeowners in the United States increased by over 9 million, many of them in the suburbs. The rush to build and buy homes was joined by a rush to make families to live in them. Although Americans had long idealized home and family, the 1950s saw a golden age of domesticity. There was a trend toward large families, and a sharp rise in the birthrate, referred to as the "baby boom." The generation born after World War II was the largest in American history. Popular culture centered on family values, as millions spent their evenings watching idealized television families like those portrayed on Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. After the social upheaval and uncertainties brought about by the war, the home symbolized a secure, comforting private retreat removed from the dangers of the outside world.
Young marriage was the vogue, and for those who could afford it, the wife stayed home and managed family affairs. Domesticity was described as a woman's destiny; Life's 1957 special issue on "The American Woman" featured an essay in which anthropologist Margaret Mead argued that women should not work and that the home was "women's natural habitat." Under the cultural ideal of the "feminine mystique," women were to find fulfillment not in education or paid employment but in their own "femininity" — "sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love." The postwar era also marked the creation of the dad — his role as family breadwinner. The idealized middle-class father was an "organization man," a midlevel manager who worked long hours, aspired to advance through the corporate ranks, and was paid handsomely for his efforts.
Though middle-class life was more comfortable than ever before, it was not without burdens, many of them consequences of affluence itself. Wealth created pressures to consume more lavishly than one's neighbors, and many in the corporate world found themselves running what was being described as the "rat race." In his 1955 novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson wrote of a returning veteran who takes a prestigious public relations job on Wall Street, only to be confronted with crushing emptiness: "All I could see was a lot of bright young men in grey flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere." Corporate policy prescribed frequent transfers of personnel, and more families relocated more often in the 1950s than in any previous era — about 33 million Americans moved each year. Noted works of social criticism, from David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd to C. Wright Mills's White Collar, convincingly demonstrated that Americans were withering spiritually and emotionally despite their material success. Daily life also unfolded against the backdrop of global instabilities and nuclear threats. In 1948 the Soviets blockaded Western access to Berlin; in 1949 they exploded their first atomic bomb. Families built bomb shelters, defense films warned of domestic Communist subversion, and schoolchildren were taught to "duck and cover" in the event of an atomic explosion. The usually optimistic Reverend Norman Vincent Peale spoke of an "epidemic of fear and worry" in the United States. "Our nation," warned a civil defense pamphlet, is in a "grim struggle for national survival and the preservation of freedom in the world."
Dangers and uncertainties notwithstanding, the national mood remained one of self-congratulatory optimism. "A car was put in every garage, two in many," wrote one commentator at the end of the decade. "TV sets came into almost every home. There was chicken, packaged and frozen, for every pot, with more to spare. Never had so many people, anywhere, been so well off." Observed Life magazine in 1952, "We have been watching in the United States something close to a miracle. ... The once sick American economy has become the wonder of the modern world." "Most of the change has been wrought by a simple but bold economic idea: more of everything for everybody."
American life was becoming "privatized." In the middle-class ethos of the time, success and fulfillment were not to be found in public life and civic engagement, as they once had been, but in the world of the personal, intimate, and domestic — one's family, home, relationships, and material possessions. As people spent more time in their cars and their homes, in their living rooms watching television, immersed in their personal and domestic concerns, private life had become synonymous with the "good life." In 1952 — the year when I Love Lucy was the most popular television show, when the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb, and when America elected Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon to the nation's two top posts — large, prosperous, suburban families like the Hills, living quiet, insular lives of domestic contentment, were seen as the epitome and embodiment of the American dream.
* * *
In a federal prison just outside Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles from Whitemarsh, three men from very different backgrounds were pursuing their own vision of happiness and freedom. On September 10, 1952, Joseph Wayne Nolen, his brother Ballard Nolen, and Elmer Schuer sawed through the window bars of the second-floor cell they shared at the Northeastern Federal Penitentiary. Using a rope made of towels, the Nolens and Schuer lowered themselves to the prison yard, then scaled the walls with a crude metal ladder fashioned out of pipes they'd hidden in the yard.
Joseph Nolen was twenty-six and Ballard twenty-two. Born in mountainous Leslie County, Kentucky, to a coal mining family, the brothers were serving twenty-five-year terms for a bank robbery in 1950. Elmer Schuer, the son of a marble cutter, had been in a gang that robbed several banks in the Chicago area. For his 1950 robbery of the People's Federal Savings and Loan Association, Schuer was serving thirteen years in federal prison. A slender, nervous-looking man who had the word "Lucky" tattooed over a horseshoe on his right arm and "Death or Glory" over a dagger on his left arm, Schuer was just twenty-one.
On the campus of nearby Bucknell University, the fugitives stabbed a campus guard when he refused to drive them away in his car. They walked down the road two miles, broke into a house, got the resident out of the bed and made him drive them to a nearby gun store. They threw the man out of the car, took the automobile, and abandoned it in the woods. Later in the day, they stole another car from outside a farmhouse, drove to West Reading, Pennsylvania, and broke into a sports shop, taking six guns and seven boxes of ammunition. The fugitives went on to Philadelphia, arriving on the morning of September 11. They hoped to find a comfortable suburban home to break into and occupy while they ate, rested, and planned their next move.
* * *
Around 8:15 on September 11, James Hill left for work in one of the family's brand-new Pontiacs. On the way, he dropped off his daughters, Susan and Betsy, at Norristown High School. Eleven-year-old Jimmy was getting ready to go to school, and he went out the back door to get his bike. Standing before him was a scruffy-looking man with a shotgun pointed at him. "Where are you going?" the man asked. "To school," Jimmy replied. "Not today, get back inside," the man said, as he pushed Jimmy back toward the house.
Joe Nolen knocked at the back door, and Elizabeth answered it. "We're not going to hurt you — we just want your house for a day. If you do what we tell you, nobody will be hurt," he said. As he forced open the back door, Ballard Nolen and Elmer Schuer appeared with shotguns, pointing them at a stunned Mrs. Hill.
The three convicts entered the house and searched it from attic to basement. Joe Nolen, the older brother, was the leader of the gang, and the other two followed his orders. The men said they were hungry, and Elizabeth prepared scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee. After breakfast, Elizabeth and Jimmy were taken to a second-floor bedroom and locked in with Clyde and Robert, the four-year-old twins.
The men took baths, shaved, and helped themselves to James's expensive toiletries and clothes. According to the Philadelphia Bulletin, the executive wore suits that cost around $125.00, $25.00 shoes, and $12.50 monogrammed shirts (around $1,100.00, $220.00, and $110.00 in 2016 dollars, respectively). Joe Nolen picked out a bluish gray suit for himself. When he discovered that the suit didn't fit him, he sat down at an old sewing machine and altered the trousers and sleeves. The thread broke repeatedly, and he asked Elizabeth to help rethread the needle, which she did with shaking fingers. Ballard Nolen was too small to wear James's clothes, so he took one of Jimmy's blue jackets and wore it as a shirt. After the men bathed, shaved, and dressed, Elizabeth recalled, they looked just like "three brisk young men whom you might see in a Chestnut street store waiting on customers."
Around three, Susan and Betsy called from a pay phone to say they had gotten off the school bus and were waiting to be picked up. Elizabeth told them they'd have to walk home. When the daughters returned, Ballard Nolen met them at the door, and the girls thought it was a practical joke. It was only then, when Betsy handed her a newspaper, that Elizabeth realized who her captors were.
The Hills' captivity was the beginning of what would become a weeks-long spree of theft, violence, and murder. The Nolen brothers and Schuer were ruthless, shrewd, experienced criminals, described by the federal judges who sentenced them as "desperate" and "potential murderers." They were also unusually polite. They used no profanity and were courteous and respectful. They offered to play games with the children and teach the boys to shoot. One of the men asked Betsy to join them in a game of poker. Throughout the afternoon and evening, they amused themselves by pointing shotguns at pictures on the wall, telling the boys that they wanted to "improve their aim." They played dance music on the radio. They were so well mannered that they even apologized for interrupting a conversation. They were, in Elizabeth's words, "perfect gentlemen."
* * *
When James got home that evening, he saw Elizabeth standing nervously by the back door. "Please don't do anything that you will be sorry for," she said. "Something terrible has happened to our family." They went inside to find Elmer Schuer and Joe Nolen in the dining room with shotguns. "Mr. Hill, we have taken over your house and we intend to keep it as long as we need it," Nolen said. "We need shelter. We need clothing. And we are going to stay as long as we need them. If you folks do what you are told, nobody will be hurt."
Nolen invited the Hills to eat dinner, and Elizabeth prepared canned soup, spaghetti, chili con carne, milk, and coffee. The convict sat down at the table, apologized to James for taking over his house, and complimented him on his beautiful children. "That boy has an IQ of 100 already and he's only four," he said, pointing to four-year-old Robert. When Robert asked, "Daddy, what is that man doing wearing your trousers?" James quipped, "That's what I'd like to know," and he and Joe Nolen laughed together.
Night fell. Nolen told the Hills to sleep in one room so he could watch over them. The family trudged upstairs to a third-floor apartment and tried to play a game of hearts. The children dozed off quickly. Elizabeth barely slept, and James sat up all night in a chair at the top of the stairs.
Around midnight, James heard loud noises; the men were rummaging through his closets. Around 3:00 a.m., a car started. About 6:00 a.m., James went downstairs and saw that the men had left. In addition to the car, some luggage and three of his suits were missing. The convicts also took Elizabeth's white rawhide traveling bag, in which they packed extra shirts, socks, and underwear. James waited until 8:00 a.m. before going to a neighbor's house to call the police. Around 8:15, local and state police and the FBI arrived, and the whole family was questioned. The Hills were then besieged by the press.
By noon, representatives from newspapers, television, and radio stations had descended on the Hills' home. Milling around noisily on the porch, they snapped pictures, took notes, smoked, chatted, and yelled at each other. A few reporters pushed their way into the living room. One tore off a screen and crawled in the window. Some tried to question the children.
Unless he made a statement to the press, "the place would practically be torn up," the state police told James. James was at first reluctant, but he agreed. He felt it was important to make clear that no one in the family had been physically harmed. It was especially important to emphasize that the daughters hadn't been sexually assaulted. Premarital virginity was an important value in the culture of the time; if people thought Susan and Betsy had been raped, it would mar their reputations and chances for marriage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Newsworthy by Samantha Barbas. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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