Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom
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Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom
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Overview
In 1952, the Hill family was held hostage by escaped convicts in their suburban Pennsylvania home. The family of seven was trapped for nineteen hours by three fugitives who treated them politely, took their clothes and car, and left them unharmed. The Hills quickly became the subject of international media coverage. Public interest eventually died out, and the Hills went back to their ordinary, obscure lives. Until, a few years later, the Hills were once again unwillingly thrust into the spotlight by the media—with a best-selling novel loosely based on their ordeal, a play, a big-budget Hollywood adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart, and an article in Life magazine. Newsworthy is the story of their story, the media firestorm that ensued, and their legal fight to end unwanted, embarrassing, distorted public exposure that ended in personal tragedy. This story led to an important 1967 Supreme Court decision—Time, Inc. v. Hill—that still influences our approach to privacy and freedom of the press.
Newsworthy draws on personal interviews, unexplored legal records, and archival material, including the papers and correspondence of Richard Nixon (who, prior to his presidency, was a Wall Street lawyer and argued the Hill family's case before the Supreme Court), Leonard Garment, Joseph Hayes, Earl Warren, Hugo Black, William Douglas, and Abe Fortas. Samantha Barbas explores the legal, cultural, and political wars waged around this seminal privacy and First Amendment case. This is a story of how American law and culture struggled to define and reconcile the right of privacy and the rights of the press at a critical point in history—when the news media were at the peak of their authority and when cultural and political exigencies pushed free expression rights to the forefront of social debate. Newsworthy weaves together a fascinating account of the rise of big media in America and the public's complex, ongoing love-hate affair with the press.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503600836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford Law Books |
| Publication date: | 01/18/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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 UniversityAll 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.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents and Abstracts1The Whitemarsh Incident chapter abstractThis chapter describes the "hostage incident" that initiated the Time, Inc. v. Hill case. In 1952, the James Hill family was held hostage in their home by three escaped convicts, who left without harming them. The story of the crime was written up in the press, and the incident inspired a novel, play, and film titled The Desperate Hours.
2Fact into Fiction chapter abstractIn 1954, Joseph Hayes wrote The Desperate Hours, a "true-crime thriller" based loosely on the hostage incident involving the Hill family. The Desperate Hours became a bestseller; it was adapted into a play, and in 1955, a Hollywood film starring Humphrey Bogart.
3The Article chapter abstractIn 1955, Life magazine published an article announcing the opening of the play The Desperate Hours. The article falsely described the play as a "reenactment" of the Hills' hostage incident. This chapter tells the story of the writing of the article, and gives background information on Life's publisher, Time, Inc. It describes the Hills' reaction to the article, which thrust them into the spotlight against their will and portrayed them in a false, distorted context.
4The Lawsuit chapter abstractShortly after the publication of the Life article, James Hill filed suit against Time, Inc., alleging an invasion of his privacy. The Hill family was represented by Leonard Garment, a young, up-and-coming lawyer at the New York law firm Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd.
5Privacy chapter abstractThis chapter describes the origins of the tort action for invasion of privacy, the basis of the Hills' lawsuit against Time, Inc.
6Freedom of the Press chapter abstractAt the same time the right to privacy was developing in the early twentieth century, courts were limiting the privacy tort in the interest in freedom of the press. By the 1950s, the right to privacy and freedom of the press were on a collision course, and the Hills' case would be at their juncture.
7Suing the Press chapter abstractThis chapter describes Time, Inc.'s response to the Hills' lawsuit, and the legal department at Time, Inc. In the mid-twentieth century, lawyers at major media companies like Time, Inc. were major forces in the creation of modern First Amendment law.
8Maneuvers chapter abstractThis chapter describes the ongoing impact of the Life article on the Hill family, the initial stages of the Hills' lawsuit, and the contested social terrain on which it was fought. In the 1950s, some courts, against the backdrop of increasing anti-press sentiment, were expanding the privacy tort. Others, reflecting growing sensitivities towards civil liberties in the postwar era, were diminishing the right to privacy in the name of First Amendment freedoms.
9The Trial chapter abstractIn the trial of Hill v. Hayes in 1962, a jury concluded that Time, Inc. had invaded the privacy of the Hill family and awarded them $175,000, the largest invasion of privacy verdict in history.
10The Privacy Panic chapter abstractThe Hills' lawsuit against Time, Inc. took place at a time of great anxiety around personal privacy. In the 1950s and 60s, "privacy," in all its meanings and senses, was seemingly under assault by an array of forces: the media, the government, researchers, advertisers, and marketers, armed with new surveillance and monitoring technologies. There was a "privacy panic" in the postwar era, and it influenced the course of the Hill case.
11Appeals chapter abstractIn May 1963, an appeals court upheld the judgment against Time, Inc.
12Griswold chapter abstractShortly after Time, Inc. announced its intent to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, the Court issued its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, announcing a "right to privacy" in the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Like New York Times v. Sullivan, Griswold complicated the Hill case. Not only a right protected by tort law, privacy was now potentially a broad, general right guaranteed by the Constitution.
13Nixon chapter abstractIn 1965, the Hills acquired an unexpected advocate. Two years earlier, the former Senator, Vice-President, and presidential candidate Richard Nixon joined the Mudge law firm. Nixon would argue the Hills' case before the Supreme Court. The case became an integral part of Nixon's efforts to rehabilitate his public image during his "Wilderness Years," the six-year span between his failed run for the California governorship in 1962 and his election as President in 1968.
14At the Court chapter abstractAgainst the backdrop of cultural concerns with privacy and press ethics, and in the shadow of Sullivan and Griswold, Time, Inc. v. Hill came to the Supreme Court freighted with a good deal of significance. The case tapped into pressing social issues: the future of privacy in the information society, the meaning of "the news," the boundaries of freedom of the press in the age of big media. It also raised questions of constitutional doctrine that were contested on the Court — the status of the constitutional right to privacy, and possible extensions of the New York Times v. Sullivan doctrine.
15Decisions chapter abstractAfter arguments by Nixon and Harold R. Medina, Jr., representing Time, Inc., the Supreme Court initially came down on the side of privacy. A 6-3 majority decided in favor of the Hills, upholding the judgment of the New York courts. Expanding the "right to privacy" established in the Griswold decision, the majority opinion, written by Justice Abe Fortas, declared that the Hills had a constitutional right to privacy that could be invoked not only against the government, but also private actors like the press. Ultimately, however, the Court changed its mind. As a result of lobbying by Justice Hugo Black, a First Amendment absolutist, votes switched, and a new majority voted in favor of Time, Inc.
16January 9, 1967 chapter abstractWilliam Brennan wrote the majority opinion in Time, Inc. v. Hill, issued in January 1967. Invoking the New York Times v. Sullivan standard, Brennan held that the Hills could not recover for invasion of privacy unless they could show that Life's story about them was false, and that the falsehood was made with reckless disregard of the truth. The Brennan opinion announced a capacious vision of freedom of the press, perhaps the broadest in the Supreme Court's history to that time.
17The Aftermath chapter abstractTime, Inc. v. Hill transformed the meaning of freedom of the press and the scope of the right to privacy in the United States. Time, Inc. v. Hill set forth an expansive vision of freedom of the press and dimmed the potential for a strong right to privacy that could be invoked against the press. This chapter examines the short and long-term consequences of the Hill decision on politics, publishing, and the First Amendment.