THE INCIDENT AT ENCINO

An incident happened on the golf course the other day. A group of older men confronted a group of younger men about the pace of play. This often happens, especially on public courses. In this instance, it was serious. The four old men were white; the four young men they confronted were black.

The four older men were regulars on the course. Once a week, every week, on Wednesday or Thursday, they played the same course together. They were retired from a lifetime of toil so that they could play rapidly in the middle of the week rather than slowly on Sunday. They usually started at 8 o’clock and expected to finish by around noon. Sometimes, though, they were unable to secure their usual time, and had to begin an hour later. This often meant that the round would take up to an hour longer. This was because younger men usually began later and played more slowly.

You might think younger men would play more quickly than the older group, but that is usually not the case. For one thing, the older men, playing every week for years, are used to the course. They don’t hit the ball as far, and thus tend to avoid trouble. Younger men have work and other obligations that prevent them from practice and regular play, especially in mid-week.  So, when they get together with friends for a rare mid-week golf outing, they want to have fun. Being young, they can sometimes hit the ball longer — when they actually do make contact — but that usually means more trouble because they are bound to hit it with a “banana slice” or a “duck hook,” results that are as bad as they sound.   

Golf is a game that demands frequent practice. It will humble even the most talented and skilled. The dilettante cannot possibly hope to successfully navigate the course without frustration. He will spend precious time searching for lost balls. He will be forced to hack out of forests, dig out of sand traps, and slash through deep grass.

Young men, by their nature, will not accept these truths. They still retain the optimism and competitiveness that keeps them running the rat race of mid-life. When they play this game with their peers, who are roughly equal in their ineptitude, they will act like adolescent males. They will tease, challenge, and try to humiliate their friends. If one reaches the green in seven, and the other in eight, they will slow down to now seriously compete to see who can score lowest on the hole that the card says should be finished in four strokes.  

For the old men, waiting to hit every ball while the four ahead of them tacked from the rough on the left to the trees on the right, inching their way toward the distant green, and then waiting more while the four athletes measured three-footers for eight to win the hole and so better the chance to avoid paying for the beers, the wait was agonizing. Old men measure events in the amount of time remaining; they can’t spend precious time waiting for something to happen. They resent traffic jams, supermarket lines, and most of all, doctor’s offices. They cannot be placed “on hold.”

So, here’s what happened. On the very first tee, while the old men were waiting for the group of young men to begin, they noticed some things that they recognized immediately were going to slow the round. First, the young men insisted on playing from the tee that required the longest, straightest drives. This position should be restricted to the pros or best amateurs, but it is common for boys and young men, no matter the lack of skill, to want to get their money’s worth, which they think forces them to  swing as hard and as often as possible. Efficiency and economical preservation of effort are skills the older players have learned in order to survive in this game. The young, most of whom will soon abandon the game for marriage, children, work, and other games and less time consuming sports, are ignorant of this.   

The second item of concern was that three of the young men, when flubbing their first tries, played a second ball. This is known as a Mulligan and it is acceptable on the first tee, recognizing the natural nervousness of duffers to cause a stumble at the start. But to the old men, it was an “uh-oh” moment. The third issue the men observed with trepidation was the jocularity with which the young men faced the embarrassment of their fellows’ failures. Golf to the experienced older player, while still a social event, permitting good fellowship among old friends, is far more serious, once the round has begun. The experienced serious older golfer knows when to josh and when to shush.

That brings up an additional point that must be emphasized. Golf has lasted a few hundred years with some lasting traditions. It began as a gentleman’s game that required gentility and patience, but one invented by the irascible Scots whose temperaments were carved by their intemperate climate. They played the game against cruel nature; they played angry at the ground, the rain, the cold. To prevent homicides during the game, they carved out strict rules of conduct among players.

Play the ball as it lies, call a penalty on yourself even if no one is looking, and most of all, be considerate of others on the course. That means moving along at a decent pace, spend no more than five minutes searching for a lost ball. Many other rules are meant to encourage an orderly and more rapid completion of each hole. The old men knew and respected these traditions and appreciated their importance. The young men didn’t know the rules. The young are often contemptuous of tradition, assuming that any rules made by previous generations are stupid, and are probably designed to hamper their enjoyment of life. They feel it is their privilege, even their duty to break the rules and find pleasure in the mere act of doing so.

As the old men watched the preceding group as they scrambled along, the pace met their expectations. They had anticipated the delays, but by the twelfth hole, they had had enough. While on that green, they noticed the foursome ahead of them to be standing on the next tee. The fairway ahead of them was vacant, meaning that the preceding group was not a cause for delay. Protocol required that the group should tee off as soon as they can safely do so. Things slow down when some players who are unfamiliar with the course or with their own lack of skill, delude themselves that they might reach the faraway golfers ahead of them. They wait, and wait. When they finally strike the ball, they dribble it a few yards forward or worse, many yards sideways.

This group was even more egregious. They not only waited far too long. They were talking to each other so vigorously that they did not notice the vast space ahead of them. They were having fun socializing. The men on the green behind them were not. They anticipated another long wait. They were furious at the inconsiderate antisocial behavior of the group. When they finally got to the tee, the others had just departed. By the time they had finished their work on the next green, the old men who were again waiting in the fairway were grumbling to each other about the criminality of the conduct. It was time for action.

In this particular situation, the generation gap was not the only problem. The other was the cultural attitude separating the races. I need to emphasize the point that if race was not involved — let’s say, if the foursomes were all white — the old men would still have been fuming, and a confrontation might have taken place anyway. But the added element of race — as always in America — complicated the issue immensely.  

At this point, I have to make what may seem to be a strange reference. Do you remember the movie, Deliverance? In my memory, it is about man’s nature as a hunter, an instinct that is suppressed beneath civilization’s veneer, but which when released can lead to dramatic consequences. The four characters who experience the event in the movie all act differently. For one, played by Burt Reynolds, it is a challenge to his manhood. Violent sport sparks his competitive soul.

Among the group of old men, one saw himself as Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. He was long past his prime as an athlete, but deep within, the tiny little fire still glowed. He had played high school football at what he remembered was a high level. He had been a lawyer, proud of his aggressive defense tactics, and now, at seventy, he clung to this self-image. And at this moment, to mix a movie metaphor, he was mad as hell and was not going to take it anymore. He raced his cart forward to the green and challenged the group for their lassitude.  

From the vantage of about 150 yards away, the confrontation went this way. The old man drove his cart up to the tee where the four young African American men had just teed off and were walking back to their carts. After a pause, the old man stood near his cart. A man in an orange shirt looked back to him, and words seemed to be exchanged. Then the man in orange walked quickly toward the old man and they stood face to face, like umpire and manager in a baseball dispute. A few seconds later a second African American man began to walk up. He took his friend’s arm and they retreated to their cart, which drove off.

When the three other old men reached the green, the first man was still excited. He related his story to the others. He had told the men that they were too far behind. The man in orange denied this. The old man had insisted; the young man then became angry, called him a bitch and challenged him. “He expected me to back off, but I didn’t. Then his friend said, ‘Okay, we’ll speed up.’” Eventually the old man’s pulse slowed. “When he threatened me, I was going to say, ‘If you do, I’ll own you!”

He meant that if he was assaulted, he would sue him. But the old man had wisely held his tongue, realizing that to an African-American, the words, “I’ll own you” had a completely different connotation that might have provoked far more violence.

This leads to other aspects of this incident. The four old men had been reluctant to press the issue of the bad behavior for more hours than they would have, had the transgressors been four young white men — and that reluctance was caused in great part by fear. White men are afraid to confront African American men because of a prejudgment based on the reputation for unreasonable violence. Rationally, the old men knew that golfing African Americans were not the same as gangsters on the corner in a ‘hood or riding in a black Escalade playing hip hop that reverbs until your teeth rattle. The old men were influenced by racial stereotypes that supports profiling.

Another aspect is the history these old men have lived through. Men now seventy or so grew up in the 50’s and 60’s when race relations were a central topic of debate. These men happened to be of the part of their generation that was sympathetic to the civil rights movement, especially in its earlier, peaceful iteration. They remembered fondly Dr. King and the marches, the fight for integration, and supported the passage of voting rights laws. They praised the concept of diversity and denounced the idea of discrimination. They admired Mohammed Ali, Hank Aaron, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, and (three out of the four) Barack Obama.

But they had been worried by the ghetto riots of the late 60’s, the Black Panthers, and the rage of Malcolm X. They each had experienced friction at school with African American students, either in sports, lunchrooms, hallways, or playgrounds. They were ambivalent about affirmative action in colleges and work, and had sent their children to private schools as the public education system they had survived now degraded and appeared to be biased in favor of the poor who were predominately of colors other than white.

The tension of the situation was not one-sided. The African-American men brought with them to the golf course their own set of prejudices. To begin with, they were fully aware of the history of the game as a white man’s domain. Even though this particular course was by no means a country club, it was a public course in the heart of the white (or at least mostly white) part of the city. Well brought up young men can tire of their parents’ reminders to behave themselves in company so as to not discredit their families. Some old men remembered a time when the warnings included the impression they might give of their People — Jews, the Irish, Italians, or other identifiable attachments. Young black men can easily tire of the reminder to represent.

In the final analysis, the incident does permit a glimmer of hope for the future. From the perspective of the old white men, the incident was a success. No one was shot, and the rest of the round proceeded at an acceptable pace. The old man who had braved the threat felt vindicated, and has something over his more timid friends forever. The other three had benefitted from their friend’s reckless risk taking behavior (aka courage). As one of the men said afterwards, “It is like that in every war; most stay safe in their foxholes while the few dare to charge the enemy!”

The final cause for optimism lies in my realization that the incident provided statistical proof of progress. Only 25% of the African American men wished to be combative, while 75% were conciliatory. The exact same percentages applied to the old white men.

That is an interesting coincidence, don’t you think?

"Compassionate Capital Punishment" Oxymoronic doublethink

The Ethicist column of The New York Times recently contained the following question under the headline “Compassionate Capital Punishment.”

Is it ethical for a physician to participate in capital punishment in order to provide a less painful execution than would otherwise be performed? 

A physician who oversees a state’s lethal injection program argues that these “patients” are going to be executed anyway. His professional responsibility is to see that it is done humanely.

Chuck Klosterman, who writes the column, had some trouble with the issue. He opined that if the doctor believed capital punishment as a principle was ethical, then it was arguably acceptable for him to feel ethically bound to help make its conduct more humane.

However, if the doctor’s position is that he believes capital punishment is ethically wrong, but he knows it will still happen regardless of his involvement, the issue remains whether his participation might then be justified because if these people will die anyway, isn’t it ethical to use your medical ability to make the inevitable less painful?

Klosterman concludes, with some equivocation, that participation in an unethical practice on the grounds that it will happen anyway over your objection is wrong. 

He never mentions similar ethical situations physicians have historically faced. 

The most common is assisted suicide and the closely associated compromise of allowing a terminally ill patient to expire without “heroic” medical interference with the natural progression of death. 

While the traditional strict view was that a physician was bound to make every effort to preserve any and all living human beings, the modern view is that when the “quality of life” has so diminished,  at some point — and the consensus at least considers the clearly terminal crisis to be that point — ethics permit, and indeed may require the cessation of measures to preserve life. 

The doctor’s duty then is to provide relief from pain, even if that relief through increasing doses of powerful drugs, shortens “life.” 

For most contemporary medical ethicists, this issue is separate from that of assisted suicide.  But for many others, the additional question of assisted suicide, which is the next short step, is also entering the mainstream as an arguably permissible ethical choice. 

Capital punishment is dissimilar from the plight of a “terminal” patient in at least one important way. From a medical standpoint, the subject is not “terminal.” There is no illness or injury that would lead to an imminent or even an inevitable death. In fact, the “patient” for whom the physician is providing the “humane” death is not ill or injured. He or she is an otherwise healthy person who, if not executed by order of the state, might live many more years without physical pain. 

The emotional pain of guilt and remorse is another issue entirely. Some may believe that it is merciful to relieve criminals from the angst of living with such guilt by terminating their lives in a “humane” manner. Considering the large number of suicides on death rows there may be some merit to this argument, but it is certainly not the law’s purpose nor is it at the mainstream of the arguments supporting physician assisted executions. 

Another example from history is the role of medical personnel in the Holocaust. Many of those who participated in the mass executions of millions in the gas chambers argued (at least retroactively) that they were assisting already doomed people to die “peacefully” — that is, without “excessive violence” or “anxiety.” Physicians, scientists, guards, and collaborators within the camps later made this argument when confronted with their culpability. 

Physicians who performed gruesome experiments on prisoners rationalized their actions by saying that these people were doomed and their “sacrifice” might save future lives. 

My question is whether the “Ethicist” would consider the actions of these doctors acceptable as long as they really believed that the genocide was ethical “in principle.” In other words, a committed Nazi such as Dr. Mengele might be, under this reasoning, acting ethically, by “euthanizing” the disabled, mentally ill, or others condemned as “subhumans” according to Nazi medical theory that doing so was beneficial to the “race.” As long as their terminating was done in a “humane” way, of course.

When it comes to the issue of doctors participating in capital punishment today, my next question is whether, by using their skills to reduce the pain of the execution for the condemned prisoner, they are deceiving themselves into believing that their actions are “humane.” 

It brings into question the whole concept of the “painless” execution. A judge recently wrote that the search for the mixture of lethal drugs that will kill without pain is wrongheaded. The goal of  the death penalty is to punish, and to deter. 

It is by nature a brutal act which the society decrees is in its best interest to commit because of the brutality of the crime for which it is designed to punish. 

Thus, why shouldn’t it be painful? The Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” was clearly intended by the Enlightenment Era Founders to include traditional unenlightened practices of torture and other forms of execution (drawing and quartering, keelhauling, disemboweling, etc.) which intentionally prolonged agony as a punishment to the condemned and a lesson to others. 

Hanging was the commonly accepted “humane” form of the time and was followed by the technological advance of electrocution and later the gas chamber and now, lethal injection. The appellate courts have pointed to those changes as efforts to spare the condemned from cruelty which they equated with prolonged infliction of pain, even if unintended. 

In reality, the pain of the condemned, though it is the constitutional rationale, is really less critical for many than the squeamish sensibilities of witnesses, the media, and the public. 

When public hangings were a form of mass entertainment, frequent miscalculations regarding physics principles regarding the weight vs distance of fall resulted in bodies writhing for ages before suffocating or the more gruesome alternative: the loud snap of the spinal cord and complete or partial decapitation. Either event turned stomachs in crowds so that they could not enjoy the treats that were being sold. Hangings were thus moved into the enclosed yards of jails and conducted at dawn — to reduce the embarrassment of officials. 

Electrocutions were always performed in relative privacy, behind the walls of prisons, and before a select group of witnesses who were banned from photographing the often grisly event. Popping eyeballs, bleeding orifices, steam and smoke rising, the smell of burning flesh, the writhing of dying bodies, all were commonly reported by the appalled witnesses. 

Death in the gas chamber was described often in terms that might have pleased Edgar Allen Poe or Alfred Hitchcock. The gas pellet dropped into the acid, the fumes rise, the condemned tries to hold his breath, but eventually inhales, writhes, turns green, shudders, faints, awakens, moans, stops. 

And now lethal injection is proven to be no less gruesome — for the witness as much as for the condemned. 

European pharmaceutical companies have balked at providing their products to be used for this purpose. Whether their ethics or business senses are offended by it is a separate question. Some might consider the association of the concept of ethics with drug companies as foreign. 

My concern is with the doctors who deem it their ethical duty to administer the lethal doses in such a system. How many would agree to be state executioner if they discovered afterward that the person they killed was shown to have been innocent. 

This has now happened often enough that it is not merely hypothetical.  

THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH

The latest botched execution elicited a modest proposal from Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski for using other methods: firing squad or guillotine as an admission that the penalty is in fact society’s brutal response to a violent crime. 

I have another proposal which I explained in this post a long time ago. Maybe it is time to reconsider televising executions. My pitch was to combine the Kardashians with American Idol — the public votes for the an eye for an eye method or other more deserving manner of death. The victim’s family can be the executioners (for closure). Alex Trebek as emcee? Working title: “Final-Final Jeopardy!” 

THE MESOPOTAMIA MESS

In the First World War, the Ottoman Empire, having taken the wrong side, collapsed. The British army marched into Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad. Britain and France divided the post war control over the middle east between them. Baghdad was the center of the area which historically had been known as Mesopotamia. The vast amorphous section included the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers which had seen the earliest agricultural civilizations rise: cities, culture, writing, law – all had begun in this area. Empires had come and gone: Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian. Now, it was to be stitched together as a nation the British would create, called Iraq.

In his book, “A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of The Ottoman Empire And The Creation of the Modern Middle East,” David Fromkin writes that idealistic post war principles espoused by Woodrow Wilson that demanded “national self-determination” trumped the British colonial predisposition. Against their better judgment, the British proceeded to create a nation although it “opened up other possibilities which were regarded almost universally with anxiety, ... gave opportunity for political intrigue to the less stable and more fanatical elements.” 

Sir Arnold Wilson was the British civil commissioner in Baghdad from 1918-1920.  
The British Cabinet tasked Arnold Wilson to “ask the peoples of Mesopotamia what states or governments they would like to see established. . . .” He told them that there was no way to gauge public opinion.

“While he was prepared to administer the provinces of Basra and Baghdad, and also the province of Mosul (which, with Clemenceau’s [the French P.M.] consent, Lloyd George [the British P.M.] had detached from the French sphere and intended to withhold from Turkey), he did not believe that they formed a coherent entity. 

“Iraq (an Arab term that the British used increasingly to denote the Mesopotamian lands) seemed to him too splintered for that to be possible. Mosul’s strategic importance made it seem a necessary addition to Iraq, and the strong probability that it contained valuable oilfields made it a desirable one, but it was part of what was supposed to have been Kurdistan; and Arnold Wilson argued that the warlike Kurds who had been brought under his administration ‘numbering half a million will never accept an Arab ruler.’”

“A fundamental problem, as Wilson saw it, was that almost two million Shi’ite Moslems . . . would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Moslem community, yet ‘no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.’ The bitterness between the two communities was highlighted when each produced a rival Arab nationalist society. ... Seventy-five percent of the population of Iraq was tribal, Wilson told London, ‘with no previous tradition of obedience to any government.’”

Another expert of the time was Gertrude Bell, a British writer who had traveled widely and understood its history, religion, culture, and politics. She was respected by her government and advised on mid-east policy in this period. Along with T.E. Lawrence, Bell tried to forge a unified and independent Iraq, and opposed the policies of her superior, Arnold Wilson, who was skeptical of Iraqi nationhood. 

According to Fromkin, Bell was also warned “by an American missionary that she was ignoring rooted historical realities in doing so. ‘You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unit. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.’” 

During the British occupation, while they were nation building, discontent and sectarian violence began to brew. Over the course of months, British soldiers began to die, in pairs, then in groups. The culprits were varied: former “officers who had served in the Hejaz forces with Lawrence had been forbidden to return home as suspected potential troublemakers . . . [now] had slipped back into the country.” British officers were killed in Kurdistan. 

“In June [1920] the tribes suddenly rose in full revolt. . . a nationalist reign of terror. . . .  For one reason or another—the revolts had a number of causes and the various rebels pursued different goals—virtually the whole area rose against Britain. . . A Holy War was proclaimed against Britain in the Shi’ite Moslem holy city of Karbalah.”

After the assassination of a high British official, the London Times asked:

“how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endevour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?” 

The revolt was not considered put down until after February, 1921, after Britain suffered almost 2,000 casualties. 

The British searched for causes of the revolt, blaming supporters of Feisal, in Turkey, Standard Oil, and other countries including the Bolsheviks who now controlled England’s traditional enemy in the area, Russia. Arnold Wilson told London that “there was no real desire in Mesopotamia for an Arab government, that the Arabs would appreciate British rule.” To explain the uprising, he concluded, “what we are up against is anarchy plus fanaticism. There is little or no Nationalism.” 

“The tribesman, he said, were ‘out against government as such’ and had no notion what they were fighting for.’”

The fact was that everywhere in the region the status quo was unstable. Kemal, the revolutionary post Ottomon leader of Turkey defied the Allies. King Hussein, who had been installed by Britain, was unpopular in Arabia. Egypt was bridling at British control. The Afghans were “conspiring with the Russians.” Arabs were rioting in Palestine and rebelling in Iraq. All the while, England’s post-war economy was in shambles, and the expenses of middle east adventure mounted. (In England, blame for the mess was variously ascribed to all of the above, and one more faction, one that should not be surprising, given our knowledge of history — the Jews. There were significant Jewish populations in Baghdad — as well as Christians— and in Palestine, and as usual, Jewish influence was sometimes disproportionately greater than their numbers.)

How things have NOT changed in a hundred years!

"The Front Page:"

When my criminal lawyer friends get together we love to tell “war stories” about the colorful characters, mostly clients, judges, and other lawyers, that stand out in our memories. Every once in a while, some of these stories turn up in television or film scripts, which is not surprising for L. A. where you can’t go to a courthouse, cocktail party, or golf course without running into cop or lawyer who would rather be a screenwriter. 

My recent reading has revealed that there is nothing new about this. Way, way back nearer the turn of the last century, two former newspapermen turned their war stories and anecdotes about people they knew (and heard of) during their time on the beat into a play which critics have called one of, if not the, greatest American comedy of all time. 

In his book, “The Front Page: From Theater To Reality,” (2002) George W. Hilton combed every word of the original text of the play and researched every name and incident mentioned. His meticulous annotations are a treasure of characters and events that flesh out an entire era – his 184 page book contains 222 footnotes. He was able to uncover many of the sources of the references in the play. In doing so, he managed to vividly sketch the entire colorful era of 1920's Chicago, an epoch which has become such a permanent touchstone of American popular culture.

In his youth, Charles MacArthur (b. 1895) had worked for the Chicago Herald & Examiner and Ben Hecht (b.1893) had written for the Chicago Journal. They had both been on the crime beat, Hecht from 1910 when he was 17, MacArthur from 1915, at 20 years old. By 1927 they each had  come to New York to write plays. They got together there and it is not hard to imagine that they waxed nostalgic, sharing memories of their youth, until someone (maybe MacArthur’s bride, the actress Helen Hayes) suggested that the stories might make a pretty good play. 

Hecht and MacArthur later asserted that they began by intending to expose the dark side of the journalism trade and instead wound up writing a loving but honest satire of the world they knew. 

As they wrote in their epilogue to the published play, 

“When we applied ourselves to write a newspaper play we had in mind a piece of work which would reflect our intellectual disdain of . . . the Newspaper. What we finally turned out . . . is a romantic and rather doting tale of our old friends — the reporters of Chicago. 

“It developed in writing the play that our contempt for the institution of the Press was a bogus attitude; that we looked back on the Local Room where we had spent half our lives as a veritable fairyland — and that we were both full of a nostalgia for the bouncing days of our servitude.  

“The same uncontrollable sentimentality operated in our treatment of Chicago which, as much as any of our characters, is the hero of the play. The iniquities, double dealings, chicaneries, and immoralities which as ex-Chicagoans we knew so well returned to us in a mist called the Good Old Days, and our delight in our memories would not be denied.

“As a result The Front Page, despite its oaths and realisms is a Valentine thrown to the past . . . .” 

 The era they write about was known for the wildly competitive world of newspaper reporting, in which getting the scoop – with blatant disregard of ethics, legalities, or even the facts – was common. The beat reporters were crass, crude, cynical, mostly young men slaving long hours for low pay and receiving little recognition beyond that of their peers.   
The play is in three acts but one scene, the pressroom in the Chicago Criminal Courts Building. In the beginning a gaggle of reporters are playing cards and waiting for news about a hanging they are there to cover. The authors describe the scene this way:

“It is a bare, disordered room, peopled by newspapermen in need of shaves, pants pressing, and small change. Hither reporters are drawn by an irresistible lure, the privilege of telephoning free.  

“. . . An equally important lure is the continuous poker game that has been going on now for a generation, presumably with the same pack of cards. Here is the rendezvous of some of the most able and amiable bums in the newspaper business; here they meet to gossip, play cards, sleep off jags, and date up waitresses between such murders, fires, riots, and other public events as concern them. . . . . 

“Four men are playing poker . . . four braves known to their kind as police reporters. Catatonic, seedy Paul Reveres, full of strange oaths and a touch of childhood. . . .”

The playwrights used two events as the core of their story. One was the practical joke played on MacArthur by his managing editor, Walter Howey. MacArthur was to marry another reporter, Carol Frinck. Before they left for New York, Howey gave MacArthur a present of his prized gold watch. After they left, he wired Gary, Indiana police to arrest MacArthur for stealing his watch. (They used Howey’s legendary: “The son-of-a-bitch stole my watch!” as one of the most famous curtain lines in Broadway history.)

They based one central character, the managing editor “Walter Burns,” on the character traits which the incident suggested. “Burns” will stop at nothing to scoop competing newspapers, especially if the story ridicules or might even bring down corrupt politicians – especially the mayor and sheriff – members of the party supported by rival papers. 

The personal lives of his employees – reporters included – must yield to the good of the newspaper. When told that his rewrite man, “Duffy,” is momentarily indisposed to treat his diabetes, Burns fumes: “It serves me right for hiring someone with a disease!”

For the character of the reporter who works for and is manipulated by Burns, they chose for a model a reporter they both knew well, who was considered one of the best of the leg men on the Chicago crime beat in their day, a man named John Hilding Johnson. They named their character “Hildebrand ‘Hildy’ Johnson.”  

When “Hildy” enters, the authors note:

“. . . . Hildy is of a vanishing type — the lusty, hoodlumesque, half-drunken caballero that was the newspaperman or our youth. Schools of journalism and the advertising business have nearly extirpated the species. Now and then one of these boys still pops up in the profession and is hailed by his editor as a survivor of a golden age. The newspapermen who have already appeared in the pressroom are in reality similar survivors. Their presence under one roof is due to the fact that Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park offering haven to a last herd of fantastic braves that once roamed the newspaper offices of the country. . . .”   

Hecht and MacArthur must have had great fun naming their characters after the people they used as templates for them. They hardly bothered to disguise many of their choices, merely changing a few letters of names to avoid lawsuits. For example, Peter M. Hoffman was sheriff of Cook County. In the play, the sheriff is named “Peter B, Hartman.” A reporter named McHugh becomes a reporter named “McCue.” Roy Baenzinger becomes “Roy Bensinger.” 

The second event that became central to the plot was the escape from the Chicago city jail by a cop killer named Tommy O’Connor four days before his date with the hangman in 1921. The plot of the play turns on the escape of “Earl Williams” the night before his execution. Instead of a petty gangster, they make Williams into a pathetic, insane, radical, who shot a policemen. As a complication, they made the murdered cop “colored” (in the accepted vernacular of the time - more about that later).

This beat was important because in the 1920's the African American community still remembered Lincoln and thus voted predominantly Republican. It would not be until FDR, after 1933, that the bloc vote would shift to the other side. In the play (as in Chicago at the time) the mayor and sheriff were Republicans and desperate to retain the “colored vote.” Thus, the rapid conviction and execution of a killer of a “colored cop” was politically correct (to use an anachronistic phrase). 

Some of the satire in the play is still timely. For example, these days the L.A. sheriff is in trouble from a scandal involving the hiring of unqualified employees based on preference to so-called “friends of the sheriff.” 

In this play set almost a century ago, the sheriff and mayor have this colloquy after the escape (The Front Page, Act II):

SHERIFF: Listen, Fred. Stop worrying, will you? Just do me a favor and stop worrying! I’m doing everything on God’s green earth! I’ve just sworn in four hundred deputies!

MAYOR: Four hundred! Do you want to bankrupt this administration?

SHERIFF: I’m getting them for twelve dollars a night.

MAYOR: Twelve dollars —! For those goddamn uncles of yours? What do you think this is—Christmas Eve?

SHERIFF: (With Dignity) If you are talking about my brother-in-law he has worked for the city for fifteen years.

MAYOR: . . .  Pete, I’m scratching your name off the ticket.

SHERIFF: Fred!

MAYOR: Now, Pete! Please don’t appeal to my sentimental side . . .     

SHERIFF: Fred, I don’t know what to say. A thing like this almost destroys a man’s faith in human nature . . .  

In the play, the mayor is named “Fred A. Busse.” A man of the same name was mayor of Chicago until 1911. I suspect the name was used because of its comic sound. Hecht was known for this playfulness, using “Dr. Egelhofer” as the name of the psychiatrist in this play and also in his screenplay for “Nothing Sacred” (1937). 

The corruption of the era didn’t leave the newsmen untouched. A 2013 Chicago Tribune article reports the following event, from June 9, 1930:

“Alfred "Jake" Lingle . . .  a Tribune police reporter, was heading for the [train station to go to the racetrack]. An ace at covering sensational crime stories, he was about to become one. A tall, blond man walked up behind him and put a bullet through his head. Lingle's killer paused over the body. Then he dropped the murder weapon, a .38-caliber revolver, and got away.

“Lingle epitomized the "Front Page" journalism of his day, cavorting with cops and robbers and working his sources in speakeasies. A street reporter, he never rolled paper through a typewriter. As in the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play about Chicago journalism, Lingle phoned in scoops to rewrite men. The popular play was a work of fiction, but it was based on fact. The world of Chicago newspapers was viciously competitive, frequently unscrupulous, and not too worried about the truth. 

“But even in that era, Lingle turned out to be exceptional. In the aftermath of his shooting, Chicago newspapers decried the slaying as a mob attempt to silence the press. [ ] But as the reporter's mysterious private life came to light, a different picture developed. He was paid $65 a week but had an annual income of $60,000. When he was killed, he had $1,400 in his pocket.

“Lingle's friends ranged from politicians and city payrollers to the henchmen of crime boss Al Capone. ‘Big Al’ thought enough of Lingle to give him a diamond-studded belt buckle. Lingle, as the Tribune reported, had been a middleman for a variety of characters seeking favors from Capone and the police commissioner, who resigned after the story broke. ‘A newspaper,’ Tribune city editor Robert M. Lee wrote with an almost audible sigh, ‘is the least likely to hear bad news about its own.’ 

“As for Lingle's killer, police rounded up 664 minor hoodlums. Nothing but headlines came of it. Then in January 1931, Chicago detectives got a tip and arrested a St. Louis gunman, Leo V. Brothers. Seven witnesses fingered him as the shooter; seven others swore he was not the man. Brothers was convicted, but he received the minimum sentence for murder--14 years. He served eight of them, his mouth shut the whole time. The questions of who wanted Lingle killed and why were never answered.”

In the play, Hildy and Burns hide the meekly pathetic condemned prisoner in a roll top desk of the pressroom, intending to break the story before turning him in.

Burns dictates the story’s lead in the purplest prose: 

“The Chicago Examiner again rode to the rescue of the city last night in the darkest hour of her history! (Lowering his voice.) Earl Williams, the Bolshevik Tiger, who leaped snarling from the gallows upon the flanks of the city, was captured ...”

This event of course never happened in “real life” but was not too far removed from actual schemes used by the papers of the era to get scoops and circulation.

For instance, in one line, Hildy takes credit for “the Fitzgerald confession.” Hilton explains that a Herald & Examiner reporter, Harry Romanoff, in 1919 was able to persuade a child murderer to confess by a subterfuge. He bought a doll, told Fitzgerald it was the child’s and her dying mother’s last wish to see her death solved. Howey published the confession in the newspaper, trumpeting it as a great coup. 

Hildy also claims to have written the “Ruth Randall diary.” This too was based on reality although “Hildy” didn’t write it. Hilton writes that managing editor Howey ordered that in cases involving attractive women, “first, get the story, second, get a picture, third, produce a diary.” The implication to “produce” included fabrication, if needed. In 1920, a Herald & Examiner editor named Frank Carson had somehow obtained from police custody a sensational diary written by Ms. Randall, who had killed her married lover and then committed suicide.

The male characters in the play are depicted as unapologetically misogynistic. Walter Burns expresses the prevailing attitude toward the “other sex” when he derides Hildy’s devotion to his fiancee, Peggy. 

HILDY: You know a lot about women! You and your goddamn stable of tarts. . . .

WALTER: What do you think women are? Flowers? Take that dame that shot the dentist! And Mrs. Vermilyea! Husband comes home all worn out, hungry, takes a spoonful of soup and falls dead! Arsenic! And Mrs. Petras! Burning her husband up in a furnace! When you’ve been in this business as long as I have you’ll know what women are! Murderers! Borgias!

Hilton traced the true sources referenced in this speech. There had been reporting about a dentist who was acquitted in the killing his wife’s father. Justice was nonetheless served — he was shot to death by his mother-in-law. “Mrs. Vermilyea” was a woman who took in boarders, including a policeman, who was one of nine which the press declared that she poisoned to death — three of whom she later claimed to have been men who were going to marry her. She had taken the arsenic herself, and was paralyzed as a result. Her trial resulted in a hung jury and apparently she was never retried. 

The reference to “Mrs. Petras” seems to be an unfair slander. The real woman of that name was the wife of an accused murderer who had loyally stood by him even though he was accused of murdering his former fiancee who was possibly his current lover. He was acquitted and promptly abandoned Mrs. Petras. 

In another near slander, Walter later mentions the “Clara Hamon murder.” Hilton traced this to the killing of Jacob Hamon, a prominent Republican in Oklahoma. Clara was his mistress and secretary, married to Jacob’s nephew to conceal the liaison. She was charged with the murder and the Hearst papers paid her legal fees. Walter Howey had sent a reporter to cover the trial in hopes of embarrassing the opposing Republicans, but she was acquitted. 

Walter Burns’s thoughts about women fit in well with the general dialogue spoken by the male characters which is replete with sexist language as well as words that today’s audiences would cringe at because of their blatantly racist, homophobic, and xenophobic content. The “n” word is commonly bandied about by the reporters, as when Hildy asks Walter how far he may go in attacking the mayor in print and Walter answers with the worst slander he can think of: “Call him a n______ if you want to! . . .” 

Slurs are tossed by others about “polacks,” “wops” and “bohunks.” The prissy reporter, “Bensinger,” who is a poet and germophobic, is widely understood to be less than masculine — compared to his testosterone charged colleagues. 

The females in the play are relative stereotypes. “Peggy Grant,” Hildy’s betrothed, is bland, innocent, shrill. Her mother, “Mrs. Grant,” based on Helen Hayes’s mother, is quite properly appalled at the shenanigans by the “hooligans.” “Molly Malloy” is the standard prostitute with a heart of gold. All three women excoriate the men for their lack of morals, ethics, decency. The authors’ note before Peggy’s introduction gives us a clue to their view of women :

“PEGGY, despite her youth and simplicity, seems overwhelmingly mature in comparison to Hildy. As a matter of fact, Peggy belongs to that division of womanhood that dedicates itself to suppressing in its lovers or husbands the spirit of D’Artagnan, Roland, Captain Kidd, Cyrano, Don Quixote, King Arthur, or any other type of the male innocent and rampant. In her unconscious and highly noble efforts to make what the female world calls ‘a man’ out of Hildy, Peggy has neither the sympathy nor acclaim of the authors, yet regarded superficially, she is a very sweet and satisfying heroine.”

As heroine, Peggy is determined to rescue Hildy from his awful job and his evil boss and deliver him into a suburban home and a respectable ad agency job. 

At first, yielding to Peggy’s loving influence, Hildy seems anxious to escape from his miserable existence. 

HILDY: Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines like a lot of coach dogs! . . . Stealing pictures off old ladies of their daughters that get raped in Oak Park. A lot of lousy, daffy, buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys! And for what! So a million hired girls and motormen’s wives’ll know what’s going on. . . . I’ve been a newspaperman for fifteen years. A cross between a bootlegger and a whore. . . .”

 But when the blockbuster story of the escape breaks, and Hildy falls back under Walter’s spell, Peggy can’t save him:

PEGGY: (to Walter): You’re doing this to him! He was going and you stopped him!

HILDY: Something terrific’s happened, Peggy! Wait till I tell you! I couldn’t — 

WALTER: You’ll tell her nothing! She’s a woman, you damn fool!

Despite her pleas, Hildy continues to type, begging her to let him work. Finally, exasperated, she accuses him of being “a heartless, selfish animal without any feelings! He answers:

HILDY: Shut up, will you? Yeah! That’s what I am! A bum! Without any feelings! And that’s all I want to be! . . . . If you want me you’ll have to take me as I am instead of trying to turn me into some lah de dah with a cane! I’m no stuffed shirt writing peanut ads. . . . Goddamn it — I’m a newspaper man. . . . (PEGGY exits, her sobs filling the room and corridor.) 

Ben Hecht’s became the most important screenwriter of his time and perhaps the most successful of all time. In his biographical memoir, “A Child Of The Century” (1954) he wrote of his former profession:

“No other profession, even that of arms, produces as fine a version of the selfless hero as journalism does . . . What I write is no blanket description of newspapermen. It includes only the kind I once knew and admired . . .  They were young, whatever their age. . . A good newspaperman, of my day, was to be known by the fact that he was ashamed of being anything else. He scorned offers of double wages in other fields. He sneered at all the honors life held other than the one to which he aspired, which was a simple one. He dreamed of dying in harness, a casual figure of anonymous power and free. . . Most harried . . . More bedeviled by duties than a country doctor . . . more blindly subservient . . . than a Marine private . . . [yet he] considered himself, somewhat loonily . . . To be without superiors and a creature always on his own. . . ‘Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender but spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.’” 

I might be exercising my own sentimental soul, but the description seems to fit some of the better criminal defense lawyers I have known and admired — and whose war stories I have shared. 

Profile In Courage

This story is confirmed in Elmer Bendiner's book, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of One of the Most Daring - and Deadly - Air Battles of the Second World War (Putnam, 1980: ISBN 0-399-12372-5), p. 30. [After the war, he became a journalist and writer.]

Elmer Bendiner was a navigator in a B-17 during WW II. He tells  this story of a World War II bombing run over Kassel , Germany , and the unexpected result of a direct hit on their  gas tanks.

"Our  B-17, the Tondelayo, was barraged by flak from Nazi antiaircraft guns. That was not unusual, but on this particular occasion our gas tanks were hit. Later, as I  reflected on the miracle of a 20 millimeter shell piercing the fuel tank without touching off an explosion, our pilot, Bohn Fawkes, told me it was not quite that simple.

"On the morning following the raid, Bohn had gone down to ask our crew chief for that shell as a souvenir of unbelievable luck. The crew chief told Bohn that not just one shell but 11 had been found in the gas tanks. 11 unexploded shells where only one was sufficient to blast us out of the sky. It was as if the sea had been parted for us. A near-miracle, I thought. Even after 35 years, so awesome an event leaves me shaken, especially after I heard the rest of the story from Bohn.

"He was told that the shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused. The armorers told him that Intelligence had picked them up. They could not say why at the time, but Bohn eventually sought out the answer.

"Apparently when the armorers opened each of those shells, they found no explosive charge. They were as clean as a whistle and just as harmless. Empty? Not all of them! One contained a
 carefully rolled piece of paper. On it was a scrawl in Czech. The Intelligence people scoured our base for a man who could read Czech. Eventually they found one to decipher the note. It set us marveling. Translated, the note read:  "This is all we can do for you now........."

"Using Jewish slave labor is never a good idea."