The Literature of Delinquency and the Inner City

In 1959, the publication and critical acceptance of Cool World made a name for Miller as both a literary stylist and an observer of the city. Through his treatment of delinquency, he became a recognized urban intellectual, engaged with social and cultural transformations that would in the mid-1960s become central elements of the urban crisis. Cool World was important to its initial readers because it contributed to the vast network of discourses that converged in the 1950s and early 1960s on the problem of juvenile delinquency in the inner city, a problem personified above all in teenage gang members like its protagonist Duke Custis. Cool World entered a stream of representations of delinquency in a variety of forums—newspapers, magazines, scholarly studies, popular and self-consciously "serious" novels, the movies, comic books—comprising a literature that played an important role in representing the inner city. As I argued in the previous chapter, the youth gangs that occupied the center of the delinquency panic inhabited and seemed to be produced by an urban world in crisis: in the 1950s, to understand one was to understand the other.

Of the various explanation systems proposed to account for delinquency, several called attention to what were seen as quintessentially urban problems: uprooted blacks and Hispanics newly arrived and ghettoized in the cities, the enfeebling of "traditional" structures of authority (family, church, school) as part of the breakup of the industrial neighborhood order, organized crime, ignorance and cultural deprivation proceeding from inadequate education and socialization. If Estes Kefauver's Senate Subcommittee to Study Juvenile

Delinquency in the United States entertained the experts' general critique of mass culture and its effect on all American youth, Kefauver was drawn in particular to the notion that organized gangs of teenage criminals posed a dangerous alternative to the social order of America's cities.^[2] If in the 1950s variously accredited intellectuals like Erik Erikson and Paul Goodman were reconsidering the meaning and character of youth and the proper formation of young citizens, the delinquency panic sustained itself in the public forum with more visceral fare: a steady diet of stories detailing heinous crimes, usually committed in urban areas, that located in the violent delinquent gang a complex knot of social and cultural malaise.

The violent gang moved through an urban world in transition. In The Shook Up Generation (1958), a book-length study of delinquent gangs adapted from a seven-part series of investigative reports in the New York Times, respected journalist Harrison Salisbury wrote that suburban New Yorkers traversing the inner city on commuter trains and new highways saw the physical signs of a new social landscape: "phalanxes of new structures . . . new brick towers . . . You can hardly recognize Harlem. The East Side has been transformed. Driving out the Gowanus Super-Highway they admire the rectangular patterns of Fort Greene Houses, Gowanus Houses, Red Hook Houses, Queensbridge Houses."^[3] Like the housing projects that have replaced the prewar tenements, the elevated structure of the Gowanus Super-Highway, casting its shadow over Brooklyn's Red Hook (a terrain much traversed in gang literature), becomes a sign of the times. The elevated highway, completed in 1941 and articulating with other highways built during the massive postwar effort to link redeveloped central business districts to the suburban periphery, is a dramatic physical sign of the urban change that forms the context for the gang's delinquency. In Salisbury's account, the historical moment that has produced the projects of the new Harlem and the Gowanus Super-Highway has dislocated a generation of young people, leading to the present crisis. Although Salisbury points to other conventional explanations of delinquency, like the power of mass culture and the weakening of family structure, and although he takes a characteristically global view in accounting for juvenile delinquency (suggesting that the specter of the bomb breeds psychic dislocations; drawing analogies between American and Soviet delinquents, housing projects, and violence), the core of his analysis takes shape around the emergence of the postindustrial metropolis. Salisbury, best known as a foreign correspondent and political reporter, treated delinquency and the urban transformations that framed it as a domestic crisis on par with and linked to the continuing international crisis of the Cold War.^[4]

The postwar inner city presented experts with a "new delinquency," for which they had to evolve new models and explanations. The Chicago School's classic immigrant-ethnic jackroller or thief of the 1920s and 1930s, gone astray in the interstices of the industrial city's social organization, no longer provided

an adequate type for delinquents in the emerging postindustrial inner city. Albert Cohen led a movement to rethink delinquency as a subculture at odds with the values and institutions of the expanding postwar middle class. This logic undergirded subsequent analyses that treated delinquency as produced by deprivation of opportunity, traceable to deep race and class divisions in the urban social landscape, and that called into question the Chicago School's prewar assumption of social mobility out of the slums. Subculture theorists like Cohen sought to explain a new order of delinquent: a violent gang member in the inner city; a ghetto-dwelling black or Puerto Rican or a white ethnic "left behind" for some reason in the geography and mentality of the slums; a youth therefore unlikely to exit the delinquent subculture without comprehensive institutional assistance from professionals like youth workers, psychologists, social workers, and teachers in public and reform schools.

Rather than continuing to believe in the Chicago School's classic "delinquency area"—the temporary slum of opportunity constantly remade as immigrant groups moved up and out and new ones replaced them—the subculture theorists addressed the prospect of a permanent ghetto underclass drastically and lastingly cut off from opportunity and the rest of the metropolis by lines of racial difference and class conflict. The ghetto was not "disorganized," Cohen argued (as David Bradley would argue in South Street); rather, the deceptively comprehensive organization of its "vast ramifying network of informal associations among like-minded people" contributed to its status as an established, continuing subculture.^[5] In Delinquency and Opportunity (1960), Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin extended Cohen's reading of the delinquent as an indicator of deep class and racial divisions, developing the notion of the delinquent as a kind of organic social critic responding rationally to the denial of genuine economic opportunity to poor, and especially black, young men.^[6]

Beginning in the early 1960s, the problem of delinquency as a youth crisis gave way to a more diffuse emphasis on youth culture, and the problem of racial segregation and conflict became the inner city's defining crisis, subsuming all others. Moving in the directions suggested by Cohen, Cloward, and Ohlin, various observers came to link the delinquent gang to the rebellious student subculture and to the emergence of racially defined identity politics in the inner city. The sedimentation of delinquency at the foundations of thinking about the ghetto helps to explain how, during the urban crisis, some delinquent gangs (like Chicago's Blackstone Rangers) succeeded in recasting themselves as political organizations. Federally funded poverty programs accepted them as community organizations through which money and effort might be directed into the ghetto.^[7] But in the 1950s and early 1960s, race and urban change were still contributing factors to the independently significant problem of juvenile delinquency, in which could be read various urban and cultural subtexts.

In the 1950 and early 1960s, therefore, delinquency experts like Albert Cohen and Fredric Wertham occupied positions of cultural authority in representing the inner city. Cohen, a social scientist, and Wertham, a psychologist, came at the problem of delinquency from opposite directions—Cohen by way of an analysis of subculture and social inequality, Wertham by way of a critique of mass culture—but they converged on the inner city as the center of the problem. Cohen put the permanent ghettos of the postwar inner city in the foreground of the study of urban subcultures. His influential work, which subordinated psychoanalytical explanations of delinquency to an emphasis on social structure and cultural order, helped launch the crisis-infused urban sociology of the 1960s. Wertham's condemnation of comic books, the movies, and other mass cultural forms made him the star witness at Kefauver's Senate hearings on delinquency. (Wertham even saw himself as a potential martyr, pointing out that certain comic books had taken to advocating violence against thinly fictionalized anti-comics crusaders modeled on himself.)^[8] If Cohen was ultimately interested in the nature of deviance and Wertham in the nature of violence, and if both achieved recognition as experts on delinquent youth, they were also regarded in important ways as urban intellectuals. In explaining delinquency, they helped to map and explain the inner city and its social cleavages.

Cohen's and Wertham's books, like Miller's Cool World, moved within a vast literature of delinquency. Like the Chicago neighborhood novels in relation to the work of the Chicago School, a body of variously fantastic and authenticated novels, movies, and first-person accounts paralleled the social scientific and journalistic treatments of delinquency. The nonfiction literature, exemplified by Salisbury's Shook-Up Generation, shared formulas of narrative, landscape, and theme with the genre of delinquent films that enjoyed a golden age in the 1950s, a series extending from early noir treatments like City across the River (1949, the film version of Irving Shulman's seminal novel The Amboy Dukes ) through classic statements like Rebel without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle (both 1955), the baroque excess of exploitation movies like High School Confidential (1958), and the exhaustion or elevation of genre (depending upon whom you ask) evident in later movies like West Side Story (1961). The movies resonated with luridly packaged paperback novels that formed the backbone of delinquent literature: Irving Shulman's Amboy Dukes, Cry Tough, and Children of the Dark; Harlan Ellison's novel Rumble, drawn from his experience as a participant-observer that also produced his fanciful "report" on gang life, Memos from Purgatory; the sensationalist hackwork (or genius, again depending upon whom one asks) of genre stalwarts like Wenzell Brown (The Hoods Ride In, Gang Girl, The Big Rumble, Jail Bait Jungle ), Hal Ellson (Duke, The Golden Spike, I Take What I Want ), Edward De Roo (Rumble at the Housing Project, The Young Wolves, Go, Man, Go ), Frank Paley (Rumble on the Docks), Willard

Wiener (The Young Killers/Four Boys and a Gun ), and Sal Lombino as "Evan Hunter" (The Blackboard Jungle ).^[9]

A brief glance at writers discussed in parts 1 and 2 will remind us that writers with reputably "serious" credentials also explored the literary possibilities of delinquency. Because the delinquency literature owed so much to Chicago realism—the naturalist constriction of slum life and the violent young male protagonists found in Algren, Wright, and Farrell; the Chicago School of sociology's portrait of prewar delinquency as a product of the industrial neighborhood order—it makes sense that Avon Publications sought to market Nelson Algren in the 1950s as a founding father of delinquent literature. Algren revised his 1942 novel Never Come Morning for subsequent printings in 1948 and throughout the 1950s as a novel of juvenile delinquency. Reframed on front and back covers as "TEEN-AGE TRAGEDY!" Algren's Chicago neighborhood novel gained new life as part of the literature that engaged with "the problem that has stunned all thinking Americans: Juvenile Delinquency." Similarly, Algren revised his first novel, Somebody in Boots, for Avon, which retitled it The Jungle and sold it as "a great novel of lawless youth" who "ride the rods to degradation [and] delinquency." Algren's fellow Chicago writer Gwendolyn Brooks was not recycling old material in the 1950s, but she was inspired by delinquency. One can read an intellectual history of the urban crisis in the progression from her much-read portrait of doomed pool-shooting layabouts of the late 1950s in "We Real Cool" to her ringing paeans to the Blackstone Rangers of the late 1960s: the delinquents are now "The Leaders," who help "construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace" that is black urbanism.^[10] One can read that same story as well in William Gardner Smith's progression in his treatment of street gangs from the destructive turf-protectors of South Street to the shock troops preparing for the coming race war in Return to Black America.

If Warren Miller preferred to keep company with the "serious" purveyors of social critique and literary stylists (and did so via good reviews in the right places), Cool World found an eminently marketable niche in the middle ground between their work and the gloriously overheated genre fiction of Sal Lombino and company. Cool World shared with this paperback formula literature a defining impulse to make imaginative forays into the mental world of the gang, delving into its subjectivity in order to address the basic question driving the delinquency panic: what possessed young people to do the terrible, apparently senseless, often titillating things they did? The formula novels told stories of gang fights, murders, rapes, and other crimes committed by and against delinquent boys and girls; they imaginatively mapped the decaying older slum order and the ghettos that succeeded it; and they pointed up the inability of parents and social institutions to control the children formed in this inner-city environment. Covering ground familiar from journalistic, social scientific, and filmic accounts, the formula novels made the most sustained attempts to see the inner

city with the delinquent's eyes and speak with the delinquent's voice. In this they surpassed the movies, which tended to shy away from sustained renderings of the inarticulate delinquents' inner lives. The novels surpassed as well the nonfiction accounts, which gestured at delinquents' mentalities with obligatory glossaries of teen slang but usually tended toward the dry, distanced language of explanation favored by delinquency professionals.