Who Gets a Childhood?: Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas

Four. James Dean and Jim Crow: The Failure of Reform and the Racialization of Delinquency in the 1950s

FOUR James Dean and Jim Crow The Failure of Reform and the Racialization of Delinquency in the 1950s On February 6, 1949, Texas Governor Beauford H. Jester and the seven members of the Texas Training School Code Commission held a much-anticipated press conference in Austin (see figure 8). After eighteen months of study, the commission had written a bill that proposed to go far beyond its original mandate to repair the state’s broken juvenile training schools. With great fanfare, it announced plans for “the most extensive youth program ever developed” in Texas, the South, the Southwest, and even the nation. The legislation would create a new state agency, the Texas State Youth Development Council (tsydc), tasked with overseeing a sweeping reduction in the training school population while aiding local governments in inaugurating a plethora of community-based prevention and rehabilitation programs. Armed with statewide authority, staffed with trained experts and professionals, the tsydc promised to eradicate the intractable abuses of the past and begin anew with “modern” approaches to delinquency. Beginning in September 1949, the tsydc’s first year of work reflected its unprecedented optimism and energy. Trained field workers fanned out across the state, advising hastily formed “community youth councils” about the creation of blueprints for intertwined juvenile justice, child welfare, and recreation services. So rapid was the tsydc’s ascent to a position of authority that, mere months after its formation, the agency’s leadership was chosen to represent Texas at the 1950 White House Conference on Children and Youth, where it was hailed as a model worthy of emulation by other states. A historic breakthrough seemed to have taken place. At long last, proclaimed tsydc chairman Walter K. Kerr, “many children and youth will have a fairer opportunity for development of a healthy personality.” The breathtaking speed with which the tsydc took shape reflected a host of converging national trends, not the least of which was growing opposition to institutions for dependent populations. One of the more critically acclaimed films of the late 1940s, The Snake Pit, portrayed the nation’s mental hospitals as places 94 · C H A P T E R F O U R that caused rather than alleviated insanity. The newly formed National Institute of Mental Health, along with the American Psychiatric Association, campaigned for federally subsidized community mental health clinics as substitutes for the asylum . Leading the anti-institutional charge was journalist Albert Deutsch, whose 1948 book, The Shame of the States, indicted the quality of care in mental hospitals . In 1950, Deutsch published Our Rejected Children, which applied the same muckraking technique to the nation’s juvenile training schools. With painstaking detail, Deutsch described sterilizations, beatings, and exotic punishments such as “hydrotherapy,” a scientific-sounding term for spraying a high-pressure hose at a boy inmate’s back from close range. Readers of this litany of seemingly limitless horrors would have been hard-pressed indeed to disagree with Deutsch’s contention that the training school had become “a disgraceful blot on a democratic and rich society.” Figure 8. Governor Beauford H. Jester (seated) signing hb 705, July 5, 1949, creating the State Youth Development Council, with members of the Training School Code Commission, sponsors of the bill in the House and the Senate, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the House. Standing from left: S. L. Bellamy, Walter K. Kerr, R. L. Proffer, Leslie Jackson, Davis Clifton, Pearce Johnson, Durwood Manford, Rebecca Townsend, Sid Gregory, A. M. Aikin, and Allan Shivers. (Box 1999/087-3, Records, Texas Youth Commission. Courtesy of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.) J A M E S D E A N A N D J I M C R O W · 95 Lending urgency to the training school crisis were predictions of a looming explosion in juvenile delinquency. One of the leading proponents of this notion was Richard Clenenden, who served as consultant on training schools for the United States Children’s Bureau, and later as executive director of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. In “The Shame of America,” a fivepart series published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1955, Clenenden recounted lurid crimes committed by teenagers across the nation. Citing the baby boom, he warned that annual juvenile arrests would reach the astronomical number of two million by 1960. This improbable figure, which would have comprised a nineteenfold increase over juvenile arrests in 1955, reflected a gulf...