The Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang and the Great Comic Book Scare of the 1950s by Mariah Adin (review)

The spectral and ultimately unanswered question of Adin’s book is how could four middle-class boys from caring homes commit acts of violence so heinous that they spark national hysteria and the censorship of an entire industry. It is this question that both incites and compels the reader forward.

Adin begins her book by vividly narrating the criminal acts of four boys who the media will inevitably label the Brooklyn Thrill-Kill Gang. Though not so much of a gang, the boys embarked on their nightly transgressions for the thrill, for the “adventure,” adventures beginning on the night of August 6, 1954, and peaking ten days later. Within this stretch, the boys went from loosely connected acquaintances to brothers bonded in delinquency: whipping local female pedestrians, harassing and battering the homeless—crimes climaxing in depravity with the murder of two vagrants.

Having provided the criminal shadow that eclipses the remainder of the book, Adin then proceeds to establish a brief historical account of the boys’ Jewish community of Williamsburg. Williamsburg in the 1950s was a community of change, and with change comes instability: at one time accommodating wealthy industrialists, then the first influx of Jewish migrants, and last the second wave of Jewish immigrants. It is in this setting of fleeing wealth paired with conflict between American-assimilated Jews and newly arrived conservative Jews that Bobby, Jerry, Mel, and Jack matured.

A brief biographical sketch of each boy offers the most revealing and paradoxical insights of Adin’s text. Jerry, age seventeen, and Bobby, age fifteen, both came from loving upper-middle-class families. They both lived comfortably, protected in secure environments with supportive parents. They were good students and active in Jewish-sponsored engagements, and it was in school and at these engagements that Jerry and Bobby became acquainted. How then were such astute boys raised in secure surroundings compelled to carry out cruel exploits and murder?

Mel—a muscular teen who came from a well-off family, was of average intellect, and had modest musical talent—was unlike Jerry and Bobby in that he possessed a more rebellious and malign personality: skipping school, smoking, whipping his sister, abusing smaller boys, and destroying property. It was his callous personality that perhaps led him into a friendship with Jack, and it was through Mel that Jerry and Bobby became friends with Jack.

Jack takes the forefront as the book’s dominant person of inquiry. In Jack’s biographical sketch, a reader sees a middle-class boy with an exceptional intellect go from a child of potential to a mentally ill teenager absorbed in a sense of superiority. After overcoming a neighborhood bully who had been tormenting him, Jack became captivated with ideas of power, domination, manipulation, elitism, control, and with horror comics, vampires, Nietzsche, and Hitler—even donning a Hitler-like mustache. Given these interests, it is no wonder that Jack led his three companions in a vigilante charge against those he felt were inferior: drunken vagrants and the destitute.

It is in the second half of the book that the question of deviant influence becomes more salient and more enigmatic. It did not take long before the boys were apprehended on August 17, 1954, and it did not take much effort for detectives to elicit a suitable confession from each boy. Adin here takes the reader through the collective anxieties of the era—which are due in large part to the traumatic imprint of World War II and the accelerated change of America: teenage delinquency on the rise, group fear of the “other,” Jewish assimilation into American culture, and mass media contaminating young minds and undermining parental nurturing. Oddly, it was comic books, among all other forms of entertainment, which became the scapegoated source of teenage misbehavior. After a lengthy psychological evaluation of Jack, the renowned Dr. Wertham intensified his already popular campaign [End...