The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1994 by George F. Will

BY 1927, at age 28, Al Capone was among the most famous Americans, master of a complex service industry in a major metropolitan area where he was a power broker with considerable clout. As exercised by Capone, clout could be memorable. But by 1938 Capone was "the Wop with the Mop," swabbing the concrete corridors of Alcatraz, a syphilitic shell of his former self. In 1947, thoroughly demented, he died.

In 1970, at age 28, Huey Newton was the toast of "progressives" on both coasts, celebrated as the distillation of radicals' yearnings--an intellectual outlaw in politics. But sometime before dawn on August 22, 1989, Newton, by then just another past-his-prime thug, disregarded reports that some drug dealers with a business grievance were gunning for him. He went looking for some crack. At 6:10 A.M. his body was found on an Oakland sidewalk.

The lives of Capone and Newton are studies in the dynamics, and costs, of celebrity. Both careers had remarkably compressed trajectories, with steep plunges from apogees that in retrospect seem as much ridiculous as scandalous. Now the simultaneous publication of biographies of Capone and Newton is an occasion for this nation to learn, at long last, a cautionary lesson about the power of the modern engines of publicity to give grotesque twists to the public's perceptions.

Capone, as portrayed by Laurence Bergreen, was a cunning creature more or less sincerely convinced that his enterprises, principally bootlegging but also gambling and prostitution, produced jobs for deserving men and women and satisfied appetites that he did not create and which someone else would satisfy if he did not. The shootings and beatings and other unpleasantnesses were, he thought, just robust solutions to business disputes that, given the irrationality of the time, could not be submitted to more decorous arbitrations, as in courts. Capone seems to have convinced himself that his activities were legitimized by the illegitimacy of the Volstead Act and other laws that gave rise to the markets he served. Mr. Bergreen, who cannot be accused of being too censorious about his subject, suggests that but for Prohibition and other laws interfering with the satisfaction of consensual vices, Capone's entrepreneurial energies would have flowed productively in other directions.

Newton, on whom Hugh Pearson casts a cold eye, was a dismal and difficult-to-decipher tangle of delusion and cynicism. The Black Panthers organization was largely Newton's creation and instrument, and finally one of his many casualties. It began in 1966 as an organization for black self-defense against perceived--and real--police brutality. For years the Black Panthers preserved a patina of social responsibility by running breakfast programs for children. However, at some point, and not long into the life of the organization, Newton almost certainly stopped believing, or trying to believe, or even pretending to believe that he was a "civil-rights activist." Yet for years portions of the American Left persisted in regarding him as an idealist whose roughness--murders, rapes, and savage beatings--testified to his "authenticity" as a man of "the streets."

No matter how hard any sympathizers try to locate "root causes" of the careers of Capone and Newton, neither career was necessary. But both careers were symptomatic of national fevers of their eras.

Around the turn of the century, about the time the Capone family booked passage from Naples to New York, it was widely assumed that Italian immigrants, especially those from Naples and farther south, were permanent residents on what today is called the far left slope of the bell curve. Mr. Bergreen labors to wring extenuation from the "climate of anti-Italian prejudice" during Capone's formative years.

Mr. Pearson, a young African-American journalist, knows the economic distress and racial tensions of the Oakland where Newton grew up and the Black Panthers were born. After World War II Oakland sent police recruiters across the South seeking officers experienced in keeping blacks subservient. But Pearson's book, which is an act of considerable moral courage, is unblinking in its refusal to give criminality and other pathologies the dignity of politics.

Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899 and was raised near the stench and disease of the Gowanus Canal. He attended schools where fistfights between male students and female teachers were not uncommon. One such fight between the 14-year-old Al and his teacher ended his schooling. He became a minor racketeer, and moved to Chicago in 1921. By then his adolescent encounters with prostitutes had given him syphilis. After years of latency (it was not discovered until a prison examination in the 1930s) it attacked his brain, distorting his personality, which was not nice to begin with. Eventually it produced dementia. No one can say how much Capone's mood swings, from ebullience to the sort of rage that resulted in his bludgeoning to death with baseball bats three business associates at a dinner party, resulted from neurosyphilis. Or how much his personality was shaped by the cocaine that produced his perforated septum, which also was discovered in a prison examination. Bergreen speculates that because tertiary syphilis is associated with megalomania, it was indispensable to Capone's criminal-commercial success: "The Capone we remember was the creation of a disease that had magnified his personality. Syphilis made Al Capone larger than life."