Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (26 page)

Numerous medical specialists and social commentators believed that Leopold and Loeb could be read like books and argued that their perversions manifested themselves on the surface of their bodies. Such somatic explana- tions of criminality were steeped in the pseudoscientific traditions of phrenol- ogy and physiognomy, two taxonomic systems largely responsible for the cod- ification of both Jewish and homosexual difference. Photographs and drawings of Leopold’s and Loeb’s physiognomies peppered Chicago newspa- pers, and various medical analysts offered expert interpretations of these im- ages (figure 2). After reviewing a dozen such photographs, veteran phrenolo-

Figure 2.
Phrenological diagrams of Leopold’s and Loeb’s heads reproduced in the
Chicago Daily Tribune,
5 June 1924, p. 2. As the accompanying article explains, the newspaper created these drawings based on an examination of a dozen photographs of the criminals by Dr. James

1. Fitzgerald, “expert in character analysis,” whose “thirty-five years’ training have given him a reputation for phrenological deduction.”
   

   gist Dr. James M. Fitzgerald, for example, concluded that “Leopold is the male, Loeb is the female, when it comes to a comparison of the temperaments of these two.”
   45
   He further observed that Leopold exhibited a curved skull ex- emplifying an excessive ego as well as moral and religious bankruptcy, a pro- truding “sex center” revealing how “his sex feelings predominate in his social ideals,” a large nose indicative of aggressiveness, sensuous lips, and the ears of someone with a dynamic personality.
   46
   Charles A. Bonniwell, a “nationally known psycho-analyst,” deduced that Loeb possessed a head displaying a “fine balance between a feminine and masculine type,” heavy eyebrows signifying a passionate nature, a full mouth, eyes revealing a selfish personality, and puffy eyelids suggestive of promiscuity.
   47
   The popularity of such studies led the prosecution to consider introducing into evidence numerous photographs
   

   taken of the youths at the time of their confessions in order to “prove murder proclivities through the character revealed in physiognomies.”
   48
   

   In nearly all the pretrial media coverage, investigators and journalists alike assumed that Leopold was the controlling “mastermind” behind the kidnap- murder and Loeb was his passive coconspirator, a “suggestible type” not en- tirely responsible for his actions. “I guess I yessed Babe a lot,” Loeb confessed to a reporter.
   49
   Tall, debonair, and strikingly handsome, Loeb was extremely popular with young women, many of whom pledged their allegiance to him upon his arrest and flocked to the courthouse to catch a glimpse of him dur- ing the hearing. In a profound moment of homophobic blockage, Chicagoans appeared unable to comprehend the fact that Loeb was Leopold’s lover and presumed instead that the latter must have lured the former into committing homosexual acts, just as he had persuaded him to become his accomplice. Dr. Sanger Brown, a Chicago psychiatrist who allegedly examined the youths, de- termined that while Loeb suffered from “moral insanity” Leopold was the vic- tim of “abnormal sexuality.”
   50
   Perhaps hoping to receive a lighter sentence, Loeb willingly collaborated in the characterization of his best friend as the true homosexual. He not only claimed to be “disgusted” by their sexual rela- tionship but flaunted his heterosexuality in front of journalists: “Girls? Sure I like girls. I was out with a girl on Friday night after the affair [the kidnap- murder] and with another on Sunday night.”
   51
   Alongside reports addressing the teens’ homosexuality, numerous other articles chronicled Loeb’s apparent heterosexual exploits. “It is an easy thing to locate girls who knew ‘Dickie,’” one female pundit divulged, “but girls who were fond of Nathan Leopold, girls who admit that they have been half in love with ‘Babe’ Leopold, are not so easy to find. Dick’s career with the girls began when he was 13 years old.”
   52
   Lorraine Nathan, who identified herself as Loeb’s fiancée, publicly announced that she was prepared to testify on behalf of her future husband in order to allay rumors that he was homosexual.
   53
   Did the Chicago community refuse to accept Loeb as a real homosexual because, in fact, he was not a real Jew, having been born of a Catholic mother? By contrast, with his dark complex- ion, small stature, hooded eyes, large nose, thick hair, and prominent lips, Leopold was unmistakably Semitic and, therefore, a natural born homosexu- al. In the words of Edward Stevenson, an American gay man who wrote a his- tory of homosexuality in 1908: “A crude saying among the observers of ura- nianism [homosexuality] is ‘Show me a Jew and you show me an Uranian’ [male homosexual].”
   54
   

   For certain Jewish Americans, however, the homosexuality of Leopold and Loeb proved
   not
   that they were too Jewish but rather that they were not Jewish enough. In an article originally published in the
   Jewish Courier
   and
   

   subsequently reprinted in the
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , Dr. S. M. Melamed blamed Christian America for the kidnap-murder of Franks: “The truth is that these two Jewish boys were not under the influence of Judaism, and they are not Jewish products, and the Jewish people has no moral control over them.”
   55
   Moreover, he insinuated that homosexuality itself was a Christian phenomenon, the perverse effects of which Leopold and Loeb would have es- caped if they had been good Jews and refused to assimilate:
   

   If the parents of these two boys had given the children a Jewish educa- tion, . . . if they had interested themselves in Jewish problems, . . . if they had been consciously Jewish with Jewish souls, they would certainly not have devoted their entire time to “pleasure and good times.” . . . You can’t convince me that if these two capable Jewish boys had interested them- selves in Jewish problems . . . that they would have surrendered them- selves to wild and unnatural passions.
   56
   

   Melamed also judged Leopold and Loeb to be lapsed Jews because they came from wealthy families: “The two sons of the Jewish millionaires, who grew up without any ideals in life—moral ‘do nothings’—are only a sad example of a life of moral anarchy. I always feared for the rich Jews who had no Jewish ideals.”
   57
   Money and greed blinded the teens to the importance of tradition- al, Jewish family values. They seemed to confirm Melamed’s hypothesis when they admitted to investigators that, prior to choosing Franks as their victim, they contemplated kidnapping their fathers, Leopold’s younger brother, Ar- mand “Billie” Deutsch—another neighborhood youth—and their close friend Richard Rubel, all of whom were Jewish.
   58
   

   During the 1920s many non-Jewish Americans construed moneymaking to be a new religion among immigrant Jews; it appeared to offer a surefire means by which to assimilate and simultaneously accumulate power and prestige. The public preoccupation with the extraordinary wealth of the Leopold and Loeb families should be understood within this historical framework. In article after article the press trumpeted the youths as sons of Jewish mercantile millionaires, eventually forcing Darrow to admit: “If we fail in this defense it will not be for lack of money. It will be on account of money. Money has been the most serious handicap that we have met. There are times when poverty is fortunate.”
   59
   Following their arrest, the
   Chicago Sunday Tribune
   published twin articles, side by side, in which journalists traced the genealogy of these two Jewish families’ fortunes, the combined value of which was estimated to be between fifteen and twenty-five million dollars.
   60
   Listing the German-Jewish forebears of both families along with
   

   their various intermarriages to members of other rich Chicago Jewish fami- lies, journalists concluded that the Leopold and Loeb clans formed part of an elite and somewhat mysterious “Jewish ‘400.’”
   61
   In a comparable com- mentary, another reporter asserted that “Nathan Leopold, Jr., is related to every branch of a little royalty of wealth which Chicago has long recog- nized.”
   62
   While politely portraying the Leopold and Loeb families as impe- rial households, this writer insinuated that the business empires controlled by both made them an aristocracy of an entirely different patrimony; that is to say, a Jewish mafia.
   

   From the moment police arrested and charged Leopold and Loeb, anxi- eties ran high that their families would flex their financial muscle and enlist the aid of the Jewish mafia in order to save the teens from the gallows. The appointment of Benjamin Bachrach and Walter Bachrach, Loeb’s cousins, as part of the defense team appeared to corroborate the existence of such a plot. An attaché from the state’s attorney’s office summarized the prosecution’s fear of a Jewish conspiracy to thwart justice when he conceded that “behind the complacent confessing of Nathan and Richard . . . there lies their family mil- lions.”
   63
   The office of the state’s attorney explained the logic behind the re- puted scheme: “If your father had $10,000,000 he’d spend at least
   

   $5,000,000 to prevent your being hanged . . . and we suppose it will be mil- lions versus the death penalty.”
   64
   Outlandish comments attributed to Leopold further exacerbated this theory. The
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   affirmed that “young Leopold, son of the prominent manufacturer, is sure money can do anything. . . . ‘You know,’ he said [to investigators], ‘we’ve got a lot of dough, I don’t know how many millions. How about fixing this thing up by getting to a few of the jurors?’”
   65
   The suspicion that Jewish wealth and influence would be dispensed to procure Leopold’s and Loeb’s freedom drove their fa- thers to issue a joint statement in which they assured the public that “in no event will the families of the accused boys use money in any attempt to de- feat justice.”
   66
   The Leopold and Loeb case presented a point of contact in a larger debate waged throughout the early decades of the twentieth century concerning alleged Jewish dominance in the American business world as well as the class bias of the criminal justice system.
   67
   

   With so much negative and sensational pretrial publicity, the defense team realized that their chances of winning a full acquittal for Leopold and Loeb were extremely slim. The cavalier manner in which both youths con- fessed to the crime and the subsequent assistance they provided law enforce- ment in collecting evidence also made it seem unlikely that the defense could prove them guilty by reason of insanity. In a surprise maneuver, Darrow en- tered a plea of guilty, circumventing a jury trial as well as the legal quagmire
   

   of an insanity defense. Left to argue for a lesser sentence before the judge, the defense team engaged the expert services of physicians and psychiatrists, col- lectively known as alienists, in order to demonstrate that while their clients were not legally insane they did suffer from the far more ambiguous mental illness of “abnormality,” in which unconscious processes and childhood expe- riences determined an individual’s adult actions. These doctors included three renowned psychiatrists—referred to by State’s Attorney Crowe as “The Three Wise Men from the East”—a local neuropsychiatrist, and two well-known physicians. The prosecution quickly followed suit, enlisting four other distin- guished health professionals as expert witnesses.
   

   This widely publicized roster of eminent medical men promised to trans- form the criminal proceedings, in the words of one Chicago reporter, into “a battle of alienists rather than a battle of lawyers.”
   68
   In fact, the emphasis placed on the testimony of the ten medical specialists, both on the witness stand and in the press, as well as the individual prestige of those involved in the case gave psychiatry and its offshoot, psychoanalysis, a popular visibility previously unparalleled in American culture.
   69
   The press recycled the daily doses of abnormal psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis dispensed in the courtroom in an attempt to increase readership as well as to sate the public’s fascination with the trial. In their competition to feed the frenzy kindled by the hearings, fierce rivalries broke out among several newspapers. One in- volved Sigmund Freud. The publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, owner of the
   Chicago Herald and Examiner,
   tried to persuade Freud to cross the Atlantic to analyze Leopold and Loeb and testify at their trial. Despite an offer of $500,000 and a chartered ship to transport him, the father of psy- choanalysis respectfully declined the invitation, claiming he was too ill with cancer to travel.
   70
   Robert R. McCormick, editor of the
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , made a similar counteroffer to Freud, which he also refused.
   71
   

   During the trial, State’s Attorney Crowe capitalized on the public enmity harbored against the Leopold and Loeb families for their excessive wealth. He argued before the court that two main motives fueled the kidnap-murder of Bobby Franks, homosexual desire and a desire for money. “Money is the mo- tive in this case. . . . All through this case it is money, money, money.”
   72
   Such rationale seemed somewhat counterintuitive, especially considering that both Leopold and Loeb received sizable allowances and possessed hefty bank ac- counts. Crowe, however, characterized the young men as money-grubbing Jews whose family riches warped their sense of reality and aroused in them an insatiable lust for financial gain. He discovered supporting evidence for his theory in Leopold’s admission that he considered becoming a clever “financial criminal” after finishing law school.
   73
   Further clues, surfacing in Loeb’s bank
   

   statements, documented a series of mysterious deposits that Crowe tried to argue were the booty from several petty robberies committed by the young man prior to the kidnap-murder. He concluded that Leopold must have been aware of these criminal infractions and used this knowledge to blackmail Loeb into submitting sexually to his “vile and unnatural practices.”
   74
   Finally, the prosecution maintained that Leopold planned to use his share of the ran- som in order to indulge his homosexual lust: “If the glasses had never been found, if the State’s Attorney had not fastened the crime upon these two de- fendants, Nathan Leopold would be in Paris or some other of the gay capitals of Europe, indulging his unnatural lust with the $5,000 he had wrung from Jacob Franks.”
   75
   

   In his counterassault on Crowe’s portrayal of Leopold and Loeb as greedy Jewish homosexuals, Darrow shrewdly invoked a host of antisemitic and ho- mophobic stereotypes of his own, all of which, ironically, worked to his clients’ advantage. Throughout the course of the trial, he never called Leopold and Loeb by their given names. Despite the fact that both young men were in their late teens, Darrow continually referred to them in the diminutive as “Babe” Leopold and “Dickie” Loeb or generically as “boys” and “children”: