Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (25 page)

These peculiar spectacles appeared to belong not only to a kind of she-male but one from upper-class, cultivated stock. Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes bolstered such an interpretation in a public statement:

We know this: that they were not purchased by a laboring man or a man who is employed with his hands. They are the type which a scholarly per- son, one who reads a great deal or was under considerable eye strain would wear. . . . Those who labor physically do not need such spectacles. I

am told it must have been a highly intellectual person who wore these glasses. A high strung, nervous temperament. Such a person would be likely to need such spectacles, and it is such a person we must look for.
15

Appropriately, these dark brown, mottled, horn-rimmed eyeglasses were clas- sified stylistically as “library.”
16
Hughes undoubtedly formulated his profile of the neurotic, bookish murderer based, in part, on the typewritten ransom let- ter received by Mr. and Mrs. Franks the day after their son disappeared. Crim- inologists observed that the literate quality of this text, including the uncom- mon spelling of “kidnaped,” as well as the handwriting on the envelope revealed the handiwork of an erudite individual.
17

The contrast between the virile male laborer, who works with his hands rather than with his mind and eyes, and the intellectual, a puzzlingly gender- less “person,” dovetails with antisemitic characterizations of Jewish men as ef- feminate.
18
In 1920 the renowned Jewish eugenist Abraham Myerson attrib- uted the lack of masculinity in Jewish men to the history of antisemitism. With the rise of Christianity “the Jew became excluded from the soil. . . .
In other words, he was excluded from all occupations in the pursuit of which the manual motor side of his nature might find expression
.”
19
As a result of such “so- cial heredity,” Jewish men staked a claim to and made a mark for themselves in the realm of scholarly and mercantile pursuits rather than in the wheat fields or on the athletic field. According to Elisha Friedman, these occupations

restricted the male Jew’s “muscular expression, stunted his motor mechanism, and afforded none of the relief from mental tension that is obtained through the exercise of large muscles of the trunk and of the limbs.”
20
A bespectacled, Jewish weakling only would have had strength enough to abduct a boy.

The explicitly homophobic and implicitly antisemitic hypotheses ad- vanced by law enforcement and the Chicago community regarding Franks’s killer(s) seemed justified after detectives traced ownership of the eyeglasses to Leopold.
21
Officers brought him in for questioning on May 30, and the press immediately launched a sensationalistic campaign in which they portrayed the young man as an effeminate, Jewish egghead who spent more time alone reading or with birds (he was an accomplished ornithologist) than carousing with other boys. One journalist confirmed that Leopold was “the type of man the oculist told the police would wear such glasses—a student, a scholar, a reader,” while another distinguished his interest in ornithology as an “eccen- tric fetish” that constituted “the only romance of his life.”
22
Despite his arcane hobby, commentators and investigators alike acknowledged Leopold to be “a superior mind” and an “intellectual giant.”
23
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago at eighteen with a bachelor’s degree in phi- losophy, won admission to Harvard Law School at nineteen, and displayed a familiarity with fifteen languages. While not as accomplished as his lover, Loeb nevertheless also distinguished himself as a wunderkind. Finishing high school at fourteen, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan at seventeen, making him the youngest graduate in that institution’s history. At the time of the kidnap-murder, he was enrolled in the graduate his- tory program at the University of Chicago.

The scholarly achievements of Leopold and Loeb gave credence to the long-standing belief, common among both Jews and gentiles, that Jewish men were intellectually superior to their Christian counterparts. In a series of 1916 articles in
Harper’s Weekly
devoted to Jews in America, editor Norman Hap- good asserted that the “one possession in which the Jew is everywhere superi- or to the rest of the population is education” and, as a result, “Jews take the best education wherever they can find it.”
24
In 1924 Jewish American psy- choanalyst Israel Wechsler reiterated this belief, noting that Jews possessed an unusual “eagerness to acquire an education at all costs.”
25
Statistics confirm Hapgood’s and Wechsler’s opinions. Jews accounted only for about 3.5 per- cent of the American population in 1917, but during the 1918–19 academic year, they comprised 20.4 percent of all undergraduates enrolled in the coun- try’s thirty most prestigious colleges and universities.
26

While such statistics were a source of great pride among Jews, in the eyes of antisemites, they merely confirmed the suspicion that Jews had colonized

the educational system and stacked the deck to their own advantage. In the late 1910s and 1920s, several American colleges and universities retaliated, re- structuring their admissions policies in order to limit the number of Jews on their campuses. Criteria for admission shifted from academic excellence to other more “gentlemanly” qualities like character, personality, leadership skills, and social adaptability.
27
In 1922 President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, who also was the vice president of the federal Immigration Restric- tion League, publicly supported the use of quotas to reduce the number of Jews at his university as well as the number of students who did not come from upper-class
wasp
families. Numerous students and faculty agreed, fear- ing a New Jerusalem in Harvard Yard. “The Jews tend to overrun the college, to spoil it for the native-born Anglo-Saxon young persons for whom it was built and whom it really wants,” one undergraduate complained.
28
Harvard never instituted such quotas, but President Lowell’s blatant antisemitism caused a storm of controversy and left an ineradicable mark on American higher education.
29

The exceptional intellectual abilities of Leopold and Loeb stupefied many. Others, however, construed these talents as indicative of their physi- cal and mental degeneracy, not to mention their moral perversity. Accord- ing to one Chicago journalist, in the wake of the youths’ arrest and confes- sion, “psycho-analysts are telling again the theory, enunciated years ago, that the end results of precocity are often perversion, at least mental and moral.” She went on to characterize Leopold as an individual who “ab- sorbed books and facts and theorems with a facility that became, almost a ‘mental deformity.’”
30
Reverend Billy Sunday, the professional baseball player turned evangelist, denounced the crime as the result of “precocious brains, salacious books, infidel minds,” while the noted Freudian Dr. A. A. Brill informed the
New York Times
that “the precocious are always abnor- mal.”
31
G. K. Chesterton, the English author, literary critic, and Roman Catholic convert, made a similar argument, declaring that the case was a slap in the face

for those who are always telling us that Utopia will be built upon the broad and solid foundation of Education. . . . No type could be more completely educated, in the sense used by modern educationalists, than these Jewish intellectuals [who] reached the other end of nowhere, the last point of nihilism and anarchy, much quicker because of the speeding up of their mental development by education. . . . If they had been ut- terly illiterate they might possibly have grown to a green old age in health and happiness.
32

The psychiatrist Leonard Blumgart suggested, at least in Leopold’s case, that his brilliance was the compensatory result of his homosexuality: “The over- development of Leopold’s intellectual life was a never-ending and ineffectu- al attempt to defend himself against his own homosexual perversion.”
33
Since the late nineteenth century, the American medical discourse of homo- sexuality routinely identified male homosexuals, like Jewish men, as intellec- tually gifted, an assessment that undoubtedly informed Blumgart’s evalua- tion of Leopold.
34

Certain actions taken by Leopold and Loeb before and after the kidnap- murder reveal that these two prodigies possessed remarkable common sense as well as extraordinary aptitude. As if aware that their crime would be per- ceived as the handiwork of homosexual Jews, they carefully planted clues to lead the police astray. Principal among these was the adoption of various aliases, all of which were unmistakably non-Jewish sounding. During pre- liminary preparations for the crime, they opened bank accounts as well as rented a hotel room and an automobile under the names “Morton D. Bal- lard” (Leopold) and “Louis Mason” (Loeb) and together signed the type- written ransom letter “George Johnson.” Furthermore, before disposing of Franks’s corpse, they poured hydrochloric acid over the face and genitals in an attempt to render it unidentifiable. Disfiguring Franks’s visage and sexu- al organs, Leopold and Loeb appear to have intended to efface the boy’s Jew- ish identity, an identity indelibly marked on his body in the form of his nose and his circumcised penis—the former being a metonymic marker for the latter. Such a gesture symbolically reenacted the ritual of circumcision and thus literalized the antisemitic notion that the practice was pathological and perverse.
35
Finally, the lovers invented an alibi both to distance themselves physically from the scene of the crime and to defend themselves from the ho- mosexual intrigue that instantly enveloped it. If apprehended, they agreed to tell their interlocutors that on the evening of the murder they dined togeth- er, picked up two female prostitutes, and drove around the city with them. Their plan, however, backfired.

Even though the police identified Leopold alone as a suspect in the crime, investigators also brought in Loeb for questioning, since he figured in the for- mer’s alibi. Nervous and overwhelmed, Leopold’s “companion,” as the press initially identified him, cracked under the pressure of the interrogation and forgot several details of their story.
36
Their cover blown, they soon separately confessed to the kidnap-murder of Franks, each blaming the other for strik- ing the fatal blow with the chisel. With the perpetrators finally apprehended, the press zealously competed in its treatment of the case, generating a stream of copy on every imaginable facet of the young men’s lives and personalities.

The American public rarely had witnessed such an orgy of media coverage. The first wave of articles and exposés relied heavily on the contents of the po- lice interrogation and the teens’ confessions, transcripts of which the media mysteriously acquired. During questioning, officers and prosecuting attorneys not only solicited a detailed account of the kidnap-murder from Leopold and Loeb but also tried to entrap them into admitting they were homosexual:

assistant state’s attorney john sbarbaro:
Did you ever commit any acts of perversion on either one of these boys [Loeb or Richard Rubel, a Jewish friend]?

leopold:
No, sir.

sbabaro:
Or they on you?

leopold:
No, sir.

sbabaro:
Are you positive of that?

leopold:
I am positive of that.

sbabaro:
There wasn’t any rumor around that you had?

leopold:
Yes, sir.
37

The rumor to which Sbabaro alluded surfaced when detectives searched Loeb’s house and retrieved a letter sent to him by Leopold after an argument. In it he advised his lover that they take measures to conceal their relationship because of a tidal wave of gossip initiated by one of Loeb’s fraternity brothers who, in the summer of 1921, discovered them in bed together. Leopold ex- plained: “Now, the word of advice. I do not wish to influence your position either way but I do want to warn you that in case you admit it advisable to discontinue friendship that in both of our interests extreme care must be used. Motifs [rumors] of falling out of cock suckers would be sure to be popular which is patently undesirable and which forms an irksome but unavoidable apparent bond between us.”
38
“Falling out of cock suckers” referred to Leopold’s concern that their friends and associates would interpret their dis- agreement as a homosexual lover’s quarrel.

Leopold’s fear that he and Loeb would be forced out of the closet proved to be well-founded. Through direct and oblique references, the prosecution and the press identified the young felons as both Jewish and homosexual. Of- ficer James Gortland testified that, during initial questioning, he suggested to Leopold that “people will probably think that this crime was probably due to early religious training.”
39
After police arrested and charged the teens with the kidnap-murder, the editors of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
announced that the importance of this case lay in the fact that “it concerns a particular people. The three principals in the tragedy are of one race. The Franks boy, Leopold

and Loeb are all Jews.”
40
Queried by journalists as to whether they could have convicted these “two erotic youths” without their confessions, assistant pros- ecuting attorneys boastfully replied in the affirmative, stating that, along with the hard evidence, “there was the suspicion that the murderers were perverts and Leopold and Loeb had been thought ‘queer’ by their classmates, and Leopold was a profound student of perversion.”
41
Furthermore, throughout the trial the prosecution repeatedly described Leopold and Loeb as “pervert- ed” and “abnormal,” two adjectives historically associated with both homo- sexuals and Jews during this period.
42

Antisemitic characterizations of Leopold received a new homophobic spin in the press when detectives discovered that his scholarly proclivities included the sexual and even the homosexual. In his confession Leopold re- vealed his familiarity with the work of Sappho, a Greek “homo-sexualist,” as he termed her, and admitted that he had read Havelock Ellis’s
Sexual Inversion
(1897), the most widely circulated English-language study of homosexuality at the time. He also expressed a great fondness for Pietro Aretino, the Italian Renaissance poet whose erotic verse he studied closely and considered translating, as well as Oscar Wilde, whom he identified as a “pervert” and whom the press described as one of his “heroes.”
43
After Wilde’s own trials in 1895 for “posing as a sodomite,” during which prose- cutors introduced his novel
The Portrait of Dorian Grey
(1891) as categoric proof of his sexual perversity, reading and writing literature became poten- tially homosexual acts.
44
However, as this case demonstrates, reading and writing scientific texts, reading and writing Leopold’s and Loeb’s bodies, never cast suspicion on either the reader or the author. Books and reading were undoubtedly Leopold’s first love, a passion ignited at a very early age. Proof of this rested on the tip of his Jewish nose in the form of his eye- glasses, which he acquired expressly in order to alleviate ocular strain caused by overconsumption of the written word. If one’s eyes are the window to one’s soul, then Leopold was a textbook case, a book entirely readable by its cover, even when inverted.