Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (27 page)

My clients are boys. . . . There is not an act in all this horrible tragedy that was not the act of a child, the act of a child wandering around in the morning of life, moved by the new feelings of a boy, moved by the un- controlled impulses which his teaching was not strong enough to take care of, moved by the dreams and the hallucinations which haunt the brain of a child.
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In this game of courtroom psychology, Darrow tried to temper the pretrial perception of Leopold and Loeb as ruthless, Nietzschean masterminds by de- picting them as helpless, naive minors who did not deserve the death penal- ty. His relentless infantalization of the teens, however, also resonated with the homophobic psychoanalytic conception of male homosexuality as arrested de- velopment. In the Freudian trajectory every little boy passes
through
homo- sexuality on his merry way to heterosexuality, and those who miss the boat sink into the abyss of sexual perversity. Even non-Freudians, like Havelock Ellis, argued that arrested development was foundational to male homosexu- ality: “If we are justified in believing that there is a tendency for inverted per- sons [homosexuals] to be somewhat arrested in development, approaching the child type, we may connect this fact with the sexual precocity sometimes marked in inverts, for precocity is commonly accompanied by rapid arrest in development.”
77
Correspondingly, since Jews were also thought to suffer from

precocity, and many Christians understood Christianity to be the fulfillment of Judaism, Jews were assumed to be immature and childlike. Wechsler theo- rized the propensity for neurosis among Jews in these evolutionary terms:

It has been said that phylogenetically every race passes through the in- fantile stage of phantasy before it enters the adult one, when the sense of reality is developed. Neurosis is the by-product of one of the stages of racial development. With the race, as with the individual, the possibility of neurosis is the inevitable accompaniment of the progress from child- hood through adolescence to maturity.
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With such a neurotic nature, the Jewish “race” appeared permanently moored in the stages of physical and mental development endemic to childhood. Dar- row’s infantalization of “Babe” Leopold and “Dickie” Loeb relied on a similar- ly skewed syllogistic logic in which homosexuality was to heterosexuality not only as childhood was to adulthood but also as Judaism was to Christianity.

The expert testimony offered by the alienists for the defense corroborat- ed Darrow’s portrait of the youths as stuck in childhood. Both Leopold and Loeb allegedly suffered from an “infantile level of development,” with mental ages equal to those of children between four and seven years old.
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Dr. Harold Hulbert asserted that Loeb’s psychological maturation actually had regressed: “This arrested maturity has retrogressed recently and the future probable de- terioration of the personality can only be estimated.”
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Leopold was small and sickly as a youngster, and his petite stature accompanied him into adulthood. Loeb began puberty late. At the age of eighteen he still possessed three baby teeth and a prepubescent voice.
81
All these childlike abnormalities led Dr. William A. White, president of the American Psychiatric Association, to tes- tify for the defense that “the arrest of their affective development would tend in both instances to keep them at a level which would result in manifestations of a more or less homo-sexual character.”
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Darrow built his defense mainly upon a medical report prepared by Dr. Hulbert and Dr. Karl M. Bowman, chief medical officer of the Boston Psy- chopathic Hospital and a specialist in endocrinology, that chronicled the psy- chological and physical development of Leopold and Loeb. Eighty thousand words long, this report included the most intimate details regarding every- thing from their family histories, educational backgrounds, and bodily meas- urements to their sexual histories, personal fantasies, and metabolic func- tions. Although intended to humanize the youths and portray them as pitiful victims of the depraved modern world, the infamous Hulbert-Bowman re- port, as it became known, also represented Leopold and Loeb as freaks of

nature, riddled with a host of emotional and physical maladies most of which happened to be associated with Jewish men and male homosexuals. For example, the doctors reported that Leopold displayed effeminate facial expressions, cross-dressed at the age of one, and spent two years at an all-girl elementary school. At nine he had a tonsillectomy that he believed miracu- lously transformed him from a girl into a boy. A swarthy physical coward with an abundance of body hair, Leopold supposedly described himself to Hulbert and Bowman as a “terrific neurasthenic in a nervous tantrum.”
83
At twelve his female governess began to molest him sexually, introducing her charge to a host of perverse practices and ideas to which he became addict- ed. Never attracted to the opposite sex, he had his first homosexual experi- ence at thirteen, began to masturbate chronically at fourteen, and soon after developed an inferiority complex because he was circumcised, for which he compensated with his bookishness. Hulbert and Bowman diagnosed Leopold with neurocirculatory asthenia, acidosis, an ossified pineal gland, overactive thyroid and pituitary glands, and dementia praecox (schizophre- nia), a mental disorder commonly ascribed to both Jewish men and male ho- mosexuals.
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Similarly, they described Loeb as a weak and sickly child who became increasingly effeminate because of his overprotective female nanny, who refused to allow him to play with other boys. In his solitude he con- structed an elaborate fantasy life fueled by the many detective stories he sur- reptitiously consumed, texts that doctors later blamed for his interest in crime. Loeb experienced fainting spells, indulged in self-pity, and contracted gonorrhea at fifteen from a loose woman. His dysfunctional endocrine gland resulted in a variety of psychological disorders, including excessive intelli- gence, naive judgment, selfishness, mimicry, compulsiveness, and general immorality.
85
Of a slightly neurotic disposition, Loeb also exhibited muscle twitches in his face and lips.
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In their attempt to identify and catalogue the surplus of physical and psychological afflictions that allegedly plagued Leopold and Loeb, Hulbert and Bowman treated the youths as virtual guinea pigs. Their report verified, beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard medical opinion of their day that Jews, homosexuals, and especially Jewish homosex- uals were pathologically disease-ridden beings whose presence in modern so- ciety threatened the health and welfare of the general community.

Of all the salacious details contained in the Hulbert-Bowman report, those surrounding Leopold’s and Loeb’s sexual relationship captivated the court and the public most. Before the trial general consensus identified Leopold—the true Jew and the real homosexual—as the evil instigator who coerced Loeb into performing both homosexual and criminal acts. To the shock of many, however, Hulbert and Bowman discovered that Loeb actually

masterminded the kidnap-murder. Furthermore, the doctors reported that the two youths entered into a pact with one another when they were fourteen and fifteen years old, the terms of which dictated that Loeb indulge Leopold sexually as long as the latter reciprocated and committed felonies with the for- mer. Enchanted by Loeb’s beauty, brawn, and brilliance, Leopold accepted this arrangement in the hope of fulfilling a recurring sadomasochistic fantasy in which he played the role of a loyal and submissive slave who uncondition- ally followed the orders of his master-king. Testifying for the defense, Dr. William Healy, an expert on juvenile psychopathology, informed the judge in camera that, in accordance with their pact, Leopold and Loeb “experimented with mouth perversions” and engaged in intercrural sexual intercourse during which Loeb, allegedly disgusted by Leopold’s homosexual desires, pretended to be drunk.
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Upholding his end of their sexual contract for four full years, Loeb’s capacity for revulsion knew no bounds.

State’s Attorney Crowe capitalized upon the defense’s revelations regard- ing Leopold’s and Loeb’s “compact” in order to establish a homosexual mo- tive for the kidnap-murder. He grilled Healy in cross-examination, pressuring him to admit publicly that the pact was a homosexual one. Healy, however, refused and instead described Leopold’s and Loeb’s sexual agreement as “childish” and “absurd” rather than perverse or pathological.
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Bowing to Freud, he argued that such an accord was a “natural” part of normal child- hood psychosexual development. When Dr. Hulbert took the stand, he also downplayed the homosexual aspect of the pact, claiming that Leopold and Loeb entered into it out of desperation rather than true love:

Loeb did not crave the companionship of Leopold, nor did he respect him thoroughly. . . . Leopold did not like the faults, the criminalities of Loeb, but he did need someone in his life to carry out his king-slave phantasy. . . . The ideas that each proposed to the other were repulsive. Their friendship was not based so much on desire as need, they being what they were.
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Darrow, in his dazzling final plea before the court, subtly contradicted the testimony of his expert witnesses and reworked Crowe’s allegations of a ho- mosexual plot: “Tell me, was this compact the act of normal boys, of boys who think and feel as boys should—boys who have the thoughts and emo- tions and physical life that boys should have? There is nothing in all of it that corresponds with normal life. There is a weird, strange, unnatural disease in all of it which is responsible for this deed.”
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In this stunningly choreo- graphed maneuver, Darrow effectively assented to the boys’ “abnormality,”

even as he studiously avoided using the term
homosexual.
Deploying such strategic homophobia, Darrow beat Crowe at his own game.

The courtroom conflict between the prosecution and the defense was, in effect, a kind of collaboration in which both factions drew on homophobic and antisemitic rhetoric to bolster their arguments. In his final decision Judge Caverly sided with Darrow and agreed that while Leopold and Loeb were not legally insane they were “mentally diseased” and, therefore, deserved to be in- carcerated and not executed. Unlike Crowe, who crooned, “No one has been able to give this mental disease a name,” Judge Caverly declared, “They have been shown in essential respects to be abnormal; had they been normal they would not have committed the crime.”
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Through a spectacular set of inter- polations, the judge confirmed that the psychological malady that dared not speak its name but nonetheless plagued Leopold and Loeb was, in fact, Jew- ish homosexuality.

To be sure, Leopold and Loeb were far from “normal.” They brutally murdered a teenage boy. However, in a cultural milieu that, as Daniel Boyarin has argued, “produced a perfect and synergistic match between homophobia and anti-Semitism,” normalcy would have remained forever elusive for these two young men.
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Through the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century two discourses of difference—homosexuality and Jewishness—them- selves modeled after and indebted to that of female sexual difference, inflect- ed, reflected, and deflected one another in powerful and profound ways. The Leopold and Loeb case remains a pivotal moment in the modern history of Jews, homosexuals, and homosexual Jews because it witnessed the explicit and explosive collapse of homophobia into antisemitism and vice versa, proving, once and for all, that the distance between the positions “homosexual” and “Jew” might be traversed in a heartbeat.

Notes

A shorter version of this paper was presented at the 1993 American Studies Association Annual Meeting. I am indebted to Jeffrey Melnick, David Getsy, Ann Pellegrini, and R. Russell May- lone, curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, for their support and assistance during the research and writing of the essay.

1. In the words of one journalist: “In that conspiracy and plot, devoid of every vestige of impulsiveness, every mitigating grace of expediency or passion, the talents of these two combined in what authorities of the law call the most cold-blooded and motiveless crime that has ever found mention in the pages of records or of history.” See “Genius Used for Six Months in Planning Cruel Slaying,”
   Chicago Herald and Examiner
   , 1 June 1924, p. 1. On the incompatibiliy of Jewish youth and criminality, see Harold Berman, “Criminality Among Jewish Youth,”
   Open Court
   , vol. 38, no. 1 (January 1924), pp. 47–53.
   

2. On the role of the press before and during the trial as well as the revival of interest in the case after World War II, see Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,”
   Journal of American History
   , vol. 80 (De- cember 1993), pp. 919–51. On the homoerotic aspects of Hitchcock’s
   Rope
   , see D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,”
   Representations
   , vol. 32 (Fall 1990), pp. 114–32. For a factual account of the case, see Maureen McKernan,
   The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb
   (Chicago: Plymouth Court, 1924). For general overviews of the case, see Maurycy Urstein,
   Leopold and Loeb: A Psychiatric-Psychological Study
   (New York: Lecouver, 1924); Alvin V. Sellers,
   The Loeb-Leopold Case with Excerpts from the Evidence of the Alienists and Including the Arguments to the Court by Counsel for the People and the Defense
   (Brunswick, Ga.: Clas- sic, 1926); Francis X. Busch,
   Prisoners at the Bar
   (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), pp. 145–99; and Hal Higdon,
   The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case
   (New York: Putnam, 1975). For his personal recollections as the defense lawyer, see Clarence Darrow,
   The Story of My Life
   (New York: Scribner’s, 1932).
   

3. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event,” pp. 926, n. 15, p. 940.
   

4. Fass’s reading of the archive also directly contradicts Leopold’s own recollections: “Whenever the subject matter was such as could not, in good taste, be discussed openly, opposing counsel and the court reporters gathered around the witness stand and the psy- chiatrist witness testified in tones audible only to them and to the Judge. The testimony, when transcribed by the court reporters at the end of each session, was made freely avail- able to the press and to other interested parties. There was nothing secret about it; it was simply not given in audible form in open court.” See Nathan Leopold Jr.,
   Life Plus 99 Years
   (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 76. Even though the press did not print the specifics of this “whispered testimony,” they made its homosexual content plainly clear to readers. See, for example, Leonard Blumgart, “The New Psychology and the Franks Case,”
   Nation
   , vol. 119, no. 3088, 10 September 1924, pp. 261–62; “The Loeb-Leopold Murder of Franks in Chicago, May 21, 1924,”
   Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology
   , vol. 15, no. 3 (November 1924), p. 347; Genevieve Forbes, “They Slew for a Laboratory Test in Emotion,”
   Chicago Sunday Tribune
   , 1 June 1924, part 1, p. 3; “Loeb ‘Master’ of Leopold Under Solemn Pact Made; Sex Inferiority Is Factor,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 28 July 1924, pp. 1–2; Genevieve Forbes, “Both Youths Mentally ‘Off,’ Alienist Says,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 5 August 1924, pp. 1–2; “Dr. Sanger Brown’s Re- port on Two Slayers,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 6 August 1924, p. 2; “Word by Word En- counter of State, Defense,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 6 August 1924, p. 3; Robert M. Lee, “Crowe Smashes at Darrow: Calls Darrow Arch Lawyer of Murderers; Hanging Fits Crime, He Says,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 27 August 1924, pp. 1–2; and Orville Dwyer, “Slayers’ Trial Ends Today: ‘Leopold, Loeb Don’t Deserve Mercy’—Crowe,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 28 August 1924, pp. 1–2.
   

5. James Doherty, “Ransom Motive in Franks Case: Chief Hughes, Wolff Agrees; Oth- ers Seek Perverts,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 24 May 1924, p. 1.
   

6. “Pursue Fugitive as Slayer of Boy,”
   New York Times
   , 27 May 1924, p. 23.
   

7. “Franks Theory from Forty States,”
   Chicago Herald and Examiner
   , 31 May 1924, p. 2.
   

8. “Robert Franks Is Victim of Mystery Death: Question Three of His Instructors,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 23 May 1924, pp. 1–2. Also see “Police Delve Into Past of Boy’s Teachers,”
   Chicago Sunday Tribune
   , 25 May 1924, part 1, p. 2; and “Harvard School Not Hurt by Franks Case, Principal Says,”
   Chicago Daily Tribune
   , 28 May 1924, p. 2. Detectives detained Mott Kirk Mitchell, the assistant principal and an English instructor, for several
   

   days while they looked into reports regarding his homosexuality. As if to deflect attention away from himself, Leopold allegedly fanned the flames of such rumors when he heard Mitchell had been taken into custody. Ernst W. Puttkammer, one of Leopold’s professors at the University of Chicago, testified that the young man admitted his knowledge “of in- stances in which Mr. Mitchell had solicited boys, presumably boys in the school, to im- proper sexual relations with him. . . . And I said, ‘Are you sure of that?’ And he said, ‘Yes; he made that sort of a proposition to my brother; that is straight enough, isn’t it. . . . I would like to see them get that fellow.’” See
   Leopold-Loeb Trial Transcript
   , Leopold-Loeb Collec- tion, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern Universi- ty, box 19, vol. 1, pp. 443–45.
   

9. Leopold-Loeb Trial Transcript
   , vol. 1, p. 95. According to a jotting written by an unidentified hand in the margin of the trial transcript, “Leopold laughed” when the coro- ner described the condition of Franks’s rectum.
   

10. “The Loeb-Loepold Case: A Symposium of Comments from the Legal Profession,”
    Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology
    , vol. 15, no. 3 (Novem- ber 1924), p. 397.
    

11. “Queries Race, Theories Based on Boy Murder: Detectives Puzzle Over Many Clews,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 24 May 1924, p. 2.
    

12. Paul Johnson,
    A History of the Jews
    (London: Weindenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), pp. 208–11.
    

13. Paul Augsburg, “Jacob Franks Thinks Slayers of Son Insane,”
    Chicago Sunday Tri- bune
    , 1 June 1924, part 1, p. 4. For a critique of Christian Science and its popularity among certain Jews, see A. A. Brill, “The Adjustment of the Jew to the American Envi- ronment,”
    Mental Hygiene
    , vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1918), p. 227.
    

14. “Glasses Near Body Not Such as Man Wears: Small Lenses and Frames, Opticians Say,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 24 May 1924, p. 2. A photograph of the spectacles along with a complete physical description appeared in the
    Chicago Sunday Tribune
    , 25 May 1924, part 1, p. 2, beneath the headline “Whose Spectacles Are These?”
    

15. “Try to See Franks Slayer Through His Spectacles,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 29 May 1924, p. 3.
    

16. “How Eyeglasses Throw New Light on Franks’ Case,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 30 May 1924, p. 1.
    

17. “Boy Killed as Father Prepares to Pay Ransom,”
    Chicago Herald and Examiner
    , 23 May 1924, p. 2; and “Ransom Letter and Spectacles Are Twin Clews,”
    Chicago Daily Tri- bune
    , 31 May 1924, p. 2. On the handwriting on the envelope of the ransom note, see “Kidnapers’ Ransom Letter Shows Hand of Expert Letterer,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 24 May 1924, p. 2. The original ransom letter is part of the Harold S. Hulbert Papers, North- western University Archives, Northwestern University, series 55/23, box 2, folder 8.
    

18. Sander L. Gilman,
    Freud, Race, and Gender
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 36–48, 132–68, demonstrates that, at the turn of the century, “Jew” and “ho- mosexual” were virtually synonymous and interchangeable categories of social and sexual difference. In most of the European and American discourses devoted to questions of Jew- ish gender and sexuality during this period, whether popular or professional in scope, “Jew” signified uniquely the Jewish
    male
    . The Jewess remained conspicuously absent from these debates. On the interpretive and theoretical issues at stake in such an occlusion, see Ann Pellegrini,
    Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race
    (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 18–19.
    

19. Abraham Myerson, “The ‘Nervousness’ of the Jew,”
    Mental Hygiene
    , vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1920), p. 67.
    

20. Elisha M. Friedman, “The Jewish Mind in the Making: A Layman’s Essay on Men- tal Hygiene,”
    Mental Hygiene
    , vol. 7, no. 2 (April 1923), pp. 352–53. Otto Weininger was far less sympathetic to the plight of Jewish men, even though he himself was both Jewish and homosexual. He alleged that Jewish masculinity was a contradiction in terms and at- tempted to demonstrate this by sketching what he perceived to be the psychobiological ho- mologies between women and Jewish men: “So many points that become obvious in dis- secting woman reappear in the Jew.” He further maintained that “Judaism is saturated with femininity. . . . The most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan.” See Otto Weininger,
    Sex and Character
    (New York: Putnam’s, 1906), p. 306. Drawing on late nineteenth-century Western scientific and popular discourse, Weininger outlined the very same parallels between male homosexuals and women. Riddled with self-hatred and mi- sogyny, Weininger’s ideas nonetheless had an unprecedented impact during the opening decades of the twentieth century and inspired the thinking of Freud and many of his fol- lowers, including that of Carl Jung. See Gilman,
    Freud, Race, and Gender
    , pp. 31–32, 77–80; and
    Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger
    , eds. Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
    

21. A rare hinge mechanism enabled police to trace the glasses to Leopold who pur- chased them from the Almer Coe Company in Chicago. See “Glasses Made Here Trapped Leopold,”
    New York Times
    , 3 June 1924, p. 3. The Almer Coe Company advertised daily in Chicago newspapers. In an uncanny foreshadowing of the antisemitism and homopho- bia that surfaced during the trial, an advertisement appeared in the May 28 edition of the
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    on the same page as reports about the Franks murder. This ad dis- plays a pair of eyeglasses below which the word “discrimination” looms large. While the fine print discusses the importance of discrimination in choosing an optician, in the con- text of the prosecution, this headline takes on a whole different resonance.
    

22. “In Fiction the ‘Clew’ Solves All; Not So Here,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 31 May 1924, p. 2; and “Genius Used for Six Months in Planning Cruel Slaying,” p. 1.
    

23. Maurine Watkins, “Big Experience Either Way, Is Nathan’s View,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 31 May 1924, p. 3; and Genevieve Forbes, “Old Fashioned Discipline Need of Leopold Jr.,”
    Chicago Daily Tribune
    , 2 June 1924, p. 3.
    

24. Norman Hapgood, “Schools, Colleges and Jews,”
    Harper’s Weekly
    , vol. 62, no. 3083, 22 January 1916, p. 77; and Norman Hapgood, “How Should Jews Be Treated?”
    Harper’s Weekly
    , vol. 62, no. 3084, 29 January 1916, p. 106.
    

25. Israel S. Wechsler, “Nervousness and the Jew: An Inquiry Into Racial Psychology,”
    

    Menorah Journal
    , vol. 10, no. 2 (April-May 1924), p. 123.