The Truth Machine (9 page)

Narrative richness was part of the explanation why the criminal anthropologists became celebrated by Italian society.
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Criminological texts were composed of anecdotes and also of stories culled from literature, philosophy,
and linguistics, as well as facts from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Lombroso was said to have observed that a vegetarian diet was less conducive to criminality than one based on meat.
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An account of the effects of heat on plants could explain why crimes increased during the summer months. Never one to let a social trend pass without comment, he offered his thoughts on the role of the bicycle in crime and an “epidemic of kissing in America.”
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Ferrero argued “the females of the ants, bees, and spiders are particularly cruel because they are particularly intelligent.” The “woman of to-day,” he maintained, was “less criminal because less intelligent than the man.”
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According to Albrecht, there were numerous cases of slaughter and torture in the animal world, occasioned by the needs of defense (the bee), avarice (the ant), or sheer “love of fighting” (the cricket). Albrecht described how Lombroso found “bands of evil-doers among animals, fraud and thieving, and even criminal physiognomies…..the gray, bloodshot eye of the tiger and hyena, the hooked beak of the birds of prey, their large eye sockets and sexual perversity.”
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Havelock Ellis alerted his readers to research on antisocial conduct among rooks.
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Criminal anthropology scrutinized the rodent-like cheek pouches of some criminals, the angle of the jaw of the lemur, and the supernumerary teeth of snakes. Reptiles, oxen, birds of prey, domestic fowl, and chimpanzees were also subjected to the physiognomic gaze. All this produced what has been appropriately called “a certain dizzying incoherence.”
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In his
L'uomo di genio
, Lombroso derived an “index of genius” by analogy. Using a classification scheme based on geographical configurations such as mountains, hills, plains, and the nature of the soil, the criminologist deduced a correlation between genius and republicanism.
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Analogical reasoning allowed criminology to make connections across time between social situations, political organizations, and disciplinary bodies. “Under certain unfavourable conditions,” Lombroso-Ferrero wrote, such as cold and poor soil, “the common oak will develop characteristics of the oak of the Quaternary period. The dog left to run wild in the forest will in a few generations revert to the type of his original wolf-like progenitor.” In humans, hunger, syphilis and trauma, and the abuse of drugs and alcohol, as well as “morbid conditions inherited from insane, criminal or diseased progenitors” could easily bring about “a return to the characteristics peculiar to primitive savages.”
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Whereas criminal texts dating from the early nineteenth century are dominated primarily by words—particularly those uttered by criminals themselves—those published toward the end of the century commonly featured statistical tables, anthropometric measures, photographs of body parts,
and illustrations of tattoos.
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Such devices performed important rhetorical functions. The illustrations in Henry Boies'
Prisoners and Paupers
(1893), for example, consisted of photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island (“Typical Russian Jews,” “A Group of Italians”), deformed “incorrigibles” at Elmira Reformatory, Roman statues, and a painting of a statesman. Criminology has been appropriately described as “an intertextual bricolage,” a jumble of disparate elements drawn from various disciplines all devoted to persuading the reader that criminality was a part of nature.
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Scientific criminology was, thus, elaborated from the familiar, its truth value “a coefficient of its relevance to its audience's needs and expectations.”
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Different types of evidence appealed to different audiences. The visual and verbal languages of criminal anthropology rendered the criminal body into an easily cognizable entity.
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This is not to say that criminal anthropology's rhetorical modalities were universally applauded. “One of the greatest defects of Lombrosoian presentation of criminal anthropological data,” Harvard anthropologist and eugenicist Earnest A. Hooton later complained, “is the sensational anecdotal method which is used to clinch arguments.”
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Gustave Tarde had been even more critical: “What he calls experimentation—the accumulation of the mass of undigested remarks (absolutely sincere but uncritical) which he has since heaped together—has merely served to confirm him in his prepossession.”
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Yet it was precisely this jumbled anecdotal-analogical method that had helped to advance criminal anthropology from the beginning. Lombroso's texts are characterized by homologies between argumentative style, tabulated statistical data, and visual images that allow the reasoning to move effortlessly between hearsay, anecdote, and story. The statistics, such as they are, are usually nothing more complex than simple percentages, and their tabulated organization evidences no systematic rationale. The photographs of amassed criminal heads look—to modern eyes at least—like pages taken from a nineteenth-century
cartes de visite
album. All these disparate sources are piled up, one after the other, relentlessly aiming to persuade with an energetic display of sheer force.

Criminal anthropology conveyed information “efficiently, powerfully, and pleasurably.”
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With its habitual use of photographs of criminals and their skulls, illustrations of tattoos, and so on, criminal anthropology had enormous “visual clout.” Both graphic and narrative forms of persuasion gave it enormous popular appeal compared to dry academic texts in other disciplines.
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The science weaved together images of class, race, and gender with commonplace understandings of deviance to create an enterprise that had incredible
epistemological power. At the heart of the project was the numinous figure of the born criminal: “lurid, horrifying, titillating, forbidden.”
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Such an exoticism was designed to evoke astonishment but not sympathy. Criminology had to appeal to a wide audience for financial and moral support. Yet it had to justify its status as a new discipline by constructing a unique and specialized scientific discourse. Unlike physics and economics, which had achieved the right to speak authoritatively about esoteric matters, criminology was obliged to amalgamate the traditional with the scientific.
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Lombroso mobilized proverbs and folklore in support of his ideas, but he did not want to be perceived as having merely appropriated popular knowledge. This dilemma triggered new anxieties; if criminology was little more than a patchwork quilt of different ideas and practices appropriated from common sense, how could it claim to have special authority? And how could this “tension of expertise” be resolved?

The dilemma of expertise was resolved in part by the ways that “titanic figure,” “the father of modern criminology,” was depicted.
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As early as 1869, a French traveler visiting Milan had described the occasion when Lombroso had discussed with him “certain anatomical indications by which criminals may be identified.” The meeting left the traveler with the lasting impression that Lombroso was “a sort of monomaniac.”
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According to one scholar, “probably no name has been eulogised or attacked so much as that of Cesare Lombroso.”
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He was “a scientific Columbus who opened up a new field for exploration, and his insight into human nature was compared to that of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.”
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Adalbert Albrecht conceded that because the science was “so intimately connected with the name of Lombroso … no one can dispute his right to be considered the godfather of criminal anthropology.” He was “one of the great men of the nineteenth century whose names were familiar to everyone, who were read by many but studied by comparatively few.”
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Max Nordau dedicated his
Degeneration
(1893) to his “dear and honoured Master.” Yet as late as 1937, two criminologists felt compelled to point out that there was “no actual evidence in the voluminous criminological literature of the nineteenth century, before or after the time of Lombroso, which justifies the extravagant eulogies that are made of him.”
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“The master” nevertheless attracted acolytes across Europe and the United States, many of whom took up his ideas with something approaching religious zeal.
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In England, Havelock Ellis vigorously promoted his work. Dorado Montero translated Lombroso's writings into Spanish, taught the doctrines to his students—and was rewarded for his efforts with a lawsuit.
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Spain's
“little Lombroso,” Rafael Salillas, became the country's foremost representative and promoter of criminal anthropology. In Germany, Hans Kurella promulgated the Italian criminologist's ideas in dozens of publications of his own and through translations of several of his works.
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“His thoughts revolutionized our opinions,” wrote Jules Dallemagne of Lombroso, and “provoked a salutary feeling everywhere, and a happy emulation in research of all kinds”: “For 20 years, his thoughts fed discussions; the Italian master was the order of the day in all debates; his thoughts appeared as events. There was an extraordinary animation everywhere.”
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That same force of character left a strong impression on Arthur Griffiths, who wrote a report on the fourth Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Geneva for the British government's Home Office: “Perhaps the most remarkable, and not the least interesting feature of the Congress was the tenacity with which Dr Lombroso held to his views. It is impossible to be brought into personal relations with this distinguished savant without being impressed by his sincerity, and the depth of his convictions… . Once in the course of the Congress, when very hardly pressed by certain hostile remarks, he cried, ‘What do I care whether others are with me or against me? I believe in the type. It is my type; I discovered it; I believe in it and I always shall.'”
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Lombroso was “a famous agitator,” according to Gustave Tarde. He might have considered Lombroso to be a malign influence on criminology by the late 1890s, but he mobilized an appropriate metaphor in his grudging recognition of the Italian's powers: “We must acknowledge him to be the tongs to the fire by which we are consumed, but of the fuel which he added to it nothing remains except a handful of ashes.”
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The unquenchable Lombroso wrote over thirty books and published one thousand articles, becoming one of the most prominent intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Italy.
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He devoted enormous efforts to propagating his theory, disseminating his ideas in this continuous stream of publications.
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Like the discipline he did so much to create, Lombroso had one foot in empirical science and the other in the emerging medium of mass culture. This was vital, because in order to win support, criminological theory had to leave the confines of the purely academic domain.
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In this respect Lombroso was supremely competent. His sensational claims—criminals were “veritable savages in the midst of the brilliant European civilization”—appealed to a mass readership. His eclecticism and constant incorporation of new medical theories into the ever-expanding
L'uomo delinquente
assured him continued influence.
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He was an expert assimilator of anecdotes and stories, empirical
facts, and historical myths. In his 1895
Contemporary Review
article, “Atavism and Evolution,” for example, Lombroso touched on cannibalism, socialism, monarchy, ancient inventions, genius, brain organization, magic, medicine, and telepathy before concluding that “the same curvature which exists in the line of progress is also found in the course of retrogression.”
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Lombroso clearly possessed a surfeit of what Max Weber called “charismatic authority,” a character style unique to spiritual leaders, warrior heroes, and archetypal figures like the “sorcerer, the rainmaker, the medicine man.”
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At times of relative social and political calm, Weber suggested, bureaucrats and patriarchs usually administered the normal requirements of everyday life. Such periods favored leaders whose expertise was based on rational rules, and governance of the everyday was in the interests of social harmony. At times of social strife, however, periods of “psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious [and] political distress,” leaders were required that had a different array of “gifts of the body and spirit.” Charismatic authority came to the fore during such periods of crisis.

Dismissive of organized economic structures and permanent arrangements, charismatic authority spurns salaries, promotion, and other established forms of career advancement. In its initial stages, it dismisses bureaucratic organization. The charismatic leader inspires his followers, demands their obedience, and insists on loyalty to an abstract ideal through the sheer force of his personality. Usually male—though not necessarily so—it is “the
duty
of those to whom he addresses his mission to recognize him as their charismatically qualified leader.”
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Those who triumph in trials of strength, perform incredible miracles, or undertake heroic journeys are rewarded with loyal followers. Lombroso was such a leader. He was perceived as a legendary hero, a visionary capable of seeing what no one else had seen: the diabolical glory of the born criminal. He was regarded as one of those rare individuals endowed with “supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.”
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According to Weber, the “god-like strength of the hero” makes “a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms.” Resolutely radical in his disavowal of preexisting laws and traditions, Lombroso possessed a single-minded rebellious streak. Paradoxically, his authority rested on an appeal to science, a form of instrumentalist organization par excellence.