Final Thoughts on the Leopold Case

...In this sense, Leopold and Loeb belong to a more general revival which brings back the early Hemingway to the films, the cloche to women's fashions, beards and bohemianism to the advanced young, arche-types of the flapper age to the current novel...

...This pious and optimistic prognosis they underlined some weeks later with the testimony of a practicing psychiatrist, who asked "What do we know about human responsibility for human behavior...

...Life imprisonment, without the possibility of parole—this was the middlebrows' last word in 1924...

...the preferred past of the prosperous and disenchanted '50s is the prosperous and disenchanted '20s— the two postwar decades reflecting each other as if the intervening decades did not exist...

...This was our childhood, our youth, and we conceive it grown old along with us: the world of Big Bill Tilden and Al Capone, of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey—faces on the picture cards we played for or the newsreels we endured between the serial and the Western...

...that the age of compulsory maturity has been moved back, and that they will be wheeling a baby carriage across campus before they know it...

...Even to plead that they were mentally sick was dangerous at a moment when anyone arguing (as Leopold and Loeb seemed to argue) that bourgeois morality ought to be transcended was classified as a "nut...

...Clarence Darrow should have spoken for them, as he had so often before, but was committed on principle to the defense...

...Darrow, who was defending Leopold and Loeb, had, to be sure, defended Debs and Debs represented to the intellectuals untainted innocence...

...Yet the most intriguing problem lies not in the quantity of the provocation, but in the quality of the response...

...Far more than any fiction, Leopold's account serves to remind us of what is legendary in our reconstruction of his crime and, indeed, of the criminals who perpetrated it...

...In an odd way, Leopold owes his freedom to the middling liberal's rejection of economic determinism as a sufficient explanation of innocence and guilt...

...The rage which the revelation of the murder of Bobby Franks stirred in the newspaper-reading public of 1924 was, for the more enlightened at least, more the product of bafflement than of fear...

...The second wave reaches its climax just after the Second World War and is marked by the Freudianization of the middlebrow liberal...

...His aim is not to dispel the show of innocence and reveal the fact of guilt, but to dissipate the conviction of guilt and reveal the fact of innocence: to deprive us of the belief in the reality of crime...

...And behind them, there are their parents in turn—an infinite regression to some dim, original source of moral failure...

...they are, in intent, timeless figures of juvenile delinquency, in fact, ciphers thinly disguised as New York prep-school boys of the '50s...

...His opposite numbers today choose the second...

...but no more is autobiography...

...Half peepshow and half confession, it titillates as it purges, a surefire hit...

...Kinsey and Dr...

...It even reported, chough with some skepticism, the popular fantasy that Loeb had not been killed at all, but spirited away alive by the omnipotent rich Jews from whose ranks he came...

...A generation ago we made a revolution...

...and in an only slightly camouflaged way, Levin's book is precisely such a confession, at home in an age of confessions...

...for he is, like them, a one-time "prodigy" and a Jew...

...In the name of such a doctrine, at any rate, Levin brings to Freud the case to which Freud himself would not come...

...Levin's long-distance, do-it-yourself psychoanalysis" a truer portrait of himself...

...The issues were too hopelessly confused...

...The single literary treatment produced between the time of the case and the mid-'50s was Patrick Hamilton's play The Rope, a commercial thriller, which converted Leopold and Loeb into Oxford undergraduates, whose crime is uncovered by a poet and war-hero embarrassingly reminiscent of Rupert Brooke...

...It is disturbing that his style reveals a man of 52 impossible to connect with our image of the 19-year-old boy tried in 1924...

...And have not all playgoers learned how young Nathan and Dick might have been saved from heterosexuality and freedom had they met the kind lady of Tea and Sympathy...

...With the resurgence of the '20s, there has come a resurgence of Freudianism, too...

...it remained always just a courtroom trial and not a cause...

...Their parents have never given them an ounce of real affection...

...It is as if the middlebrow mind has at last discovered the true meaning of the case, its own true meaning in that case, and moves now to rewrite its past...

...Their special interest lay in asserting that accepted morality was disease...

...Something it denied in itself has been paroled along with the gray-faced murderer...

...Neither "history" nor fiction seems adequate to the legend...

...It is more sentimental rhetoric, perhaps, than political theory, but it convinces certain minds...

...Are we surprised that kids drive fast and drink...

...What is left except forgiveness—a parole, perhaps...

...An unforeseen consequence of the second Freudian wave, with its emphasis on the critical role of the parent in the psychic development of the child, is to have left the generation of the American middle classes whose children are now adolescent ridden with anxiety and guilt...

...If anyone in the case represented the intellectuals, it was Nathan Leopold, with his tortured face and his quotations from their own kind of literature...

...It is just such cases he reads about in the teen-age columns of his daily newspaper, discusses with his neighbors at the Child Study Group, or listens to his children debate at the High School Forum...

...To the aid of the student-reporter-delective comes the embryo psychoanalyst, played in Compulsion by Willie Weiss...

...They were not yet prepared to go beyond the dated daring of Darrow and launch a general defense of the sexual deviant (Hemingway, who was to be their spokesman, was at that moment in Paris, scorning "queers" even as he scorned Mencken) ; nor were they inspired by Darrow's contention that no one was responsible for anything, that crime was only disease...

...their significance belongs not to art but to not-quite-current events...

...Yaffe's protagonists are no longer specifically Jewish, no longer overt homosexuals, no longer rich college boys in Chicago of the '20s...

...and promptly answered himself: "I do not think the time far distant when all crime and bad behavior will be approached as human illness is now, where moral questions do not enter in...

...if the boys were rich and spoiled they were also Jews and students, as well as young, neurotic, lost...

...What were the intellectuals of the '20s to do with these travesties of themselves, improbably come to life and notoriety...

...The relation of the two Leopolds seems accidental and unconvincing: the one perfected correspondence courses for prisoners (under the aegis Ratione autem liberamur—by reason, however, we are freed), the other killed Bobby Franks...

...The rich they looked for not in the docket but on the sidelines crying for the condemnation of the victims they had driven to violence...

...Only the latest generation are pure victims, only those who have not yet begot children innocent...

...Even Levin's book, put together with skill and a certain passion, does not finally transcend the interest of the documents upon which it is based...

...The innocence they were eager to establish was not a universal innocence, but only that of the exploited and injured...

...The crime that had shocked all middlebrow America appeared to have expired in the first film to be made without cutting, a vehicle for Jimmy Stewart...

...and this time the defense was on the side of the rich...

...the middlebrow spectator (who clamored once for the death sentence or imprisonment without hope of parole) guilty of the failure of sympathy and understanding...

...The first wave represents its capturing of the intellectuals' imaginations during the '20s, when it seemed to a restless avant-garde (never clearly aware of where D. H. Lawrence stopped and it began) a cue for sexual emancipation, deliverance from bourgeois taboos...

...Their Sacco and Vanzetti they have found in Leopold and Loeb...

...None of the works which embody it is, in the real sense, "literature...

...Most middlebrow readers, however, were not yet ready to scrap their inherited notions of free will and guilt...

...for the myth has a life of its own, though it lay dormant for over thirty years and was revived only at the moment that the man emerges from prison...

...But why, to begin with, the shrill concern with juvenile delinquency on which Gardner trades, the almost hysterical response to the problem on which the revival of interest in the Franks case feeds...

...their parents guilty of the failure of love...

...Yet in him, all their attitudes and commitments were parodied: the blatant atheism, the theory of the Superman ("the only mistake he can do, is make a mistake, that anything that gives him pleasure is right"), but especially the absurd questions he had sealed up to be answered after death by his spirit, if it survived: "Is there complete omniscience...

...Leopold and Loeb are not the inventions of Meyer Levin, as Raskolnikov is the invention of Dostoevsky...

...Spock, read as a good, gray guide to tolerance and understanding, a prophet of the social adjustment which supplants the class struggle as an ideal image of society...

...Yet ten years after the release of Hitchcock's film, Leopold and Loeb had become once more a staple of mass culture on its middlebrow levels...

...What reader of Levin does not consider himself something of an expert in these matters, able to smile condescendingly at his presumably sophisticated young men and women who read each other Walt Whitman without "any suspicion in those days that he could be singing of another kind of love...

...Meanwhile, the intellectuals of the waning '20s had found other, more congenial courtroom legends—the Scopes trial and, eminently, Sacco and Vanzetti...

...It is an age in which the analyst becomes as standard an adjunct of modern living as the dentist...

...but he cannot quite forbear attempting to retouch the image of his accomplice (whose death at the bands of a fellow convict, Leopold insists, was not occasioned by a homosexual pass) or even mitigating a little his own guilt...

...They were, Erle Stanley Gardner argues in his pious foreword to Leopold's book, "merely the first shocking symptom of a change which was destined to sweep across the country...

...It is not, of course, in the heedless euphoria of their beginnings that we resurrect the heroes of Before-the-Crash, but in the pathos of their ends: Fitzgerald blind-drunk and mocked by Dartmouth undergraduates...

...They were committed to the sentimental thesis that murder and kidnapping were, by and large, the crimes of the desperate poor...

...Levin projects himself into the events of his case in the guise of an investigator: a poor student called Sid Silver, a part-time newspaperman to whom are attributed several critical discoveries which lead to the exposure of the criminals...

...Even so critical and self-righteous a journal as the Nation, speaking for the minority of enlightened middlebrows who favored sentencing Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment, preferred to concentrate on psychology and penal reform...

...To be sure, the Freudianism which triumphs in the suburbs and the housing developments is somewhat expurgated—stripped of its bleak stoicism, its tragic view of man, and its more disturbing moral implications...

...This play, performed in 1929, had to wait nearly twenty years for a movie version, in which Alfred Hitchcock moved the principals back to America (though only as far as New York) and converted the soldier-bard into a guilt-ridden schoolteacher, who attempts to make amends for having exposed his neurotic students to Nietzsche by exposing their crime...

...But just as there stood behind the accused their guilty parents, behind those parents stood theirs, guilty like them and like us, of having under-cherished or over-protected their children (how can one ever be sure...

...His crime and trial he announces he will not even treat...

...In an editorial taking its cue from the psychiatric defense, the editors assured their readers that "when we cease talking in terms of guilt and begin talking in terms of psychological cause and prevention, lawyers may no longer be needed...

...It is almost as if they realized that these days one must explode early or not at all...

...Their confessions, that is to say, must be matched with our own...

...more important to him is discovering what impulse moved that hand...

...The real intellectuals, the highbrows, however, were simply not interested, for to them the case made no symbolic sense...

...Told this nowadays, an enlightened parent, avid for blame, would demand his money back...

...But who of those who had wished his death in 1924 and his release in 1958, who had been titillated by the newspaper accounts then or Compulsion now, could believe in the man behind the symbol, forgive anyone but himself...

...and there seems, on the face of it, small reason to ransack dead files for old causes...

...One is just as good as the other...

...For them, there is only an all-inclusive "we" involved in universal complicity: the accused guilty of the fact of crime...

...What are the reasons behind this revival...

...It is the myth, however, which finally concerns us, not the man who has survived it...

...Who, in this context, is not guilty as charged, whatever the charge...

...The generations, which as children reveled in their own innocence now, as parents, wallow in their own guilt...

...to James Yaffe ("Their peace of mind, their freedom from fears, their chance to develop into happy men, all this depends on their parents...

...Twenty years-later he would have been a quiz kid, thirty years later a winner on The $64,000 Question...

...In the end, the whole account seemed annomalous, irrevelant, sandwiched between a feature story on John L. Lewis and the latest news on Stakhanovism in the Soviet Union...

...These are its children...

...Beneath a rather perfunctory gesture at anti-intellectualism, Hitchcock is, like Hamilton before him, exploiting the case chiefly for the audience appeal of horror in an upper-class setting...

...For the highbrow, the case failed utterly to define a clear-cut "we" and "they," to distinguish "our" innocence from "their" guilt...

...What an orgy of understanding the psychiatric record of Leopold and Loeb makes possible...

...The surliest lowbrows found in the case just another atrocity to justify their distrust of Jews, atheists, intellectuals and "perverts...

...As BUDD SCHULBERG redeemed Scott Fitzgerald for the middlebrow readers of fiction, so Levin rescues Leopold and Loeb...

...Yet we know all the time that they are really Leopold and Loeb, and are disconcerted by the documented facts which slip by Yaffe's censorship (Leopold's fantasies, for instance, or the scheme for collecting ransom), facts which detach themselves from his perfunctorily contrived context, and, improbable enough in their own right, seem now doubly improbable...

...Meyer Levin, Compulsion (Simon and Schuster, $5.00) ; James Yaffe, Nothing but the Night (Atlanlic, Little, Brown, $3.75) ; Maureen McKernan, The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb (New American Library, $.50) ; Nathan F. Leopold, Life Plus 99 Years (Doubleday, $5.50...

...The conscientious middlebrows, on the other hand, did not know what to do with a crime rooted in perversity rather than poverty...

...JD's, Rebels without a Cause, members in good standing (had they not stolen the electric cars of old ladies, cruised the drag in their fire-engine red Stutz Bearcat...

...But the parents of these two boys have never fulfilled their responsibility . . . these boys have been neglected children...

...Youth had broken away from the pattern of thinking which had been the ironclad rule...

...Who has not at some moment seemed to reject (most terrible of words) his child...

...But reminiscence and remorse cannot create a Leopold adequate to our memory of his crime or our sense of what his suffering in prison must have been...

...Leopold, diabetic and potbellied, at the moment of his parole...

...both awaited a certain evolutionary development of the popular mind, the creation of a new middlebrow definition of innocence and guilt...

...In the end, their true spokesman turned out to be the Judge, who wept a little as Darrow summed up, and saved the accused from death...

...This is not all...

...and what infinitely extended possibilities of higher and higher understanding are implicit in their plight...

...Yet we have recently seen the publication of two novels (one already a play and perhaps on its way to becoming a movie) based on the same criminal case, decided more than thirty years ago...

...But even this is not yet all...

...A counter-revolution has been fought and won in the pages of the journals of popular culture, a coup accomplished, whose beneficiaries search now for an ideology and an American Tragedy to dramatize it...

...When Richard Loeb was slashed to death with a razor in 1936, only a single magazine in the United States considered the event worth an article...

...Has not Tennessee Williams made it clear to us all what it is to be queer and how we must meet revelations of sexual aberration with tolerance rather than contempt...

...The reader of my own generation and the one just before it, I suppose, responds most sensitively to the recalled '20s...

...Had we not seen," Levin writes, "massive demonstrations in our time of entire populations so infected with some mad leader's delusions...

...and the film seemed not so much a revival of the case as a technicolor tombstone on its grave...

...Leopold is especially true to type, from his owlish glasses and faintly condescending air to his painstaking classification of birds, his study of the Oscan and Umbrian dialects, his dazzling scores on the intelligence tests —just then becoming for the earnest parent more important than report cards or diplomas...

...in us, they must be joined by an effort of imaginative faith...

...With the disavowal of the cliches of social consciousness, the '30s are excised from the popular imagination...

...The real solution of the case for Levin, however, goes beyond finding out what hand held the chisel that cracked the skull...

...Understanding, however, even for the middlebrow, must begin with the case itself, be rooted in a sympathy with the very lusts of the principals, an identification of id with id...

...Typically enough, Nathan Leopold, in the years when he was busy making good in jail, contributed statistical pieces of his own to the "scientific" literature on penology, aiding in the process by which legends are reduced to footnotes...

...and watching mothers would have held him up to their sons as an example of how hard work in school pays off in America...

...Have not all the enlightened finally read the Kinsey Report...

...and Freud seems somehow to sanction this revisionism...

...though he urged that they never be granted a parole and remarked (perhaps to persuade himself that he had not really been moved to mercy) that "to the offenders . . . the prolonged suffering of years of confinement may well be the severest form of retribution and expiation...

...In Leopold's account the two are simultaneously linked and separated by an act of repentence...

...Moreover, the New Psychology, called upon by the defense and debated with ignorant vehemence in the daily press, was only watered-down psychoanalysis, old stuff to the advanced—to whom it seemed useful chiefly as a weapon against the sexual mores of the middle classes...

...I do not believe that there is any sort of distinction between the moral condition in and out of jail...

...Is life on earth correct in judgment, or is there a higher judgment...

...What is happiness...

...And again, "There in 1924, in the Chicago court-room, far from the Munich where another Nietzschean began his march in 1924, the tocsin for the era was scarcely heard...

...But our innocents are JD's...

...Leslie Fiedler, who discusses this question here, is Professor of literature at Montana State University and the author of An End to Innocence...

...but the middlebrows' insistent whispers about a "million dollar fee' made it easier to believe that Darrow was "selling out" than that he was carrying on the good fight...

...To this issue, so vital in the Franks case, whose courtroom revelations were those not of private eyes but of psychiatrists, we shall return...

...Freud is confused with Dr...

...Signaled not only by new novels, a play, an autobiography, and the reprint of the MoKernan book, but also by a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, an appeal for clemency by Meyer Levin in Coronet, and a piece in Life itself, the revival culminated in the freeing of Nathan Leopold— who had been consigned, presumably forever, to prison and oblivion...

...Though the presiding judge had specifically discounted the entire plea of pathological disability, and had mitigated the sentence of Leopold and Loeb on the basis of their youth alone—he had recognized the pertinency of such psychological testimony for future legislative reform, and this encouraged certain long-time critics of our courts and jails...

...Leopold and Loeb were not so much intellectuals as the middlebrows' image of the intellectual: the young "genius," the "prodigy" who reads outlandish books and skips grades in school (were they not the youngest graduates in the history of the universities of Michigan and Chicago...

...In an age which prefers explaining social forces in terms of psychological motivations to deriving such motivations from those forces, the case of the two young murderers seem to offer a clue to the nature of fascism itself...

...and cried out that "they are entitled to as much mercy as mad dogs are entitled to...

...Between its resurrection and his release there is surely some connection...

...There is an overwhelming concert of opinion, from John Barlow Martin in the Saturday Evening Post ("We are all involved in this...

...The criminals are, however, even apter occasions for tolerance, for they are also homosexuals...

...The conviction of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the murder of Bobby Franks in 1924 has recently been the subject of renewed public interest...

...Well, the revolution is over now...

...The case had been made a forum not only for the clash of oldsters and youngsters, "formal, orthodox psychology" vs...

...How far we have come from 1924, when the psychiatrists who examined Leopold (paid, of course, by his family and Loeb's) felt it expedient to declare: "There is nothing in the family training, either of omission or commission, which is responsible for his present condition...

...Leopold and Loeb were (before the tag had been invented) Juvenile Delinquents, too, precisely the sort of problem children who most concern the middle-class liberal in our time...

...What is especially baffling is the willingness, even eagerness of parents to declare themselves guilty of the misdemeanors of their children—their almost neurotic insistence upon their responsibility and the innocence of the young...

...it had served also to air the quarrel of psychiatric penologists in general with lawyers and the law...

...of the first Beat Generation: how familiar they seem...

...To be sure, the JD's are our last rebels and last gangsters: public enemies shrank to adolescent dimensions, growing (apparently) younger and younger, more and more frantically pointless in their violence...

...What the highbrows learned in the case of Alger Hiss, their former middlebrow allies have been learning here: that there is no pure "we" engaged in a legendary battle with a corrupt "they," no melodramatic encounter of innocence and guilt...

...The point is not to change the world but to understand it," runs the new anti-Marxist critique of the social philosophy of the '30s...

...It remains parasitic upon the earlier newspaper stories, the psychiatrists' published case reports, but especially upon our collective memories of the shocking crime: the naked boy's body thrust up a culvert, and the two adolescent "degenerates" who killed him quite at random...

...and they see now backward in the Leopold and Loeb case an exemplar not of juvenile viciousness or the curse of wealth but of the Failure of Parents...

...At this point, Dr...

...Their commitment to a "science" of family life only aggravates the normal concern of any parent confronting the inevitable imperfection of his children and reflecting on his own inevitable mistakes...

...Phychoanalysis as a method of treatment, a theory of the mind, has been a part of our culture uninterruptedly for nearly half a century...

...and the despised fairy, though he offers a tougher test, excites the good will of the modern middlebrow quite as much as any other case of discrimination...

...dynamic psychology...

...The publishers have rushed back into print a journalistic account which first appeared in 1925 (camouflaged as usual to seem new to the unwary newsstand customer) and the autobiography of one of the principals in the crime.* But what has the Franks case, what have Leopold and Loeb to do with us in 1958...

...Either all are innocent or all guilty...

...Under the impossible burden of wisdom and love demanded by the marriage of Freudianism, philistinism and Puritanism, a generation of middle-aged Americans has staggered and slipped...

...At its climax, Levin avows his own urge to commit a similar act of darkness, his own kinship to Leopold and Loeb...

...Who has not slipped up in toilet training, discipline, selection of books, supervision of TV...

...Leopold is in Puerto Rico now...

...Their attitude is summed up in the vulgar, almost hysterical plea of the state's attorney, who reviled the accused as "these two perverts, these two murderers,' "these poor, little sons of multi-millionaires," "these young, egotistical smart alecks...

...Nathan Leopold, writing from prison 33 years after his crime, attempts to set the record straight by substituting for what he calls "Mr...

...Caught between succeeding schools of child-rearing that advocate contradictory theories of permissiveness or rigor, they are unable to cast all theory aside, but chase madly after the latest, reproach themselves for having followed the next-to-the-last...

...but as a Weltanschauung, a world-view, it has affected us in two major phases, quite different from each other...

...or moral guidance...

...It is at this point that the ladies' magazines devote more and more space to superficial psychoanalytic articles on sex in marriage or sibling rivalry, PTAs sponsor sex-education films, and enlightened parents learn to smile benignly at masturbation...

...This long-term quarrel, given new impetus by a new instance, soon resumed its cool expert tone in the professional journals, much to the relief of the academic specialists, who had been embarrassed by the more sensational aspects of the court case...

...Thirty-three years ago, Clarence Darrow opted for the first alternative: "There is no such thing as crime...

...This time the Nation was silent, while Time exhumed all the discredited lowbrow canards (even the report that the Franks boy had been "violated"), excoriated the prison authorities who "pamper wealthy prisoners, place perverts in positions of authority...

...Since, therefore, the meanings of the crime of Leopold and Loeb are implicit in the act itself as that act is apprehended by the popular imagination, all Levin and Yaffe can do is to explicate those meanings— in effect, to solve the crime...

...The psychiatric issue, therefore, fell quickly from the lofty "philosophical" level on which it had been proposed by Darrow and the Nations psychiatrist to that of a family squabble among American doctors...

...The psychic detective investigates crime for reasons exactly opposed to those of the ordinary cop...