by Meyer Levin
He resumed the tale of the crime. “They parked the bloody automobile in front of Judd’s house. They cleaned it to some extent that night and left it standing in the street. ‘Oriented’, of course, ‘oriented’. They left it there for the night so that anybody might see and know. And then in a day or so we find Artie with his pockets stuffed with newspapers telling of the Kessler tragedy. We find him consulting with his friends, with the newspaper reporters; and my experience has been that the last person that a conscious criminal associates with is a reporter.” Wilk looked at us with an appeasing smile. “But he picks up a reporter, and he tells him he has read a great many detective stories, and he knows just how this would happen.
“Talk about scheming! But they must be hanged, because everybody is talking about the case and because their people have money.”
He turned then to a professional tone. He spoke of the traditional arrangements between prosecution and defence, the usual consideration accorded a plea of guilty. “How many times has Your Honour listened to the State’s Attorney come into this court with a man charged with robbery with a gun – which means from ten years to life – and on condition of a plea of guilty ask to have the gun charge stricken out and get him a chance to see daylight inside of three years? How many times?
“What about this matter of crime and punishment, anyhow? You can trace it all down through the history of man. You can trace the burnings, the boilings, the drawings and quarterings, the hanging of people in England at the crossroads, carving them up and hanging them as examples for all to see.
“We can come down to the last century where nearly two hundred crimes were punishable by death. You can read the stories of hanging on a high hill, and the populace for miles around coming out to the scene, that everybody might be awed into goodness. Hanging for picking pockets – and more pockets were picked in the crowd that went to the hanging than had been known before.
“What happened? Gradually the laws have been changed and modified, and men look back with horror at the hangings and killings of the past. What did they find in England? That, as they got rid of these barbarous statutes, crimes decreased instead of increased. I will undertake to say, Your Honour, that you can scarcely find a single scholarly book – and I will include all the works on criminology of the past – that has not made the statement over and over again that as the penal code was made less terrible, crimes grew less frequent.
“This weird tragedy occurred on the twenty-first of May. It has been heralded, broadcast through the world. How many attempted kidnappings have come since then? How many threatening letters have been sent out by weak-minded boys and weak-minded men since then? How many times have they sought to repeat again and again this same crime because of the effect of publicity upon the mind? I can point to examples of killing and hanging in the city of Chicago which have been repeated in detail over and over again, simply from the publicity of the newspapers and the public generally.
“Let us take this case. If these two boys die on the scaffold, which I can never bring myself to imagine, every newspaper in the United States will be filled with the gruesome details. It will enter every home and every family. How many men would enjoy the details? And you cannot enjoy human suffering without being affected for better or for worse; those who enjoyed it would be affected for the worse.
“Do I need to argue to Your Honour that cruelty only breeds cruelty? If there is any way to kill evil and hatred and all that goes with it, it is not through evil and hatred and cruelty; it is through charity and love and understanding.
“There is not a man who is pointed to as an example to the world who has not taught it. There is not a philosopher, there is not a religious leader, there is not a creed that has not taught it.”
We looked to Judd. Would he let himself be defended by this assault on his Nietzschean creed? But he was attentive, only flushing slightly.
“This is a Christian community,” Wilk went on, “so-called; at least it boasts of it. Let me ask this court, is there any doubt about whether these boys would be safe in the hands of the Founder of the Christian religion? It would be blasphemy to say they would not. And yet there are men who want to hang them for a childish, purposeless act, conceived without the slightest malice in the world.
“Your Honour, I have become obsessed with this deep feeling of hate and anger that has swept across the land. I have been fighting it, battling with it until it has fairly driven me mad, until I wonder whether every righteous human emotion has not gone down in a raging storm.
“I am not pleading so much for these boys as I am for the infinite number of others to follow, those who perhaps cannot be as well defended as these have been. It is of them that I am thinking, and for them I am begging of this court not to turn backward toward the barbarous and cruel past.”
In the morning Wilk turned to speak of the boys themselves. “Now, Your Honour, who are these two boys? Straus, a boy robbed of his boyhood, turned into a prodigy; Steiner, with a wonderfully brilliant mind-”
Judd leaned forward, as if at last the moment of fruition had come, when a great soul would interpret him to the world. But it was to the general psychiatric argument that Wilk gave attention. The brilliant youths, from earliest childhood “crowded like hothouse plants to learn more and more and more. But it takes something besides brains to make a human being who can adjust himself to life.
“In fact, as Dr. Ball and Dr. Tierney regretfully admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human conduct. The emotions are the urge that makes us live – the urge that makes us work and play, or move along the pathways of life. They are the instinctive things.”
Wilk pictured the examination by the State’s alienists after the boys had made their confession. “Dr. Tierney and Dr. Ball are undoubtedly able men. Dr. Tierney said this: The only unnatural thing he noted was that they showed no emotional reactions. Dr. Ball said the same. These are the State’s alienists, not ours. These boys could tell this gruesome story without a change of countenance, without the slightest feelings. What was the reason? I do not know. I know what causes the emotional life. I know it comes from the nerves, the endocrine glands, the vegetative system. I know it is practically left out of some. They cannot feel the moral shocks which safeguard others. Is Artie Straus to blame that his machine is imperfect? I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame. I am not wise enough to fix it.
“A man can get along without his intellect, and most people do, but he cannot get along without his emotions. These boys – I do not care what their mentality: that simply makes it worse – are emotionally defective.
“Mr. Horn worked with intelligence and rapidity. On that Sunday afternoon, before the defence had a chance to talk to the boys, Mr. Horn got in two alienists, Ball and Stauffer, and they sat around hearing these boys tell their stories, and that is all.
“Your Honour, they were not holding an examination. They were holding an inquest and nothing else. A little premature, but an inquest.
“If Mr. Horn was trampling on the edges of the Constitution, I am not going to talk about it here. A great many people in this world believe that the end justifies the means. I don’t know but what I do myself. And that is the reason I never want to take the side of the prosecution, because I might harm an individual. I am sure the State will live anyhow.
“But what did Dr. Ball say? He said that it was not a good opportunity for an examination. Of course there was Stauffer. ‘Fine – a fine opportunity for an examination, their souls were stripped naked.’ Stauffer is not an alienist. He is an orator. Well, if Stauffer’s soul was naked, there wouldn’t be much to show.” So much for the prosecution’s alienists.
But the defence alienists had indeed examined the emotional conditioning of the boys. First there was Artie’s Miss Newsome. “This nurse was with him all the time, except when he stole out at night, from four to fourteen years of age. She, putting before him the best books, which
children generally do not want; and he, when she was not looking, reading detective stories, which he devoured. We have a statute in this state, passed by the legislature last year, if I recall correctly, which forbids minors reading stories of crime. Why? Because the legislature in its wisdom felt that it would produce criminal tendencies in the boys who read them. This boy read them day after day. He never stopped. When he was a senior he read them, and almost nothing else. Artie was emotionally a child.
“Counsel have laughed at us for talking about childhood fantasies and hallucinations. Your Honour has been a child. And while youth has its advantages, it has its grievous troubles.
“What do we know about childhood? The brain of the child is the home of dreams, of castles, of visions, of illusions and delusions. I remember, when I was a child, the men seemed as tall as the trees, and the trees as tall as the mountains. I can remember very well when, as a little boy, I swam the deepest spot in the river for the first time. I have been back since, and I can almost step across the same place, but it seemed an ocean then. And these tall men who I thought were so wonderful, they were dead and they had left nothing behind. I had lived in a dream. I had not known the real world, which I met, to my discomfort and despair, as I grew older, and which dispelled the illusions of my youth.
“We might as well be honest with ourselves, Your Honour. Before I would tie a noose around the neck of a boy, I would try to remember the surging, instinctive, persistent feelings of the child. One who honestly remembers and tries to unlock the door that he thinks is closed, and calls back the boy, can understand the boy.
“Both these boys were in the most trying period of the life of a child; both these boys were at the moment when the call of sex is new and strange; both these boys were moved by the strongest feelings and passions that have ever moved men; both these boys were at the time boys grow insane, at the time crimes are committed. Shall we charge them with full responsibility that we may have a hanging? That the dead walls of Chicago will tell the story of the shedding of their blood?
“From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty or twenty-one, the child has the burden of adolescence, of puberty and sex, thrust upon him. Girls are kept at home and carefully watched. Boys without instruction are left to work the period out for themselves.
“They had parents who were good and kind and wise in their way. But I say to you seriously that the parents are more responsible than these boys. They might have done better if they had not had so much money. I do not know. Great wealth often curses those who touch it. I know there are no better citizens in Chicago than the fathers of these poor boys. I know that there are no better women than their mothers. But I am going to be honest with this court, if it is at the expense of both.”
He spoke more slowly. “To believe that any boy is responsible for himself or his early training is an absurdity that no lawyer or judge should be guilty of today. Somewhere this came to this boy. If his failing came from his heredity, I don’t know where or how.”
The audience was staring at Judd’s father. The old man raised his massive head, as if almost eager to take his share of castigation. On Artie’s side, it was as though one knew at last why his father and mother had been too ill to come to court.
“I do not know what remote ancestors may have sent down the seed that corrupted Artie Straus. If there is responsibility anywhere, it is back of him, somewhere in the infinite number of his ancestors, or in his surroundings, or in both.”
It was curious that when he spoke of heredity, he emphasized Artie, rather than the two. Did Wilk feel the weight of Artie’s other, unnamed crimes? Did he know more of Artie’s madness?
“‘Now I have put off childish things’, said the Psalmist thirty centuries ago. Suppose we cannot put them off? It is when these dreams of boyhood, these fantasies of youth still linger, and the growing boy is still a child – a child in emotion, a child in feeling, a child in hallucinations – that it indicates a diseased mind. There is not an act in all this horrible tragedy that is not the act of a child, the act of a child wandering in the morning of life, moved by the new feelings of a body, moved by the uncontrolled impulses which his teaching was not strong enough to take care of, moved by the dreams and hallucinations which haunt the brain of a child.
“Your Honour, all parents can be criticized; likewise teachers. Some time education will be more scientific. Some time we will try to know what will fit the individual boy, instead of putting all boys through the same course, regardless of what they are.”
He looked at Artie, who stirred uncomfortably. “This boy needed more love, more directing. He needed to have his emotions awakened. He needed guiding hands along the serious road youth must travel. Had these been given him, he would not be here today.”
His gaze moved to Judd. “Now, Your Honour, I want to speak about Judd.” Their eyes held for an instant, until Wilk turned away. “Judd is a boy of remarkable mind – away beyond his years. He is a sort of freak in this direction, as in others – a boy without emotions.”
I wondered if that could be as properly said of Judd as of Artie. There was, first, his attachment to Artie. And Dr. Vincenti had pointed out that in Judd’s case there were strong remnants of emotional life. Perhaps it was rather a case of powerful suppression, diversion of feeling.
Wilk went on with his analysis: “He was an intellectual machine going without balance and without a governor, seeking to solve every philosophy, but using his intellect only.
“Of course his family did not understand him; few men would. His mother died when he was young. He grew up in this way. He became enamoured of the philosophy of Nietzsche.
“Your Honour, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was the most original philosopher of the last century – a man who probably has made a deeper imprint on philosophy than any other man within a hundred years, whether right or wrong. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward that superman.” He glanced at Judd, like teacher correcting pupil.
“He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them – a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. Judd Steiner is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way he was influenced.”
Today we know that more, far more were influenced, or thought they recognized in Nietzsche something of their own selves. There in 1924, in the Chicago courtroom, far from the Munich where another Nietzschean began his march in 1924, the tocsin for the era was scarcely heard.
Jonathan Wilk walked back to the defence table and picked up some notes. “I have made a few short extracts from Nietzsche. These would not affect you. They would not affect me. The question is how these works did affect the impressionable, visionary, dreamy mind of this boy. Here are some of the things which Nietzsche taught:
“‘Why so soft, oh my brethren? Why so soft, so unresisting and yielding? This new table, oh my brethren, I put over you: Become hard. To be obsessed by moral consideration presupposes a very low grade of intellect. We should substitute for morality the will to our own end, and consequently to the means to accomplish that.’”
His own voice hardened by the words, Wilk went on. “‘A great man, a man that nature has built up and invented in a grand style, is colder, harder, less cautious and more free from the fear of public opinion.’”
He spoke directly to Judd, as to a misunderstanding pupil. “This was a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.” Wilk went on to quote a scholarly appraisal: “‘Although no perfect superman has yet appeared in history, Nietzsche’s types are to be found in all the world’s great figures – Alexander, Napoleon – in the wicked heroes such as the Borgias, Wagner’s Siegfried and Ibsen’s Brand, and in the great cosmopolitan intellects suc
h as Goethe and Stendhal. These were the gods of Nietzsche’s idolatry. The superman-like qualities supposedly lie not in their genius, but in their freedom from scruple. They felt themselves to be above the law. So the superman will be a law unto himself. What he does will come from the will and superabundant power within him.’”
An excited gleam had come to Judd’s eyes. Was Wilk defending him now? And the great accusatory question stood forth in those eyes: How was anyone to know whether the will to power led to good or to evil?
But the moment passed. Wilk seemed to shake himself out of his abstraction and slowly to load upon himself again the burden of defence. “Your Honour, this philosophy became part of his being. He lived it and practised it. Now, he could not have believed it, excepting that it either caused a diseased mind or was the result of a diseased mind.
“Here is a boy who by day and by night, in season and out, was talking of the superman, owing no obligations to anyone, believing whatever gave him pleasure he should do – believing it just as another man might believe a religion.
“You remember that I asked Dr. Ball about these religious cases and he said, ‘Yes, many people go to the insane asylum on account of them.’ I asked Dr. Ball whether the same thing might come from a philosophical belief, and he said, ‘If one believed in it strongly enough.’ And we know this about Nietzsche: He was insane for fifteen years before the time of his death. His very doctrine is a species of insanity.”
Judd’s mouth opened. Then he sank back.
“Here is a man,” Wilk continued, “who made his impress upon the world. Every student of philosophy knows him. His doctrines made him a maniac. And here is a young boy in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is his life. Do you suppose this mad act could have been done by him in any other way?
