Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (24 page)

112.
S.E.
18:105–6 and note.

1. Diana Fuss, “Identification Papers,” 45.
   

2. The antisemitic turn of Blüher’s writing led to increasing consternation among other otherwise sympathetic readers. Not only were his writings among the most provoca- tive contributions to the masculinist political counterculture, but like the work of other antisemitic intellectuals who commanded the respect of a particular generation, such as Weininger (
   Sex and Character
   , 1903) and Sombart (
   The Jews and Modern Capitalism
   , 1911) before him, Blüher’s work demanded a response. Kafka’s letters repeatedly discuss the appeal of his writings as well as confer upon them a certain authoritative status. Thomas Mann records in his diaries (17 November 1919) the profound and positive im- pact Blüher’s lectures and books made upon him; Widdig,
   Männerbünde und Massen
   , 33–34. When
   Secessio Judaica
   appeared in 1922 Kafka wrote to Robert Klopstock (30 June 1922) of the necessity to respond to its characterizations and proposed solution to the Jew- ish problem in German cultural life. Kafka considered it a standard against which to read similar studies that differentiate German from Jewish culture/writing, such as Friedrich van der Leyen’s
   Deutsche Dichtung in neuer Zeit
   ; Kafka,
   Letters
   , 330–31. And the psycho- analyst Paul Federn in his review,
   Imago
   9 (1923): 138–39, felt compelled to dismiss it.
   

3. Blüher,
   Secessio Judaica
   , 23–24.
   

4. Freud letter to Leyens, 4 July 19 [23]; cit. Neubauer, “Sigmund Freud und Hans Blüher,” 131.
   

5. Ibid.
   

6. Sigmund Freud, “The Acquisition and Control of Fire” [1932],
   S.E.
   22:185–93.
   

7. Sigmund Freud,
   Civilization and Its Discontents
   [1930],
   S.E.
   21:90n., 103–4, 101, 114.
   

8. Freud,
   Moses and Monotheism
   , 23:91.
   

9. Sigmund Freud, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homo- sexuality” [1922],
   S.E.
   18:230–32.
   

10. Cf. Geller, “Of Mice and Mensa”; and the work of Homi Bhabha, e.g.,
    The Lo- cation of Culture
    (New York: Routledge, 1994).
    

11. Blüher,
    Die Rolle
    , 2:175.
    

12. Sigmund Freud,
    Letters of Sigmund Freud
    , ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic, 1975 [1960]), 375 (30 January 1927).
    

13. Freud,
    Moses and Monotheism
    , 23:7.
    

Jew Boys, Queer Boys: Rhetorics of Antisemitism and Homophobia in the Trial of Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr.

and Richard “Dickie” Loeb

PAUL B. FRANKLIN

All the comments about the supposed stronger sexual drive among Jews have no basis in fact; most frequently they are sexual neurasthenics. Above all, the number of Jewish homosexuals is extraordinarily high.

—Moses Julius Gutmann,
Über den heutigen Stand der Rasse- und Krankheitsfrage der Juden

Both of these boys were deficient in potency. It is doubtful if either of them, certainly Leopold, ever attained a hetero-sexual object love, even in approximation. 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.

—Dr. William Alanson White,
Report on Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold

On 21 May 1924 Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr. (age nineteen) and his lover, Richard “Dickie” Loeb (age eighteen), members of two illustrious, wealthy, Chicago German-Jewish families, kidnapped fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks—Loeb’s second cousin from an equally well-to-do Hyde Park Jewish family—and brutally murdered him with a chisel. They disposed of Franks’s naked, mutilated body in a culvert and subsequently tried to extort a

$10,000 ransom from his family. Like seasoned criminals, Leopold and Loeb meticulously plotted the murder, envisioning it as the perfect crime. Instead of eluding capture and outwitting the criminal justice system, however, they botched their efforts. By the time the ransom note arrived, police had dis- covered the cadaver along with a pair of unusual eyeglasses that had fallen out of Leopold’s jacket pocket. This telltale piece of evidence eventually led to their capture. Defended by Clarence Darrow, the most charismatic and controversial criminal lawyer of his day as well as an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, Leopold and Loeb miraculously escaped the death

penalty and instead received a sentence of life plus ninety-nine years in prison (figure 1).

Although journalists dubbed their heinous deed “the crime of the centu- ry,” the avalanche of publicity and the spectacle surrounding their prosecu- tion made it one of the trials of the twentieth century. The Leopold and Loeb case became a cause célèbre in American culture of the 1920s, in part because it crystallized a plethora of highly contested social and sexual discourses rang- ing from homosexuality, juvenile criminality, and atheism to excessive wealth, psychiatry, and capital punishment. The young men’s privileged backgrounds and intellectual acumen made the motive and barbarity of their act all the more incomprehensible.
1
On the surface, nothing about Leopold and Loeb suggested the profile of ruthless criminals.

The fascination surrounding the kidnap-murder of Franks still endures, largely because of the numerous fictionalized stage, screen, and literary adap- tations of the case. Alfred Hitchcock based his 1948 homoerotic thriller
Rope
on a 1929 theatrical dramatization of the crime by the English author Patrick Hamilton. In 1959 Richard Fleischer directed
Compulsion
with Orson Welles in the role of Darrow, a cinematic venture inspired by Meyer Levin’s best- selling 1956 novel of the same title in which the author redefined the limits of historical fiction, portraying Leopold and Loeb as sex-starved,
heterosexual
teens. Barbet Schroeder’s recent movie
Murder by Numbers
(2002) is of the same genre. Tom Kalin’s acclaimed 1992 film
Swoon
is one of several post- Stonewall, gay ruminations on the crime, which include the plays
Never the Sinner
(1985) by John Logan and
Leopold and Loeb
(1978) by George Singer. While certain scholars have analyzed these popular adaptations of the Leopold and Loeb case, most have overlooked the original crime and trial.
2
The few who have examined the latter have ignored the subtle rhetoric sur- rounding the defendants’ Jewishness and homosexuality, both in the public reception of the crime and during the prosecution. The historian Paula Fass, for example, maintains that “Leopold and Loeb’s Jewishness was not stressed in the press” and further contends that “the public was largely guarded from specific knowledge about the details of Leopold and Loeb’s homosexual rela- tionship.”
3
These conclusions, however, do not hold up to historical scruti- ny.
4
Fass fails to recognize that while references to homosexuality and Jewish- ness in the press and the courtroom often were whispered or shrouded in innuendo, homophobia and antisemitism nevertheless were writ large in the public reception of the crime and trial. What went unsaid in the course of the investigation and prosecution of Leopold and Loeb did so precisely because it went without saying. These youths were construed to be two Jewish teens whose Jewishness “naturally” predisposed them to homosexuality, a “crime

Figure 1.
Renowned defense lawyer Clarence Darrow (
center
) with his youthful clients, Nathan “Babe” Leopold Jr. (
left
) and Richard “Dickie” Loeb (
right
), guarded by two officers of the Chicago court. Courtesy and with the permission of the Charles Deering McCormick Library

of Special Collections, Northwestern University.

against nature” that incited them to commit further crimes against humani- ty. As I will demonstrate, the intimately entangled rhetorics of antisemitism and homophobia voiced in the wake of Bobby Franks’s disappearance em- bodied widespread debates regarding the increasing visibility of Jews, homo- sexuals, and homosexual Jews in American culture of the 1920s.

From the moment investigators recovered the youthful corpse on the morning of May 22, theories of a homosexual motive abounded. On May 24 the
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported: “Some of the police and some persons close to the [Franks] family believe the boy [was] the victim of a degenerate who sought to cloak his act and the boy’s presumed accidental death by the demands for money.”
5
The
New York Times
noted that “a general round-up of all persons suspected of being degenerates had been ordered.”
6
In the days fol- lowing the murder, the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
held a contest for the

best theory of the crime, and entries poured in from some forty states, many of which proposed that Franks was “the victim of subnormal persons and that that was the reason the body was found nude.”
7
Detectives launched their in- vestigation by questioning several unmarried male teachers who taught at the exclusive Harvard School where Franks was a student and from which Loeb graduated.
8
The myth of the male homosexual as child molester held sway during the initial stages of the inquest.

The suspicion that a homosexual kidnapped and murdered Franks inten- sified after Dr. Joseph Springer, the coroner’s physician, submitted his report. Even though Springer testified that the boy’s “rectum was dilated and would admit easily one middle finger,” he also concluded that “there was no evidence of a recent forcible dilation.”
9
Many in the Chicago community, including members of the police force, however, refused to accept such an assessment. Harry Olson, chief justice of the Municipal Court of Chicago, admitted that he doubted “whether this was a kidnaping case at all. . . . The killing may have been accidental as a result of possible abuse of the Franks’ boy, or it may have been done to silence him so that he could not tell of such abuse.”
10
When asked by reporters whether Franks was “attacked,” detectives cautiously re- sponded, the “coroner’s physicians say he probably was not, although it is dif- ficult to determine this. Attempts to attack him might have been made, and some forms of attacks accomplished without leaving external evidence of vi- olence.”
11
For this apparently motiveless crime, homosexuality could be mo- tive—and crime—enough.

Other speculations regarding the perpetrator(s), many of which con- tained antisemitic overtones, reinforced the belief that a homosexual killed Franks. Like their homosexual counterparts, Jews too presumably preyed upon helpless innocent children. Beginning in the Middle Ages, European Christians accused Jews of abducting their male offspring and either con- verting them to Judaism through forcible circumcision or murdering them in a sadistic, symbolic reenactment of the Passion.
12
Leopold’s and Loeb’s ruthless violation of Franks echoed these antisemitic notions, especially con- sidering the fact that Jacob Franks, the victim’s father, previously renounced his Jewishness in favor of Christian Science and buried his son according to the rituals of this denomination.
13

Of all the clues recovered from the scene of the crime, Leopold’s eyeglass- es provided law enforcement and the Chicago community with the most bountiful fodder to draw together homosexuality, Jewishness, degeneracy, and perversion. The May 24 headline of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
heralded, “Glasses Near Body Not Such as Man Wears.” The article went on to explain:

A woman probably owned the pair of small horn rimmed spectacles picked up in the south side swamp. . . . “It would be a strange kind of man, a little bit of a wizened faced fellow, who could wear these,” said one of the opticians. . . . Not only are the circumferences of the lenses ex- traordinarily small for men’s glasses but the ear supports are far too short for the average masculine head, it was pointed out. Illustrating his argu- ment, one of the opticians attempted to fit the glasses upon a detective. The effect was grotesque.
14