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Guided Readings: The Jazz Age - The American 1920s
Leopold and Loeb
It was the first "Crime of the Century." It took place in 1924. Two teenagers with every social advantage kidnapped and killed and mutilated a 14-year-old neighbor.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb came from highly privileged Chicago families. At 19, Leopold was already a University of Chicago graduate and spoke 14 languages. 18-year-old Richard was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. Leopold would describe the two as evil geniuses who were above ordinary standards of morality.
Theirs was a thrill killing, which included various sexual perversions with their victim's body. They even mutilated the boy's genitals with acid. And yet they were not executed. Their defender, the attorney Clarence Darrow, introduced the psychiatric defense into the legal system. He claimed that the youths had been sexually abused by their governess and scarred by feelings of physical inferiority. He maintained that Leopold had been traumatized by his mother's death and that Loeb had been pushed into extreme academic overachievement. In addition, Leopold and Loeb had indulged in extreme sexual fantasies.
Before the 1920s, the dominant view of violent juveniles emphasized deficiency and deprivation. Juvenile killers were generally thought of as subnormal in intelligence. The conventional view is that delinquents had been neglected by their families and deprived of education. But the Leopold and Loeb case challenged that view. The case was interpreted to mean that any parent could have raised these two youthful murderers. Said a prominent judge:
Let no parent flatter himself that the Leopold-Loeb case has no lesson for him....It is more than the story of a murder. It is the story of modern youth, of modern parents, of modern economic and social conditions, and of modern education.Rather than blaming the young men's parents, the jury and the press accepted Clarence Darrow's argument that society, schools, and violent social conditions were largely to blame for the crime. Darrow also succeeded in putting the morality of the death penalty on trial. He acknowledged his clients' guilt and admonished the jury to hate the sin but not the sinner. He succeeded in persuading the jury to give the two murderers life sentences.
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