Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“And yet they murdered a little boy against whom they had nothing in the world, to get five thousand dollars each. That is what their case rests on. It could not stand up a minute without a motive. Without it, it was the senseless act of immature and diseased children, as it was.”

He turned and gazed at the boys, interminably, it seemed, and a gloom, a heart-heaviness at existence itself could be seen coming over him, and it came over the courtroom, too.

“How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They committed the most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.

“Was their act one of deliberation, of intellect, or were they driven by some force such as Dr. McNarry and Dr. Allwin have told this court?

“Why did they kill little Paulie Kessler?

“Not for money, not for spite, not for hate. They killed him because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.

“Are they to blame for it? It is one of those things that happened; and it calls not for hate, but for kindness, for charity, for consideration.

“Mr. Padua with the immaturity of youth and inexperience says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will for ever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?

“Kill them. Will that prevent other senseless boys or other vicious men or vicious women from killing? No!

“I heard the state’s attorney talk of mothers. I know that any mother might be the mother of a little Paulie Kessler who left his home and went to his school and never came back. I know that any mother might be the mother of Artie Straus, of Judd Steiner. The trouble is that if she is the mother of a Judd Steiner or of an Artie Straus, she has to ask herself the question, ‘How came my children to be what they are? From what ancestry did they get this strain? How far removed was the poison that destroyed their lives? Was I the bearer of the seed that brings them to death?’

“I remember a little poem that gives the soliloquy of a boy about to be hanged, a soliloquy such as these boys might make.” And he quoted Housman:

The night my father got me

His mind was not on me;

He did not plague his fancy

To muse if I should be

The son you see.

The boys were looking down. Judd seemed to brush at his eyes, and two rows behind him his father sat with a strange, tranced pain, his eyes fixed on the back of his son’s head.

The day my mother bore me

She was a fool and glad,

For all the pain I cost her,

That she had borne the lad

That borne she had.

My father and my mother

Out of the light they lie;

The warrant would not find them,

And here, ‘tis only I

Shall hang so high.

O let not man remember

The soul that God forgot,

But fetch the county sheriff

And noose me in a knot,

And I will rot.

And so the game is ended,

That should not have begun.

My father and my mother

They had a likely son,

And I have none.

“No one knows what will be the fate of the child he gets or the child she bears; the fate of the child is the last thing they consider. This weary old world goes on begetting, with birth and with living and with death; and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end. I do not know what it was that made these boys do this mad act, but I do know they did not beget themselves. I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in these boys’ minds, whom you are asked to hang in malice and in hatred and injustice, because someone in the past has sinned against them.

“I am sorry for the fathers as well as the mothers, for the fathers who give their strength and their lives for educating and protecting and creating a fortune for the boys that they love; for the mothers who go down in the shadow of death for their children, who watch them with tenderness and fondness and longing, and who go down into dishonour and disgrace for the children that they love.

“All of these are helpless. We are all helpless. When you are pitying the father and the mother of poor Paulie Kessler, what about the fathers and mothers of these two unfortunate boys, and the boys themselves, and all the fathers and all the mothers and all the boys and girls who tread a dangerous maze of darkness from birth to death?”

He lifted his head up from his soliloquy. “Do you think you can cure it by hanging these two? Do you think you can cure the hatreds and the maladjustments of the world by hanging them?

“What is my friend’s idea of justice? He says to this court, ‘Give them the same mercy that they gave Paulie Kessler.’

“If the state in which I live is not kinder, more humane, more considerate, more intelligent than the mad act of these two boys, I am sorry that I have lived so long.”

So ended the first session.

In the afternoon, Wilk resumed, speaking of the clumsiness, the ineptitude of the “carefully planned” crime. “Without the slightest motive, moved by nothing except the vague wanderings of children, they rented a machine, and about four o’clock in the afternoon started to find somebody to kill. For nothing.”

Wilk described how they picked up their victim. “… They hit him over the head with a chisel and kill him, and go on, driving past the neighbours that they knew, in the open highway in broad daylight. And still men say that they have a bright intellect, and as Dr. Stauffer puts it, can orient themselves and reason as well as he can.

“If ever any death car went over the same kind of route, driven by sane people, I have never heard of it. The car is driven for twenty miles. The slightest accident – anything would bring destruction. They go through the park, meeting hundreds of machines, in the sight of thousands of eyes, with this dead boy.

“And yet doctors will swear that it is a sane act. They know better.

“You need no experts, you need no X-rays, you need no study of the endocrines. Their conduct shows exactly what it was, and shows that this court has before him two young men who should be examined in a psychopathic hospital and treated kindly and with care…

“We are told that they planned. Well, what does that mean? A maniac plans, an idiot plans, an animal plans; any brain that functions may plan; but their plans were the diseased plans of diseased minds.” He walked close to the prosecution table, looking quizzically at his opponents. “My friend pictured to you the putting of this dead boy into this culvert – but, Your Honour, I can think of a scene that makes this pale into insignificance.” And gazing then at Judd and Artie, he described, in gruesome detail, the prospective hanging. “I can picture them, wakened in the grey of morning, furnished a suit of clothes by the State, led to the scaffold, their feet tied, black caps drawn over their heads, stood on a trap door, the hangman pressing the spring; I can see them fall through space – and – I can see them stopped by the rope around their necks.

“Wouldn’t it be a glorious day for Chicago? Wouldn’t it be a glorious triumph for the State’s Attorney? Wouldn’t it be a glorious illustration of Christianity and kindness and charity?