Meyer Levin - Compulsion

“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.