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106 Making and Remaking an Event The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture The act which created a stir far beyond this country is so frightful, psychologically so incomprehensible, so singular in its unfoldment that, if Poe or a writer of detective stories wished to unnerve his readers, no better tale could be invented; no harder knot to unravel; no events could follow each other more effectively than life, or rather disease, has here woven them together. —Maurice Urstein, Leopold and Loeb: A Psychiatric-Psychological Study, 1924 What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is! —Nathan Leopold, Life plus 99 Years, 1958 From the instant it broke on public awareness in 1924, the Leopold and Loeb case was enveloped by the mass media. In fact, journalists gathered critical evidence that helped crack the case. And two newsmen on the Chicago Daily News, James Mulroy and Alvin Goldstein, eventually shared some of the reward money as well as the Pulitzer Prize for helping to connect Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb to the abduction and murder of Bobby Franks. As they pursued leads, rumors, and suspicions, journalists not only helped solve the crime, but gathered materials for stories that became the basis for public knowledge of the presumed events. Journalists and storytellers continued their active involvement with the case throughout the twentieth century as the Leopold and Loeb affair maintained a hold on the American imagination. Journalists, novelists, and screenwriters interpolated fictions into the facts of Loeb’s murder in prison, testified at Leopold’s parole hearings, and fictionalized the case in novels and movies. When Meyer Levin published 4 Compulsion in 1956, this process of story creation not only culminated in a new form of historical fiction but also occasioned a notable court ruling about the boundaries between public and private, fact and fiction. Through their stories, the media actively offered Leopold and Loeb as subjects for a process of social interpretation, which began in 1924 and continues today, as the two have become characters in an avant-garde film with a very contemporary focus. I began to study this case while writing about child kidnapping, and I gradually became convinced that the tangled mystery at its heart— why two rich, gifted boys would commit a murder embedded in the form of a ransom kidnapping—had a Dostoevskian quality that made it at once compelling and unsolvable. Leopold and Loeb may have been aware that they were playing at the boundary of human consciousness where analytic intentionality blended with irrational passion, and Loeb was infatuated with detective fiction, which often illuminates that borderland . That we would probably never know exactly what happened or why was not, however, the significant issue. For a historian the important question was not what happened and why. Rather, since the case has been repeatedly reframed, the question was how the story has been presented over time and what issues it propelled into public awareness. The themes explored in the repeated reimaginings of the case were ones important to twentieth-century culture: childhood, sexuality, the nonrational self, and psychology as a way to understand these. And the implicit questions went deep—to the source of evil in modern life. It is my argument that in using those themes to explain a heinous crime, first the newspapers , through which the case initially exploded into the public arena, and then other cultural agencies participated in a public discourse that offered Americans the new terms normality and abnormality to understand transgressive behavior. Indeed, the judicial hearing that determined Leopold and Loeb’s fate was guided, not by legal questions of responsibility , but by a psychiatrically driven defense that popularized those terms. That public discourse began in an uneasy way in the reportage of the 1920s and culminated in the 1950s in a coherent fiction. Perhaps because so much was at stake and the issues so tangled, the discourse consisted of stories told and retold. At its inception, the plot concocted by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had been modeled on detective fiction, and its depiction always existed along the uncertain boundary between fact and fiction. Because the case and the protagonists were rapidly engulfed in the evolving public discourse and the stories were vivid, the public portrayals overwhelmed the identity of the individual characters. When Leopold eventually wrote his own memoirs, he had difficulty distinguishing the The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture 107 [13.59.34.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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