“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.
“He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them – a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. Judd Steiner is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way he was influenced.”
Today we know that more, far more were influenced, or thought they recognized in Nietzsche something of their own selves. There in 1924, in the Chicago courtroom, far from the Munich where another Nietzschean began his march in 1924, the tocsin for the era was scarcely heard.
Jonathan Wilk walked back to the defence table and picked up some notes. “I have made a few short extracts from Nietzsche. These would not affect you. They would not affect me. The question is how these works did affect the impressionable, visionary, dreamy mind of this boy. Here are some of the things which Nietzsche taught:
“‘Why so soft, oh my brethren? Why so soft, so unresisting and yielding? This new table, oh my brethren, I put over you: Become hard. To be obsessed by moral consideration presupposes a very low grade of intellect. We should substitute for morality the will to our own end, and consequently to the means to accomplish that.’”
His own voice hardened by the words, Wilk went on. “‘A great man, a man that nature has built up and invented in a grand style, is colder, harder, less cautious and more free from the fear of public opinion.’”
He spoke directly to Judd, as to a misunderstanding pupil. “This was a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.” Wilk went on to quote a scholarly appraisaclass="underline" “‘Although no perfect superman has yet appeared in history, Nietzsche’s types are to be found in all the world’s great figures – Alexander, Napoleon – in the wicked heroes such as the Borgias, Wagner’s Siegfried and Ibsen’s Brand, and in the great cosmopolitan intellects such as Goethe and Stendhal. These were the gods of Nietzsche’s idolatry. The superman-like qualities supposedly lie not in their genius, but in their freedom from scruple. They felt themselves to be above the law. So the superman will be a law unto himself. What he does will come from the will and superabundant power within him.’”
An excited gleam had come to Judd’s eyes. Was Wilk defending him now? And the great accusatory question stood forth in those eyes: How was anyone to know whether the will to power led to good or to evil?
But the moment passed. Wilk seemed to shake himself out of his abstraction and slowly to load upon himself again the burden of defence. “Your Honour, this philosophy became part of his being. He lived it and practised it. Now, he could not have believed it, excepting that it either caused a diseased mind or was the result of a diseased mind.