Agency – Part 2

The inevitable last links of Darrow’s chain of reasoning.

In the first essay in this series, we learned how the argument of a local public school superintendent at a forum on school safety and the argument of renowned trial lawyer and American Civil Liberties Union leader, Clarence Darrow, both posited that a young person’s violence should not generally be attributed to them, but to the larger environmental influences that surround them.  While that’s about as far as our local superintendent went with the argument, Darrow, in 1924, brought the jury further, to his logic’s inevitable conclusion, which is the subject of this essay.

Darrow was trying to persuade the jury that his young person clients, Leopold and Loeb, should not be executed for their murder of another young person, and he argued the true cause of the murder was not the murderers, but the environment that produced them.  Many might find his arguments persuasive.  If so, there is more you should know.

Leopold and Loeb were not from poor families. They were white, rich, and well educated.  They might today be called “white privileged.”  Does that change your view of Darrow’s arguments regarding his clients?  As Darrow explained to the judge, it shouldn’t, as a matter of logic:

There are times when poverty is fortunate. I insist, your Honor, that had this been the case of two boys of these defendants’ age, unconnected with families supposed to have great wealth, there is not a State’s Attorney in Illinois who would not have consented at once to a plea of guilty and a punishment in the penitentiary for life … We are here with the lives of two boys imperiled, with the public aroused. For what? Because, unfortunately, the parents have money. Nothing else … Your Honor, last night I was speaking about what is perfectly obvious in this case, that no human being could have done what these boys did, excepting through the operation of a diseased brain … Ordinarily there would be no sort of question of the condition of these boys’ minds. The question is raised only because their parents have money.

Darrow went on to explain some details of his wealthy client’s lives:

Now, your Honor, who are these two boys? Leopold, with a wonderfully brilliant mind; Loeb, with an unusual intelligence; -- both from their very youth crowded like hothouse plants, to learn more and more and more. Dr. Krohn [an expert witness in the case] says that they are intelligent. In spite of that, it is true: -- they are unusually intelligent. But it takes something besides brains to make a human being who can adjust himself to life. In fact, as Dr. Church and as Dr. Singer [two other expert witnesses] regretfully admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human conduct. There is no question about it. The emotions are the urge that make us live; the urge that makes us work or play, or move along the pathways of life. They are the instinctive things … Whatever our action is, it comes from the emotions … The intellect does not count so much … The question of intellect means the smallest part of life. Back of this are man's nerves, muscles, heart, blood, lungs -- in fact, the whole organism; the brain is the least part in human development. Without the emotion-life man is nothing. How is it with these two boys?

Darrow first turned to Dickey Loeb:

Is Dickey Loeb to blame because out of the infinite forces that conspired to form him, the infinite forces that were at work producing him ages before he was born, that because out of these infinite combinations he was born without it [that is, emotional feeling]? If he is, then there should be a new definition for justice. Is he to blame for what he did not have and never had? Is he to blame that his machine is imperfect? Who is to blame? I do not know. I have never in my life been interested so much in fixing blame as I have in relieving people from blame.

Darrow argued that even though “Dickie Loeb was a child of wealth and opportunity,” he was no more immune from the causal determination of nature and nurture than any other human being.  As Darrow said:

Over and over in this court your Honor has been asked, and other courts have been asked, to consider boys who have no chance; they have been asked to consider the poor, whose home had been the street, with no education and no opportunity in life, and they have done it, and done it rightfully. But your Honor, it is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes, and I am asking your Honor to consider the rich as well as the poor (and nothing else).

In the case of Loeb:

Can I find what was wrong? I think I can. Here was a boy at a tender age, placed in the hands of a governess, intellectual, vigorous, devoted, with a strong ambition for the welfare of this boy. He was pushed in his studies, as plants are forced in hot houses. He had no pleasures, such as a boy should have, except as they were gained by lying and cheating. Now, I am not criticizing the nurse. I suggest that some day your Honor look at her picture. It explains her fully. Forceful, brooking no interference, she loved the boy, and her ambition was that he should reach the highest perfection. No time to pause, no time to stop from one book to another, no time to have those pleasures which a boy ought to have to create a normal life … 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, story after story, in his young life. Of all of this there can be no question. What is the result? Every story he read was a story of crime … This boy early in his life conceived the idea that there could be a perfect crime, one that nobody could ever detect; that there could be one where the detective did not land his game; a perfect crime.

And that dream of a perfect crime was no less deserving of understanding than any other young person’s misunderstanding of anything else:

The whole life of childhood is a dream and an illusion, and whether they take one shape or another shape depends not upon the dreamy boy but on what surrounds him … And, if your Honor shall doom [my clients] to die, it will be because they are the sons of the rich … 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. And I submit, your Honor, that under every principle of natural justice, under every principle of conscience, of right, and of law, he should not be made responsible for the acts of someone else. I say this again, without finding fault with his parents, for whom I have the highest regard, and who doubtless did the best they could. They might have done better if they had not had so much money.

In the case of Darrow’s client Leopold:

Now, your Honor, I want to speak of the other lad. Babe [Leopold’s nickname]. Babe is somewhat older than Dick, and 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, a boy obsessed of philosophy, a boy obsessed of learning, busy every minute of his life.

And then Darrow makes the point that sometimes only the wealthy have the means to be exposed to the ideas of thinkers considered very interesting in elite circles, which can lead to disastrous results:

[Leopold] became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; 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. More books have been written about him than probably all the rest of the philosophers in a hundred years. More college professors have talked about him. In a way he has reached more people, and still he has been a philosopher of what we might call the intellectual cult.

Now, you still haven’t heard the ultimate result of Darrow’s chain of reasoning.  He’s explained so far that if the behavior of people of low income are to be excused due to the external negative influences they experience, so, too, should wealthier people be excused for the external negative influences they experience as a result of the many dysfunctions that come with being rich.  But still, if people of low and high income are to be mutually excused for bad behavior, is anyone left deserving of accountability for their actions?  As lawyers like to say, “What’s the limiting principle of this argument?  Exactly how far does its logic go?”  Darrow tells us:

What had this boy to do with it? He was not his own father; he was not his own mother; he was not his own grandparents. All of this was handed to him. He did not surround himself with governesses and wealth. He did not make himself. And yet he is to be compelled to pay. There was a time in England, running down as late as the beginning of the last century, when judges used to convene court and call juries to try a horse, a dog, a pig, for crime. I have in my library a story of a judge and jury and lawyers trying and convicting an old sow for lying down on her ten pigs and killing them. What does it mean? Animals were tried … None of us are bred perfect and pure, and the color of our hair, the color of our eyes, our stature, the weight and fineness of our brain, and everything about us could, with full knowledge, be traced with absolute certainty to somewhere; if we had the pedigree it could be traced just the same in a boy as it could be in a dog, a horse or cow.

So now we see the ultimate end of Darrow’s argument (as well as the school superintendent’s).  Not only does its logic apply to the privileged as well as the nonprivileged, but it also reduces everyone to innocent … animals.

Surely there’s a better model for human flourishing, and that model is to recognize that most everyone has the capacity for agency.  And that’s the topic of the next essays in this series.

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6.