For the Thrill of It Page 4

  The architects had constructed the campus in the late Gothic style. It might have seemed anachronistic to build in Chicago—the most modern of American cities—a university that resembled the medieval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, but there was a pleasing regularity about the campus. Everything was in proportion; nothing was too large or too small; and the Gothic style allowed for an astonishing diversity of embellishment and ornamentation. Innumerable gargoyles studded every building, peering down on the students making their way to class; crockets and finials—elaborate decorations shaped in the form of foliage—ran hither and thither over the buildings, stretching across the tops of doorways and around the arches of bay windows; and the generous use of stained and leaded glass in the windows provided an essential ingredient to the riot of medievalism that constituted the University of Chicago.5

  Already—even before his matriculation—the university dazzled Nathan Leopold with its promises of future achievement: academic triumphs in the classroom, acclaim from the professors, scholastic awards and honors. His mother—his gentle, loving, affectionate mother, Florence—had extracted a promise from him, willingly given, that he would make Phi Beta Kappa before graduation. Nathan intended to keep his promise—and perhaps, also, he hoped, he would attain what had almost always eluded him in high school: companionship and friends.

  For Nathan Leopold—fifteen years old, five feet three inches tall, weighing 110 pounds, with a sallow complexion, gray eyes, thick black hair, and a curiously asymmetrical face that gave him an evasive appearance—had always been a lonely and unhappy child.

  HIS GRANDFATHER SAMUEL F. LEOPOLD had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1846, eventually settling in northern Michigan. Samuel had opened several small retail stores, each one close to the copper mines, first in Eagle River, a second in Eagle Harbor, a third in the town of Cliff Mines, and a fourth in Hancock. Business was good, and within a few years he had been able to open several more stores, so that his reach extended along the Upper Peninsula. But obtaining supplies to sell on to the miners and laborers had become a constant struggle: there was no railroad connecting Chicago to the copper mines, and shipping facilities were rudimentary.6

  In 1867, Samuel Leopold bought his first steamship to carry grain and other provisions to the mining towns; then came his second, the SS Ontonagon; and in 1872, he added the SS Peerless to his fleet. He moved to Chicago with his wife, Babette, and their six children; invested wisely; and gradually built up his shipping business so that, at his death from septicemia in 1898, the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior Transportation Company was the largest shipping line plying the Great Lakes.7

  His first son, Nathan F. Leopold, born in Eagle River in 1860, proved as astute a businessman as his father. Nathan inherited the family business; married his childhood sweetheart, Florence Foreman; purchased a large house at 3223 Michigan Avenue; and made a second fortune manufacturing aluminum cans and paper boxes. Through his marriage to Florence, a daughter of the financier Gerhart Foreman, Nathan F. Leopold Sr. was now connected to some of Chicago’s most prosperous and prominent bankers. Within a single generation, the Leopolds had won a place among the wealthiest families in Chicago.8

  In 1915, Nathan and Florence moved their family—three sons: Michael, Samuel, and Nathan Jr.—from Michigan Avenue to the residential neighborhood of Kenwood, eight miles south of the Loop. Their new home, 4754 Greenwood Avenue, a three-story mansion set back from the street, was one of the more unusual homes in a neighborhood distinguished by architectural diversity: the Leopold house included, on the first floor, an enormous rectangular living room built in the modernist style, facing the garden on three sides, around which the architect had attached the remainder of the mansion built in traditional nineteenth-century style complete with gabled roofs.

  The youngest son, Nathan Jr., had reason to welcome the family’s move to Kenwood. For two years Nathan had attended the local public school, the Douglas School, just a few blocks from their home on Michigan Avenue. It had been an unhappy experience. Nathan was one of those unfortunate children who attract the relentless, unforgiving attention of schoolboy bullies, and during his time at the Douglas School his classmates taunted and teased him remorselessly. He was different from the other boys, Nathan realized: he was naturally shy and more studious than his peers; he had little interest in baseball and no athletic ability; his parents were affluent; and, each afternoon, at the end of the school day, his governess would embarrass him by appearing at the school gate to escort him home. And when his classmates discovered that Nathan had, as a six-year-old, briefly attended a girls’ school—the Spaides School on Buena Avenue—his humiliation was complete. Nathan’s acknowledgment that he was different—“I realized I was not like other children, that I had wealthy parents, that I lived on Michigan Avenue and had a nurse who accompanied me to and from school”—did nothing to ease the pain and distress that accompanied the daily torture inflicted by his classmates.9

  To whom could he turn for help? His father was aloof and remote, preoccupied with his business ventures; his two brothers, Michael and Samuel, older than he by several years, had never taken him seriously; and his mother, Florence, was an invalid, bedridden after contracting some mysterious illness during her pregnancy with Nathan.

  There was only one person in whom he could confide. His governess, Mathilda (Sweetie) Wantz, had joined the Leopold household in 1911. She was an attractive, strong-willed woman, around thirty years old, with a heavy German accent and a flirtatious manner. Mathilda quickly established herself as a presence in the Leopold household, less as a governess to the two younger boys, Samuel and Nathan, than as a substitute for their invalid mother. Florence Leopold loved her three sons, and had a special regard for Nathan, a weak, frail boy; but because of her illness, she had gradually given up control of the household to the governess.10

  It was not long before the maids were exchanging gossip about Mathilda’s increasingly eccentric, even outrageous behavior. Everyone remarked on her obvious familiarity with the two younger boys, and soon it had become common knowledge among the household staff that Mathilda was having sex with seventeen-year-old Samuel; even more scandalously, she had become sexually intimate with twelve-year-old Nathan.11

  The youngest boy, especially, was smitten with his governess. Nathan recognized that Mathilda had taken the place of his mother—“She had a very great influence over my brother and myself. She displaced my mother”—but any regret that his mother’s illness had reduced her importance was overwhelmed by the affection and love that he now felt for his governess: “I was thoroughly devoted to her.”12

  3. THE HARVARD SCHOOL. The Harvard School for Boys, founded in 1865, moved in 1917 to a new location at 4731 Ellis Avenue. This illustration first appeared as the frontispiece to the school catalog.

  His home life was in turmoil; Nathan, nevertheless, excelled at his studies at his new school. After the family had moved to Greenwood Avenue, his father had enrolled him at the Harvard School for Boys. The school building, located at 47th Street and Ellis Avenue, was unremarkable—a single three-story redbrick building facing onto Ellis Avenue with chemistry laboratories at the rear and an asphalt playground at the side—but the teachers were, without exception, conscientious and hardworking, devoted to their pupils, and determined that each boy should, if he desired, have the opportunity to attend college.

  Fewer than 200 boys attended the Harvard School. The primary school included eight grades, with approximately fifteen boys in each grade; the high school consisted of four classes, ranging from the fresh-man class to the seniors. The Harvard School emphasized academic excellence; the size of each class, along with an extensive counseling program, enabled the teachers to give each boy individual attention. Very occasionally, a boy might forgo university to enter directly into his father’s business, but more typically, every member of each graduating class went on to college: in the majority of cases, either to the University of Chicago or to an elite pr
ivate institution in the East such as Yale, Cornell, or Dartmouth.

  The classes at the Harvard School were too small to support sports teams, and success in sports was always elusive. In 1919, the school abandoned football because of a lack of interest among the seniors; and, although the school fielded baseball and basketball teams, other, larger schools, most notably the Francis Parker School, Chicago Latin, and Wendell Phillips, invariably trounced the Harvard boys.13

  Nathan Leopold had no interest in sports—he was indifferent to the lack of success of the Harvard teams—but he excelled in the classroom. At the Harvard School, he took, in addition to the assigned courses, electives in German and classical Greek, and he succeeded, year after year, in standing at the top of his class. He was still an outsider—his classmates regarded him as an eccentric loner—but by his junior year, he had won a few friends through a shared interest in ornithology. Nathan had a passion for collecting birds, a passion that had begun six years earlier through the encouragement of a teacher at the Douglas School. His bird collection, kept in a study adjoining his bedroom, encompassed over 2,000 specimens; on weekends, he would drive to the lakes southeast of the city near the Indiana state line to hunt up new species for his collection.14

  By spring 1920, Nathan, fifteen years old, now a junior at the Harvard School, felt that he had nothing more to learn from his teachers. He had accumulated sufficient credits to forgo his senior year and was eligible to matriculate at the University of Chicago. He was eager for the challenge. And so, in 1920, Nathan prepared to enter the university’s freshman class.15

  But that summer, in June 1920, Nathan met a new acquaintance, a boy six months younger than himself, an impossibly good-looking boy, slender but well built, tall, with brown-blond hair, humorous blue eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile.

  RICHARD LOEB CAME FROM a wealthy, well-connected family. His father, Albert Loeb, was vice president of Sears, Roebuck and a close friend of the millionaire philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Richard’s mother, Anna, was a prominent member of the Chicago Woman’s Club and an associate of Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement house movement in Chicago. His uncle Jacob then, in 1920, a lawyer in private practice, had been president of the Chicago Board of Education until 1919, responsible, most notoriously, for the Loeb Rule enjoining teachers in the city’s public schools from going on strike.16

  Albert Loeb had begun his career as a lawyer—he had been admitted to the Illinois bar in 1889 and had worked for the firm of Loeb and Adler for twelve years. In 1901, he accepted Julius Rosenwald’s invitation to work for Sears, Roebuck, and within the decade he had become vice president of the company. As the business expanded during the early years of the century, Albert accumulated a personal fortune that by 1920 exceeded $10 million. Albert and Anna Loeb had four sons: Allan lived in Seattle, where he was the manager of Sears, Roebuck on the West Coast; Ernest was a student at Vanderbilt University; Richard, fifteen years old, had recently completed his freshman year at the University of Chicago; and the youngest, Thomas, was in the eighth grade at the Harvard School for Boys.17

  Richard had always been the intellectual of the family. At an early age, with the benediction of his governess, Emily Struthers, he read widely in history and literature. Emily introduced Richard to the novels of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and encouraged him to read the adventure stories of Ernest Thompson Seton. Historical novels, loosely based on actual events, were all the rage in the United States in the early years of the century, and Richard, too, was caught up in the craze: as a young boy, he read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur. Emily Struthers was ambitious for Richard—she imagined he might choose a career as an ambassador or a diplomat—and she encouraged him to read not only the literary classics but also such serious historical works as John Lothrop Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic and Herman Grimm’s Life of Michael Angelo.18

  4. RICHARD (DICKIE) LOEB. Born 22 June 1905. This photograph shows Loeb as a seven-year-old pupil at the University Elementary School.

  Richard was a dutiful pupil who conscientiously read those books that Emily picked out for him. But he never divulged to his governess his real passion, which was for crime stories and detective mysteries, a genre that he knew would never win Emily’s approval. He had discovered a copy of Frank Packard’s The Beloved Traitor among his brother’s books. Out of sight of his governess, alone in his bedroom, Richard would spend hours reading Packard’s stories about a famous criminal who could extricate himself from the most complex and dangerous situations. Richard was enthralled by such adventures; the more intricate the story, the greater his fascination. He could not stop reading the Packard stories. No sooner had he finished The Beloved Traitor than he purchased Packard’s The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, a collection of tales in which the eponymous hero, an expert crook with noble motives, carried out a series of dazzlingly clever robberies. Richard had a passion for detective stories. He quickly read the Arthur Conan Doyle oeuvre, taking particular pleasure in The Sign of Four; he followed Sherlock Holmes with Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar, Maurice Leblanc’s 813, and Wyndham Martin’s Anthony Trent, Master Criminal.19

  IN OCTOBER 1917, RICHARD, THREE months past his twelfth birthday, entered the freshman class at University High School. The school, adjacent to the University of Chicago, was the creation of John Dewey, professor of philosophy at the university. In 1896 Dewey had established an elementary school, for pupils younger than eleven, as part of his initiative to overturn traditional pedagogical methods. In 1902 Dewey added a high school on the same site in new buildings on the north side of the Midway, immediately east of the university campus. The teachers at University High School would forgo the traditional pedagogy then current in American high schools—rote learning and memorization—and replace it with a pedagogy that encouraged innovation, initiative, and experimentation. Students, Dewey believed, should be educated in a way that best prepared them for the demands of daily life; the pupils at University High were expected, therefore, to solve practical problems creatively and in cooperation with their classmates.20

  As a consequence, University High, in the first two decades of its existence, was a riot of creative activity both inside and outside the classroom. The University of Chicago took especial pride in the high school and its innovative pedagogy and provided the resources, including financial support, to enable the faculty to introduce a many-sided curriculum. By 1917, 500 boys and girls were enrolled at University High; many of them were sons and daughters of the university professors.

  Extracurricular activities flourished at the school. The students organized a jazz band, a symphony orchestra, a Glee Club (for theatrical performances), Sketch Club, Discussion Club, and Engineering Club. Each class organized a Literary Society (exclusively for members of the class) to meet for readings, debates, and musical recitals. There were three academic honor societies: Kanyaratna (for girls), Tripleee (for boys), and Phi Beta Sigma (for pupils with an outstanding academic record). Boys from all four classes could join together as the Boys’ Club for informal discussions and meetings; the girls quickly established the Girls’ Club as a counterpart. Students at University High organized three publications: The Midway, a literary magazine that appeared each fortnight; The Correlator, the high school yearbook; and that most extraordinary of accomplishments, the University High School Daily, a four-page newspaper that appeared on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays during the school term. Finally there were the sports teams: football, soccer, and baseball for the boys; basketball for boys and girls.

  Richard Loeb entered the freshman class in 1917 with a sense of anticipation. His elder brother Ernest, a senior and captain of the soccer team, could provide guidance to Richard if he needed it; but Richard had been a pupil in the elementary school and was now entering University High with his classmates. It was not difficult, therefore, for Richard to adjust to his new situation. He was an extroverted, outg
oing, enthusiastic twelve-year-old, with no hint of shyness or diffidence. He had no particular talents that set him apart from his classmates—no outstanding athletic ability and no aptitude for playing a musical instrument—but he was likable, engaging, and popular, someone who readily joined in school activities.21

  In his first term at University High, Richard joined the Discussion Club and the Engineering Club, two groups that recruited their members from all four classes. Predictably, the upperclassmen—seniors and juniors—dominated the affairs of both groups; Richard attended sporadically during his freshman year but said little during the discussions. His enthusiasm was reserved for meetings of the Freshman Literary Society. No seniors and juniors could dominate the proceedings of this group, and the freshmen—nicknamed “the molecules” by the upperclassmen—could organize their own activities without interference from their elders.22

  Each fortnight members of the Freshman Literary Society would meet to debate some pressing issue, to hear a musical recital by one or more members, and to listen to extemporaneous talks. Richard was irrepressible and indefatigable, and scarcely a meeting went by without one of his many contributions. He was an enthusiastic presence, always volunteering his thoughts and remarks, and perhaps, therefore, it was a cruel disappointment that, in May 1918, when he ran for president of the Freshman Literary Society, he lost narrowly to Henry Abt.23