For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (5 page)

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.

R
ICHARD
L
OEB 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.
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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.
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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
.
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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
.
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I
N
O
CTOBER
1917, R
ICHARD, 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.
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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, outgoing, 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.
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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.
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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.
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Richard’s failure to win the election was the sole blemish on an otherwise successful freshman year. Everyone liked Richard—he was one of the most popular boys in the class. He rarely missed a homework assignment, and his teachers regarded him with affection and admiration as someone who always did well in his studies. In January 1918, at the start of the winter term, his classmates elected him treasurer of the freshman class, and in February Richard helped organize the freshman-sophomore dance. At the end of the school year, in May, Richard was manager of the freshman class party. It was a tremendous success; there had been plenty of ice cream and cakes and, of course, lots of bottles of Bevo, more than enough for all the boys and girls present.
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Richard’s freshman year had been a triumph—but his governess, Emily Struthers, was ambitious for him to aim higher. Emily, an attractive woman in her early thirties, had a strong sense of duty. She had moved to Chicago in 1910 from her native Canada; she felt fortunate to have found such a generous and considerate employer as Albert Loeb, and she was determined to raise Richard in the best way that she knew. She was neither harsh nor cruel—she never applied the rod—but she expected to be obeyed.
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5.
RICHARD LOEB.
Loeb became a pupil at the University High School in 1917, at the age of twelve. When this photograph was taken, in 1918, Loeb was a freshman at University High. He matriculated at the University of Chicago at age fourteen.

Until he was eleven years old, Richard remembered, he never questioned Emily’s commands (“I always obeyed her to the minute—second. Her word was law”), but as he grew older, he resented her diktats as onerous and excessive. Other boys could spend their evenings playing baseball and their weekends fishing in the Jackson Park lagoon. Why, Richard complained to himself, did Emily compel him to spend so much of his free time studying, studying, always studying? It was not fair; it was not reasonable; and gradually a spirit of rebellion and resentment crept over him. Emily’s demands were unceasing; every evening, after dinner, she would sit down by his side and compel him to stay at the desk until his homework was completed to her satisfaction. “As a boy,” Richard recalled, “I was kept under and did not do the things other boys did.”
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Nor was there any recourse to a higher authority. His father, Albert, was a busy man and had neither the time nor the inclination to worry about his sons’ education. Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, had absented himself from the day-to-day management of the firm and, in his place, Albert Loeb effectively ran the company. It was an all-consuming task, and in any case, and as far as Albert could tell, the governess, Emily, seemed to be doing a good job with Richard’s upbringing. Albert was content to leave matters in her hands. Anna Loeb, also, was not unduly concerned about Emily’s management of her son’s education. Anna, too, was busy, busy with the affairs of the Chicago Woman’s Club; she knew only that Richard was doing well at school and that Emily was clearly a capable woman who could be trusted with the children.
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