This belief was widely held between 1890 and 1910—the years when criminal anthropology exerted its greatest influence. Arthur MacDonald’s Criminology (1893) was the first work of criminal anthropology in the United States and Philip A. Parsons’ Responsibility for Crime (1909) one of the last.72 Phrenology had already encouraged Americans to link character and morality to biology, and Lamarckian and degenerationist notions had further correlated biology with social progress—and decline. This was a period in which both policing and penology were professionalizing and were receptive to new ideas that promised expert solutions to social problems. Criminal anthropology provided a useful set of explanatory tropes for a nation concerned with the illnesses, poverty, and biological dangers associated with a growing underclass. “The Degenerate Stock has three main branches, organically united,” wrote social welfare worker Charles Henderson in 1893, “Dependents, Defectives and Delinquents. They are one blood.”73 In his Diseases of Society, Frank Lydston suggested that rapists should be castrated and all habitual criminals sterilized: “The confirmed criminal … is simply excrementitious matter that should not only be eliminated, but placed beyond the possibility of its contaminating the social body.”74 W. Duncan McKim’s solution for a “tremendous reduction in the amount of crime” was even more extreme: “the very weak and the very vicious” should be afforded a “gentle, painless death” by gassing with carbonic acid.75 In effect, the people “most concerned with crime control were receptive to the idea of the criminal as a biologically distinct and inferior being.”76 As had been the case in Italy, in the United States the impact of criminal man was to refigure the social problem of crime as biological.
Criminal anthropology was in a constant state of flux. It was not an ordered and precise system in which the criminal body was fully decipherable, but an unruly and often obscure discourse. Incapable of delineating criminal man’s precise qualities, the science instead provided a flexible set of interpretative notions that were widely applicable. Lombroso’s ideas appealed to the police and also to administrators of asylums, hospitals, and orphanages.77 The fecundity of categories such as “moral insanity,” “atavistic stigmata,” and “inhibition” was a function of their plasticity and inherent ambiguity.78 Above all it was the network of associations between physical, psychological, moral, and political domains that established scientific criminology. Homo criminalis might have been elusive but he was very promiscuous.
Criminal man was the offspring of a variety of heterogeneous discourses. Criminological texts were consequently a captivating assemblage of words, statistics, and images. Lombroso’s description of the brigand Villella’s skull for example—“the totem, the fetish of criminal anthropology”—might well have been a post hoc rationalization of events, but its legacy was a dramatic origin myth:
At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresponsible craving of evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.79
Considering the long history of the many concepts that went into making criminal man, it is telling that Lombroso claims to have discovered the essence of the criminal in an Archimedean moment of sudden insight. Although this passage contains some unusually arresting imagery, its poetic language was far from unique within criminal anthropology, a discourse that was often composed for a mass-market audience. Lombroso retained a strong interest in language throughout his career, a concern his biographer attributes to the influence of the linguist Paolo Marzolo.80
Aiming to communicate “the positivist gospel to the masses, criminal anthropologists were indefatigable in giving public lectures and writing articles for popular audiences.”81 Such an ambition required a sensitive ear for rhetoric and a keen awareness of the power of metaphor. In his 1893 book Prisoners and Paupers, the American criminal anthropologist Henry Boies, for example, wrote that criminals were “the imperfect, knotty, knurly, worm-eaten, half-rotten fruit of the human race.”82 Lombroso’s own writings were bursting with quotations from literature, history, and folklore, all burdened with carrying the same evidentiary weight as personal observations, statistics, and experimental data. Aiming to be simultaneously popular and scientific, Lombroso was perpetually drawn to sensational examples that supported his argument.83 Anecdotes were presented in captivating, lugubrious prose: “It is almost superfluous to record once again the instance of the aboriginal Australian, who, in reply to an inquiry as to the absence of old women in his country, said, ‘We eat them all!’ and on being remonstrated with for such treatment of his wives, answered, ‘For one whom we lose, a thousand remain.’”84 Criminal anthropology thrived on the sober reporting of the scandalous. Anecdotes that made the same point could be stacked one after the other in an apparent parody of inductivist science. Like so-called “savage races,” criminals were idle. As the New Caledonians were stereotyped, they would rather die than work. North American Indians were thought to enjoy savage games: so did criminals. In the same way that South American Indians were thought to be incapable of blushing, so criminals were considered shameless. Criminals were inveterate thieves, a flaw they were thought to share with British New Guinea natives.85 Criminal anthropology was obsessed with “otherness”: the child, the woman, the so-called primitive, the mad. It was an otherness that had to be relentlessly reiterated.
In The Female Offender, amid the exhaustive presentation of prosaic statistics, Lombroso and Ferrero occasionally devoted space to particularly noteworthy case studies. Three photographs of “The Skull of Charlotte Corday,” assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, were accompanied by a detailed description of her “extraordinary number of anomalies.” Having discussed wrinkles—zygomatic, goniomental, and labial—in their chapter on the “Anthropometry of Female Criminals,” the authors recalled “the proverbial wrinkles of witches, and the instance of the vile old woman, the so-called Vecchia dell’ Aceto of Palermo, who poisoned so many persons simply for love of lucre.” The authors revealed that although their evidence concerning the wrinkles had come from a photograph of a statue, it nevertheless possessed good evidentiary value of the criminal’s “virile angularities.” The bust, “so deeply wrinkled, with its satanic leer, suffices of itself to prove that the woman in question was born to do evil, and that, if one occasion to commit it had failed, she would have found others.”86
In their chapter, “Vitality and Other Characteristics of Female Criminals,” Lombroso and Ferrero presented a list of anecdotes featuring historical and classical figures in support of their claim that “if statistics are silent … history and tradition are there to show that the women who most frequently survive accidents and incidental and professional maladies are not the women of purest life.”87 The chapter “The Born Criminal” consists of little more than explanations of general principles interspersed with terse descriptions of notorious female villains, whose appalling crimes are described with staccato prose: “Tiburzio, after having killed a companion who was pregnant, bit her ferociously”; “Ta-ki used to order pregnant women to be torn limb from limb”; “Hoegli beat her daughter, and plunged her head into water to suffocate her cries”; “Pitcherel poisoned her neighbour out of revenge for his having refused to consent to his son’s marriage”; “Jegado constantly poisoned people without any object”; “Sophie Gautier killed, by slow torture, seven children who had been given into her care”; “P … preferred to wound [her ex-lovers] by throwing into their eyes a powder made of fine glass which she had crushed with her tee
th.”88 The wicked deeds of more than sixty named women are thus described, although some are used in evidence on three or four occasions at different points in the chapter. The narrative darts along, rarely dwelling long on any one particular theme. Single sentences are packed with disparate but colorful images: “It is a familiar remark in farmhouses that the most active and the readiest servant-girls are the least honest; while as for prostitutes, their agility is proved by the numbers among them who are dancers and tight-rope performers; and there is no cocotte who does not fence.”89
Narrative was one of criminal anthropology’s most important popularization devices.90 Lombroso’s 1902 study of the capture of the “celebrated brigand” Guiseppe Musolino for Nuovo Antologia magazine, for example, appealed both to conservatives and liberals due to its rich if logically inconsistent framework that attributed criminality to both innate physical factors and environmental forces. Guglielmo Ferrero deployed rhetorical stylistics to great effect in his account of the murderess Ernesta Bordoni for his World of Crime (1893), reporting the lurid facts of the case before proffering a scientific diagnosis. Giovanni Falco’s account of one of Ottolenghi’s case studies for the Bulletin of the School of Scientific Policing faithfully recorded the multiple voices of the participants, a tactic that encouraged the audience to make multiple interpretations.91
Narrative richness was part of the explanation why the criminal anthropologists became celebrated by Italian society.92 Criminological texts were composed of anecdotes and also of stories culled from literature, philosophy, and linguistics, as well as facts from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Lombroso was said to have observed that a vegetarian diet was less conducive to criminality than one based on meat.93 An account of the effects of heat on plants could explain why crimes increased during the summer months. Never one to let a social trend pass without comment, he offered his thoughts on the role of the bicycle in crime and an “epidemic of kissing in America.”94 Ferrero argued “the females of the ants, bees, and spiders are particularly cruel because they are particularly intelligent.” The “woman of to-day,” he maintained, was “less criminal because less intelligent than the man.”95 According to Albrecht, there were numerous cases of slaughter and torture in the animal world, occasioned by the needs of defense (the bee), avarice (the ant), or sheer “love of fighting” (the cricket). Albrecht described how Lombroso found “bands of evil-doers among animals, fraud and thieving, and even criminal physiognomies…..the gray, bloodshot eye of the tiger and hyena, the hooked beak of the birds of prey, their large eye sockets and sexual perversity.”96 Havelock Ellis alerted his readers to research on antisocial conduct among rooks.97 Criminal anthropology scrutinized the rodent-like cheek pouches of some criminals, the angle of the jaw of the lemur, and the supernumerary teeth of snakes. Reptiles, oxen, birds of prey, domestic fowl, and chimpanzees were also subjected to the physiognomic gaze. All this produced what has been appropriately called “a certain dizzying incoherence.”98
In his L’uomo di genio, Lombroso derived an “index of genius” by analogy. Using a classification scheme based on geographical configurations such as mountains, hills, plains, and the nature of the soil, the criminologist deduced a correlation between genius and republicanism.99 Analogical reasoning allowed criminology to make connections across time between social situations, political organizations, and disciplinary bodies. “Under certain unfavourable conditions,” Lombroso-Ferrero wrote, such as cold and poor soil, “the common oak will develop characteristics of the oak of the Quaternary period. The dog left to run wild in the forest will in a few generations revert to the type of his original wolf-like progenitor.” In humans, hunger, syphilis and trauma, and the abuse of drugs and alcohol, as well as “morbid conditions inherited from insane, criminal or diseased progenitors” could easily bring about “a return to the characteristics peculiar to primitive savages.”100
Whereas criminal texts dating from the early nineteenth century are dominated primarily by words—particularly those uttered by criminals themselves—those published toward the end of the century commonly featured statistical tables, anthropometric measures, photographs of body parts, and illustrations of tattoos.101 Such devices performed important rhetorical functions. The illustrations in Henry Boies’ Prisoners and Paupers (1893), for example, consisted of photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island (“Typical Russian Jews,” “A Group of Italians”), deformed “incorrigibles” at Elmira Reformatory, Roman statues, and a painting of a statesman. Criminology has been appropriately described as “an intertextual bricolage,” a jumble of disparate elements drawn from various disciplines all devoted to persuading the reader that criminality was a part of nature.102 Scientific criminology was, thus, elaborated from the familiar, its truth value “a coefficient of its relevance to its audience’s needs and expectations.”103 Different types of evidence appealed to different audiences. The visual and verbal languages of criminal anthropology rendered the criminal body into an easily cognizable entity.104
This is not to say that criminal anthropology’s rhetorical modalities were universally applauded. “One of the greatest defects of Lombrosoian presentation of criminal anthropological data,” Harvard anthropologist and eugenicist Earnest A. Hooton later complained, “is the sensational anecdotal method which is used to clinch arguments.”105 Gustave Tarde had been even more critical: “What he calls experimentation—the accumulation of the mass of undigested remarks (absolutely sincere but uncritical) which he has since heaped together—has merely served to confirm him in his prepossession.”106 Yet it was precisely this jumbled anecdotal-analogical method that had helped to advance criminal anthropology from the beginning. Lombroso’s texts are characterized by homologies between argumentative style, tabulated statistical data, and visual images that allow the reasoning to move effortlessly between hearsay, anecdote, and story. The statistics, such as they are, are usually nothing more complex than simple percentages, and their tabulated organization evidences no systematic rationale. The photographs of amassed criminal heads look—to modern eyes at least—like pages taken from a nineteenth-century cartes de visite album. All these disparate sources are piled up, one after the other, relentlessly aiming to persuade with an energetic display of sheer force.
Criminal anthropology conveyed information “efficiently, powerfully, and pleasurably.”107 With its habitual use of photographs of criminals and their skulls, illustrations of tattoos, and so on, criminal anthropology had enormous “visual clout.” Both graphic and narrative forms of persuasion gave it enormous popular appeal compared to dry academic texts in other disciplines.108 The science weaved together images of class, race, and gender with commonplace understandings of deviance to create an enterprise that had incredible epistemological power. At the heart of the project was the numinous figure of the born criminal: “lurid, horrifying, titillating, forbidden.”109 Such an exoticism was designed to evoke astonishment but not sympathy. Criminology had to appeal to a wide audience for financial and moral support. Yet it had to justify its status as a new discipline by constructing a unique and specialized scientific discourse. Unlike physics and economics, which had achieved the right to speak authoritatively about esoteric matters, criminology was obliged to amalgamate the traditional with the scientific.110 Lombroso mobilized proverbs and folklore in support of his ideas, but he did not want to be perceived as having merely appropriated popular knowledge. This dilemma triggered new anxieties; if criminology was little more than a patchwork quilt of different ideas and practices appropriated from common sense, how could it claim to have special authority? And how could this “tension of expertise” be resolved?
The dilemma of expertise was resolved in part by the ways that “titanic figure,” “the father of modern criminology,” was depicted.111 As early as 1869, a French traveler visiting Milan had described the occasion when Lombroso had discussed with him “certain anatomical indications by which criminals may be identified.” The meeting left the traveler with
the lasting impression that Lombroso was “a sort of monomaniac.”112 According to one scholar, “probably no name has been eulogised or attacked so much as that of Cesare Lombroso.”113 He was “a scientific Columbus who opened up a new field for exploration, and his insight into human nature was compared to that of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.”114 Adalbert Albrecht conceded that because the science was “so intimately connected with the name of Lombroso … no one can dispute his right to be considered the godfather of criminal anthropology.” He was “one of the great men of the nineteenth century whose names were familiar to everyone, who were read by many but studied by comparatively few.”115 Max Nordau dedicated his Degeneration (1893) to his “dear and honoured Master.” Yet as late as 1937, two criminologists felt compelled to point out that there was “no actual evidence in the voluminous criminological literature of the nineteenth century, before or after the time of Lombroso, which justifies the extravagant eulogies that are made of him.”116
“The master” nevertheless attracted acolytes across Europe and the United States, many of whom took up his ideas with something approaching religious zeal.117 In England, Havelock Ellis vigorously promoted his work. Dorado Montero translated Lombroso’s writings into Spanish, taught the doctrines to his students—and was rewarded for his efforts with a lawsuit.118 Spain’s “little Lombroso,” Rafael Salillas, became the country’s foremost representative and promoter of criminal anthropology. In Germany, Hans Kurella promulgated the Italian criminologist’s ideas in dozens of publications of his own and through translations of several of his works.119 “His thoughts revolutionized our opinions,” wrote Jules Dallemagne of Lombroso, and “provoked a salutary feeling everywhere, and a happy emulation in research of all kinds”: “For 20 years, his thoughts fed discussions; the Italian master was the order of the day in all debates; his thoughts appeared as events. There was an extraordinary animation everywhere.”120
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