Clarence Darrow: Attorney for The Damned, Farrell - B

                      At the age of thirty-six in 1893, Darrow found himself at the pinnacle of success as the number two lawyer for the Chicago & North Western Railway Company. He was making a good living but felt unfulfilled working for the great businesses of the Gilded Age. His heart was with America's underdogs. When his boss died suddenly in April, he opted to go to work for the mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison. "The great theme of Darrow's life, the long war he fought in his march through courtrooms and cases, was the defense of individual liberty from modernity's relentless, crushing, impersonal forces."

                     He was born in northeast Ohio on April 18, 1857. His father was a brilliant, widely-read man of liberal tendencies who made a  modest living as a furniture maker. The growth of the country during Darrow's boyhood produced "huge extremes of poverty and wealth." From his father, he learned "to question rather than accept."  He spent a year in Ann Arbor at law school, and began clerking in Youngstown, Ohio. He passed the bar, practiced in his hometown of Kinsman and married Jessie Ohl.  In 1887, they moved to Chicago, then described as "a mining camp five stories high." His legendary oratorical skills soon attracted admiration, fans, and clients. His political involvement led to an appointment as the city's special assessment attorney. He started a law practice in the Rookery Building with three former judges. 

                  On the last day of the Columbian Expedition, Patrick Prendergast assassinated Mayor Harrison. Prendergast was convicted and sentenced to death.  Darrow took his case and obtained a retrial. After five hour closing statement regarding the man's insanity, Prendergast was again convicted, and was soon executed. It was his "first big criminal case. And he lost the mad newsboy to the hangman's rope."

                When the Panic of 1893 led to the Pullman Company cutting wages, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike.  Violence ensued in  Chicago and Debs was arrested. Darrow became his lawyer. Debs was cited with contempt for failing to follow an injunction prohibiting the strike, convicted, and imprisoned. Additionally, the federal government pursued a criminal case for obstructing the mails. The case was so weak and Darrow's arguments so convincing that the US withdrew the complaint. Debs emerged a hero.

                 Darrow was unique for his times. He did not believe in religion. Indeed, he developed a deep distaste for presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan because of the latter's focus on the scriptures. Of equal importance, he was an inveterate womanizer who preached the gospel of free love. He divorced his wife of seventeen years and carried on endlessly with innumerable younger women.  Politically, he described himself as a "reformer, a Democrat, a philosophical anarchist, a socialist, a populist, or a progressive."

                One of Darrow's great skills was his ability to use his courtroom tactics to play to the press and public opinion. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt intervened on behalf of the United Mine Workers to compel a commission to resolve issues between the strikers and the mine owners. Before a seven man commission in Scranton, Darrow paraded disabled men, children and women to such an extent that there were regular tears in the hearing room. Although the miners did not achieve all of their goals, their success before the commission was considered a major breakthrough for union rights. Darrow was now the country's leading labor lawyer.

               In 1903, he married Ruby Hamerstrom.  Although honoring his marriage vows was not part of the understanding, the marriage was a successful one. His next great battle was in Idaho. "The violent struggle between capital and laboring industrial age America reached a climax out west." From 1906-1913, he spent a considerable amount of time there, and won a number of cases. In Caldwell, Idaho, the former Gov. Steunenberg was blown to smithereens by a miner named Frank Orchard. The Pinkerton's, charged with investigating the murder, intended "to dismember the union..." When Orchard was told he would not be hung, indeed he might even be set free, he implicated the union's management in every crime throughout the west that he could think of. After three leaders of the Western Federation of Miners were kidnapped in Colorado and taken to Idaho, the union retained Darrow. The trial of the union leader Big Bill Haywood, with Orchard was the leading witness, closed with what is considered Darrow's greatest summation before a jury. Not guilty, but many were upset with Darrow as he excused violence when discussing the union's grievances against the owners. He returned to Idaho for a second trial of a union chief in Steunenberg's death. It was the same story from Orchard, and Darrow destroyed his flimsy credibility on cross, but illness precluded him from finishing the trial. He was in LA seeking medical help when the not guilty verdict came in.  "Despite its home court advantage and the star witness, the finest prosecutors and a compliant press, the mine owner's money, the Pinkerton spies, a permissive Supreme Court, and the unconscionable meddling of Theodore Roosevelt, the state had failed to prove that the union killed Frank Steunenberg."

                 On October 1, 1910, the LA Times headquarters  was rocked by an explosion that destroyed the building and killed twenty-one. The following spring, James and John McNamara were arrested, and their union hired Darrow, who dissolved his law firm and moved to California. He put together a defense team, but acknowledged that the McNamara's were "as guilty as hell." Darrow saved their lives by having them take a plea deal, but he incurred the wrath of organized labor and was indicted for attempting to bribe the jury.  The prosecution presented a weak case and Darrow was acquitted. The LA prosecutor had state-wide political aspirations and tried Darrow for the bribery of a different juror. His lawyer became ill during the trial and Darrow defended himself. The trial ended in a hung jury, after which the prosecutor agreed to drop the matter if Darrow promised to not practice law again in California. "Darrow was fifty-five when the second trial ended, broke and disgraced. But for the rest of his life he would make amends, score his greatest triumphs, and die an American hero." 

                  No longer the darling of the labor movement, he rebuilt his life and legal practice in Chicago. In 1915, when 844 Western Electric workers and their families died when the 'Eastland' capsized in the Chicago River, Darrow represented the chief engineer, and kept him from jail by convincing the judge that the ship itself was unsafe. During WWI, the US passed an Espionage Act and a Sedition Act, both intended and used to crush any dissent about the US's involvement in Europe. Immediately afterwards, the country was wracked by race riots, labor violence, and the Red Scare. When the prosecutions began, Darrow took on many cases some of which he won and some of which he lost. As the war receded, many of those convicted were pardoned. Throughout the Roaring 20's, he represented the gamblers, rum-runners, and corrupt politicians of the era. When asked why,  he said "money." One of his biggest cases was the defense of Fred Lundin, Cook County's Republican boss, force behind the throne of the mayor and fourteen of his colleagues. They had taken Chicago's noted corrupt ways to new heights, but were of course not guilty. 

                "Of the infamous villains whom Darrow defended, none were so patently evil in the eyes of Americans as the teenaged killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb." Privileged, well-educated, Jewish homosexuals, they killed a young boy for the "thrill" of it. He took on the trial because of his opposition to capital punishment and he knew he'd be paid well. Darrow pleaded them guilty and began to present evidence of mitigation hoping to save their lives.  Darrow emphasized the fact that Leopold's nanny sexually abused him, presented exculpatory psychiatric testimony, tried to manipulate the press on the issue of hanging teenagers. In the end, the prosecution insulted the judge, and no minors pleading guilty in Illinois had ever been hung. Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life plus 99 years. 

               In 1925, Tennessee banned the teaching of Darwinism in the public schools. Beliefs other than those propounded in Genesis were criminal. One of the leading lights of the Evangelical movement throughout the Bible Belt was former Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. He believed in a strict reading of the Bible.  The town of Dayton cooked up the trial to generate tourism, and a local teacher, John Scopes, volunteered to be the guinea pig. When Bryan offered to prosecute, Darrow decided to lead the defense. Dayton now had an international event to occupy its summer. The prosecution confirmed that Scopes had taught in violation of the law. The judge ruled against the defense's request to present expert scientific witnesses. After Darrow was held in contempt, he apologized, the judge forgave him and he called an expert on the Bible - William Jennings Bryan. They battled for two hours, at first calmly but eventually yelling and pointing fingers at each other. Darrow slowly wore Bryan down and got the better of him. Darrow pushed him on how long were the days of creation. When Bryan said they could have been a million years, the crowd gasped. He had conceded the defense's main points. Bryan "agreed that no intelligent person would accept the Bible literally." That Darrow had bested Bryan flashed around the world. William Jennings Bryan died five days later.

            "When he arrived in Tennessee in the summer of 1925, Darrow was a famous man; by the time he left, he was an American folk hero." At the request of the NAACP,  he defended 11 black men in Detroit who had fired on a white crowd trying to stop a black physician from moving into a white neighborhood. The trial led to a hung jury. In the retrial, the prosecution named the one man who had acknowledged firing into the white crowd. Darrow won a not guilty verdict and the publicity propelled the nascent NAACP to the forefront of civil rights organizations. Just before his 70th birthday, he had a heart attack. There were now fewer trials, and more speaking engagements and trips to Europe. He took on a case in Hawaii defending some navy men accused of vigilante atrocities against Hawaiians. He resolved the case with his clients sentenced to an hour in jail. He returned to the mainland, published his memoirs, and did some narrative work for Hollywood. At the age of 75, he took two more cases and saved two youngsters from the gallows. But, he was suffering from arteriosclerosis and it began to affect his brain. He soon needed full time nursing care, could not get out of bed some days, and was down to 90 pounds. He died on March 13, 1938.

                 This has been a superb read, but somehow somewhat wearying. Darrow was clearly a complex human being filled with faults, but someone on the right side of history. This book is a vivid reminder of how trying the industrialization of America was, how violent the conflicts between capital and labor were, and just how biased the institutions of the country were. I was prompted to read the life of William Jennings Bryan earlier this year ( July 11) and now Darrow by virtue of re-watching one of my favorite movies. The 1960 film 'Inherit The Wind' was based on a play produced on Broadway in 1955. The play was not historically accurate, but used events from 30 years earlier to take a swipe at McCarthyism. The Clarence Darrow character was called Henry Drummond and was brilliantly portrayed by Oscar nominated Spencer Tracy. The funny thing about reading this book is that I have seen and heard Spencer Tracy throughout. It's been over 60 years since I first saw the film and needless to say, it had a powerful impact on me.