Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (17 page)

Darrow revived his political career with a successful campaign for the Illinois legislature, using the West Side ghetto as his base and the women at the Langdon as his campaign organizers. “He expects to be governor of Illinois and even aspires to the Presidency,” Perdue told Ely. She described how Johnson, “his private secretary,” had run Darrow’s campaign, helping him with “most inflammatory” speeches and gathering the “lowest men and boys” from the district’s saloons to parade down the streets and light bonfires in his honor. It was “a miniature French Revolution,” the elated Johnson told her. Perdue concluded that Darrow was “a dangerous man.”

Barnum, who arrived at the Langdon after breaking off an engagement, thought Darrow was a bit frightening, with “his Free Love theories; his radicalism.” But “unlike most men, even in passionate relations with women, Darrow always made those contacts human—not just ‘sexy,’ ” she said. “He respected each individual soul.” It was a rare attitude, she concluded, among the men of her day.
⁹

Barnum “was deeply in love with Darrow, and … it was a great disappointment that she did not win him to herself. But that is true of … a considerable number among Miss Barnum’s intimates,” Ruby Hamerstrom recalled. Darrow was “smothered” with female attention, she said. “He was continuously finding himself much more strongly entwined with them than ever intended by himself. He would have a hell of a time to extricate himself.”

Hamerstrom met Darrow in 1899 at a meeting of the White City Club, an artsy group, where he gave a talk on Omar Khayyám. He was forty-two and she was twenty-six. He was taken by this girlish writer with doe eyes and a pink and white complexion, and asked her out. She was engaged to a stockbroker and declined, but he clung to her hand, refusing to let go. She agreed to join him for dinner some nights later at an Italian restaurant favored by the literary set. Afterward, as they crossed the Rush
Street bridge in the rain, Darrow paused, took one of her gloves from her hand, entwined his fingers with hers, and slid their hands into his overcoat pocket.

He told her he was smitten—but warned her he would never marry again. That was all right, she replied, as she was preparing to marry someone else. “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to devise ways to break your engagement.” Soon, she was seeing him regularly.
¹⁰

T
HE FREE LOVE
movement bloomed in the years after the Civil War, when utopian dreamers and some of the early feminists pushed society to relax laws governing marriage, divorce, and contraception. By the turn of the century, libertarians of both sexes were enlisting. “All that is good in marriage, home or child-rearing rests on
free love,”
wrote one of Darrow’s friends, the poet and lawyer C. E. S. Wood. “When it rests on a forced appearance of love, on a forced relationship, it rests on falsity, vice and hypocrisy and no apparent social quiet can justify that … torture of the soul.”

In 1899, Darrow served as a legal adviser to Dr.
Denslow Lewis, the president of the medical staff at the Cook County Hospital, who had proposed to the American Medical Association that it publish his paper on the physiology of sex. His description of sexual practices in the Victorian era explains the appeal of the movement. A bride “too often comes to the marriage bed with inexact ideas of all that pertains to sexual intercourse,” he wrote. Young women needed to be taught how pregnancy occurs and to be instructed that, in marital relations, “it is right and proper for her to experience pleasure.”

“Her husband is not usually so ignorant,” said Lewis, but not because anyone had instructed him. “His experience in sexual matters is due to intercourse with prostitutes. His knowledge is imperfect and often dangerous. His relations with his bride are sometime brutal.” Too often, “he will come home from the club at midnight and find his wife in bed … Erection is speedily followed by intromission, and often before the wife is really awake, the orgasm has occurred,” Lewis wrote.

“Some one should tell him the difference between a virtuous girl and a street walker,” the gynecologist said. “He should know regarding the
anatomic conditions. He should know that intromission is painful until dilation of the parts has occurred. He should understand that reciprocity in the mechanism of the act is not to be expected until his wife is accustomed to the marital relationship.”

It was basic stuff, carefully phrased, based on years of experience treating women; but Lewis ran into fierce opposition. “I should be very sorry if in this country these matters became … freely talked about,” one AMA discussant, Dr.
Howard Kelly, told him. “I do not believe mutual pleasure in the sexual act has any particular bearing on the happiness of life.”

The AMA refused to print the “nasty” article, claiming that it would run afoul of postal censors. Lewis went to Darrow, one of a few attorneys who would handle such cases. The medical society should be ashamed of its timidity, Darrow said, trying to nudge the organization to action: “Any publisher who … would fear to give out a paper written in good faith, for a good purpose, by a man of standing and ability … is not fit to publish a scientific journal.” But the AMA could not be budged. Lewis was forced to publish his findings himself.
¹¹

It was during these years that journalist
Hutchins Hapgood arrived in Chicago from the East to gather material for a book on the city’s radical causes. Often, he stayed as Darrow’s guest. The free love enthusiasts, Hapgood found, viewed marriage as “enslaving.” They might enter relationships, but maintained the right to “follow out” desires with other partners. “This is called varietism, and was supposed to be hygienic and stimulating to the imagination,” he wrote. “No doubt it was, but the time always came when human nature couldn’t stand it and when one or the other broke down, and separation, sorrow and disappointment followed.”

Because it undermined the elemental structures of society, the proper folk viewed the free love movement as highly subversive—“the most boiling pot on the Devil’s stove”—Mary Field recalled. But Darrow was its defender. Real love is “the love of life, the love of reality, the strong love of men, the intense love of women, the honest love that nature made, the love that is,” he wrote. “Not the unhealthy, immoral, false, impossible love … given to young girls and boys … to poison and corrupt.”

Alarmed at rising divorce rates, the churches and good people were pushing elected officials to tighten the marriage laws. “I have noticed … many things said by newspapers, clergymen and others of the
evils of divorce,” Darrow told his friends at the Sunset Club. “I view with alarm the efforts of those who would tighten the cords that bind unwilling hearts.”

“So long as the instincts of men and women are left free to act, and men and women are brought together purely by choice, very little evil can result,” he said. “You may think that these things of which we speak are crimes or sins, or call them what you will, but back of all is the instinct of man … the heart of man.”

Darrow became a legal paladin for the cause. He tilted with
Anthony Comstock, the self-ordained leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who had persuaded Congress and many states to pass the so-called Comstock Laws, which banned writing, publication, sale, and ownership of “immoral” material. When Comstock hounded
Ida Craddock, a Chicago counselor who wrote sex education pamphlets for naive young couples, Darrow took up her defense; to his regret, he was not able to save her when she moved to New York and, in part as a result of Comstock’s harassment, committed suicide. Darrow contributed articles to
To-Morrow
magazine, a radical journal published by the eccentric
Parker Sercombe, which espoused the free love cause and employed Darrow’s friend the poet
Carl Sandburg. He defended Dr.
Alice Stockham when she was prosecuted for circulating an informational booklet, “The Wedding Night.” And, in “Woman,” one of his first published essays, Darrow emerged as something of a feminist himself.
¹²

“Man has always trampled on her rights,” Darrow wrote. “Out of this desire to control one woman absolutely grew the institution of marriage … and not from any thought of a fair or equal contract.”

A young woman enters the “occupation of husband-getting unconsciously,” Darrow wrote, “with a smiling face, a laughing voice and a fairy step … She does not strive to be an individual, an entity, with high ambitions and desires, but to be a pliant, supple thing … to conform to another’s ignoble thoughts.”

Women can be lawyers, preachers, and doctors. “We know they
can
because they
have,”
said Darrow. Yet “for a woman to have any other ambition than marriage is to be at once considered different from the rest of her sex; to be regarded with doubt; to be called ‘strong-minded’ and ‘unwomanly.’ …

“Man, looking down upon her as the plaything of an hour, the creature
formed for no purpose but to serve his wants, has ensnared her with the debasing thought that he likes her best when she comes upon her bended knees,” he wrote. “What woman needs to-day, first of all, is freedom; the chance to be an individual … to be released from the cruel restrictions and proprieties that society has thrown around her.”

Darrow did more than preach. He hired
Nellie Carlin, who worked with him for years, one of the first female attorneys to succeed in Chicago.
¹³

“W
OMAN” WAS
D
ARROW’S
first published essay on a matter outside law and politics. He was branching out, speaking and writing on philosophy and literature.

“The artist and the philosopher were growing apace through these years,” said Barnum. “Evenings, Sundays and vacations were spent in delivering lectures, writing essays and stories and novels … He would tuck the loose notes of a favorite theme into an overcoat pocket and scurry off, late, to teach Tolstoy.” Darrow made good friends in Chicago’s burgeoning literary scene, like Sandburg and Dreiser and Masters, and helped launch Whitlock’s writing career by bringing him to the attention of novelist
William Dean Howells, the “Dean of American Letters.” Journalist
William Allen White visited Chicago in this period and was introduced to Darrow at a literary party that included author
Hamlin Garland and two of the city’s most famous stylists,
George Ade and
Peter Finley Dunne. Darrow stood out as “a gaunt, loose-skinned, fiery-eyed rebel,” White recalled. At the Sunset Club, Darrow debated “Realism vs. Idealism in Literature and Art.” At the Independent Penwoman’s Club, he spoke on Omar Khayyám. At the Chicago Ethical Society, Darrow praised the poetry of Robert Burns. He honed, as well, a lecture on Walt Whitman. And there was a dark psychological essay, “The Skeleton in the Closet.”

In 1899 Darrow paid the print shop at the Roycroft artisan colony in New York to produce 980 copies of
A Persian Pearl, and Other Essays
, a collection of these lectures and writings. It was well received. The
Tribune
hailed it as “a charming chaplet” of “graceful and pleasing” prose. The “pearl” of the title was
The Rubáiyát
, the series of quatrains from a twelfth-century Persian poet that Darrow had quoted in the Prendergast case. In Khayyám’s poetry, Darrow recognized the values by which he
lived his life. The first was agnosticism. He remained the son of Amirus and Emily, the Kinsman freethinkers, and the follower of the atheist
Robert Ingersoll. When Ingersoll died that summer, Darrow was chosen to give eulogies before thousands at great memorial meetings in Chicago and Ohio. And in his essay on the
Rubáiyát
, Darrow remained faithful to the freethinkers’ creed.

“There is no moment but the one that’s here,” he wrote. “Man has ever sought to make himself believe that these things are not what they seem; that, in reality, a death is only birth, and the body but a prison for the soul. This may be true, but the constant cries and pleadings of the ages have brought back no answering sound to prove that death is anything but death.”

Man was not just doomed at death, said Darrow, he was powerless in life. Human beings were shaped by inexorable forces and, far from being captain of their fate, were “less than the tiniest bubble in the wildest, angriest sea.” A man would do better to face the hopelessness of life, said Darrow, and do what he can to ease the pain of his fellow sufferers, so that “here and there some pilgrim will tell of a burden that we helped him bear, or a road we tried to smooth.”

While good works occupy the time, said Darrow, so should life’s pleasures. He was a hedonist. Not just a philosophical hedonist (for there was a school of philosophy, of which Darrow approved, which held that the value of any act or experience is contained in the pleasure it gives), but a sybarite who shared Khayyám’s taste for the “jug of wine and thou.” He lauded “the giving up of self to the enjoyment of the hour—the complete abandonment that forgets time and space and eternity, and knows only the moment that is.”

    
Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring

    
Your winter garment of Repentance fling;

    
The Bird of time has but a little way

    
To feather—and the Bird is on the Wing
.

Similar themes ran through Darrow’s other essays. His pieces on realism, Whitman, and Burns praise the artist who confronts the frightening riddle of life, prizes love, and savors pleasure. The exception was “The Skeleton in the Closet,” a chilling ode to sin and its instructive power.
“The anguish of the human soul cannot be told—it must be felt,” Darrow wrote. “It is the hated skeleton that finds within our breast a heart of flint and takes this hard and pulseless thing and scars and twists and melts it in a thousand torturous ways until the stony mass is purged and softened and is sensitive to every touch.”