Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (18 page)

Darrow leaves his personal skeleton nameless, though it seems to have been a sin of passion—“a flash of that great, natural light and heat that once possessed this tottering frame” which brought him “the keenest, wildest joy” like a “boiling, seething cataract.” In its wake, his guilt and shame were as intense.

“We knew only the surface of the world,” said Darrow. “We needed this to teach us, from the anguish of the soul, that there is a depth profound and great where pain and pleasure both are one.”
¹⁴

D
ARROW WAS INFLUENCED
,
as well, by
Leo Tolstoy’s doctrine of Christian anarchism and he responded to the war drums of the fin de siècle with a pacifist treatise,
Resist Not Evil
.

“Force is wrong,” Darrow wrote. “A bayonet in the hand of one man is no better than in the hand of another. It is the bayonet that is evil.”

In 1898, for the first time in the industrial age, the United States had gone to war with a European power. A generation of men who came of age after the Civil War—Theodore Roosevelt, publisher
William Randolph Hearst, and others—yearned to show their mettle, and Spain’s suppression of a rebellion in Cuba was a convenient cause. But Darrow opposed American imperialism. “It was never a doctrine of the founding fathers that this should be a land of conquest,” he told the Sunset Club. The war was “a wild excursion of jingoism into unknown seas in foreign lands.”

The United States seized the Philippines from Spain, annexed the islands, and fell into a long, grim struggle against guerrillas there. “This war against the Filipinos is murder … this conquest is robbery, and … it is imperiling the government under which we live,” Darrow told an audience of workingmen. “If this war be called patriotism then blessed be treason.”

“True courage and manhood come from the consciousness of the right attitude toward the world, the faith in one’s own purpose, and the sufficiency of one’s own approval as a justification for one’s own acts,” Darrow wrote. He found his own courage tested when McKinley was
assassinated. In the frenzy that followed, the radical publisher
Abraham Isaak was jailed in Chicago and accused of aiding the assassin. Darrow wondered if he might not be next: Isaak was a good friend, and Darrow had chaired a gathering of radicals the previous spring at which several militant anarchists spoke. Under the doctrines of the Haymarket case, he told
Jane Addams, he could be arrested for inciting Czolgosz to kill.

“I would gladly avoid this if I could. I have stood in front of mobs so long that my heart is heavy and my head sore,” Darrow wrote to Addams. But “the powers of capital will try to stamp out all radical thought.”

“I know that Isaak and his boy … are perfectly innocent of any crime and are in great danger,” he said. “See these people … and if they want me … I shall be ready to do all I can.” The fury passed. Isaak was released. A little later, Darrow gave Isaak’s daughter a job.
¹⁵

Darrow’s literary interests included journalism. When Hearst opened a newspaper in Chicago in 1900, Darrow took up his pen and joined the muckrakers—a breed of journalists, including Henry Lloyd,
Ida Tarbell, and
Lincoln Steffens, who were stirring Americans with reportage that exposed shameful social conditions. On thirteen Sundays in 1902, Darrow wrote “Easy Lessons in Law,” an elegant series of columns in the
Chicago American
that revealed how the courts robbed the common folk of justice.

Each of Darrow’s “lessons” has a mundane hero who is injured by the contrivances of the industrial age—railroads, skyscrapers, sweatshops—and turns to the law for aid. But once in court these victims find defeat at the hands of high-paid corporate lawyers, corrupt judges, and legal precedents—the “Doctrine of Fellow Servants” and the like—that place property above people.

Darrow’s understated style and ice-cold irony presaged the work of twentieth-century realists in stories like that of John Swanson, a worker in a mill whose owner does not believe in unions, government regulation, or safety equipment. As a result, Swanson loses a hand in an industrial accident. “The board caught as the saw passed through, his foot slipped, he threw out his right hand to save himself,” Darrow wrote. “His hand fell on the side where the waste pieces of timber were wont to drop, and the blood trickled down in the saw dust below.”

Pat Connor, an Irish railway man blacklisted for his role in the Debs strike, takes dangerous work on a night train, where he is decapitated by a
low bridge. “The heavy oak beam struck him just above his nose and the upper third of his skull came off almost as clean as if cut by a surgeon’s saw,” Darrow wrote. “He really felt no pain whatsoever.”

And James Clark, an ironworker, dies in a fall from a towering skyscraper. “When the workmen went to him they found a limp, shapeless bundle of flesh and blood and bones and rags,” Darrow wrote. Even the emperor Trajan insisted that nets be strung beneath the acrobats in the Roman circus. But “this was before Christianity and commercialism,” Darrow noted. In court, Clark’s widow receives nothing, and the judge goes on to speak at a Commercial Club banquet. “There he met some of the members of the beef trust, the railway combine and the associated banks. He spoke long and feelingly about the tyranny of labor organizations and his words were loudly cheered.”

In a summary essay, “The Influences That Make the Law,” Darrow told readers that these tales were drawn from real cases he had witnessed, and he warned of the pernicious interests of the era. “This is the age of iron and steel,” he wrote. “Legal principles and decisions and individual rights and privileges have been as much changed, contorted and destroyed as have the old business methods that have been supplanted by electricity and steam.”

The “independent artisan has been destroyed” and the legislatures were now manned by “lawyers … saloon-keepers and professional politicians” whose function “has sunk to the business of giving public property and privileges to the few, and executing such orders as the industrial captains see fit to give.”

The legal profession, Darrow told his readers, must share the blame. “The judges are chosen from the ranks of lawyers, and by natural selection the brightest of these have been placed upon the bench,” he wrote. “These have been the ones who were formerly employed by corporations and great aggregations of wealth. There is no other clientage that can yield the money and influence which the ambitious lawyer craves.”
¹⁶

L
IKE MANY OF
his fellow radicals at the turn of the century—when the liberal impulse was strong but the structures for promoting it were weak—Darrow rambled around the Left. He would describe himself, variously, as a reformer, a Democrat, a philosophical anarchist, a socialist,
a Populist, or a progressive. He was skeptical of human creeds, and had the lawyer’s knack for seeing all sides of an issue. Darrow was a “gathering point for all the ‘radical notions’ of the time … a dreamer, practical man, lawyer, politician, friend of labor, friend of women, friend of literature and of experiment,” wrote Hapgood.

And if Darrow claimed no one cause, neither did any claim him. He was “regarded as ‘dangerous’ by the ultra-conservative, and as ‘crooked’ by the pure idealists, and as ‘immoral’ by the … ladies of blue stocking tendency,” said Hapgood. “He is radical, idealistic and practical at once … with a marvelous inconsistency of mind.”

“As we grow older we feel more and more the hunger for applause instead of sneers,” Darrow said, as he entered his fifth decade. But for meager pay, and sneers, he continued to defend radical causes in court. In the fall of 1898, he traveled to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to represent an old Populist ally, the union leader
Thomas Kidd, who had been jailed during a woodworkers’ strike. It was the Debs case, writ small. There was no attorney general claiming that the sanctity of the mails called for intervention: just local prosecutors, aping Ogden’s legal tactics. But things would be bad, indeed, for American workers if any local prosecutor in a company town could use the conspiracy statutes to toss union men in jail.

Conditions were wretched in Oshkosh, a town of twenty-eight thousand dominated by seven big manufacturers specializing in the production of doors, windows, and custom millwork. The average man, typically an immigrant, earned under $1 for a day’s work ($240 a year, given the seasonal nature of construction), but even that was too much for the mill owners, who started hiring women and children and paid them 60 cents for each ten-hour day. The factories were run like prison camps. “All employees are to be in their places when the bell rings and whistle blows for starting, and must not absent themselves,” read the rules of the
Paine Lumber Company. “Employees who quit their places … without our consent … are subject to damages … No unnecessary talking will be allowed during working hours.”

The woodworkers called a strike. The governor dispatched units of the national guard to maintain order, and Kidd and two others were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy. The trial began in mid-October. Darrow’s strategy, as in the Debs case, was to put the mill owners on trial. For the role of the Dickensian villain, Darrow selected
George Paine,
the union-hating owner of the town’s largest factory. Darrow recounted the steps that Paine took to break the strike: hiring Pinkerton detectives to infiltrate the union; intimidating and attempting to bribe witnesses. When he got Paine on the stand, Darrow forced him to admit he had pressured the local authorities to have Kidd indicted. And Darrow surprised everyone by calling the prosecutor,
W. W. Quatermass, to the stand to testify about child labor violations in the factories.

After two weeks of testimony, Darrow began his summation on October 31.

“This is really not a criminal case,” he told the jury. “It is but an episode in the great battle for human liberty.”

Only collective bargaining gave workingmen the leverage that they needed to free their families from servitude, said Darrow. But Paine had refused to negotiate. “He desired that these poor slaves should come to him and petition him singly, beg him as individuals, as Oliver Twist in the almshouse held out his soup bowl,” Darrow said.

“The poor devil who works there for six or seven dollars a week cannot speak loud except in case of fire, and he cannot go out excepting he raise his hand like a little boy in school, and he cannot speak to his neighbor because it hinders him in his work,” Darrow said. “When the poor slaves go in there at a quarter to seven in the morning they lock the door to keep them there; and when the whistle sounds at twelve they send their guards around to unlock the doors. And when one o’clock comes again, this high priest of jailers sends his turnkey back to lock up his American citizens once more so that they cannot leave the mill until nighttime comes.”

Darrow spoke for eight hours over two days without notes. He closed with a tribute to Kidd, equating the union organizer with Christ’s disciples and the Abolitionists.

“Those outlaws, those disreputables, those men and women spurned, despised and accused, were the forerunners of a brighter and more glorious day,” Darrow said. “Gentlemen, the world is dark … but it is not hopeless.”

It took the jury less than an hour to acquit Kidd and his colleagues. Darrow earned only $250, though the union agreed, at his request, to print and circulate a pamphlet of his closing remarks. A Chicago newspaperman, traveling by train, came upon Amirus and spoke of the case with the old woodworker. The old man glowed at the mention of his son’s name.

D
ARROW DID NOT
ignore his criminal practice and showed, in these years, a continuing attraction to sensational cases. One began a few days before Christmas in 1898, when thirteen-year-old Thomas Crosby shot Deputy Sheriff
Frank Nye. Crosby’s widowed mother, Marjorie, had struggled to keep her house through economic hard times. She hired lawyers and sued her dead husband’s firm for a considerable sum it owed her. But, ultimately, the bank foreclosed on her mortgage. For weeks before the shooting, Marjorie and her son, her sister, and her aged mother had lived on nothing but oatmeal and water, shivered for lack of coal, and took turns patrolling the house with a loaded revolver. She padlocked the gate and nailed boards over the windows. For young Thomas, saving the house took on overwhelming import. When Nye arrived to evict them and used a crowbar to pry the boards away, Thomas fired once, mortally wounding the deputy. The boy and his mother were arrested and charged with murder, and their home was seized.

The trial got blanket coverage. The prosecutor was resolute: “Frank Nye was there on legal business and they knew it. The boy fired deliberately. The act constitutes murder.”

When it came his turn, Darrow startled the courtroom by daring the jurors to hang the boy.

“Gentlemen of the jury, rather than have you send this boy to the penitentiary or to the reform school, to be incarcerated among criminals, where his young life would be contaminated … I would have you sentence him to death,” Darrow told them.

His bluff worked. Thomas was acquitted, and his mother was found guilty—but of manslaughter. Darrow appealed, and the
Illinois Supreme Court threw out her conviction.

The poignant tale would not be complete without a final ironic twist. A few days after the trial, Marjorie was notified that she had won a $17,700 judgment against her late husband’s firm—the money she had hoped would save her home.
¹⁷

D
ARROW WAS WORRIED
about Altgeld’s declining health and spirits, and invited his friend to join his law firm, where the former governor was given top billing. The partners at Altgeld, Darrow, and Thompson stayed involved in politics and radical causes, including the plight of the Boers—the Dutch South Africans who were fighting a guerrilla war against imperial Britain. On March 11, 1902, after arguing a labor case in Chicago, Altgeld took the train to a speaking engagement in Joliet. He looked tired at the podium, but finished a forty-five-minute address in defense of the Boers by declaring that the universe, despite its swings, was ultimately just. As he stepped off the stage he was staggered by a stroke, collapsed, and died.