Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (5 page)

Amirus would study at four colleges and acquire two postsecondary degrees, but he never became more than a shopkeeper.

“Nature had some grudge against my father,” Darrow recalled. “Day after day and year after year he was compelled to walk the short and narrow path … while his mind was roving over scenes of great battles,
decayed empires, dead languages and the starry heavens above … To his dying day, he lived in a walking trance.”

Amirus was a disciple of Thomas Jefferson and savored the works of the atheist pamphleteer Tom Paine, the heretical David Hume, the infidel Volney’s ruminations on natural law, and the writings of the French libertarian and skewer of religious orthodoxy, Voltaire. He read, as well, from the evolutionists Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. His love for scholarship and disputatious nature appear to have cost Amirus his faith, for he never did practice as a minister of the Lord. He became a freethinker, one of a class of American rationalists who put no faith in organized religion, or in a Supreme Being who ordered the lives of men. “He began to doubt. He doubted Hell, and he even questioned Heaven and God,” Darrow remembered. Amirus forsook the pulpit, acquired a degree from Cleveland University, then chose to practice his father’s craft, making furniture in tiny Farmdale, Ohio.

Amirus and the wide-eyed Emily, who was five or six years younger than her husband, labored as well at the happy business of procreation. After Everett and Channing came Mary, and a baby boy who died in infancy; then Clarence and Hubert and Herman and Jennie.
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When Clarence Seward Darrow arrived in the world on that spring morning in 1857, Amirus was still naming sons after his heroes. Everett and Channing had been christened after prominent Unitarian leaders;
William Seward was a militant abolitionist, a lawyer, a U.S. senator, and former governor of New York.

Seward was an “agitator,” known for his defense of immigrants and fugitive blacks and for his pioneering use of the insanity defense. In 1846, he showed moral—even physical—courage when he defied the local mobs and agreed to represent
William Freeman, a deranged black man who had invaded the home of a prosperous farmer and murdered the man and his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and mother-in-law. The case was political strychnine, but “a higher law and a louder voice called him to the defense of the demented, forsaken wretch,” wrote Seward’s biographer in 1853, in a volume that no doubt had a place in Amirus Darrow’s library. Seward hired medical experts and carried the defense through the courts. “And all this for whom? For a
Negro!
—the poorest and lowest of his degraded caste,” one commentator wrote.

“I am not the prisoner’s lawyer—I am the lawyer for society, for mankind,”
Seward told the jurors, in a closing argument whose format and fire would be matched by his namesake in years ahead. “The color of the prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual immortal mind which works beneath … He is still your brother, and mine.”

Such was the hero whom Amirus honored, and hoped his son would emulate.
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Everett recalled that Amirus “took a prominent part in the antislavery agitation.” And in Darrow’s accounts of his boyhood, he recalls his father speaking admiringly of men like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and writes of how members of the abolitionist “army,” when passing through town, would “make my father’s home their stopping place.” In his later years, Darrow told people that his father had helped shelter runaway slaves.
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Three of Clarence’s uncles served in the Union Army in the Civil War—one was wounded, another survived captivity—but Amirus did not join them. He was well past forty, and had that growing brood to support. In 1864, Amirus enrolled at the University of Michigan to study law, but he failed to complete his studies and returned to Ohio. He moved his family a few miles to Kinsman where, on the main road leading north from town, Amirus invested in a furniture store, set up a barnlike “machine shop” to make cabinets, chairs, coffins, and cupboards, and installed his wife and children in a strange, octagonal home that sang of nonconformity.
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K
INSMAN WAS ONE
of the thousands of such midwestern towns: a homogeneous community of several hundred souls, a dusty village square, and some tall shade trees on the banks of a shallow river—the Pymatuning, in this case—that supplied its boys with the requisite fishing holes and a sandy bend for swimming. It had woods and fields to roam and hills to coast, a graveyard with an iron gate, and a Presbyterian church with a tall white steeple that commanded the skyline like the spires of New England.

“It would be hard to make a town better fitted for boys,” Darrow remembered. He and his brothers and their friends ran barefoot in all but the coldest months, playing games like fox and geese, or skin the cat. They clapped gunpowder between the blacksmith’s anvils for the required
salutes on Independence Day, went skating when the ponds and creeks froze, and plucked tiny gifts from Christmas trees lit by wax candles at church. They walked to the local schoolhouse with dinner pails of lunch and pie, and were generally tardy because, as Darrow recalled, “there were always birds in the trees and stones in the road and no child ever knew any pain except his own.”

Clarence had a sloppy demeanor, with a lock of lanky hair that invariably fell upon his forehead, and a lazy, easygoing personality. One prissy classmate remembered turning in her seat and gasping at his arithmetic: barely legible and blotted with ink. “I never seemed able to finish any work that I began; some more alluring prospect ever beckoned me,” Darrow would confess. He was a dedicated whittler, aimlessly shaving sticks until “it became as mechanical as breathing.” A favorite book was
The Story of a Bad Boy
, a tale of mischievous youth. As he grew older, he became devoted to the adventure novels of Thomas Mayne Reid and Frederick Marryat. One of Kinsman’s most “alluring prospects” was baseball, a sport that acquired its modern rules and format at midcentury, caught the popular imagination, and swept across the land. “I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life,” Darrow said. Skills and equipment were rudimentary; scores of forty runs were not uncommon. Darrow was sturdy and broad-shouldered as he reached adolescence: a good-enough first baseman, and good-enough-looking, his sister Jennie recalled, to acquire the attention of Kinsman’s girls.

The Darrows’ eight-sided home, a relic of an eighteenth-century architectural fad, was made of chestnut beams and concrete, with large rooms and closets and a wraparound veranda. Clarence and three brothers shared two beds in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Downstairs was a kitchen, a parlor, and his father’s study, lit at night by kerosene lamps. The yard was sheltered by a towering elm, and across the street was a tin shop whose proprietor,
Cliff Fitch, doubled as a justice of the peace. Nearby was
Lorenzo Roberts, the blacksmith who knew some law, and Collin’s grocery, where, as a boy, Darrow took a nickel he’d received for Christmas, mumbled a request for almonds—a treat he’d heard of but never tasted—and was sold a small bag of alum. He went home with puckered lips and told his mother that he could not understand why people liked the stuff.
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Its Puritan roots made Kinsman a “narrow and smug community,” Darrow remembered. Material success was seen as proof of character and not—as was often the case—of avarice, or luck, or intrigue. Conformity was a smothering virtue. Clarence preferred the approach of some Darrow relatives who never amounted to much of anything, but seemed to have a good time doing so. “I had an uncle or two—not very prominent,” he would recall. “They were engaged largely in fiddling and drinking whiskey, which is not a bad way to kill time while we are here.” To their children, Amirus and Emily were distant and demanding. “They were New England people, raised in the Puritan school of life … demonstrations of affection were signs of weakness rather than of love,” Darrow remembered.
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T
HE YEARS OF
Darrow’s upbringing were a volatile era in American government, and Amirus’s interests ensured that the household was immersed in the turmoil. Jefferson and other members of the Revolutionary generation were still living when Amirus was born, but the nation had already begun its transformation from Arcadian domain to commercial giant. The pace of change, wrought by wondrous inventions, cheap labor, and new sources of energy, accelerated after the Civil War. The status of the individual was diminished in this increasingly mechanistic world, as Americans struggled to apply the principles of liberty in the industrial age.

The Republicans of the
Gilded Age had a concise theory: government was a guarantor of property rights. If but one man in a thousand took the liberty conferred by the Constitution, clawed his way up from the factory floor, and built a business empire, the others did not have a right to deprive him of his gains. If the Morgan family were better bankers, or the Vanderbilts more adept at running railroads, so be it. And if a mill worker or a railway switchman didn’t like the wages offered, well, they had the right to quit.

Liberals like Amirus thought it preposterous that an Ohio farm boy or a seamstress from eastern Europe could negotiate with a corporation. Workers penned up in company towns, by industries whose ownership was clustered in trusts, had no leverage. Nor did farmers, who were forced to ship crops on monopolistic railroads. The American economy
was producing huge extremes of poverty and wealth, and quaked with recurring “panics” and depressions. But the government’s power to regulate and tax, and the workers’ right to take collective action, were curbed by the courts.

Amirus subscribed to the
New York Weekly Tribune
, whose exuberant editor,
Horace Greeley, championed westward expansion, abolitionism, and the interests of the workingman. The paper, with its eclectic mix of correspondents and coverage of political fads, became the Darrow household’s “political and social Bible,” Clarence recalled. Amirus was a supporter—one of the few in Trumbull County—when Greeley made his unsuccessful run for president as a Republican liberal aligned with the Democrats in 1872. The household’s hopes were doused again in 1876 when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote for the presidency, but lost the White House to skullduggery.

Amirus was an admirer, as well, of
Peter Cooper, a Unitarian philosopher who ran for president as the candidate of the Greenback Party. It was just the sort of hopeless cause to attract Amirus, and he joined the movement, an insurrection of farmers and laborers united in their opposition to Republican tight-money policies. “He had moved his soiled and tattered tent to a new battlefield and was fighting the same stubborn sullen threatening public opinion for a new and yet more doubtful cause,” Clarence recalled. The “determined band of agitators” that visited during the abolitionist days now returned to the Darrow home. “They were always poor, often ragged, and a far-off look seemed to haunt their eyes, as if gazing into space at something beyond the stars,” he recalled. “They would sit with my father for hours in his little study, where they told each other of their vision and their hopes.”

In 1883, Amirus ran for the state senate. He finished fourth in a field of five candidates, with 146 votes.
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C
LARENCE
D
ARROW LOVED
his father, and admired the courage and the wit that Amirus displayed when besting his neighbors in arguments about politics or religion. “My father had directed my thought and reading. He had taught me to question rather than accept,” he remembered. “I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd. My instinct was to doubt the majority.”

Darrow had, as well, a particularly keen sense of compassion. As a boy, he was known for sticking up for the weaker children of the town, his sister Mary recalled, and her family was astonished when, after their mother slaughtered and cooked a chicken that Clarence had favored, he fled the house and refused to eat fowl ever again. He had nursed the frail thing as a chick, carried it around on his shoulder, and named it “David.” Later in life, he would add veal and lamb to his list of forsaken foods. Not surprisingly, this empathetic soul was moved by his father’s talk about injustice. “I listened so rapturously and believed so strongly,” he recalled, and “looked with the same unflagging hope for the promised star … the brilliant rainbow.”

Yet it was not easy, in that small town, to be the son of the local apostate. The good people in the Kinsman congregations shunned the Darrow furniture shop, and their children eyed the family warily. For their father’s strange ways, Darrow and his siblings faced “the social boycott that the Godly … enforced” against the “children of darkness,” he recalled. As Darrow made his way through adolescence, he began to view his father as harebrained and weak—a man who had “pathetically” come to “glory in his reputation as the village infidel.” Amirus had raised his children to be skeptics, and Clarence turned that skepticism toward his father. He was angry, and ashamed of being angry, as he watched Amirus consign himself to failure. “A simple child he always was”: this was Darrow’s ultimate, dismissive verdict. He would be different. He would show them. He would show them all.
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I
N THE SUMMER
of 1872, Emily Darrow died.

Everett had gone to Europe to study and that spring he received a letter from Clarence, alerting him that their mother was ill. Before Everett could leave for home, Amirus wrote him with the awful news. “The doctors have finally pronounced it a cancer,” he told his son. “There is no chance for her recovery.”