Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (69 page)

“The papers are prejudiced against us and may not say so,”
Herbert Hicks wrote his brother Ira. But “we gave the atheist Jew Arthur Garfield Hays, the agnostic Clarence Darrow, and the ostracized Catholic Dudley Field Malone a sound licking.”

But at trial’s end, the crowd surged to congratulate Darrow. He “was delighted as a boy and seemed as shy,” one account noted. Bryan was “a weary, heartbroken man,” wrote another correspondent. And so ended what Bryan called the “little case of little consequence.”
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M
OST OF THE
participants and reporters left Dayton that evening, but not the two titans. They each had speaking engagements to honor in Tennessee and wanted to rest and enjoy the scenery. Darrow was the featured guest at a dance thrown by Dayton’s young people, where he danced a waltz with Malone’s handsome wife. Bryan kept to his fervent schedule with no apparent signs of discouragement. Five days after the trial, Darrow was sightseeing in the Smoky Mountains near Knoxville when a reporter tracked him down with the news that Bryan, while napping in his borrowed bed in Dayton, had died in his sleep.

Darrow managed to compose a suitable public tribute to his old foe. But when it was suggested that Bryan died of a broken heart he murmured, “Busted heart nothing; he died of an overstuffed belly.”

“The lapse of time leaves heroes stranded,” the
Nation
reported, in its farewell tribute. It was Bryan’s great flaw “that his heart was much stronger than his head … He was lost when pinned down to detail.

“Always the heart swept him on, with no check from a reasoning hand,” the magazine said. “And when Clarence Darrow got him on the witness stand he revealed himself as a pathetically sincere and pitifully ignorant old man.”
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Bryan’s funeral was a national event. He was still,
Will Rogers wrote, the tribune of the little folk. His death gave a hyperdramatic coda to the Scopes trial, further cinching its claim on history. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, his coffin draped in an American flag. And the poet
Vachel Lindsay wrote:

    
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan

    
That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?

    
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,

    
Where the kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest
.

Chapter 19

SWEET

That is all there is to this case …
Take the hatred away and you have nothing.

W
hen 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. He had been known for much of his professional life as a radical, a rebel, and a champion of underdogs. Now, after winning Chief Healey and Fred Lundin their freedom, saving the lives of Leopold and Loeb, and besting Bryan in the Bible Belt, he emerged as an American archetype: the legal sorcerer who won hopeless cases.

The Monkey Trial had captured the American imagination.
Ernest Hemingway slipped a mention of Bryan’s demise into
The Sun Also Rises
. Inspired by the events in Dayton,
Sinclair Lewis began work on
Elmer Gantry
, a tale of a corrupt preacher. There was a slice of Darrow in the lawyer Billy Flynn in the 1926 play
Chicago
. And “Get Clarence Darrow!” cried editor Walter Burns when
The Front Page
debuted on Broadway in 1928. There was no need to explain the joke to Manhattan theatergoers: it signified the depth of the editor’s predicament. Darrow had become,
Lincoln Steffens would write in the
Saturday Review
, the “Attorney for the Damned.” Or, as
Vanity Fair
christened him, “The Great Defender.”

The Scopes trial “was inconceivably dramatic: two ancient warlocks brought jaw to jaw at last,” wrote Mencken. “It was superb to see Darrow throw out his webs, lay his foundations, prepare his baits. His virtuosity never failed. In the end Bryan staggered to the block and took that last appalling clout. It was delivered calmly, deliberately, beautifully. Bryan was killed as plainly as if he had been felled with an axe. He rolled into the sawdust a comic obscenity.”
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Darrow’s friends rejoiced. “Nothing is dangerous which the whole world is laughing at, and the world is laughing at Tennessee and Mr. Bryan,” Erskine Wood wrote in his diary. In Europe,
Brand Whitlock shared a similar sentiment in his journal: “This chance, Darrow made the most of, rendering Bryan ridiculous.”
²

When Darrow arrived back in Chicago, he could have demanded staggering fees for whatever fat and easy cases struck his fancy. Instead, he worked almost a year for meager wages saving Negroes charged with murdering a white man.

T
HE KILLING OCCURRED
on September 9, 1925, but the tension that caused the event began to build the day before, in a modest middle-class neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. At mid-morning a truck filled with furniture moved up to the curb at the corner of Garland and Charlevoix Avenues, where young black men carried furniture into a two-story brick bungalow. The house belonged to Dr.
Ossian Sweet, twenty-nine, and his twenty-three-year-old wife, Gladys. With their baby daughter, they were the first African American family to settle in this white neighborhood and had no illusions about how they would be welcomed. Among the furnishings were a sack of firearms and a satchel heavy with some four hundred rounds of ammunition.

Earlier that summer, Dr.
Alexander Turner, another black physician, had been confronted by a mob as he tried to move into his purchased house in a white neighborhood in Detroit. Rocks and bricks shattered the windows of his car and home and, at gunpoint, he was compelled to sign a deed and relinquish ownership of the property. Turner was but one of a number of black homebuyers who met violence when they tried to move outside the city’s cramped “Black Bottom” ghetto. In several cases, the blacks or police had to ward off racist mobs with gunfire.

Sure enough, a crowd of several hundred white people gathered at the corner of Garland and Charlevoix that evening; some rocks were thrown, and those in the house heard shouted vows to get the “niggers.” A contingent of Detroit policemen kept the whites in order, and the night passed without violence. The Sweets went shopping for furniture for their new home on Wednesday, and Ossian spent the afternoon seeing patients at his medical practice in the black quarter of the city. But alarmed by reports
that the mob would return, he asked his brothers—Henry and Otis—and a group of friends, and some friends of friends, to help defend his home.
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At nightfall on Wednesday, the crowd was back, lining the sidewalks and lots across the streets. Inside, the black men tried to calm themselves with a game of whist and waited for a dinner of fresh ham, greens, and sweet potatoes. Gladys was baking a cake for dessert. Then, as Otis and a friend arrived in a taxi, the first rock hit the house. Ossian opened the door to let his brother in and saw the crowd surge toward the house. Stones rained on the roof and porch. Someone shouted, “The people! The people are coming!” A bedroom window was broken. The men armed themselves and took firing positions throughout the house. Another pane shattered. And, down in the dining room, Ossian heard volleys of gunfire.

Some twenty shots were fired. On the lawns and sidewalks across the avenues, men ducked and women screamed and ran to collect their children. Two of the Sweets’ white neighbors went down, hit by gunshots. One of them, a foreman at an auto plant named
Leon Breiner, was smoking his pipe when a bullet hit him in the back. He bled to death before doctors could save him. A dozen Detroit policemen who had been stationed about the corner were stirred into action by the fusillades, and an officer fired at the armed black men on the second floor. Inspector
Norton Schuknecht, the burly, double-chinned officer in charge, chuffed up the steps of the Sweet house and, incongruously, rang the doorbell.

“Jesus Christ!” he exploded, when Ossian let him in. “What in hell are you fellows shooting for?”

“Why, they’re ruining my house,” Sweet stammered.
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News of Breiner’s death spread quickly. The crowd swelled into the thousands, black motorists on nearby streets were assaulted, and the police had to deploy an armored car and hundreds of club-wielding officers to keep the house protected. The Sweets and their friends were stripped of their weapons—a shotgun, two rifles, and seven handguns—and pushed from the house, out the back door and across the yard, into a paddy wagon parked in the alley. Only the drawn guns of the police kept the whites at bay.

Ossian and Gladys and nine of their friends and family members were taken to police headquarters and questioned that night. Most tried to obfuscate, but
Henry Sweet, twenty-one, the doctor’s brother, told his interrogators how he crouched at the front window with a rifle and, with
the stones “pouring down like rain,” fired two shots “to protect myself.” If he had not acted in self-defense, Henry told the authorities, “probably, I would have been dead by now.”

The white prosecutors saw things differently. The blacks had provoked things by moving into a neighborhood where they were not wanted. The crowd on the corner was tiny and tame. The threat “was not sufficiently serious to justify taking a life,” the prosecuting attorney would claim later. “If a man threatens to slap my face, I have no right to kill him.” All eleven black men were charged with assault with intent to commit murder, and with first-degree murder for the death of
Leon Breiner. In the parlance of the law, they had maliciously conspired “to shoot to kill without legal justification or excuse.”

T
HE
S
WEET BROTHERS
,
grandsons of slaves, had been raised in the South. Ossian was born in central Florida in 1895, the oldest surviving boy of ten children in a family of hardworking farmers. At the age of thirteen Ossian was sent north, to a Negro college in Ohio. To help pay his tuition, he got summer jobs in Detroit. In 1917, he entered medical school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and after graduation moved back to Michigan, where he opened his practice, met and married Gladys, and joined Detroit’s professional black elite. He tended the sick and injured at the Negro hospital, opened a pharmacy, and took Gladys to Europe, where he studied advanced medicine in Vienna and Paris.

Otis, a dentist, joined Ossian in Detroit, as did Henry, a college student. They were part of the great migration of African Americans who made their way north in the years around World War I, fleeing the Jim Crow era in the South, manning the factories, and packing the cramped black ghettoes of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities. Almost a million blacks made the journey, one-tenth of the nation’s Negro population.

“The great majority of people came here absolutely broke … you saw families coming here with their old clothes, and a basket and a bundle … just getting here, you know,” the black lawyer
Charles Mahoney recalled. “They lived where they could and they worked for what they could get … They had no experience, they had no money, they had no
contacts. They were just here … They came because it was better, you know. They came looking for hope.”

Three or four families shared a single apartment. Homes took in so many lodgers that they might as well have been hotels. Stables, garages, and cellars were converted into rented rooms. A growing number of the new arrivals, like the Sweet brothers, were college educated and middle class. They vowed to secure their rights.
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