Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (84 page)

7.
With everything else he had to do in this chaotic summer, Darrow still made the time to take
Brockway v. Jewell
to the Ohio Supreme Court—and won. Eugene Debs to Caro Lloyd, Jan. 31, 1905, Florence Kelley to Henry Lloyd, July 18, 1894, HDL; Arthur
Garfield Hays,
Democracy Works
(New York: Random House, 1939); Masters,
Across Spoon River;
Jane Addams, “A Modern Lear,”
Survey
, Nov. 2, 1912; Darrow,
Story of My Life
.

8.
Chicago Times
, Sept. 27, 1894;
Chicago Tribune
, Sept. 27, Dec. 15, 1894;
Milwaukee Sentinel
, Sept. 27, 1894;
Denver Post
, Dec. 19, 1894;
Inter Ocean
, Dec. 15, 1894;
New York Times
, Dec. 15, 1894.

9.
Chicago Tribune
, Jan. 13, 15, 17, 30, Feb. 7, 1895;
Chicago Times
, Jan. 13, 14, 15, 27, 29, 1895;
Inter Ocean
, May 31, 1894, Jan. 27, 30, Feb. 6, 7, 8, 18, 1895;
New York Times
, Jan. 17, 1895;
Denver Post
, Jan. 26, 1895;
Milwaukee Journal
, Feb. 13, 1895; Theodore Roosevelt to White, Nov. 30, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt papers, Library of Congress; Theodore Debs to L.W. Rogers, Jan. 12, 1944, Bernard Brommel and Eugene Debs papers, Newberry Library.

10.
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 26, 27, May 28, 1895;
Chicago Times
, Mar. 26, 27, 1895;
New York Times
, Mar. 26, 27, May 28, 1895; Edwin Walker to Olney, Apr. 27, May 21, 1895; and U.S. attorney John C. Black to Judson Harmon, Feb. 28, 1896, U.S. Department of Justice records, National Archives.

11.
Lindsey,
The Pullman Strike;
Barnard,
Eagle Forgotten;
Waldo R. Browne,
Altgeld of Illinois
(New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1924).

12.
Barnard,
Eagle Forgotten
.

13.
Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform
(New York: Vintage, 1955);
Chicago Times
, Feb. 4, 1895; Willis J. Abbott, “The Chicago Populist Campaign,”
The Arena
, Feb. 1895.

14.
Keeping the other guys from stealing the election was an essential ingredient for victory in Chicago. Darrow defended one Democratic faction that turned off the lights, boarded up the windows, and built a wooden barricade across the door to a polling place so that the voters had to stand on tiptoe to hand their paper ballots to the armed poll workers inside. It was necessary, Darrow contended, in order to keep the ballot boxes from being carried off by the other side. But voters were advised to remove any rings before voting, lest they disappear into the dark with the ballot.
Chicago Tribune
, Aug. 8, Oct. 7, 20, 23, 31, 1894, Mar. 17, 1895;
Chicago Times
, Sept. 22, 30, Oct. 7, 20, 25, Nov. 4, 1894, Feb. 4, 1895;
Searchlight
, Oct. 25, 1894.

15.
Chicago Times
, Nov. 8, 1894; Darrow to Lloyd, Nov. 22, 1894, Apr. 23, 1896, Lloyd to Darrow, Nov. 23, 1894, Darrow to Caro Lloyd, Nov. 9, 1905, HDL.

16.
Darrow, Altgeld memorial address, Apr. 20, 1902;
Chicago Tribune
, Feb. 23, Apr. 19, 24, 25, Nov. 14, 1895, Jan. 5, Sept. 16, 17, Nov. 10, 1896;
Chicago Record
, Dec. 25, 1895;
Chicago Times Herald
, Feb. 23, Mar. 16, Apr. 24, 28, June 3, 25, 1895;
New York Times
, June 7, 1895, July 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 26, 1896. Barnard,
Eagle Forgotten;
William Allen White,
Autobiography;
Edgar Lee Masters,
The New Star Chamber and Other Essays
(Chicago: Hammersmark, 1904).

17.
In his autobiography, Darrow erroneously maligned Congressman Belknap as “a clerk in a railroad office who had never taken any interest in politics.”
Chicago Tribune
, May 11, 12, July 23, 24, Aug. 31, Sept. 9, 10, Oct. 6, 13, 15, 29, Nov. 10, 1896;
New York Times
, Nov. 1, 1896, Jan. 24, 1897; Kelley to Lloyd, Oct. 1, 1896, R. H. Howe to Caro Lloyd and Lloyd to Howe, June 1911, Altgeld to Lloyd, Aug. 2, 1899, Lloyd to Fay, Mar. 10, 1898, HDL; Edgar Lee Masters to Carter Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938 (“He always hated and envied Bryan”), ELM; Schretter, “I Remember Darrow”; Darrow testimony, 1900, United States Industrial Commission; Darrow,
The Story of My Life;
Darrow, Altgeld memorial address, Apr. 20, 1902; Barnard,
Eagle Forgotten
.

CHAPTER 5: FREE LOVE

1.
Paul Darrow and Wilson interviews with Stone, CD-DOC; Darrow to Jessie, Jan. 8, 1896, CD-UML; Masters,
Across Spoon River;
Darrow to Lloyd, Jan. 2, 1895, ALW.

2.
Harrison was a lifelong foe of Sullivan and for years gathered information on the
Ogden Gas deal. He determined that one of the eleven controlling shares was divided into small pieces as “chicken feed” for unnamed persons who helped the scheme but did not rate a full cut. See “Notes on Ogden Gas Company,”
Carter Harrison papers, Newberry Library;
Chicago Tribune
, Feb. 26, 27, 28, Mar. 4, 6, 7, 9, 20, 21, 22, 26, Apr. 4, 1895, Jan. 16, 19, 20, 1897;
Chicago Times Herald
, Mar. 4, 5, 6, 7, 14, 21, 22, May 15, July 3, 1895;
New York Times
, May 1, 1897; Barnard,
Eagle Forgotten;
Harrison,
Stormy Years;
Carter Harrison,
Growing Up with Chicago
(Chicago: Seymour, 1944).

3.
A typewritten transcript of the “My Dear Miss S” letter from Darrow to Starr, but not an original, is in Darrow’s papers at the Library of Congress. I presume it is authentic and accurately transcribed. Need and greed drove Darrow’s actions, but he may have been motivated, as well, by devotion to Altgeld. The economic hard times had wrecked the governor’s finances and compelled him to take loans from an unprincipled banker. To meet the payments, Altgeld secretly borrowed money from the state treasury and from banks that were custodians of state funds. Altgeld did not profit from the gas deal as much as he might have. Needing cash, he sold his interest for some $35,000 to a downtown pawnbroker named Jacob Franks. When Ogden Gas was dealt, Franks’s shares were worth $666,000. Harrison,
Stormy Years
.

4.
The sequence of Darrow’s articles, which ran through August and September in the
Chronicle
, places him in England, Venice, Switzerland, and, finally, Paris. But it seems that the order was scrambled, as he wrote from France about “coming out of London into Paris.” Gertrude Barnum to Stone, Jan. 5, 1942, Irving Stone papers, University of California, Berkeley.
Chicago Record
, Sept. 18, 1895; Eliot White, letter to the editor,
Unity
, Darrow memorial issue, May 16, 1938.

5.
Chicago Tribune
, Nov. 24, 1895; Darrow, “Rights and Wrongs of Ireland.”

6.
Darrow to Jessie, Jan. 8, 1896, and undated financial statement, CD-UML; Paul and Jessie interviews with Stone, CD-LOC.

7.
Mary Field, another of Darrow’s lovers, would also leave Chicago to work for Dreiser. Leckie papers, New York Public Library; Chicago city directories;
Woman’s Who’s Who of America
(New York: American Commonwealth, 1914);
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 9, 1897; Ruby Darrow to Helen Darrow, Nov. 30, 1941, KD; Darrow divorce records, Cook County Circuit Court; Darrow to Whitlock, Feb. 5, 1902, and others, BW; Darrow to Addams, Sept. 11, 1901, and Bradley interview, ALW; A. A. Dornfield,
Hello Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!
(Chicago: Chicago Academy, 1988); Margaret Haley,
Battleground
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Emma Goldman,
Living My Life
(New York: Penguin, 2006); Dorothy Dudley,
Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free
(New York: Smith & Haas, 1932).

8.
Bradley interview, ALW; Barnum to Stone, Jan. 5 and 9, 1942, Irving Stone papers, University of California, Berkeley; Schretter, “I Remember Darrow”; Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC; Mary Field Parton, journal, MFP.

9.
Edgar Lee Masters, “My Youth in the Spoon River Country,” manuscript, ELM;
Chicago Tribune
, Jan. 7, 1901, Feb. 6, Feb. 15, 1902; Rosa Perdue to Ely, Jan. 23, 1903, ALW; Ethel Colson, “A Home in the Tenements,”
Junior Munsey Magazine
, 1901; Helen Todd file, U.S. Bureau of Investigation, National Archives; Ruby Darrow to Helen Darrow, KD; James Weber Linn,
Jane Addams
(New York: Appleton-Century, 1935); Mary Field Parton journal, MFP.

10.
Ruby wrote a human-interest story about Darrow’s nephew Karl, a “boy genius.” He would grow up to be a famous American physicist. Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC.

11.
Wood to George Field, Jan. 15, 1913, CESW-HL; Denslow Lewis,
The Gynecologic Consideration of the Sexual Act
(Chicago: Shepard, 1900).

12.
James McParland, Pinkerton Detective Agency report, Mar. 5, 1907, IHS; Hutchins Hapgood,
The Spirit of Labor
(New York: Duffield, 1907) and
A Victorian in the Modern World
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939); Mary Field to Sara, 1913, CESW-HL;
To-Morrow
magazine, various editions, 1907; Janice Ruth Wood,
The Struggle for Free Speech in the United States, 1872–1915
(New York: Routledge, 2008); Women’s Legal History Biography Project, Stanford University; Sunset Club proceedings, Nov. 5, 1891.

13.
Darrow, “Woman,”
Bedford’s Magazine
, July 1890. In “Some Reminiscences of a Pioneer Suffragette,”
Chicago Tribune
, Dec. 5, 1909, Elizabeth Loomis recalled how “Clarence Darrow often attended our parlor debates about woman’s suffrage.” The Chicago papers of the late 1880s and 1890s contain ample references to Darrow’s support of the cause (see, for example,
Chicago Tribune
, Feb. 3, May 29, 1889, Feb. 4, April 11, 1890, Oct. 14, Nov. 6, 1891; May 21, 23, June 6, 1905, and others in OHL).

14.
Darrow,
A Persian Pearl
(East Aurora, NY: Roycroft Shop, 1899); White,
Autobiography;
Whitlock,
Forty Years of It;
Barnum, “Darrow, the Enigma”; see also Whitlock correspondence and diary notations, BW.

15.
Darrow,
Resist Not Evil
(Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1902);
Chicago Tribune
, June 24, 25, Aug. 7, 1898; Darrow to Addams, Sept. 11, 1901, ALW.

16.
The fellow-servant rule, according to
Black’s Law Dictionary
, is “a common-law doctrine holding that an employer is not liable for an employee’s injuries caused by a negligent coworker.” The “Easy Lessons” series ran through the summer and fall of 1902 in the
Chicago American
. For sequence and subjects, see Willard D. Hunsberger,
Clarence Darrow: A Bibliography
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), and for analysis see Abe Ravitz,
Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition
(Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1962). Darrow was drawn into a sensational murder mystery when
F. Wayland Brown, a private detective he knew, asked for his help. The pretty
Marie Defenbach, twenty-four, an artist’s model, had been conducting a torrid affair with Dr.
August Unger, who was handsome, married—and broke. Together, they plotted to defraud several insurance companies by faking her death, substituting a vagrant’s body, and having it cremated before anyone could raise questions. They hired Brown to help them with some logistical details. Then Defenbach died horribly, frothing at the mouth and twisting in agony—a few days after signing papers leaving her estate to Unger. The doctor quickly had her body burned but, in his eagerness to collect on the insurance policies, provoked suspicion, and he and Brown were indicted for fraud. Unger had his own attorney and got the maximum jail time. (Since there was no body, the state could not prove murder.) But Darrow persuaded the judge that Brown had been duped. The court fined Brown and set him free. The cause of Marie’s death remained unknown.

17.
Virginia Glenn Crane,
The Oshkosh Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898
(Oshkosh, WI: V. Crane, 1998);
Milwaukee Sentinel
, June 24, 1898;
Chicago Tribune
, June 24, 25, Aug. 7, and Dec. 23–31, 1898; Apr. 26, May 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 27, Aug. 8, 9, 1899, and Feb. 22, 1901;
Chicago Daily News
, Apr. 26, May 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 1899; Hapgood,
The Spirit of Labor
.

18.
Darrow, Altgeld funeral address, Mar. 14, 1902, in
Story of My Life;
Jane Addams and Rev. Frank Crane of the People’s Church also spoke at the Altgeld home on Friday.
New York Times
, Mar. 13, 15, 17, Apr. 4, 1902;
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 12, 13, 14, 15, Apr. 21, 1902.

CHAPTER 6: LABOR’S LAWYER

1.
Lloyd to his wife, Nov. 11, 1902, HDL; Anthracite Coal Strike Commission,
Report to the President on the Anthracite Coal Strike of May-October, 1902
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1903); Anthracite Coal Strike Commission (hereafter ACSC), transcript of hearings, Library of Congress; Rosamond Rhone, “Anthracite Coal Mines and Mining,”
American Monthly Review of Reviews
, Nov. 1902; Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless,
The Kingdom of Coal
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Robert J. Cornell,
The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1957).