Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  IT WAS DURING his stay in Ashtabula that Darrow launched a career in politics, which he would pursue for the next twenty years. He fell in with the Democrats, who were glad to have him, for he was a handsome, well-spoken young man. He served as secretary of the county party and was a delegate to the state convention. He worked on the victorious presidential campaign of Grover Cleveland in 1884, then ran for the state senate and lost. He entered the race for Ashtabula County prosecutor and lost. He finally found a race he could win when, with the help of a friendly judge, Darrow was elected Ashtabula’s city solicitor, with a salary of $75 a month.

  Darrow now added a partisan edge to his rhetoric. After an 1884 trip to Washington, D.C., he filed a report in the local Democratic newspaper in which, with mock consternation, he told how in “the sacred marble halls” of Congress he had found “a real, living, terrible saloon.”

  “I sat down at one of the tables and wept in silence,” Darrow wrote. “To make sure of the character of the place, I ordered drinks.” The Republicans, he told audiences, were a “party that talks temperance in Ohio and runs a gin mill in Washington.”

  A Memorial Day address in 1886 contained the expected patriotic flourishes—and a radical proposal, as well. “Once more we bring the tender tokens of our love, the Spring’s bright flowers and garlands green, and strew them o’er our soldiers’ graves,” he began. “We hear the fife’s shrill notes, the drum’s loud beat and the bugle’s clarion call, we hear the roar and din of strife, the cannon’s deadly peal, the war horse neigh and see the wounded and the slain. Once more we watch the daily tidings from the South and with quickly beating hearts we scan the list to know whose loved one has fallen in the fray. We see the pall; the bier; the hearse and view again the brave boys, cold in death.”

  But the dreams of the Founding Fathers, and the sacrifice of those who died in the Civil War, would not be fulfilled until women could vote, Darrow said. In denying women the ballot, “we defame the principles for which our fathers fought,” he told the crowd. “Strange that men … without a blush of shame … take from woman, the class who needs it most, and as a class the most fitted for its use, the only weapon which a self-governing people have the right to use—the ballot box.”

  Darrow shared cases with a lawyer named Charles Lawyer and worked as a public defender. And throughout his years in Ashtabula, Darrow kept up a running fight on behalf of James Brockway. In March 1885, Brockway had cared for a wealthy but sick “inebriate” and, in return for his help, been promised a gilt-trimmed horse harness. But then the drunkard was assigned a guardian, Cornelius Jewell, who refused to honor the deal. Darrow tried the case—Brockway v. Jewell—before a justice of the peace and lost. Unwilling to give up, he fought the case through retrials and appeals until finally he prevailed, nine years after it was first contested, in the Ohio Supreme Court. It was a battle over principle, not money. The harness was worth $30.

  Ohio was beginning to take notice. In August 1886 he went to the state Democratic convention in Toledo. One newspaper called Darrow “a young man of brilliant attainments” who “already enjoys an enviable reputation as a lawyer and an orator.” Another noted how Darrow “brought his candidate before the convention in a masterful manner. He has a scholarly look, a perfectly beardless face and a deep rich voice.”

  But life was tame in what Darrow took to calling “benighted Ashtabula.” There was little chance as a Democrat to win higher office. The poker games with pals were fun, but it was still a place where life and commerce came to a halt and everyone gathered to see the spectacle when the movers hoisted a safe through an upstairs window. He had lots of time to read, and to the books he had discovered in his father’s library, he added a small volume on crime, recommended by a local judge: Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims, written and self-published by a Chicagoan named John Peter Altgeld. It argued that biological and social conditions, and not willful deviltry, were the source of criminal behavior. Darrow became an acolyte, as well, of Robert Ingersoll, an elegant orator and famous agnostic, whose willingness to champion freethinking philosophy in the face of popular disapproval made him, in Darrow’s eyes, a “soul of matchless courage.”

  And Darrow was moved by Progress and Poverty, a bestselling political tract written by Henry George. An Ashtabula banker brought it to his attention, and it made a marked impression. “In factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work … Amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation … Everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the fear of want,” George wrote. He advocated a heavy “single tax” on property, to ensure equality.22

  Darrow’s radical soul was stirring. Jessie might be comfortable in Ohio, but he desired more. “I had accumulated $500 in cash and wanted to buy a home. Of course, I don’t suppose I did, but the family wanted it,” Darrow recalled. “Wives always want homes, something to bring a man to at night … it stabilizes things. Wives are great stabilizers.”

  “I made a bargain with a fellow for that home, which I was to pay $3,500 for—$500 down and the rest as long as I lived,” said Darrow. “He came up the next morning to bring the deed, and he said he could not bring it because his wife would not sign it.” In some versions of the tale Darrow, provoked, tells the seller, “I don’t want your fool house anyhow, I am moving to Chicago.” In others, he tells off the wife. What really matters is, he told it to himself. Great men were doing great things, and he wanted to be among them.

  The March 5, 1887, edition of the Ashtabula Standard carried the news. “City Solicitor CS Darrow has decided to locate in Chicago,” it said, “and early next month will shake the dust of Ashtabula from his feet and take up his abode in the wickedest city in the United States.”23

  Chapter 2

  CHICAGO

  Chicago was a mining camp, five stories high.

  Clarence Darrow arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887, knowing no one of any consequence, lost in the flocks of other young pilgrims seeking their fortunes in the great boomtown in the middle of the continent. Chicago’s unbridled growth, corsair creed, and mesmerizing license gave the city its magnetic pull. The Great Lakes port had ninety thousand inhabitants in the year Darrow was born. By the time he arrived at the age of thirty, there were a million people living there, and it had become the nation’s second-largest city. Everyone came from somewhere else; most were foreign born. “First in violence, deepest in dirt,” wrote journalist Lincoln Steffens. “Loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.”1

  The Chicagoans were a truly intrepid lot. When their effluence despoiled Lake Michigan and threatened to slay them all with cholera, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River and sent the sewage down the Mississippi. When the lake sand gave way beneath their buildings, they lifted the city, block by block. In 1871 the famous Chicago fire razed the downtown, destroying eighteen thousand buildings. From tent cities out on the prairie, emissaries were dispatched to assure Wall Street and Capitol Hill that Chicago would rebuild; that wall and shingle could be consumed, but not the great kinetic spirit of the town.

  The fields and pastures of the Republic shipped grain and hogs and cattle to Chicago to be butchered, processed, and sent east. In return came fine goods and imports, and a tide of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Scandinavia, and Italy. The city was known as the “Rome of Railroads,” for its immense depots and switchyards. The McCormick Reaper Works and the Pullman Palace Car Company topped the manufacturing sector. Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour built mighty packinghouses, feeding on the herds of livestock slaughtered at the Union Stockyards. The docks were crowded with stevedores, unloading lumber and iron ore from the Great Lakes fleet. Towering grain elevators competed with that new architectural phenomenon, the skyscraper, to define the city skyline.

  With splendor came sin and corruption. The buck
et-shop bars, faro games, and bordellos ran all night. “City Hall … is filled with brothel-keepers, saloon-keepers and prize-fighters, ready to barter the rights of citizens for a song,” wrote John Burns, a visiting British socialist.2 From 1875 to 1890, the homicide rate soared by 413 percent, driven by brawls in the saloons and gunfire in the alleys. The legal domain that Darrow entered was worthy of the town. “Chicago was a mining camp, five stories high,” the journalist George Ade recalled. “It was owned by the gamblers” and “the minor courts were controlled by agents of crime.” Attorneys worked in rundown buildings, with the invariable leather chair, rolltop desk, and bust of Lincoln. A few hundred dollars was, for a few years yet, a significant fee. Fistfights broke out in court. Verdicts could be purchased. “I could cite many cases of organized attempts to bilk my companies on absolutely fictitious testimony,” the streetcar baron Charles Yerkes recalled. And so, said Yerkes, “I bribed juries.”

  Darrow rented a desk in an office downtown on LaSalle Street. Among the first to engage his services was Dr. Charles Arnold, who had been sued for slander by Richard McDonough, a rival for an office in the “Grand Lodge of the Knights and Ladies of Honor.” Darrow presented witnesses who testified that, as Arnold had claimed, McDonough did indeed run “a bawdy house” on Madison Street. A clerk who manned the front desk told how the male guests, to disguise their identities, signed the register as Grover Cleveland. Arnold described the hotel as a den of sin where “Negroes with white women, white men with Negro women, young girls with old men and old women with young men” came and went, staying but an hour, with no luggage, “in a manner that demonstrated their abandoned purpose.”

  “What kind of women go there?” Darrow asked a German barber who worked nearby. “Shippies.”

  “How do you know they’re chippies?”

  “Vell, they got their hair cut, and I know ’em.”

  Darrow earned little that first year. He was homesick and awed, but not alone: the whole Darrow clan was moving to the city. Darrow’s older brother Everett and sister Mary worked as public school teachers and lived on the West Side at 907 Sawyer Avenue, where Amirus and Darrow’s youngest sister, Jennie, another teacher, soon joined them. After renting a house in Englewood, Darrow and Jessie moved to 905 Sawyer Avenue. Within months, his brothers Hubert, a musician, and Herman, a teacher and a printer, had arrived.

  And Darrow had an uncle in Chicago—his mother’s brother, William “Horse” Eddy, a trader and breeder who ran a stable and carriage shop on Dearborn Street. Profane, loquacious, and opinionated, Eddy was “quite a character,” the Tribune noted, a “man of shrewd discernment and radical politics.” He had arrived in Chicago from Ohio in the 1840s and made his fortune in livestock and real estate. He was an abolitionist who, during the Civil War, had gained fame for horsewhipping Wilbur Storey, the Lincoln-hating editor of the Chicago Times. Eddy became wealthy, civic-minded, and almost respectable, and helped found the city’s Republican Party. But he lost almost everything in the great fire, and took to drinking, brawling, and waging hopeless campaigns for office. In the face of various religious revivals, he remained an infidel. “Tain’t natural to think a man is going to be roasted after death because some people say so,” he explained.

  Darrow took to Eddy and agreed to represent him in a seemingly hopeless lawsuit he had filed to recover a disputed thirty-acre tract of land near Auburn Park. It took six years, and Darrow had to carry the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, but he won his uncle title to the now-valuable property. W. H. EDDY RECOVERS HALF A MILLION, read the front-page headline in the Tribune. It was Darrow’s first big legal triumph.3

  VICTORIAN AMERICA LOVED its clubs, and Darrow became a stalwart at the Land and Labor Club, the Andrew Jackson League, the Secular Union, the Equal Suffrage Club, the Women’s Physiological Institute, the Personal Rights League, and other organizations. Getting known was good for business. So were letters to the editor. Just days after arriving in Chicago, Darrow wrote the Inter Ocean, decrying the widespread practice by which wealthy landowners lied about the assessed value of their properties. “About the only class … that pays taxes on the full value of their personal property are those of widows, orphans and imbeciles.”

  Many in the community were struck by Darrow’s speaking skills, his wry sense of humor, and his restless, inquiring mind. George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”

  Though Darrow admired Christ’s teachings, he doubted his divinity, and was a regular with Schilling at the Secular Union. It had been organized to oppose the “infliction” of religion on secular society, and met, appropriately, in an abandoned church. “The religion for which we are struggling and which must prevail in the future is not based upon … a Supreme Being,” Darrow told a standing-room-only crowd of nonbelievers at Easter in 1888. “But … a foundation deep in human reason.”

  Here, Darrow expressed the deterministic philosophy that would guide him all his life. “The worst of all cruel creeds and of all the bloody wrongs inflicted by the past can be found in the barbarous belief that man is a free moral agent,” he said.

  “The political and religious rulers of the world have ever taught that each individual possessed the power to choose the right or wrong … and if he chose the bad it was because he … preferred the sin,” said Darrow. That was ignorance, and folly. Man was but a leaf, tossed and bashed in the “great moving restless universe of which he forms so small a part.”

  Darrow enlisted in the local Democracy, as the party was called, and was dispatched to Rock Island, Warren, Dixon, and other small towns on behalf of President Cleveland in the 1888 election. After an appearance at a YMCA hall in Moline, he was described as a “Chicago orator and reformer” and hailed for his “brilliant and forcible exposition.” He was not so well received when debating in Belvidere. “Poor Darrow,” the Tribune reported, was “completely demolished.” So, in that Republican year, was Cleveland.

  Darrow sought out influential men in the community to cultivate their friendship. To the wealthy reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, Darrow sent an ingratiating note asking to “allow me to thank you for your brave and able letter in yesterday’s Herald. It will do much good. The cause of organized labor is fortunate in having such a champion.” Lloyd was a scholar and a journalist related through marriage to an owner of the conservative Tribune. With long white hair and a drooping mustache, he looked a bit like Mark Twain. As early as 1881, he had started writing about the pernicious influence of trusts and monopolies, and his 1894 book Wealth Against Commonwealth was a model for muckrakers to come. His home in Winnetka became a salon for radicals. It wasn’t long before Darrow was attending. “He is one of our best young lawyers,” Lloyd told a friend, “and a zealous friend of the working men.”4

  LLOYD AND DARROW would join many crusades in the coming years, but none so eruptive as that which brought them together during Darrow’s first months in Chicago—the execution of the Haymarket defendants. It was “not the first unholy verdict rendered by a jury and sustained by a court, but it is perhaps the most unrighteous,” Darrow declared.

  In the fall of 1897, as three hundred policemen armed with rifles and shotguns guarded the approaches to the Cook County jail, four men cloaked in spectral shrouds dropped through the gallows and, kicking and writhing, slowly strangled to death. The hangman had erred, their necks did not break, and it took them time to die. Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were anarchists, a word which came to evoke nihilism, but which then described a utopian philosophy.

  The anarchists saw the one-sided nature of the transaction between capital and labor, witnessed the great disparity in wealth that resulted, and
recognized the awful toll that the industrial age took on workers. They believed that men would rise, seize power from the ruling class, and live without government or laws. The most aggressive formed paramilitary groups like the Irish Labor Guards or the Bohemian Sharpshooters, who, before the authorities banned such activities, drilled in the parks and paraded with rifles and uniforms.

  The movement’s short-term goals were modest, however, and shared by mainstream labor groups. American wage earners, using strikes and boycotts, were demanding an end to ten- or twelve-hour shifts and agitating for an eight-hour day that spring. On May 3, 1886, in a clash at the McCormick works, the police opened fired, killing several men. A protest was called for the next night at an intersection called the Haymarket.

  The rally was small and orderly, but as it drew to an end, an officious police captain ordered his men to clear the street. Someone threw a bomb at the advancing police column, and in the explosion and resultant gunfire, dozens of officers were wounded, eight fatally. “Goaded to madness, the police were … as dangerous as any mob, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between the peaceable citizen and the Nihilist assassin,” the Tribune reported.

  “Excitement was at fever heat,” Darrow recalled. The public hysteria was not limited to Chicago. In an “acute outbreak of anarchy a Gatling gun … is the sovereign remedy,” the New York Times advised. “Later on hemp, in judicious doses, has an admirable effect.”

  None of the anarchists was conclusively tied to the furtive bomber. Six of the defendants were not at the scene that night, and the two others were on the speakers’ platform, not down on the sidewalk from where the bomb was thrown. Their crime was incitement: they were alleged to have inspired the assassin with their ideas. “There is no evidence,” Albert Parsons wrote, “that I or any of us killed, or had anything to do with the killing … But it was proven clearly that we were, all of us, anarchists, socialists, communists … unionists. It was proven that three of us were editors of labor papers; that five of us were labor organizers and speakers at workingmen’s mass meetings … Of these crimes against the capitalist class they found us guilty.”