Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  In the “reign of horror” and generally chilly political climate that followed McKinley’s assassination, Darrow had a hankering for a good free-speech case, he told Whitlock, and Hearst and his editors supplied one.

  The American was then crusading against the “gas trust” that, the newspaper said, was gouging Chicago consumers. The gas interests sued, and when Judge Elbridge Hanecy sided with them, the paper ripped him in its columns and cartoons. Hanecy charged Hearst and six employees with contempt, alleging that “scandalous matter was printed … to terrorize and intimidate this court.” The managing editor, Andrew Lawrence, and a reporter, H. S. Canfield, were sentenced to jail. There was bad blood between Hanecy and Darrow, and their exchanges in court were frequently hostile. So Darrow appealed to a more amenable jurist—his friend, the politically ambitious and liberal Judge Edward Dunne—who agreed to hear Darrow’s plea for a writ of habeas corpus.

  “It is for the cause they represent that powerful interests desire to place these men in jail: this yellow journal must be suppressed for through its columns has been heard the bitter cry of the outcast millions who have here found voice,” Darrow told Dunne. “I care for this paper and for these men because a blow struck at them is a blow struck at the freedom of the press, which is really the greatest privilege the citizen enjoys, the greatest safeguard of human liberty.”

  The journalists were freed. “Public officials … have always been and always will be subject to criticism because of their official acts,” Dunne ruled. “It is one of the incidents and burdens of a public life.”9

  HEARST PAID HIS stars well, and demanded loyalty. When the publisher launched his presidential campaign in 1904 he called on Darrow to lead it in Illinois. The job ensnared Darrow in considerable intrigue, as three groups now vied for control of the Democratic Party in Chicago: Darrow, Hearst, and Dunne led the so-called radicals, Harrison had his personal following, and the Hopkins-Sullivan machine formed the third faction. They met at the state convention, where the radical and machine forces joined, at first, to crush Harrison. The Hopkins faction imported squads of “muscular, red fisted, red faced street fighters” from local street gangs like the “Stockyard Indians” and the “Black Rabbits,” to intimidate Harrison’s supporters.

  It was an unholy alliance. As much as he liked Darrow, his pal George Schilling told a friend, “I would under no circumstance advise that you assist him … The Hopkins element … are pirates and bandits whose only purpose … is to protect and extend the predatory interests of a lot of franchise grabbers.” The machine men proved him right when, having disposed of the mayor, they double-crossed Hearst and Darrow. All that was missing was “the flying of the Jolly Roger,” a newsman wrote. “The … buccaneers on the platform chortled until they shook like masses of jelly.”

  Darrow rallied the Hearst forces and tugged other delegates to their cause. They massed in the rear of the hall, yelling “Pirates!” and “Rotten!” at the machine men on the dais. Seizing the moment, Darrow, white-faced, his eyes intent, climbed onto a chair and offered a resolution binding the state’s delegates to Hearst at the Democratic convention. It passed, and in the giddy moments afterward, Hearst’s troops demanded that Darrow be nominated as the Democratic candidate for governor. The nomination was his if he wanted it. But Darrow had no desire to lead the fractious party against a Republican ticket topped by the popular Theodore Roosevelt in the fall. He shoved his way to the podium and told the Democrats that he would not accept the nomination.

  In July, the battle shifted to the Democratic national convention in St. Louis. The Wall Street Democrats—the old gold and Grover Cleveland men—united behind New York judge Alton Parker and labeled themselves “the reorganizers.” William Jennings Bryan had run and lost in 1896 and 1900 and was not a declared candidate, and so Hearst was the progressive alternative. But the publisher was a poor politician—he had a reedy voice and a fear of public speaking—and Bryan schemed to supplant him. When the Hopkins-Sullivan crew voted with the “reorganizers” on procedural questions Bryan challenged their credentials on the floor. “No band of train robbers ever planned a robbery … more deliberately, or with less conscience,” he thundered. But this was not 1896. His challenge was soundly defeated, and Darrow had to plead with Hopkins for time to speak for Hearst.

  It was, for Darrow, his own “cross of gold” moment. Who knew what might happen if Darrow could touch the hearts in the hall and tug them away from Wall Street and Parker? It was after midnight—still prime time in the days when sessions lasted until dawn—when Darrow rose to speak. He reminded the Democrats of the glorious days of ’96, when they had campaigned in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, for a real democracy. The forces that now led the party, Darrow said, were the very ones who had sold them out for Mark Hanna’s money.

  “Gentlemen of the convention,” Darrow said, “even now it may not be too late to consider and to pause.…

  “The United States is not … made up alone of the pawnshops that line the narrow, crooked lane which men call Wall Street; shops where human souls are placed in pawn for gold,” he said. “The United States is the place where countless millions, under the clear sky and in the bright light of day, do their work and live their lives and earn their bread without the aid of schemes.…

  “If this convention would gain the votes of the common people of the United States, that great class without whom there never was a Democratic party, they must name a man who has fought the battles of the poor,” he said. “With such a man the mighty hosts of workers from the fields and prairies, from the factories and mills, from the railways and the mines … will bring us a victory that will be a victory indeed.…

  “This great party will come back from the golden idols and the tempting flesh pots and once more battle for the rights of man!”

  Darrow barely mentioned Hearst at all. He “enlivened the wearying crowd,” the Washington Post reported, and “carried the galleries,” said the Tribune. But there was, alas, no stampede. The spectators may have loved it, but those were Parker men on the floor of the convention. The Gold Democrats got their man, who was trounced by Roosevelt in November.

  Darrow had taken Paul with him to St. Louis. He was trying to patch things up with his son, who had just graduated from Dartmouth. They had a long ramble that summer to Colorado, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and joined a Dartmouth group for three days camping in the Canadian Rockies. And in January, Paul joined his father and Masters on a trip to Cuba. To ward off seasickness, Darrow organized an onboard poker game. He feared that Paul was too serious and straitlaced. “You have all your life to work,” he told his son. “Take a boat ride to Europe or something.”10

  AMID THE TEMPESTUOUS events of that election season, Darrow published two novels and mourned the death of his father.

  Amirus passed away in April 1904. The funeral was held at Darrow’s brother Edward’s house, and the body, in keeping with the old infidel’s wishes, was cremated. Darrow’s relationship with his father dominates the opening chapters of Farmington, a novel of boyhood, which was published the year of Amirus’s death. Darrow had written it on his honeymoon, on trains and in hotels. It is the story of his life in Kinsman—a sturdy piece of American realism that preceded such better-known accounts of Midwest villages as his law partner’s Spoon River Anthology, or his friend Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

  John Smith, the narrator of the novel, grows up in a small town. His father runs a gristmill, not a furniture shop, but otherwise is Amirus. “No man knew so much of books as he,” says Smith, “and no man knew less of life.”

  Darrow draws a pastoral scene—a one-room schoolhouse, baseball, summer evenings—on which he splatters acid. For all the talk of idyllic boyhood, summer days, and willow trees, death is the foremost resident of Farmington, “the little … town beside the winding stream where I used to stone the frogs.”

  Darrow recites the inscriptions on the cool granite monuments in the cemetery. He takes his readers
to Squire Allen’s grand funeral, and to a burial ceremony for a young Union soldier, “glorious, brave, and noble,” who went to war with a smile. We see Darrow’s mother, struck down at forty-eight by cancer, “lying cold and dead” in the front room of their home. We meet his Sunday school teacher, pale and dying from tuberculosis. And we contemplate the folly of Aunt Mary, who so carefully preserved her parlor from the wear of visitors that it is spotlessly clean on the day that she’s laid out in her coffin, until the neighbors track mud on her Brussels carpet, as the bluebottle flies swarm about her corpse.

  “All my life I have been planning and hoping and thinking and dreaming and loitering and waiting,” reads Darrow’s coda. “All my life I have been getting ready to begin to do something worth the while. I have been waiting for the summer and waiting for the fall; I have been waiting for the winter and waiting for the spring; waiting for the night and waiting for the morning; waiting and dawdling and dreaming, until the day is almost spent and the twilight close at hand.”

  Darrow was feeling the twilight close at hand.

  DARROW’S CRITIQUE OF small-town values was so subtly expressed that the Tribune missed the point. “If he has any bitterness he has concealed it,” the reviewer wrote, congratulating him for producing “an idyll” of boyhood. The New York Times saw Darrow’s book with a clearer eye. Its author writes “so much truth at times that you are a bit afraid,” the paper said. It called Farmington “real art.”

  William Dean Howells was delighted with Darrow’s effort. “I could not lay your book down until I had finished it,” he wrote. It was weakened by “grammatical solecisms,” he said, “but it is also full of bottom facts and abounds in human nature.” He compared it to Tolstoy’s memoir of boyhood and took it to several publishing houses. But the publishers shrank from the bite of Darrow’s work and concluded that the public would not buy it. Harper & Brothers found it “cold and depressing” with “unnecessary philosophizing” and decided that “the general effect is disheartening.” Darrow finally got the book to a local publishing house in Chicago, whose meager sales and marketing resources confined it to obscurity.

  Darrow’s second novel, An Eye for an Eye, followed quickly. It was scrawled on vacation in the summer of 1904. The new book had quite a different setting than Farmington, but its fatalistic theme was much the same. “It took years of care and toil to show me that life is stronger than man, that conditions control individuals,” Darrow wrote in Farmington. In An Eye for An Eye, he drew the lesson explicitly. Written in the same bleak style as the “Easy Lessons in Law” series, the novel tells the tale of Jim Jackson, an inmate on death row. From his cell, Jackson recounts the story of his crime: how he married in a hurry, lost his way at work, ran out of money, and was stuck in an unhappy marriage because the church and the law frowned on divorce. He describes how, one night in a drunken argument, he killed his wife with a poker and was tried in a city inflamed by the newspaper accounts of the crime. “I never intended to kill anybody but somehow everything just led up to it,” says Jackson. “And I didn’t know I was getting into it until it was done, and now here I am.”

  The two books of fiction, like Darrow’s previous essays and his newspaper work, buffed his reputation in the literary world. He had helped set Whitlock on his path as a serious writer, and had edited a book of Altgeld’s writings. In 1905 he joined with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and other authors to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a literary group for college campuses. And he was a founding member, with Hamlin Garland, of the Society of Midland Authors. But neither of Darrow’s novels was commercially successful. They were imperfect, written in nooks of his life—dashed off as afterthoughts, almost. He was discouraged at the public reaction, and abandoned the art. Had Darrow found the means and the dedication, he may have emerged as another Dreiser. Garland certainly thought so.

  “This is very true, very sad, and very beautiful,” Garland wrote in the back of his copy of Farmington. “He is humorous but he is also tragic in the hopelessness of his outlook. He voiced the doubts and the questioning of our generation.” Farmington was “only a fragment, but it is noteworthy for its diction, which has something rich and noble in its music.” He urged Darrow to keep working on the book, but Darrow said he did not have the time, or money, to devote to art. “I did not tell him what I really felt,” Garland wrote in his diary, “which was that to rewrite Farmington would be worth more than all his work in defense of criminals and fools.”11

  AMERICA HAD ENTERED the Progressive Era, that time in the country’s history when middle-class Americans, alarmed at the excess of industry and the pervasive corruption of the Gilded Age, launched mighty crusades to curb big business and make government more powerful, honest, and responsive. Darrow, moving dexterously from populist to progressive, became a leading actor in the nationwide movement for municipal reform.

  Throughout Darrow’s years in Chicago, various reform movements had attempted to quell the city’s rampant corruption. “Chicago under my father, and in lesser degree under me, was what is known as a ‘wide open town,’ ” Carter Harrison Jr. acknowledged in his memoirs. Each Harrison served five terms as mayor, with the help of a roster of political allies that included “saloonkeepers of high and low degree, gamblers, dive-keepers, men about town of shady connections, the Madames of the brothels, and the owners of the less disreputable of the ten cent Flops.”

  The anything-goes attitude reached beyond the streets of the Levee. Factories were dangerous. The air was thick and black, and the waters polluted. The alleys were strewn with garbage and the streetcars were crowded, filthy, and freezing in winter. Shamed by critics, a group of the city’s better folks organized the Civic Federation. A smaller and more focused organization—the Municipal Voters’ League—followed in 1896. Of sixty-eight aldermen, it announced, fifty-seven were thieves. They were branded “the gray wolves.”

  Yet even in that target-rich environment there was “one man who stands out conspicuous among all the rest,” wrote the muckraker William Stead. His name was Charles Yerkes, and he built and operated much of the city’s streetcar system in North and West Chicago. Yerkes was hardworking and arrogant, had served time in prison for fraud, and had few illusions about his fellow man.12 He could have profited discreetly, like the local transit barons who owned the Chicago City Railway on the south side of town, if the streetcar franchises that he purchased were not due to expire in 1903. Yerkes needed an extension of his franchise rights, and that gave the aldermen in Chicago and the legislators in Springfield a prized opportunity to auction their votes. Yerkes played the game with zest. It was Yerkes who “first made boodling a serious business,” wrote Lincoln Steffens.

  Yerkes wanted his franchises extended to ninety-nine years. In 1895, he offered Altgeld a bribe of at least $500,000 if the governor would approve an “eternal monopoly” bill. Yerkes was “a man of iron will, and as bold as any buccaneer who ever sailed the financial seas,” Darrow recalled. And Altgeld desperately needed the money. “I knew all of Altgeld’s most trusted friends; we often discussed the matter among ourselves,” said Darrow. “All that was required was to withhold a veto and let it become a law.” But Altgeld issued a very public veto, with a ringing declaration of the rights of the citizens to control their streets.

  When Yerkes finally triumphed in Springfield, pushing a franchise extension through the legislature in 1898, former governor Altgeld joined with Mayor Harrison, the Municipal Voters’ League, and angry crowds (some of whom threatened the aldermen with nooses) to block the enabling legislation in the city council. Harrison’s two knavish allies—Bathhouse and Hinky Dink—opposed Yerkes, who lost in the council by a single vote. In return, the Levee lords secured the mayor’s protection of the First Ward’s saloons, gambling houses, and brothels. Yerkes had enough. He sold his interests and went to London, where he helped build the Underground, and offered no apologies. “I was fighting the Devil in Illinois,” he said. “I fought him with fire.”13 />
  Municipal control of streetcars and other utilities became a potent political issue. In city after city, the citizenry called for government to run public services. Darrow acquired a national reputation in the struggle, as an ally of reform mayors like Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones and his successor, Brand Whitlock, in Toledo; Tom Johnson in Cleveland; and the socialist Emil Seidel in Milwaukee. In 1903, during Darrow’s term in the Illinois legislature, the battle came to Springfield, where a measure to give Chicago the authority to run its own streetcars was imprisoned in committee by house speaker John Henry Miller and allies of the transit interests. Chicago’s representatives jumped to their feet and climbed on desks, demanding to be recognized. When Miller refused to call on them, some smashed chairs and tables, waving the legs as clubs as they moved toward the rostrum.

  WILD RIOT IN THE HOUSE, the Daily News reported. Members shouted “Coward!” and “Roll call!” and “Liar!” as “the advance of the moving host” became “threatening.” Fistfights broke out. Men grappled and tumbled about the dais. Darrow knocked a foe to the floor, by one account, and dumped a wastebasket on his head. The speaker, surrounded by a praetorian guard, declared the house adjourned, beat a hasty retreat to his private rooms, and barricaded the door.