Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Critics like Edgar Lee Masters often looked for baser motives—money, publicity—in Darrow’s willingness to defend the misbegotten. But there was no percentage in representing Ike Bond in Chicago in 1914. The city was roiled by prejudice and hate, and would erupt in an ugly race riot in the summer of 1919, in which thirty-eight people would die. Bond “had no money, his friends had none either, and no compensation was to be counted on,” Yarros recalled. But Darrow took the case. “Most identifications are of little value unless a witness has been acquainted with the subject,” Darrow believed. “If a man is black that is identification in itself, in most minds.”

  The jury was “seething” after the prosecution gave the gory details of the rape and murder. Respectable white folks—a pawnshop clerk, a railroad cop, a streetcar motorman—swore they had seen Bond in Chicago at the time of the killing. Bond’s black friends from Gary tried to give him an alibi. “The material upon which he had to rely for a defense was the testimony of several ignorant, illiterate and stupid” witnesses who gave “incoherent, rambling, uncertain and contradictory statements,” Darrow’s friend Mulks recalled. “It is practically impossible to conceive of a case where a sentence of death would appear more inevitable.”

  But in closing, Darrow challenged the all-white jurors to confront their own prejudices. His eloquence worked its magic. Though they brought in a verdict of guilty, the jurors spared Bond’s life. Of the dozens of men Darrow saved from the hangman, Bond’s rescue was one of the more miraculous. Privately, even he was certain that Bond was guilty.

  A few months later, in a public forum, Darrow explained his tactics. “You try to throw around the case a feeling of pity, of love, if possible, for the fellow who is on trial,” he said. If the jurors can be made to identify with the defendant and his “pain and position” they will act “to satisfy themselves.” At this point, the case is won, Darrow said. Juries will furnish their own rationalization. “If a man wants to do something, and he is intelligent, he can give a reason for it,” said Darrow. “You’ve got to get him to want to do it … That is how the mind acts.”

  The ordeal in Los Angeles had changed him. That “sad, hard experience made me kindlier and more understanding and less critical,” Darrow would say. “He had been on the ropes,” said Francis Wilson. “He knew what it was to suffer.” Not too long after the Bond trial, Darrow saved the life of nineteen-year-old Edgar Hettinger, a psychiatric patient who had slashed the throat of a woman because he wanted money for a bicycle. Darrow persuaded a judge to accept a guilty plea, and the troubled young man escaped the noose. And when the Chicago police arrested a chronic petty criminal called “Booster” on what they called “general principles,” Darrow took up his defense. It did not matter that “Booster” had a long record, Darrow told the judge. The police have no right to harass citizens. His client had been arrested while walking down a sidewalk. “He had done no wrong. He is accused of disorderly conduct and there is no evidence,” Darrow said, and Booster went free.8

  Darrow’s life was percolating again. “He is surrounded by the maim, the halt and the blind and to get an audience with him is like getting an audience with King George,” Mary told Sara after a visit to Chicago. “I cannot see that his prosecution in any way hurt him, except financially. His name draws an immense audience. His practice—half charity—is tremendous.”9

  He was no longer America’s leading labor lawyer, but Darrow played a role in one more notorious working-class tragedy. On Christmas Eve, 1913, in the copper-mining community of Red Jacket, Michigan, hundreds of children and their parents jammed the second-floor meeting room of a community building, the Italian Hall. The party had been organized by the wives of Finnish, Italian, and Slavic miners, members of the Western Federation of Miners who had been on strike for six months.

  The boys and girls were standing in long lines to see Santa Claus or opening their gifts when a man in the crowd yelled “Fire!” The revelers panicked and rushed for the staircase that led down to the street. Some fell, causing those behind them to tumble as well. Children were trampled and squeezed to death as bodies blocked the stairway, rising to its ceiling, crushing those below them. It was over in minutes, but it took rescuers hours to disentangle the dead. Incredibly, seventy-three people—including fifty-nine children—had been killed. That night, Charles Moyer, the head of the WFM, blamed the mining industry for the tragedy.

  Bill Haywood had gone to the Wobblies, and George Pettibone was dead. But Moyer still led the WFM. When the miners went on strike that summer, he had hired Darrow as a union negotiator. The two of them met with Governor Woodbridge Ferris, and Darrow tried to broker a settlement with the mining companies. Each side offered some minor concessions, but violence overran the talks. The mining companies hired ruffians and detectives and organized a vigilante group called the “Citizens’ Alliance.” Two union men died when company gunmen surrounded a boardinghouse and opened fire, and on Labor Day a fourteen-year-old girl participating in a protest march was shot in the head. Union assassins retaliated, murdering three strikebreakers in early December. Then came Italian Hall. The local newspapers accused Moyer of exploiting the tragedy, and he was cornered by a mob in his hotel room, shot in the back, dragged through the streets, shoved on a train, and told not to return.

  Before his abduction, Moyer had asked Darrow to speak at the funeral for the Italian Hall victims. After the incident, Darrow, perhaps fearfully, declined. Instead he and John Mitchell went to plead with Ferris, who made a last, unsuccessful attempt to bring the two sides to an agreement. Ferris was disconsolate, but Darrow told him to take heart. He, too, had wrestled with unbending zealots. “About all I know,” Darrow wrote, “is that through constant agitating for more justice, something comes.”10

  Twenty years earlier, the American public would have blamed the violence in Michigan on Reds and anarchists. But the Los Angeles Times bombing, the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914 spurred a national soul-searching.11 President Woodrow Wilson appointed the Commission on Industrial Relations, and among those summoned to appear as witnesses were J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, General Otis, and many of Darrow’s friends and associates, including Wood, Haywood, Gompers, and Johannsen. Darrow preceded John D. Rockefeller Jr. as a witness, and the famous industrialist had to cool his heels as the commissioners, enjoying themselves, devoted three sessions over two days to sparring with the radical lawyer. He described the government’s machinations and misuse of the Sherman Act in the Pullman strike and the kidnappings of J. J. McNamara and the Western Federation leaders. The best lawyers seek the best fees, Darrow explained, and so the legal system was tilted toward wealth. “I don’t think we live in a free country,” he said, “or enjoy civil liberties.”

  “Are you a believer in bloodshed?” one of the commissioners asked him.

  “Neither a believer nor disbeliever in it,” Darrow said. “Suppose blood was shed and property destroyed, but liberty was saved, then what?” he said. “There are things to consider besides property and other things to consider besides bloodshed. The liberty of the man, which is one thing worth defending.”

  The commissioners wanted to like Darrow and were troubled by his general hopelessness. “There is no moral purpose in the universe that we can see,” Darrow told them. “The righteous man suffers the same as the unrighteous. The good is crucified as often as the evil, and evil triumphs as often as the good.”

  “Is it not better to look at the doughnut than the hole?” one asked of him.

  “We differ in our temperaments,” Darrow admitted. “My emotions are quickly reached and my sympathy is quickly touched, and I have a lot of imagination—which has caused me a lot of trouble.”12

  HIS ORDEAL IN California had left deep furrows. Privately, Darrow was struggling. Life was just a weary journey to “death and annihilation,” he wrote Mary, and the wiser human beings found their own brand of �
��dope—intellectual, spiritual or physical”—with which to endure. “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right, the dope fiends of all kinds are right,” he wrote. “For some of us the dope must be good and strong and shot into the arm.”

  He had been reading the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose theories he stirred into his Spencer and Jefferson, the fading influence of Tolstoy, and what he was learning about genetics, sociology, and human behavior from a group of scientists, mostly from the University of Chicago, whose gatherings he dubbed “Biology Class.” They met to discuss books and papers, listen to speakers, and keep abreast of new discoveries. “Nietzsche is … influencing me against the rabble with its cruelty, its littleness, its prejudices, its hatred, its stupidity,” he wrote Mary.

  In June 1914 the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by a Bosnian gunman in Sarajevo, triggering events that brought Europe to war. Before it was over, the Great War would claim the lives of 14 million people—a human catastrophe beyond conception for those who lived though it. It put an end to the Good Years, as they were called, when the general glow of prosperity and good feelings was interrupted only by spectacular disasters like the San Francisco earthquake, or the sinking of the Titanic. Now people grew glum as the stock market crashed and the economy fell into recession. Darrow was ahead of his countrymen in exhibiting feelings of dread and despair.

  In October 1914, Darrow delivered a lecture on war to the Society of Rationalism at the Germania Theatre in Chicago and conveyed his grim perspective. The dreamers who had brought such optimism to the era before the war had been revealed as frauds, Darrow said. The German socialist who had called his French counterpart “comrade” would “run a dagger into him” now, he said. “All the theories have fallen down—religion, socialism, trade-unionism, capitalism, education—every theory has been swept away.”

  The “small feelings” of life are “swallowed up in a strong emotion,” Darrow said. “Men are not kept alive by intellect—they are kept alive by the will to live, the will to power, the deep instincts and emotions.…

  “We feel sorry for the poor peasant that dies on the field of battle in Europe … seized by strong emotion, goes into a battle, fighting like a demon, and dies,” said Darrow. But “if he had not gone to war, he would have lived fifty years in cold, in rags, in hunger, in toil and suffering, and brought forth a dozen others to live the same kind of life that he had lived.

  “Did he win, or did he lose, by having that one great emotion which meant his death?”

  Darrow had come a long way from Resist Not Evil, in which he had argued that man “with his higher intellect and better developed moral being is … susceptible to kindness and love.” The Otises and McNamaras of the world could do that to a man.13

  It was embryonic philosophy; Darrow was a synthesizer, who tended to think things out as he went along. He was writing and lecturing about Voltaire and was influenced by Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe novels, a saga of a musician who must balance the call of genius with the uninspiring demands of a dull, materialistic world, and by Folkways, a study of how natural instincts and social customs become law, by the American sociologist William Sumner. “I wonder what I really do believe, anyhow,” he told Mary.

  Death continued to dominate his days. Many in Chicago knew Darrow as a friend, but he was deft at masking his real feelings. Outwardly he would charm, while “every other emotion or estimate was most completely concealed,” Ruby said. Among the exceptions were his closest intellectual companions: his brother-in-law, the gentle naturalist John H. Moore, with whom he discussed the mysteries of eternity, and George Burman Foster, a tall and elegant philosophy professor at the University of Chicago with whom Darrow debated and caroused.

  In the summer of 1916, the gentle Moore saw his wife Jennie off on a shopping trip and went to the Wooded Island, in Jackson Park. There, where he had liked to go to watch the birds and wildlife, he shot himself. “The long struggle is ended,” he wrote in a suicide note. “Oh, men are so cold and hard and half-conscious toward their suffering fellows … Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

  Darrow gave the eulogy. Moore “was my brother and my friend,” Darrow said. “His was a tender heart, a noble brain, and a nature so sensitive and fine that in his imagination he lived the lives of every thing that breathes—and men like him cannot die old.”

  Darrow’s letters to his friends were now dabbled with notations that he was “blue” or “in the dumps” or “longing.” He spoke of life’s “dark maze” and muttered “we are so long dead.” He told Mary that “every thing is such a dull gray to me” and “I fear it grows grayer as the time comes for it to turn black” and that “nothing is important but death.” A winter snowstorm made him feel “that the warmth of the crematory would be welcome.”

  Darrow’s friendship with Foster was a relief and an exception. They were a year apart in age, had been raised in strict midwestern towns, and now, in their late fifties, did “the things they should have gotten out of their system when they were 18,” as Foster’s wife put it. They would stagger in at midnight from a tour of the Fifty-seventh Street art colony or a masquerade ball and eat cold baked beans as they rehashed the night’s events. “They were as young as the youngest,” an acolyte, Natalie Schretter, recalled. “Girls never thought of them as old men.” After Sunday evening debates, Darrow and Foster would retreat to a nook at the Kunz-Remmlers restaurant with a small circle of pals, to continue the discussion. One night, after Darrow had lectured on a certain radical pamphleteer of the American Revolution, a rich and pretty widow was invited to join them. She made both men’s wives nervous until she asked, “Is Tom Paine a Chicago man?” and was instantly dismissed.

  Two years after Moore’s death, Foster was struck down by illness at the age of sixty. Darrow gave that memorial address as well. His friend “had the head of a god and the heart of a child,” Darrow said. He loved him “as I seldom loved any other man.…

  “At a time like this, the mortality of things is brought home to all, and there is no chance to close our eyes,” he said, and quoted verse from “A Shropshire Lad.”

  And since to look at things in bloom

  Fifty springs are little room,

  About the woodland I will go

  To see the cherry hung in snow.

  “All that is left for us is to go out and see the cherries hung with snow,” Darrow told the mourners. “Get what you can—get it kindly—because that is the best—but get it while the day is here, for the night comes apace.”

  His friend was gone. “The winter will be longer and colder, and the summer shorter now that he is dead,” said Darrow. “The stars in heaven will never shine so bright again. The day will lose its old time glory. The sun will fade faster, the twilight fall quicker and the night close deeper since he is dead.”

  Darrow “was at his best,” Margaret Johannsen told Sara. “I sat, unconscious of having a body until I felt the tears rolling quietly down my cheeks.” 14

  DEATH WAS DARROW’S near-constant companion at work, as well. The 2,500 men and women and children who went aboard the steamship Eastland early on the morning of July 24, 1915, didn’t mind a bit of drizzle. They were factory workers and their families, eager to be ferried on the grand lake steamer to a Western Electric company outing in Michigan City, Indiana.

  They did not know that the Eastland had a history of instability. As the crew prepared to get under way the ship dipped to starboard, toward its dock on the Chicago River. Chief Engineer Joseph Erickson issued orders to take on water, for ballast, to trim the ship. Now the Eastland rocked to port, and unsecured equipment and frightened picnickers slid along the deck. The musicians, playing ragtime on the promenade, dug in their heels to stay in their chairs. The ship rocked back
up, there was a pause—just long enough for the frightened families to sigh in relief—and then the Eastland took one slow, final roll toward the river and capsized.

  Sirens blew; thousands of Western Electric employees, boarding other steamships, looked on, horrified. Trapped below deck, the passengers stumbled and clawed at one another, trying to flee the flooding boat. The river was filled with frantic folk, weighed down by their heavy, soaked clothing, many of whom had never learned to swim. In moments, 844 people died. In loss of life, the sinking of the Eastland surpassed both the Iroquois Theatre fire and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as the greatest disaster in the city’s history. Captain Harry Pedersen survived the day, but the police had to take him into protective custody to save him from being lynched on the wharf. Pedersen, Chief Engineer Erickson, and several corporate officers of the two companies that owned and operated the Eastland were indicted by a federal grand jury.

  Once more Darrow bucked the mob. He agreed to represent Erickson, who had stayed at his post below deck as the ship capsized, flooding the boiler so it would not explode, until the water reached his neck. Erickson and the others were charged with conspiring to operate an unsafe ship. Darrow sought an alternate theory of events and proposed that the Eastland had toppled from an underwater obstruction. It was a possibility that had first been raised by federal officials, and Darrow hired divers to survey the site. Three submerged pilings, left behind from construction of a streetcar tunnel, were discovered at the steamship’s berth, as well as an accumulation of debris. Darrow had a model of the ship made and a three-dimensional relief map of the river bottom, and tried to swing the blame back toward the city of Chicago, which was supposed to maintain a safe waterway.