Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  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).

  2. ACSC hearings.

  3. Darrow, “The Breaker Boy,” in Weinberg, Verdicts.

  4. Baer to Clark, July 1902, HDL; New York Times, Aug. 21, 1902; Washington Post, Jan. 10, 1903; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 10, 1903; ACSC, Report to the President; Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike.

  5. ACSC hearings; Roosevelt to Hanna, Sept. 27, 1902, Roosevelt to Lodge, Sept. 27, 1902, Roosevelt to Bacon, Oct. 5, 1902, Roosevelt to Morgan, Oct. 15, 1902, Roosevelt to Crane, Oct. 22, 1902, Lodge to Roosevelt, Sept. 27, 1902, Theodore Roosevelt papers, Library of Congress; New York Times, Sept. 26, Oct. 12, 1902; Chicago Daily News, Oct. 3, 4, 11, 1902; Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

  6. ACSC hearings; Lloyd to his wife, Oct. 16, 20, 1902, Lloyd to Mitchell, Oct. 25, 1902, Mitchell to Lloyd, Oct. 25, 1902, Lloyd to Mitchell, Oct. 27, 1902, Weyl to Lloyd, Oct. 29, 1902, Mitchell to Lloyd, Oct. 30, 1902, Lloyd to his wife, Nov. 4, 1902, HDL.

  7. ACSC hearings; Chicago Daily News, Nov. 17–26, 1902.

  8. ACSC hearings; Lloyd to his wife, Nov. 14, 15, 18, 22, and 28, 1902, HDL; Mitchell to Wilson, Nov. 27, 1902, John Mitchell papers, Catholic University; New York Times, Nov. 22, 1902; Washington Post, Nov. 22, 1902; Hamlin Garland, Companions on the Trail (New York: Macmillan, 1931).

  9. The wrenching human stories may have touched some journalists, but Darrow was still fighting a royalist press. The New York Times blamed the fathers of the mill girls, not the factory owners. The culprits were immigrant Irish parents, and “various lost tribes of Southeastern Europeans—Polacks, Hungarians, Bohemians, or what not—who have no civilization, no decency, nothing but covetousness, and who would with pleasure immolate their offspring on the shrine of the golden calf,” the newspaper declared in a Dec. 17, 1902, editorial. ACSC hearings; Washington Post, Dec. 7, 16, 1902; New York Times, Dec. 16, 1902; Chicago Daily News, Dec. 9, 1902; Wilkes-Barre Daily News, Dec. 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 1902; Lloyd to his wife, Dec. 12 and 16, 1902, Lloyd to Brandeis, Dec. 16, 1902, HDL; E. Dana Durand, “The Anthracite Coal Strike and Its Settlement,” Political Science Quarterly, Sept. 1903; Caro Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912).

  10. Darrow to Brandeis, Nov. 28, 1902, Brandeis to Darrow, Dec. 2, 12, and 13, 1902, Louis Brandeis papers, Library of Congress; Jones to Darrow, Dec. 11, 1902, Sam Jones papers, University of Toledo; Jones to Darrow, Feb. 13, 1903, CD-LOC; Lloyd to Brandeis, Jan. 29, 1903, HDL; ACSC hearings.

  11. ACSC hearings.

  12. Stone has Darrow speaking for three days; he actually spoke a day and a half. Similarly, Stone has Gray interrupting Darrow’s declaration that the miners were outmatched by the corporations with an admiring murmur, “Except the lawyers!” The transcript shows that Gray, in fact, was teasing Darrow with the question “Except the lawyers?” ACSC hearings; Philadelphia North American, Jan. 16, Feb. 14, 1903; Boston Globe, Feb. 14, 1903; Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1903; New York Times, Feb. 14, 1903; Chicago Daily News, Feb. 12, 1903; unnamed newspaper clipping, Sept. 22, 1902, OHL; Lloyd to his wife, Jan. 13, 14, 16, 1903, HDL; Harriet Reid to Weinberg, May 11, 1958, ALW.

  13. ACSC, Report to the President; Washington Bee, May 2, 1903; Chicago Tribune, Mar. 22, 1903; New York Times, Mar. 22, 1903; Chicago Daily News, Mar. 21, 1903; Boston Globe, Mar. 22, 1903; Robert Wiebe, “The Anthracite Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1961; Durand, “Anthracite Coal Strike”; Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (New York: Dutton, 1925); Darrow to Samuel Jones, Apr. 14, 1900, Sam Jones papers, University of Toledo.

  14. Darrow letter to Cruice, quoted in unidentified newspaper clipping, OHL; Darrow to Mitchell, Jan. 23, 1903, John Mitchell papers, Catholic University; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 6, 1902; Chicago Daily News, Dec. 22, 1902, Feb. 1, 1903; Simons to Darrow, Nov. 8, 1902, HDL.

  15. Daily People, Jan. 3, 1903; Chicago Daily News, Dec. 6, 1902; Chicago Tribune, Mar. 10, 1897, Mar. 21, 1901, Feb. 5, 1903; Chicago Post, Mar. 9, 10, 1897, Dec. 14, 1898; see Harrison, Growing Up.

  16. Lloyd to his wife, Feb. 21 and 22, 1903, Abbot to Lloyd, Feb. 24, 1903, HDL; Gompers to Darrow, Mar. 5, 1903, Samuel Gompers papers, Library of Congress. The teamsters had refused to tote “scab” coal during a Midwest strike, and John Mitchell was in their debt. “He couldn’t refuse when I asked him to tell Darrow to withdraw his name. Darrow couldn’t refuse to do what Mitchell asked, and there you are,” said Driscoll. “The votes that would have gone to Darrow went to Harrison.”

  17. Whitlock to Darrow, Feb. 11, 1903, CD-UML; Chicago Daily News, Jan. 31, Feb. 1, 3, 16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 1903; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 28, 30, Feb. 1, 3, 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 24, Apr. 5, 1903; Daily People, Jan. 3, 1903; Chicago American, Dec. 22, 1902; Inter Ocean, Feb. 3, 1903; Los Angeles Times, Feb. 15, 1903; untitled Washington, D.C., newspaper clipping, Mar. 12, 1903, OHL; Morgan to Lloyd, John Livingston papers, University of Denver.

  18. The union accounts in the Mitchell papers at Catholic University confirm Darrow’s $10,000 fee. Chicago Tribune, Apr. 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 1903, June 15, 1905; Chicago Daily News, Apr. 1, 2, 1903; Washington Post, May 22, 1904; Rockford Herald, Apr. 8, 1903; Inter Ocean, Apr. 8, 1903; Rockford Morning Star, undated clipping, CD-LOC; unidentified Chicago newspaper clippings, Apr. 3 and 4, 1903, OHL; E. Pomeroy to Mrs. H. D. Lloyd, June 22, 1904, HDL.

  CHAPTER 7: RUBY, ED, AND CITIZEN HEARST

  1. Ruby Darrow letters to Stone, and Stone interview notes, CD-LOC; Ruby letter to Jennie Moore, Nov. 25, 1911, CD-UML; Chicago Tribune, July 17, 19, Aug. 25, 1903.

  2. Ruby letters to Stone, and Stone interview notes, CD-LOC; Darrow to Jessie, Sept. 8, 1903, and Mar. 10, 1904, CD-UML; Ruby Darrow letters to Helen Darrow, Helen Darrow letter to Jennie Darrow, and Karl Darrow diary, KD; McParland, report, Mar. 5, 1907; Chicago Tribune, July 17, 19, Aug. 25, 1903; Darrow letter to Ruby quoted in the News-Review, July 28, 2009.

  3. Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Ruby letters to Helen and Jennie Darrow, and Helen to Jennie Darrow, KD; Ella Winter and Granville Hicks, eds., The Letters of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).

  4. Darrow to Whitlock, Nov. 17, 1902, BW.

  5. Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1904; Masters to Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, and Masters to Barnard, May 22, 1938, ALW; Masters, “My Youth in the Spoon River Country” manuscript and Across Spoon River manuscript and unfinished chapters, ELM; Masters, Across Spoon River; Ruby Darrow letters to Stone, CD-LOC.

  6. Chicago Tribune, Mar. 16, 17, 1905, Jan. 7, 1912; New York Times, Oct. 24, 1903; Darrow to Mrs. Lloyd, Oct. 19, 1903, HDL; Turner v. Williams, 194 US 279; Sidney Fine, “Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley,” American Historical Review, July 1955; Masters, “My Youth in the Spoon River Country” manuscript and Across Spoon River manuscript and unfinished chapters, ELM; Masters, Across Spoon River.

  7. Darrow’s letter to the Daily News appears to have inspired a myth that he “fixed” the Iroquois Theatre probe. It was cited in a 1929 book by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith (Chicago: The History of Its Reputation [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929] and picked up by later writers as proof that Darrow had helped Harrison escape justice. Darrow’s defense of the chief engineer of the capsized lake steamer Eastland in 1915—an accident that claimed more than eight hundred lives—shows that he was more than willing to take the unpopular side in such matters, but the available public record in the Iroquois case shows that Levy Mayer was the criminal defense lawyer, A. S. Trude r
epresented Harrison, and Darrow, Masters & Wilson represented the families of victims who sued the theater owners. Anthony Hatch, whose book Tinder Box (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2003) offers the most thorough account of the fire, found no evidence that Darrow played a nefarious role. And Masters and Harrison, two prolific memoirists who wrote about the Iroquois tragedy, and exchanged venomous gossip about Darrow, never mention his involvement in the episode. See Harrison, Stormy Years, and Masters, Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1927); see also Chicago Herald, Jan. 27, 28, 1904; Chicago Chronicle, Jan. 30, 1904; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 24, Dec. 31, 1903, Jan. and Feb. 1904, and May 28, 1907; New York Times, Dec. 31, 1903, Jan. 1904; Chicago Fire Marshall, Annual Report, 1903.

  8. The American was the inspiration for the play and motion picture The Front Page. Darrow also defended the newspaper when its two-thousand-pound electric sign, the biggest in the city, pulled free from its moorings and showered Mary Spiss, a woman on the sidewalk below, with chunks of masonry that broke her arm and thigh. The sign was illegal; the newspaper was found guilty of negligence, and she was awarded $8,000. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 5, 1896, Mar. 28, 1904; Lloyd to Bowles, Mar 17, 1897, HDL; Hearst’s Chicago American v. Mary E. Spiss, 117 Ill. App. 436; George Murray, The Madhouse on Madison Street (Chicago: Follett, 1965); W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribner’s, 1961).

  9. The Oakley case was appealed, and she and the newspaper ultimately reached a settlement. Masters, Across Spoon River, and “My Youth” and “The Two Annie Oakleys,” manuscripts, ELM; Chicago Tribune, Aug. 10, Oct. 2, 3, 29, Nov. 2, 16, 17, 27, 28, 30, Dec. 8, 1901; Chicago Record Herald, Dec. 4, 1901; Chicago Daily News, Dec. 7, 1901; the most colorful and complete coverage of Darrow’s closing address was in the Chicago American, of course, of Dec. 4, 1901.