Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  14. Bridgemen’s Magazine, fall 1912; Darrow to Mary, Nov. 28, 1912, CD-LOC.

  15. Mary to Wood, undated, Nov. 1912, CESW-HL; Mary to Lem Parton, undated, Jan. 1913, Lem Parton to Mary, undated, Jan. 1913, MFP.

  16. Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1, 1913.

  17. Darrow to Paul, Jan. 9, 1913, CD-UML; Darrow, Story of My Life; Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1913; Los Angeles Record, Feb. 5, 1913.

  18. Los Angeles Record, Feb. 7, 1913; Los Angeles Examiner, Feb. 8, 1913.

  19. Schilling to Darrow, Feb. 12, 1913, CD-LOC.

  20. Los Angeles Examiner, Feb. 14, 1913.

  21. Francis Peede interview with Stone, CD-LOC; Mary to Wood, Feb. 22, 1913, CESW-HL; Mary to Lem Parton, undated, Feb. 1913, MFP.

  22. Los Angeles Record, Mar. 4, 1913.

  23. Los Angeles Examiner, Mar. 5, 1913.

  24. Darrow to Meyers, Feb. 24, 1913, CD-LOC; Wood to Sara, Feb. 24, 1913, CESW-HL. See also Darrow to Paul (“No one believes I will lose”), Feb. 15, 1913, CD-UML.

  25. Transcript of Darrow’s closing argument in his second bribery trial, CD-LOC.

  26. Los Angeles Examiner, Mar. 6, 1913.

  27. Los Angeles Times, Mar. 6, 1913.

  28. Transcript of Darrow’s closing argument, CD-LOC.

  29. Johannsen, statement, CD-CHI.

  30. Mary to Lem, undated, Mar. 1913, MFP.

  31. Los Angeles Times, Mar. 8, 1913.

  32. New York Times, Mar. 8, 1913; Los Angeles Times, Mar. 8, 9, 1913; Baillie, High Tension.

  33. Yarros, My Eleven Years.

  34. Transcript, People v. Darrow; Hapgood, Spirit of Labor; Wood to Sara, Aug. 30, 1912, CESW-HL; Baillie, High Tension; Darrow to Everett, early 1912, Leo Cherne papers, Boston University; Darrow to Paul, Jan. 13, 1912, CD-UML; Los Angeles Times, Feb. 28, 1915.

  35. Even Darrow’s version of that conversation was a non-denying denial: “If I had ever dreamed of any such thing it could not possibly have been.” Transcript, People v. Darrow; Darrow, introduction to The Autobiography of Mother Jones by Mary Harris Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1925).

  36. Wood to Sara, Mar. 11 and Mar. 13, 1913, CESW-HL.

  37. Darrow to Paul, Mar. 8, 1913, CD-UML; Darrow to Wood, Apr. 17, 1913, CESW-HL. Darrow was broke, and had borrowed some $20,000 to conduct the second trial. Fred Gardner, a wealthy businessman from St. Louis, who would one day be elected governor of Missouri, heard of Darrow’s troubles and sent him $1,000. Darrow wrote later of the “deep gulf” he faced “between blank despair and the illusion of hope” that Gardner’s gesture helped him cross. But Gardner was not totally without motive. In a subsequent letter, he asked Darrow to say some nice things about him to union voters. See Darrow, Story of My Life and Gardner correspondence, CD-LOC.

  38. Darrow to Wood, Apr. 17, 1913, CESW-HL; Darrow to Paul, Mar. 24, 1913, CD-UML; Los Angeles Tribune, Oct. 14, 1914.

  39. Chicago Tribune, Apr. 4, 1913.

  40. Sara to Wood, Apr. 4, 1913, CESW-HL.

  CHAPTER 14: GRIEF AND RESURRECTION

  1. The Olders forged ahead—prompting jokes in San Francisco about the “love colony”—but a persistent drought robbed their land of water and ultimately doomed the project. Cora Older to Wood, Sept. 14, 1913, and Cora to Wood, undated, 1914, CESW-HL; Ruby to Stone, CD-LOC.

  2. Mary and Darrow remained faithful correspondents. “I have found out beyond a doubt that the one real supreme passion of Mary’s life is Mr. D,” Sara wrote Erskine in April 1913. “She still bows at that shrine of love and yet contemplates matrimony” to Lem. “If D. was half worthy of Mary he could make her happy without her being forced to another man for companionship and to escape the horror of a lonely old age,” Sara added a week later. Mary would be content as “his intellectual food and his loving mistress” if Darrow was not “running after these disgustingly brainless women all the time.”

  3. Darrow to Paul, May 14, June 25, 1913, CD-UML; Darrow to Mary, July 4, 1913, July 10, 1913, Nov. 30, 1913, Mar. 1914, Mar. 29, 1915, CDMFP-NL; Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 1913; New York Times, Sept. 14, 1913; Mary to Wood, 1913, Mary to Sara, 1913, CESW-HL.

  4. Darrow remarks at dinner of Lawyers Association of Illinois, May 10, 1913, CD-LOC; Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1913.

  5. See People v. Covitz, 262 Ill. 514 (1914); Chicago Tribune, June 1, 29, 1913, Jan. 11, 1914; Darrow, Whitman fellowship remarks, CD-CHI; Darrow to Mabel Dodge Luhan, circa 1913–1914, ALW; Garland diary entry, May 19, 1913; Darrow to Paul, June 25, 1913, CD-UML. Ruby did not appreciate Sissman, who, she complained to Stone, had an accent that juries could not understand and spent too much time playing cards at his club. Sissman and Paul Darrow interviews with Stone, CD-LOC.

  6. Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18, 20, 1914, Feb. 9, Mar. 4, May 16, 17, Nov. 17, 1915, Apr. 26, Dec. 17, 1916; New York Times, Dec. 4, 5, 9, 1914; Chicago Herald, Sept. 24, 1915; Darrow to Older, Jan. 2, 1914, ALW; Harold Mulks reminiscence, CD-LOC. The film is not to be confused with A Martyr to His Cause, another movie based on the McNamaras, which was made during the trial by the AFL to raise funds. Neither film has survived the years.

  7. Chicago Tribune, June 5, 6, 1913, Mar. 14, 15, 1914; Chicago Journal, Mar. 15, 1914. Of eighty white women who killed their husbands in Chicago between 1875 and 1920, only seven were found guilty, and only two were sentenced to prison terms of more than one year. See Jeffrey S. Adler, “ ‘I Loved Joe But I Had to Shoot Him’: Homicide by Women in Turn of the Century Chicago,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Spring/Summer 2002.

  8. Darrow scored a different kind of victory in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, where his argument on behalf of Charles Ramsay, a Colorado man who was challenging a disputed summons, was embraced by the justices.

  9. The appeals court noted that seven defense witnesses had sworn to seeing Bond in Gary at the time of the murder, but demeaned them as “all colored.” See People v. Bond, 281 Ill. 490 (1917). The Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all carried lurid accounts of Leegson’s murder. Bond died in jail a few years later. In a letter to Mary Field in the spring of 1915, Darrow said he had just received a $250 check from a philanthropist to pay for the appeal of “a colored man’s case,” so perhaps he received something for his efforts. See Darrow, Story of My Life and Yarros, My Eleven Years; Darrow Testimony, U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, May 1915; Darrow to Field, Apr. 27, 1915, CDMFP-NL; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 7, 8,16, 22, 24, Dec. 1, 1913, Jan. 14, 15, 18, Feb. 1, May 11, July 8, 11, 14, 16, 18, 1914; Washington Post, Oct. 7, 8, 1913; Boston Globe, Oct. 7, 1913; Los Angeles Times, Oct. 7, 1913; New York Times, Oct. 6, 1913; Harold Mulks reminiscence, CD-LOC; Mary to Sara, June 9, 1914, CESW-HL.

  10. Darrow worried that his presence might cause more violence; indeed, a riot would erupt when he spoke on industrial conditions in an appearance at Cooper Union in New York that spring. U.S. House Committee on Mines and Mining, “Conditions in the Copper Mines of Michigan,” Feb. 1914; U.S. Dept. of Labor, “Strike in the Copper Mining District” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914); Arthur Thurner, Rebels on the Range (Lake Linden, MI: John H. Forster Press, 1984); Steve Lehto, Death’s Door (Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 2006); Steve Lehto, Italian Hall: The Official Transcript of the Coroner’s Inquest (Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 2007); Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1913; Chicago Tribune, Dec. 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 1913, Jan. 1, 2, 6, 9, Oct. 7, 1914; Boston Globe, Dec. 28, 1913, Jan. 1, 2, 3, 1914; New York Times, Dec. 28, 1913.

  11. In the Triangle disaster of Mar. 1911, 146 garment workers were killed by the flames or when jumping from windows to escape the fire, after finding that the doors and exits had been locked by the factory owners. On Apr. 20, 1914, a few weeks after the collapse of the Michigan copper strike, the Colorado state militia, with the aid of machine guns, attacked and set fire to a colony of striking coal miners in Ludlow. At least twenty-one people died, including two women and eleven children, most of whom suffocated in a crude pit where they had taken shelter as the tent above them burned. Three union leaders who su
rrendered to the troops were summarily shot.

  12. Darrow testimony, Commission on Industrial Relations, May 17 and 18, 1915. He wrote Mary Field: “Had a fine time telling the Commission about everything on earth.”

  13. Darrow, “The War in Europe,” lecture before Society of Rationalism, Oct. 1914; Darrow had the speech printed as a pamphlet and gave versions of it several times in the months ahead, in Chicago and elsewhere. Darrow to Mary, July 4, 1913, CDMFP-NL.

  14. Darrow to Wood, Jan. 4, 1914, Darrow to Mary, Oct. 31, 1913, Nov. 14, 1914, CDMFP-NL; Darrow to Gerson, June 29, 1915, Perceval Gerson papers, UCLA; Karl Darrow diary, KD; Schretter, “I Remember Darrow”; Ben Hecht, “Schopenhauer’s Son” in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1922); Yarros, My Eleven Years; Darrow, “Eulogy for John Howard Moore,” CDMFP-NL; Darrow pamphlet, Remarks of Clarence Darrow at Memorial Services to George Burman Foster and at the Funeral of John P. Altgeld (Chicago: J. F. Higgins, 1919).

  15. Erickson went on to serve ably in World War I and died in 1919, at the age of thirty-seven, of heart disease. George W. Hilton’s painstaking study Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), which includes commentary from several marine experts, shows the flaws in Darrow’s theory, yet absolves Erickson of wrongdoing. See also F. W. Willard to Doubleday, Nov. 10, 1941, with attachment, Stone papers, Berkeley. The case is not mentioned in Darrow’s autobiography. Stone’s account, provided by Paul Darrow, is unreliable, with an apocryphal courtroom confrontation before a nonexistent jury. The trial was, technically, a proceeding before Judge Sessions to determine if the accused should be removed to face charges in Illinois. Chicago Tribune, July 25–Aug. 12, Sept. 22, 23, 24, 1915, Jan. 21–Feb. 19, 1916, July 21, 1935; New York Times, July 25–Aug. 12, 1915, Jan. 23, Feb. 19, 1916; Kansas City Star, May 17, 1925.

  16. In 1917, Darrow wrote to Daniel Kiefer, an old friend who had criticized him for abandoning the Christian ideals of Resist Not Evil. “I did write a book advocating non-resistance. Most of the things I said in that book I still believe. I hated war then and I do today,” Darrow wrote. “My error then, as I see it now, was the belief that you could make a general rule of life that could cover every case.” Darrow to Mary, Apr. 27, 1915, CDMFP-NL.

  17. Darrow to Paul, Feb. 7, 1917, CD-UML.

  18. Chicago Tribune, Aug. 25, Sept. 2, 6, 8, 11, Oct. 22, 23, Nov. 2, 18, 1917, Mar. 24, July 15, 1918; New York Times, Sept. 16, 1917; National Security League pamphlet, “Address by Clarence Darrow,” Nov. 1, 1917; Darrow to Paul, Sept. 29, 1917, Hamlin Garland to Darrow, Dec. 21, 1917, CD-UML.

  19. Johannsen to Sara, June 16, 1917, Wright to Wood, Feb. 8, 1921, Mary to Sara, undated, CESW-HL; Gerson to Darrow, Jan. 17, 1918, Perceval Gerson papers, UCLA; Darrow to Paul, July 17, 1918, Darrow to Jessie, July 20, 1918, CD-UML; Chicago Daily Journal, Oct. 21, 23, 25, 28, Nov. 4, 6, 8, 1918. The long excerpt is from an unattributed manuscript in the Mary Field Parton papers, which was identified by Margaret Parton as being Darrow’s work. It mirrors the travels and observations Darrow relates in his censored newspaper reports and appears to be his writing but, like the “Miss S” letter, has an unverified provenance.

  CHAPTER 15: RED SCARE

  1. Many of Darrow’s friends were also put under surveillance, including Lincoln Steffens, Anton Johannsen, Helen Todd, Mary and Lem Parton, former senator Richard Pettigrew, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. On Darrow, see General and Special Staff, Military Intelligence Division report, May 7, 1920, Military Intelligence Division, U.S. War Department, National Archives. For other Wilson administration reports on Darrow, see documents dated Dec. 12, 1918, and May 26, 1919, U.S. Department of Justice records, National Archives; Darrow to Mary, Feb. 13, 1922, CDMFP-NL. David Kennedy, Over There: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  2. Roger Baldwin statement, Mar. 18, 1960, ACLU; Hearings Before the Special Committee Appointed Under the Authority of House Resolution No. 6 Concerning the Right of Victor L. Berger to Be Sworn as a Member of the 66th Congress (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1919); Ralph Izard memo, Jan. 8, 1918, from Federal Bureau of Investigation to Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice records, National Archives; Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1917; New York Times, July 7, 1917, Oct. 19, 1917; Kenneth Ackerman, Young J. Edgar (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007).

  3. Debs would stay in jail until a new president—Republican Warren Harding—released him. He had turned down Darrow’s offer to represent him at his original trial. Wilson to Darrow, Aug. 9, 1917, Palmer to Wilson, July 30 and Aug. 12, 1919, Darrow to Wilson, July 29, 1919, Wilson to Palmer, Aug. 1, 1919, Kent to Wilson, May 20, 1918, and Aug. 11, 1917, Woodrow Wilson papers, Library of Congress; Darrow to Mary, Jan. 29, 1918, CDMFP-NL.

  4. Darrow to Wood, Aug. 26, 1919, CESW-HL.

  5. Frank Lloyd Wright was almost as blunt. “The animosity of this false ‘morality’ has shocked and sickened me,” he said, and he lashed out at a society which “meddles in matters that can only be shown right or wrong by the hearts and consciences of those to whom they are sacred.” Sara to Wood, Nov. 7, 1915, CESW-HL; Hecht, Gaily Gaily; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 5, 6, 7, 14, 1915, Feb. 29, May 16, July 7, 1916, Apr. 17, 21, May 3, 1918, Dec. 23, 1919; Chicago Daily News, Nov. 5, 6, 1915.

  6. Masters also scorched Darrow in the poem “Louis Raguse,” in a follow-up volume of Spoon River poems in 1924: “His ethical skin was thick / From handling and reaching for fees …” Masters, unpublished chapters of Across Spoon River, Reedy to Masters, Feb. 23, 1916, Masters to Tietjens, July 11, 26, 1921, Masters to Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, ELM.

  7. Masters, unpublished chapters of Across Spoon River, Reedy to Masters, Feb. 23, 1916, Masters to Darrow, Nov. 8, 1919, Darrow to Masters, Nov. 10, 1919, Masters to Tietjens, July 11, 26, 1921, Masters to Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, ELM; New York Times, Mar. 22, 1923; Chicago Tribune, Mar. 22, Apr. 15, July 15, Sept. 6, 1922, Apr. 14, Aug. 19, 1923. Literary critic Carl Van Doren thought that Masters owed an unacknowledged debt to Darrow’s novel, Farmington. He ranked Darrow with Mark Twain and William Dean Howells as a pioneering critic of rural American life, and Masters as a follower. “Clarence Darrow in his elegiac Farmington had insisted that one village at least had been the seat of as much restless longing as of simple bliss,” Van Doren wrote. “Spoon River Anthology in its different dialect did little more than to confirm these mordant, neglected testimonies.”

  8. Lem Parton to Wood, Apr. 29, 1918, Ehrgott to Sara, Nov. 21, 1918, and Dec. 6, 1918, Darrow to Sara, Nov. 16, 1918, CESW-HL; Darrow to Mary, Jan. 29, 1918, CDMFP-NL.

  9. Darrow, “War Prisoners” speech, Nov. 9, 1919, CD-LOC; Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

  10. Bianchi v. State, 169 Wis. 75; New York Times, Sept. 10, Nov. 25, 26,1917; Washington Post, Nov. 25, 1917; Chicago Tribune, Sept. 10, 1917.

  11. The first neighbor to arrive was Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the navy, who lived across the street with his wife, Eleanor, and five children. He had to step through splotches of blood and fragments of a body to get to the door. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar.

  12. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar; Darrow to Cochran, Jan. 1, 1920, Negley Cochran papers, Toledo Public Library; Darrow to Mary, Thanksgiving Day, 1920, CDMFP-NL.

  13. People v. Gitlow excerpts in Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 1925, New York Public Library; Arturo Giovannitti, “Communism on Trial,” Liberator, Mar. 1920; Harold Josephson, “Political Justice during the Red Scare: The Trial of Benjamin Gitlow” in American Political Trials, ed. Michael Belknap (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994); Gitlow and Darrow, The Red Ruby Address to the Jury (New York: Communist Labor Party pamphlet, circa 1920); Benjamin Gitlow, I Confess (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940); New York Times, Nov. 11, 15, 29, 1919, Jan. 22, 31, Feb. 4, 5, 6, 12, 1920; Darrow to Mary, Feb. 13, 1920, CDMFP-NL.

  14. Liberals scored a major victory in the Gitlow case. The ACLU lawyers who handled the appeal took Darrow’s a
rgument on the constitutionality of the New York law to the U.S. Supreme Court, and though the court did not reverse Gitlow’s conviction, the justices ruled, for the first time, that the First Amendment extended to the states.

  15. Parson would write a novel about her experience, The Trial of Helen McLeod, in which Darrow appeared as a hero. Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, Jan. 2, 1920–Apr. 26, 1920.

  16. Address of Clarence Darrow in the Trial of Arthur Person (Rockford, IL: Communist Labor Party of Illinois pamphlet, 1920); Apr. 24, 1920, CD-LOC; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 21, 22, 23, 25, 1920; Chicago Daily News, Jan. 8, 1920; Alice Beal Parson, The Trial of Helen McLeod (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1938); Parson to Stone, Oct. 4, 1939, Irving Stone papers, University of California, Berkeley; Rockford Daily Register-Gazette, Jan. 2, 1920–Apr. 26, 1920.

  17. Lloyd was once arrested when cruising down State Street in his chauffeur-driven limousine decorated with the Red and American flags, offering free rides to those who would join the socialists.

  18. Clarence Darrow, Argument of Clarence Darrow in the Case of the Communist Labor Party (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1920); People v. William Bross Lloyd, New York Public Library; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 26, Dec. 28, 1917, Feb. 22, 1919, Jan. 7, 16, 22, 27, Feb. 16, May 10, July 14, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, Aug. 1, 3, 1920; Chicago Daily News, Jan. 6, 1919, Feb. 25, May 10, 1920; New York Times, Jan. 22, May 11, July 14, 1920; H. Austin Simons, “Guilty,” Liberator, Aug. 1920.

  19. Ackerman, Young J. Edgar; Johannsen to Wood, Mar. 10, 1919, CESW-HL.

  CHAPTER 16: ALL THAT JAZZ

  1. Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, “Tennes as a Vice Chief” in The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago: Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, 1929); Darrow to Mary, Feb. 1, 1923, CDMFP-NL; Yarros, 192, Independent, vol. 119, Weekly Review 7.