14. In addition to the comprehensive Pinkerton report, with its accompanying memos and transcripts of interviews, there are other investigative summaries in the Houston and Judd papers in the Hawaii State Archives, most of which raise doubts about Thalia’s story. See Stirling’s Dec. 23, 1931, report to the secretary of the navy; Professor Kelly’s letter to Judd; Judd’s May 17, 1932, report to the secretary of the interior; and the governor’s discussions of why he refused to pardon the defendants (Judd to Caldwell, May 21, 1932, and Judd to secretary of the interior, May 19, 1932); a memorandum, “The Ala Moana Case,” sent by Alexander Robertson, former chief justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court, to Representative Victor Houston; prosecutor Kelley’s motion to nolle pros the original indictments; and an unpublished manuscript of Judd’s memoir.
15. The letters of Tommie and Thalia to Darrow (BU), each maligning the other, are instructive. So are the records of Thalia’s 1934 psychiatric examination by Dr. Walter White, contained in the St. Elizabeths Hospital file at the National Archives, and the naval personnel records for Tommie, in the military files at the archives. Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1933; New York Times, Feb. 24, 25, Apr. 7, 1934.
16. Darrow had recently cooperated with biographer Charles Harrison, whose book Clarence Darrow was published in 1931. Darrow, Story of My Life; Darrow to Barnes, Aug. 1, 1931, ALW; Perkins to Darrow, Oct. 10, Nov. 12, Dec. 10, 1931, internal Scribner’s memorandum, Ruby to Scribner’s, Dec. 1931, Scribner’s archives, Princeton University.
17. Time, July 20, 1931; New York Times, Oct. 25, 30, 1931; Universal Pictures promotional copy, June 1932, CD-LOC; Nathan, Intimate Notebooks; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 24, Oct. 20, Nov. 20, 21, 23, Dec. 5, 8, 14, 15, 17, 1932, Jan. 4, 6, 29, Feb. 8, 10, 19, Apr. 12, June 23, Dec. 5, 1933; Chicago Herald Examiner, Jan. 6, 1933; People v. Varecha, 353 Ill. 52; Chicago American, Apr. 11, 18, 1933; Rockford Register-Republic, Feb. 18, 1933; Darrow to Taylor, May 16, 1932 or 1933, John Livingston papers, University of Denver; McWilliams to Darrow, Nov. 10, 1935, Jan. 5, 1936, Dec. 27, 1936, and McWilliams, “Life History of Russell McWilliams,” CD-LOC.
18. An administration review of the Darrow review board found much to agree with. Darrow speech, New York Academy of Medicine, Jan. 13, 1931; Chicago Daily News, Oct. 10, 1932; Time, Nov. 13, 1933; Masters to Roosevelt via Raymond Moley, May 21, 1934, Thompson to Roosevelt, June 13, 1934, Darrow to Roosevelt, Apr. 27, June 28, 1934, Darrow supplementary report, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, FDR Library; Mencken to Masters, May 10, 24, June 9, 1934, ELM; Richburg to Darrow, May 29, 1934, M. H. McIntyre, on behalf of FDR, July 2, 1934, CD-LOC; Julian Street notes on conversation with Darrow, July 11, 1934, Julian Street papers, Princeton University; Ruby to J. B. McNamara, June 23, 1934, James and John McNamara papers, University of Cincinnati; Lowell Mason, “Darrow vs. Johnson,” North American Review, Dec. 1934; Washington Post, June 10, 1934; New York Times, May 27, 1934; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), Hugh Johnson, The Blue Eagle, from Egg to Earth (New York: Doubleday, 1935); John Ohl, Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985).
19. Hays to Darrow, June 8, 1934, Ruby to Hays, June 16, 1934, Arthur Garfield Hays papers, Princeton University; New York Times, July 1, 2, 3, 4, Sept. 3, 1934; Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1934; Washington Post, July 3, 1934; “What I Think of Nazi Germany,” symposium with Dr. Preston Bradley and Dr. Louis Mann at the Washington Boulevard Temple, Dec. 7, 1933, CD-LOC.
20. Julian Street, journal, July 11, 1934, Street papers, Princeton University; Helen to Jennie, July 18, 1934, KD; Mary Field diary, Jan. 18, 1934, MFP; ACLU to Darrow, July 25, 1934, Darrow to ACLU with Baldwin notation, July 30, 1934, ACLU.
21. Older to Lem Parton, Aug. 31, 1934, Fremont Older papers, University of California, Berkeley.
22. Ruby to J. B. McNamara, Oct. 1, Nov. 13, undated circa 1934 or 1935, James and John McNamara papers, University of Cincinnati.
23. Senate Finance Committee testimony, Mar. 20, 1935; New York Times, Mar. 21, 1935; Chicago Tribune, Mar. 21, 1935.
24. For church remarks see reprint of “Warren Ave. Congregational Church Sunday Evening Forum,” Sept. 29, 1935, CD-LOC. Darrow said he was sad to get the news but that Loeb was probably “better off dead” (New York Times, Jan. 29, 1936), told an audience of University of Chicago students that Capone’s conviction on tax charges was “a terribly wrong … outrageous deal” (Time magazine, Nov. 2, 1936), and told a United Press reporter that Bruno Hauptmann should get another trial because his conviction was “a farce” (Rockford Morning Star, March 29, 1936); Chicago Daily News, April 4, 1936; Paul Darrow to Fay Lewis, included in Lewis to Gerson, Feb. 2, 1938, Perceval Gerson papers, UCLA; Paul Darrow to Karl Darrow, Mar. 20, 1938, and Nov. 20, 1937, courtesy of William Lyon.
25. Lewis to Gerson, Feb. 2, 1938, Gerson papers; Chicago Daily News, March 5, 1938; Akron Times Press, Mar. 15, 1938. On Feb. 27, 1938, Mary Field Parton wrote to her sister Sara, “I have tragic word from Chicago; namely that Mr. Darrow has lost his mind, just walks up and down, up and down, mumbling and muttering. Paul, his son, writes that they have no hope of his recapturing his memory. Intimate friends are strangers. I personally think he has retreated from a world that was too inhuman and cruel for him to bear. Unlike you, he had no … refuge into which to escape: a world of beauty. He knew nothing of the solace of music. Science only confirmed his beliefs in the fixed pattern of homo-sapiens, his fundamental brutality, cruelty. Art was an unknown door. Nature alone comforted him. Of all the people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people I never knew a soul that shrank so before cruelty” (Mary to Sara, Feb. 27, 1938, CESW-HL). When she received word of his death, Mary wrote in her diary, “Good bye dear friend. We spoke the same language, the inarticulate language of the heart” (MFP). The Darrow obituaries are on March 14, 1938, in the Chicago newspapers. In Baltimore, Mencken hailed the “Gladiator of the Law” in the Evening Sun: “In his private life and philosophy he was singularly gentle and even sentimental, but when he enlisted for a cause he was a terror. It was to his credit that he was most often a terror to quacks and dolts, hypocrites and scoundrels.”
26. Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1938; Chicago Daily News, May 16, 1938; Chicago American, Mar. 15, 1938; the Chicago Herald Examiner account of the scattering of Darrow’s ashes is from Unity magazine, which published a memorial issue on May 16, 1938, that included tributes from James Weldon Johnson, Arthur Garfield Hays, Victor Yarros, and others, as well as Judge William Holly’s funeral address.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Irving Stone, the author of Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), said that telling the story of Darrow’s life was like writing about Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and other folk heroes. And he did so, magnificently. Stone used all his skills as a novelist and biographer, and the Darrow who emerges in his work is wry, compassionate, idealistic, folksy, and heroic. Written with the aid of Ruby and Paul Darrow, the book reinforced Darrow’s iconic status, and looms above all subsequent titles.
But in working so soon after Darrow’s death, Stone faced hurdles. Folks then were more reticent, and many of Darrow’s friends and acquaintances were grieving. There were relatively few collections of important letters and documents open to researchers. And Ruby’s cooperation came with a price. In her correspondence with Stone she spoke of the book as “their” project and pressured him to gloss over Darrow’s flaws. “It would be regrettable if the biography should become a thorn for the rest of my life, something to be sensitive about instead of proud of,” she told him. When Stone asked about Darrow’s love affair with Mary Field Parton, for instance, Ruby replied: “She is the one you seem bent on injecting into your story. Please do not.” Nor did Paul have an interest in challenging the myth.
Stone’s work, then, was seriously flawed. To cite one lasting error, he begins his story with a great set piece of American biography: the vivid and detailed description, complete with dial
ogue, of Darrow resigning from the Chicago & North Western Railway in protest over the government’s persecution of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union. It places Darrow at the center of things in July 1894, confronting railroad president Marvin Hughitt, rushing back and forth between strife-torn Chicago and Governor Altgeld’s office in Springfield, and conferring with Debs in prison. Stone cites the “Darrow family” as his source, and his account has been accepted and repeated by authors ever since. It makes for great reading, but it is fiction. Darrow left the railroad after the death of his patron, William Goudy, in May 1893, worked at City Hall and then went into private practice, and in 1894 was preoccupied by the Eugene Prendergast case—which Stone calls “Pendergast” and erroneously places in 1895. Darrow was certainly restless at the railroad and ultimately did represent Debs, and his departure marked the start of a brave and principled career—but he did not quit in protest in 1894. Stone made other errors, and left out Darrow’s more unsavory clients and tactics. I have tried to correct the record in the text and footnotes.
The other great pillar of Darrow lore was set in place in 1954, when Inherit the Wind hit Broadway. The play, based on the Monkey Trial, became a sturdy favorite—to this day—of high school English classes, Broadway revivals, and community theater. Borrowing heavily from the trial transcript, the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee drama—and the 1960 motion picture starring Spencer Tracy—has at its climax the famous confrontation between Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Lawrence and Lee wrote their play to sound a warning about McCarthyism and the suppression of free thought and expression. They acknowledged in their Playwrights’ Note that “Inherit the Wind is not history … It is theatre.” But the power of the imagery has lingered and cemented Darrow’s status.
It is a challenging task for a biographer to escape the shadows cast by such totemic works, even more so if, as I do, he or she also sees Darrow as a heroic individual. Yet time passes. Men and women die. Their papers are left to university libraries; documents are rescued from attics or cellars. The opening of new collections of Darrow’s correspondence in 2010 and 2011, including hundreds of previously unpublished letters to his friends and loved ones, and of other archives in recent years, gives today’s historian advantages that Stone, no doubt, would appreciate. So call me a loving revisionist, one who believes that the story of Darrow’s life is no less rich when grounded in the grays and contradictions of truth. Darrow’s flaws, and his great fall in Los Angeles, make his subsequent struggles for freedom, civil rights, and liberty that much more admirable. I am fortunate to be the first to use these new resources in a biography of the Attorney for the Damned.
DARROW BIOGRAPHIES
Stone was not Darrow’s first biographer: Charles Yale Harrison wrote the admiring Clarence Darrow (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931) with some help from his subject. And of course there was Darrow’s own The Story of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). Darrow scholarship made a huge leap during the Cold War, when Arthur and Lila Weinberg, two feisty liberals from Chicago, published three landmark volumes. The first, Attorney for the Damned (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), was a book of Darrow’s courtroom addresses. Next came Verdicts Out of Court (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), a gathering of excerpts from his speeches, writings, lectures, and debates. Then, in Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), the Weinbergs gave their take on Darrow’s life. Most notably, they persuaded Margaret Parton to let them publish selected excerpts from Darrow’s letters to her mother, Mary Field Parton, and portions of Mary’s diaries. Without this material, Kevin Tierney’s Darrow: A Biography (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979) suffered in comparison but, especially because its author was a practicing attorney, it offered a unique perspective.
Several authors have examined Darrow’s life in shorter forms, or from select angles. I found especially compelling insight in Ray Ginger’s 1953 essay on Darrow in The Antioch Review; in unpublished works I found in the papers of Edgar Lee Masters at the University of Texas, and of Louis Adamic at Princeton University; and in Martin Maloney’s chapter on Darrow in A History and Criticism of American Public Address (1960).
“Born into a society of independent men, he lived to see his country pass under the sway of vast impersonal bureaucracies. The process was brutal, and he was trapped in it,” Ginger wrote. “But Darrow would not give up his battle for the rights of any individual, all individuals.” Sadly, Ginger never completed a full-scale biography of Darrow, but Altgeld’s America (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958) captured Darrow’s partnership with his great friend and mentor, John Peter Altgeld.
Abe Ravitz traced Darrow’s philosophical journey in Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition (Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1962), as did John Livingston in Clarence Darrow: The Mind of a Sentimental Rebel (New York: Garland, 1988). Susan Jacoby’s study Freethinkers (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) described Darrow’s place in American secularism. Richard Jensen examined Darrow’s oratory in Clarence Darrow: The Creation of an American Myth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992). And Willard D. Hunsberger took on the arduous task of tracking Darrow’s writings in Clarence Darrow: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981).
Jack Marshall and Edward Larson offered a worthy sampling in The Essential Writings of Clarence Darrow (New York: Random House, 2007), as did S. T. Joshi in Closing Arguments (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005). More speeches by Darrow, and his contemporaries, can be found in Echoes of the Sunset Club (Chicago: Sunset Club, 1891) and the club yearbooks of the era. Many of Darrow’s talks were printed as pamphlets during his life and are available, along with the text of or excerpts from his books, on the Internet or at the Library of Congress and other major libraries.
Darrow’s Story of My Life and his biographical novel Farmington (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1904) are the primary sources for his childhood. Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931) and Hamlin Garland’s Companions on the Trail (New York: Macmillan, 1931) offer glimpses of Darrow in middle age, as does Hutchins Hapgood in The Spirit of Labor (New York: Duffield, 1907) and A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934). The Unity memorial issue of May 16, 1938, is quite valuable, as is the newspaper and magazine journalism of Henry L. Mencken, David Lilienthal, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius.
DARROW’S CASES
Ray Ginger’s Six Days or Forever (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) and L. Sprague De Camp’s The Great Monkey Trial (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) captured the circus in Dayton, as did Edward Larson in Summer for the Gods (New York: Basic Books, 1997) and John Scopes in Center of the Storm (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967). Jerry Tompkins edited the very useful D-Days at Dayton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), and Leslie Allen did the same for Bryan and Darrow at Dayton (New York: Russell & Russell, 1925). The New Yorker, the New Republic, the Spectator, the Literary Digest, and the Nation offered lively coverage of the trial.
Given the impact of the Leopold and Loeb case on the American imagination, it is surprising that not until Hal Higdon wrote The Crime of the Century (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974) did the trial receive an in-depth look. Before Higdon, readers had to settle for Meyer Levin’s novel Compulsion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). Nathan Leopold’s Life Plus 99 Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958) told the story of the crime and his rehabilitation. See also Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). Liberty magazine gave notable coverage to the trial in 1924.
In Geoffrey Cowan’s The People v. Clarence Darrow (New York: Times Books, 1993) we get the finest account of the McNamara fiasco and Darrow’s first bribery trial, and the first literary application of Sara and Erskine Wood’s extensive archives, which also form the spine of Robert Hamburger’s biography of Wood, Two Rooms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). See also Bombs and Bribery (Los Angeles: Dawson’s
Book Shop, 1969) by W. W. Robinson, Grace Stimson’s Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), and Luke Grant’s account of the Los Angeles troubles in the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations report The National Erectors’ Association and the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers (Washington, D.C., 1915).
The story of General Otis and the Los Angeles Times is told in Thinking Big (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977) by Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt.
On Earl Rogers, read Alfred Cohn and Joe Chisholm in Take the Witness (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1934), Adela Rogers St. John in Final Verdict (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), Jerry Giesler in The Jerry Giesler Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), Once Upon a Time in Los Angeles (Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 2001) by Michael Lance Trope, and Walton Bean’s Boss Ruef’s San Francisco (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).
Gene Ceasar wrote of William Burns in Incredible Detective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968). Alexander Irvine’s Revolution in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: The Citizen Print Shop, 1911) offers a glimpse into socialist politics and Job Harriman’s campaign for mayor. The invaluable book on the Owens Valley saga is Water and Power (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982) by William Kahrl. For the early history of organized labor in California see also Michael Kazin’s Barons of Labor (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
Robert Munson Baker, in “Why the McNamaras Pleaded Guilty to the Bombing of the Los Angeles Times” (1949), and Richard Cole Searing with “The McNamara Case: Its Causes and Results” (1947) offered valuable insight in their master’s dissertations for the University of California at Berkeley. See also the coverage by Outlook, Collier’s, and McClure’s magazines in 1911 and 1912, the Survey special issue in December 1911, and subsequent analyses in Southern California Quarterly.
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