Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (115 page)
Read Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Online
Authors: John A. Farrell
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hicago at the turn of the century, shortly after Darrow arrived. The “smooth-faced” young man rose through the city’s rough legal and political scenes at a pace that the newspapers called “phenomenal.”
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larence Darrow’s great mentor, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld. “His character was that of the dreamer, of the idealist”, but “there was mixed with that … the practical touch of the politician”, said Darrow. “He knew how to play to those cheap feelings which the politician uses to inspire the vulgar mob.”
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ailway union leader and socialist Eugene Debs, who hired Darrow after the federal government crushed a successful strike against the Pullman company and the nation’s railroads in 1894. “He never felt fear”, said Darrow. “He had the courage of the babe who has no conception of the word.”
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n the wake of the great Pullman strike, the cover of the July 21, 1894, edition of
Harper’s Weekly
showed John P. Altgeld in a fool’s cap and a gang of Populist leaders bearing Eugene Debs as the king of anarchy.
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arrow’s longtime lover, Mary Field Parton. She would have been content to be “his loving mistress”, her sister Sara said, if Darrow were not “running after these disgustingly brainless women all the time.”
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he radical muckraker Lincoln Steffens, who joined with Darrow in progressive causes and stuck by him through perilous times. “Sometimes all we humans have is a friend, somebody to represent God in the world”, Steffens said. It was he who christened Darrow “the attorney for the damned.”
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awyer and poet Edgar Lee Masters. In 1903, he formed a law partnership with Darrow, which ultimately collapsed in enmity. In the end, they were too much alike.
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n the winter of 1902–03, Darrow represented the striking United Mine Workers before a presidential commission investigating the dire working conditions of anthracite coal miners. He called a number of child laborers and injured miners to testify, including “breaker boys” like these. Lewis Hine, who took these two photographs at a Pennsylvania Coal Company mine in Pittston, Pennsylvania, wrote, “The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrated the utmost recesses of the boys’ lungs. A kind of slave-driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding them into obedience.”
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uckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd, union leader John Mitchell, and Darrow. For their ardent work representing the mine workers before the presidential commission, they became known as “the miners’ trinity.”
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nion officials George Pettibone, Big Bill Haywood, and Charles Moyer in the yard outside the Boise, Idaho, jail, awaiting their trials for the assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg by a bomb planted at his front gate.
