Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (2 page)

H
ERE, THEN, WAS
a blueprint for Darrow’s aspirations. He was no scion of a wealthy family like his liberal friends, the muckraker
Henry Demarest Lloyd or the philanthropist
Jane Addams, who used her inheritance to found the Hull House settlement for immigrants in Chicago’s West Side ghetto. Darrow’s parents, though educated, were moneyless. He tasted want and shame as a child, and “I never have been able to get over the dread of being poor, and the fear of it,” he would confide to a friend. Nor were there government programs in this laissez-faire era for a man to fall back on in hard times, illness, or old age. The only social safety net was the free lunch offered in workingmen’s saloons, and a bit of floor space on which to sleep in municipal hallways during Chicago’s bitter winters. Darrow had a deep interest in learning, and in literature, “but he has been under the awful compulsion of the age, to make money,” his friend
Brand Whitlock would tell a confidant. “Have you ever reflected that we of this time are kept so busy making a living that we never find time to live?”
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Yet Darrow chafed in corporate harness. There was something missing in the Goudy model. If Darrow’s cunning was a defining attribute,
more so was his empathy. He was “sensitiveness and egotism all twisted as the strands of a rope … a great character of wonderful sweetness, of profound intelligence, of Godlike patience and tenderness—shot through with queer pettiness—about money, about criticism,” one of his lovers,
Mary Field Parton, would confide to her diary. What saved him was his “extraordinarily” acute compassion, she concluded, “the edges of his emotions sensitive as the antennae of insects.”

Darrow felt guilty working for a corporation, where his legal skills and his boss’s clout were employed at union busting, or to limit the relief sought by the pitiful victims of the railway crossings. He longed for peace of mind. “It seems to me, and
for me
, that I have no right to save myself when the injustice is so great,” he would tell Addams.
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Around him was injustice in abundance. The slaughter at
Chicago’s railway crossings was emblematic of conditions in the
Gilded Age, when the United States grappled with economic and social transformations that many Americans feared, with some justification, might trigger revolution. Immigrants packed the tenements of the cities, where women took piecework in squalid, ill-lit flats, while men and children labored in the factories, mills, mines, and collieries for twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, for cents. Unions were assailed; a political and corporate aristocracy employed the police, the state militia, and private armies of detectives to disperse—or gun down—striking workers. Blacks were condemned to lynch law. Congress, the judiciary, and the state legislatures were corrupted, and the criminal justice system was no such thing. “The rich and powerful are seldom indicted and never tried,” one of the city’s leading lawyers,
W. S. Forrest, told an audience in 1892. “Manslaughter is committed by corporations with impunity. Men are convicted who are innocent. Even in ordinary trials, the forms of law are frequently set aside and the rules of evidence ignored.”
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Chicago witnessed all the era’s ills. Drenched in blood, bone-weary workers slaughtered the illimitable herds of hogs and cattle that clanked by them on the assembly lines of the stockyards. At McCormick Reaper and other storied industrial works, union organizers fighting for higher wages or an eight-hour day were locked out, harassed, and beaten by police. The houses of prostitution never closed in Little Cheyenne and the Levee, nor the predatory gambling and drinking dens. The city was divided along class lines and still seething that spring from the 1886 bombing
that killed seven policemen at a workers’ rally in the Haymarket, and the subsequent public delirium that sent four guiltless anarchists to the gallows. The city’s smokestacks cast a famous pall, to rival that of London, across the prairie sky, and the polluted water spurred outbreaks of cholera. A visitor from England, well versed in the miseries of the industrial age, was stunned. “Chicago is a pocket edition of hell,” he wrote, “and if it is not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.”
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Darrow had delved into politics, joining the movement to assist the Haymarket defendants and employing his talents and political connections to persuade the Illinois legislature to pass a bill regulating sweatshops and child labor. More than a year before, he had written to Lloyd, confessing his shame at working for the railroad and praising a protest that his friend had led after a police raid on a union meeting. “You dare to say what is true,” Darrow told him. “Your speech … made me feel that I am a hypocrite and a slave, and added to my resolution to make my term of servitude short.” But he could not summon the will to act. The months passed, and his time of “servitude” dragged on.
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D
ARROW’S CONSCIENCE WAS
still struggling with his comfort on the morning of Thursday, April 27, when, shortly after eleven a.m., Goudy finished dictating a letter, dismissed his secretary, and summoned his first visitor—a retired Civil War hero, General
John McArthur—into his office. Darrow prepared to join them.

“Good morning, Judge,” McArthur said, greeting his friend Goudy. Then: “You don’t look very well … are you ill?”

Goudy seemed stricken, and gasped. McArthur cried out in alarm, and Darrow rushed in, as Goudy collapsed at his desk.

Darrow and McArthur carried the lawyer to a couch. Goudy stared up at Darrow with pleading eyes, said nothing, and died.

The great man’s heart attack was front-page news in Chicago. “He lived only a few minutes,” Darrow told the reporters. “It all happened so suddenly that we can scarcely appreciate that Mr. Goudy is really dead.” Darrow was a pallbearer at the funeral. He had lost his patron, and his paradigm.

Goudy’s death changed Darrow’s life. That weekend, the newspapers carried the story: C. S. Darrow was leaving his position as lawyer for the
railroad to go to work for Mayor
Carter Harrison. No one then perceived that this was the birth of the grandest legal career in American history. In 1893, of Darrow’s future clients,
Eugene Debs was still an obscure labor leader with dreams of forming a national railway union.
Patrick Prendergast was a mumbling paperboy, lost in delusions. Bill Haywood was a frontier ruffian. Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb,
Ossian Sweet, and
John Scopes were not yet born.

And yet, in little more than a year, Darrow would be battling to keep Debs and the other ringleaders of a turbulent workers’ uprising out of prison, and to save the demented Prendergast, by then an infamous assassin, from the hangman. He would be on his way to becoming an American icon, his name synonymous with a passionate, eloquent, and miraculous defense of the underdog. Journalist
Lincoln Steffens would cite Darrow’s departure from the railroad as the “turning point” in his friend’s life. “Darrow counted the cost; he seems always to have counted the cost,” Steffens wrote, but “he found himself off-side, and had to cross over to where he belonged.”

And so was born, said Steffens, “the attorney for the damned.”
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H
E HAD MAGNIFICENT
presence. He would walk into a courtroom, the conversation would stop, and people would murmur, “There’s Darrow.” He was over six feet tall, and handsome in a roughcast way, with eyes set deep and the bold cheekbones that evoked, as
George Bernard Shaw once said, a Mohican brave. His hair was brown, and straight and fine, with a famously unruly lock that was apt to drift down to his forehead. His face, in middle age, was deeply lined; his skin charitably described as leatherlike, or bronzed. His ears lacked lobes, a puckish touch; his chin was cleft. His voice was a melodious grumble of a baritone, flowing from a deep chest. “He had what the French call in a woman—the beauty of the Devil; the charm of the imperfect,” one female admirer recalled. His eyes roamed restlessly until those times when, with intent fury, they bore into a witness or a foe.
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What most impressed those who witnessed Darrow in court were his big, evocative shoulders, which he hunched or tossed this way and that, like a bull in the corrida. His wife Ruby ordered special shirts and had his hats custom made, wider at the brim and higher in the crown, to offset
the bulk of that upper body. “The powerful orator hulking his way slowly, thoughtfully, extemporizing,” wrote Steffens. “Hands in pocket, head down and eyes up, wondering what it is all about, to the inevitable conclusion, which he throws off with a toss of his shrugging shoulders.”
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“His clothes were a mess, wrinkled, untidy,” noted jounalist
William Allen White. “He slouched when he walked and he walked like a cat. I always thought of him as Kipling’s cat, who walked alone.”
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He would slouch, as well, in his seat at the defense table, sinking indolently toward the horizontal, a signal to the jurors that nothing they were hearing from the prosecutor was important. It was all, of course, performance. “The picture of Darrow drawling in front of a jury box was a notable scene,” wrote the Chicago newsman and author
Ben Hecht, whom Darrow defended from the censors. “The great barrister artfully gotten up in baggy pants, frayed linen, and string tie, and ‘playing dumb’ for a jury as if he were no lawyer at all, but a cracker-barrel philosopher groping for a bit of human truth.”
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Darrow crafted an American archetype: advocate for the common folk, hooking his thumbs in his vest or suspenders, regarding the jury from beneath that cascading shock of hair, speaking with plain but emotional conviction of the nobility of man, the frailty of mankind, and the threat to liberty posed by narrow-minded men of wealth—“the good people,” he called them, with no shortage of sarcasm—and their legal guns-for-hire.

“With the land and possessions of America rapidly passing into the hands of a favored few,” he would roar, “with thousands of men and women in idleness and want; with wages constantly tending to a lower level … with the knowledge that the servants of the people elected to correct abuses are bought and sold in legislative halls at the bidding of corporations and individuals: with all these notorious evils sapping the foundations of popular government and destroying personal liberty, some rude awakening must come.

“And if it shall come,” he warned, “when you then look abroad over the ruin and desolation, remember the long years in which the storm was rising, and do not blame the thunderbolt.”
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It was quite a show. In the days before radio and motion pictures, the era’s courthouse clashes and public debates played the role of mass entertainment. It was not unusual for the gallery to be packed with prominent lawyers, off-duty judges, newspapermen, and politicians, and the hallways
outside jammed with spectators trying to get in, all to see Darrow close for the defense. At times a mob of thousands would spill through the corridors, down the stairs, and out into the yard, to surround a courthouse and listen at the windows.

Darrow savored the attention. “In corporation law practice he was but an invisible cog in a great machine. And he disliked being invisible,” said the writer
Louis Adamic. “His superior powers and wit, of which he was more and more conscious, demanded function and expression. The actor-egoist in him sought opportunities to play great parts. Hero parts.”
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It wasn’t only ego. Darrow employed his celebrity to shape public opinion, knowing that jurors reflect communities. “Cases are not won in the courtroom alone, and no one on earth knows this better than Darrow,” said his friend Erskine Wood. “His first move is to get the outside atmosphere right for his case and he sticks at nothing to do this.”

In lectures and public speaking, Darrow affected a humble awkwardness; in court, simplicity, to endear him to his audience. He might start with his arms folded, tapping his gold spectacles on his shoulder, his brow contracted in thought. Often, he would lean on the rail, as if to take the jurors into his confidence, talking so softly that those in the back row would lean toward him to listen. Then, suddenly, his demeanor would change. His voice would turn harsh; his jaw muscles would tighten. Soaring in a crescendo, he would swing his arms, shake clenched fists at heaven, or point a finger in the face of his opponent. And then the storm would pass, the sun would return, the jurors would relax, and Darrow would be genial and engaging, lightening the mood with a wisecrack. He never addressed juries, he said. He talked to them.

He often used laughter as a weapon. “We will never get a conviction unless we can make this case more serious,” one frustrated prosecutor told his associates, as he watched Darrow captivate the courtroom. His galluses were a favorite prop, and he wore them long after belts became the fashion. “The old man used to crack his suspenders like the explosion of a .45,” a Chicago newspaperman recalled. “I used to think he’d break a rib.”
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D
ARROW’S APPEALS TO
juries were all about context. The haughty judges and the lean and hungry prosecutors of Victorian America knew
their duty; they were there to exact vengeance, and to safeguard property and propriety. But Darrow believed that jurors, if given the opportunity and a skillful enough invitation, could be persuaded to look past the legal particulars, to judge a defendant in the context of the times, and consider the situational factors that prompt behavior. He sought to make even the most hideous of crimes comprehensible.