Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (24 page)

In the “reign of horror” and generally chilly political climate that followed McKinley’s assassination, Darrow had a hankering for a good free-speech case, he told Whitlock, and Hearst and his editors supplied one.

The
American
was then crusading against the “gas trust” that, the newspaper said, was gouging Chicago consumers. The gas interests sued, and when Judge
Elbridge Hanecy sided with them, the paper ripped him in its columns and cartoons. Hanecy charged Hearst and six employees with contempt, alleging that “scandalous matter was printed … to terrorize and intimidate this court.” The managing editor,
Andrew Lawrence, and a reporter,
H. S. Canfield, were sentenced to jail. There was bad blood between Hanecy and Darrow, and their exchanges in court were frequently hostile. So Darrow appealed to a more amenable jurist—his
friend, the politically ambitious and liberal Judge
Edward Dunne—who agreed to hear Darrow’s plea for a writ of habeas corpus.

“It is for the cause they represent that powerful interests desire to place these men in jail: this yellow journal must be suppressed for through its columns has been heard the bitter cry of the outcast millions who have here found voice,” Darrow told Dunne. “I care for this paper and for these men because a blow struck at them is a blow struck at the freedom of the press, which is really the greatest privilege the citizen enjoys, the greatest safeguard of human liberty.”

The journalists were freed. “Public officials … have always been and always will be subject to criticism because of their official acts,” Dunne ruled. “It is one of the incidents and burdens of a public life.”
⁹

H
EARST PAID HIS
stars well, and demanded loyalty. When the publisher launched his
presidential campaign in 1904 he called on Darrow to lead it in Illinois. The job ensnared Darrow in considerable intrigue, as three groups now vied for control of the Democratic Party in Chicago: Darrow, Hearst, and Dunne led the so-called radicals, Harrison had his personal following, and the Hopkins-Sullivan machine formed the third faction. They met at the state convention, where the radical and machine forces joined, at first, to crush Harrison. The Hopkins faction imported squads of “muscular, red fisted, red faced street fighters” from local street gangs like the “Stockyard Indians” and the “Black Rabbits,” to intimidate Harrison’s supporters.

It was an unholy alliance. As much as he liked Darrow, his pal
George Schilling told a friend, “I would under no circumstance advise that you assist him … The Hopkins element … are pirates and bandits whose only purpose … is to protect and extend the predatory interests of a lot of franchise grabbers.” The machine men proved him right when, having disposed of the mayor, they double-crossed Hearst and Darrow. All that was missing was “the flying of the Jolly Roger,” a newsman wrote. “The … buccaneers on the platform chortled until they shook like masses of jelly.”

Darrow rallied the Hearst forces and tugged other delegates to their cause. They massed in the rear of the hall, yelling “Pirates!” and “Rotten!” at the machine men on the dais. Seizing the moment, Darrow,
white-faced, his eyes intent, climbed onto a chair and offered a resolution binding the state’s delegates to Hearst at the Democratic convention. It passed, and in the giddy moments afterward, Hearst’s troops demanded that Darrow be nominated as the Democratic candidate for governor. The nomination was his if he wanted it. But Darrow had no desire to lead the fractious party against a Republican ticket topped by the popular
Theodore Roosevelt in the fall. He shoved his way to the podium and told the Democrats that he would not accept the nomination.

In July, the battle shifted to the Democratic national convention in St. Louis. The Wall Street Democrats—the old gold and Grover Cleveland men—united behind New York judge
Alton Parker and labeled themselves “the reorganizers.” William Jennings Bryan had run and lost in 1896 and 1900 and was not a declared candidate, and so Hearst was the progressive alternative. But the publisher was a poor politician—he had a reedy voice and a fear of public speaking—and Bryan schemed to supplant him. When the Hopkins-Sullivan crew voted with the “reorganizers” on procedural questions Bryan challenged their credentials on the floor. “No band of train robbers ever planned a robbery … more deliberately, or with less conscience,” he thundered. But this was not 1896. His challenge was soundly defeated, and Darrow had to plead with Hopkins for time to speak for Hearst.

It was, for Darrow, his own “cross of gold” moment. Who knew what might happen if Darrow could touch the hearts in the hall and tug them away from Wall Street and Parker? It was after midnight—still prime time in the days when sessions lasted until dawn—when Darrow rose to speak. He reminded the Democrats of the glorious days of ’96, when they had campaigned in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, for a real democracy. The forces that now led the party, Darrow said, were the very ones who had sold them out for Mark Hanna’s money.

“Gentlemen of the convention,” Darrow said, “even now it may not be too late to consider and to pause.…

“The United States is not … made up alone of the pawnshops that line the narrow, crooked lane which men call Wall Street; shops where human souls are placed in pawn for gold,” he said. “The United States is the place where countless millions, under the clear sky and in the bright light of day, do their work and live their lives and earn their bread without the aid of schemes.…

“If this convention would gain the votes of the common people of the United States, that great class without whom there never was a Democratic party, they must name a man who has fought the battles of the poor,” he said. “With such a man the mighty hosts of workers from the fields and prairies, from the factories and mills, from the railways and the mines … will bring us a victory that will be a victory indeed.…

“This great party will come back from the golden idols and the tempting flesh pots and once more battle for the rights of man!”

Darrow barely mentioned Hearst at all. He “enlivened the wearying crowd,” the
Washington Post
reported, and “carried the galleries,” said the
Tribune
. But there was, alas, no stampede. The spectators may have loved it, but those were Parker men on the floor of the convention. The Gold Democrats got their man, who was trounced by Roosevelt in November.

Darrow had taken Paul with him to St. Louis. He was trying to patch things up with his son, who had just graduated from Dartmouth. They had a long ramble that summer to Colorado, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and joined a Dartmouth group for three days camping in the Canadian Rockies. And in January, Paul joined his father and Masters on a trip to Cuba. To ward off seasickness, Darrow organized an onboard poker game. He feared that Paul was too serious and straitlaced. “You have all your life to work,” he told his son. “Take a boat ride to Europe or something.”
¹⁰

A
MID THE TEMPESTUOUS
events of that election season, Darrow published two novels and mourned the death of his father.

Amirus passed away in April 1904. The funeral was held at Darrow’s brother Edward’s house, and the body, in keeping with the old infidel’s wishes, was cremated.
Darrow’s relationship with his father dominates the opening chapters of
Farmington
, a novel of boyhood, which was published the year of Amirus’s death. Darrow had written it on his honeymoon, on trains and in hotels. It is the story of his life in Kinsman—a sturdy piece of American realism that preceded such better-known accounts of Midwest villages as his law partner’s
Spoon River Anthology
, or his friend Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
.

John Smith, the narrator of the novel, grows up in a small town. His
father runs a gristmill, not a furniture shop, but otherwise is Amirus. “No man knew so much of books as he,” says Smith, “and no man knew less of life.”

Darrow draws a pastoral scene—a one-room schoolhouse, baseball, summer evenings—on which he splatters acid. For all the talk of idyllic boyhood, summer days, and willow trees, death is the foremost resident of Farmington, “the little … town beside the winding stream where I used to stone the frogs.”

Darrow recites the inscriptions on the cool granite monuments in the cemetery. He takes his readers to Squire Allen’s grand funeral, and to a burial ceremony for a young Union soldier, “glorious, brave, and noble,” who went to war with a smile. We see Darrow’s mother, struck down at forty-eight by cancer, “lying cold and dead” in the front room of their home. We meet his Sunday school teacher, pale and dying from tuberculosis. And we contemplate the folly of Aunt Mary, who so carefully preserved her parlor from the wear of visitors that it is spotlessly clean on the day that she’s laid out in her coffin, until the neighbors track mud on her Brussels carpet, as the bluebottle flies swarm about her corpse.

“All my life I have been planning and hoping and thinking and dreaming and loitering and waiting,” reads Darrow’s coda. “All my life I have been getting ready to begin to do something worth the while. I have been waiting for the summer and waiting for the fall; I have been waiting for the winter and waiting for the spring; waiting for the night and waiting for the morning; waiting and dawdling and dreaming, until the day is almost spent and the twilight close at hand.”

Darrow was feeling the twilight close at hand.

D
ARROW’S CRITIQUE OF
small-town values was so subtly expressed that the
Tribune
missed the point. “If he has any bitterness he has concealed it,” the reviewer wrote, congratulating him for producing “an idyll” of boyhood. The
New York Times
saw Darrow’s book with a clearer eye. Its author writes “so much truth at times that you are a bit afraid,” the paper said. It called
Farmington
“real art.”

William Dean Howells was delighted with Darrow’s effort. “I could not lay your book down until I had finished it,” he wrote. It was weakened by “grammatical solecisms,” he said, “but it is also full of bottom facts and
abounds in human nature.” He compared it to Tolstoy’s memoir of boyhood and took it to several publishing houses. But the publishers shrank from the bite of Darrow’s work and concluded that the public would not buy it. Harper & Brothers found it “cold and depressing” with “unnecessary philosophizing” and decided that “the general effect is disheartening.” Darrow finally got the book to a local publishing house in Chicago, whose meager sales and marketing resources confined it to obscurity.

Darrow’s second novel,
An Eye for an Eye
, followed quickly. It was scrawled on vacation in the summer of 1904. The new book had quite a different setting than
Farmington
, but its fatalistic theme was much the same. “It took years of care and toil to show me that life is stronger than man, that conditions control individuals,” Darrow wrote in
Farmington
. In
An Eye for An Eye
, he drew the lesson explicitly. Written in the same bleak style as the “Easy Lessons in Law” series, the novel tells the tale of Jim Jackson, an inmate on death row. From his cell, Jackson recounts the story of his crime: how he married in a hurry, lost his way at work, ran out of money, and was stuck in an unhappy marriage because the church and the law frowned on divorce. He describes how, one night in a drunken argument, he killed his wife with a poker and was tried in a city inflamed by the newspaper accounts of the crime. “I never intended to kill anybody but somehow everything just led up to it,” says Jackson. “And I didn’t know I was getting into it until it was done, and now here I am.”

The two books of fiction, like Darrow’s previous essays and his newspaper work, buffed his reputation in the literary world. He had helped set Whitlock on his path as a serious writer, and had edited a book of Altgeld’s writings. In 1905 he joined with
Jack London,
Upton Sinclair, and other authors to found the
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a literary group for college campuses. And he was a founding member, with
Hamlin Garland, of the
Society of Midland Authors. But neither of Darrow’s novels was commercially successful. They were imperfect, written in nooks of his life—dashed off as afterthoughts, almost. He was discouraged at the public reaction, and abandoned the art. Had Darrow found the means and the dedication, he may have emerged as another Dreiser. Garland certainly thought so.

“This is very true, very sad, and very beautiful,” Garland wrote in the back of his copy of
Farmington
. “He is humorous but he is also tragic in the hopelessness of his outlook. He voiced the doubts and the questioning
of our generation.”
Farmington
was “only a fragment, but it is noteworthy for its diction, which has something rich and noble in its music.” He urged Darrow to keep working on the book, but Darrow said he did not have the time, or money, to devote to art. “I did not tell him what I really felt,” Garland wrote in his diary, “which was that to rewrite
Farmington
would be worth more than all his work in defense of criminals and fools.”
¹¹