Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (79 page)

The Kinsman chapters were charming, and reminiscent of
Farmington
. “The house was small, the family large, the furnishing meager, but there were books whichever way one turned,” he remembered. But his account of his resignation from the Chicago & North Western railroad was fictitious. His repeated defeats in election campaigns, and involvement in lost causes, went unmentioned. An extra chapter on the Massie trial was published in
Scribner’s Magazine
in 1932 and added to later editions of the book. He continued to insist, knowing it was not true, that Massie fired the shot that killed Joe Kahahawai.

An interesting feature of Darrow’s autobiography is what, and whom, he chose to leave out. There is no mention of
Gertrude Barnum, Mary Field, and his other loves, though that’s to be expected. But Darrow also omits, in the telling of his story, all the sociopaths he saved, the women who shot their cheating husbands, the con men, the gangsters, drunk drivers, labor sluggers, corrupt businessmen, and crooked politicians who were his clients. Forgotten or omitted are William Goudy,
Edgar Lee Masters,
Cy Simon, Olav Tvietmoe,
Anton Johannsen,
Samuel Gompers,
William Randolph Hearst,
Robert Crowe, Mayors Carter Harrison Jr. and Big Bill Thompson,
Fred Lundin, Chief
Charles Healey, “Three-fingered Jack” White,
Mont Tennes, Vincenzo Cosmano and the boys,
Emma Simpson and the other homicidal ladies, the
Bank of America, the
Scottsboro Boys, the
Iroquois Theatre fire, the
Eastland
disaster, and the Ogden Gas scandal. Darrow’s two wives and son are mentioned, but almost as afterthoughts.

Darrow’s account of the McNamara case was curt and defensive. “Before I left Chicago I knew nothing about the facts,” he claimed. After arriving in Los Angeles, he wrote, it quickly became clear that the case
was hopeless, and more so after Bert Franklin was arrested for bribery. Darrow’s foremost obligation was to save his clients’ lives, he argued. “By every emotion of my life, by the rule of my profession, by every human instinct, I was bound to act as I did, and consider my clients only, and I am glad that I did not stop to think of consequences,” he said. “My life is made up, and must stand as it is. But I was in a terrible crisis that I faced almost alone.”

Darrow did reveal how, during his first bribery trial, a hulking cop killer named
George Bissett whom Darrow had once defended in Chicago arrived in Los Angeles and offered to murder Franklin. Darrow gently dissuaded him and sent him home. But as for the bribery charge, “I feel confident that no reader will blame me if I do not unduly dwell on this part of my story,” Darrow wrote. “As I write the old ghosts creep out of the dimming past and dance around me as if in glee, and I am anxious to drive them back and lock them up where I cannot see their haunting faces or hear their mocking jeers.”
¹⁶

T
HE MASSIE
T
RIAL
had further fanned Darrow’s fame, and made his name quite marketable. He performed on the radio, defending (unsuccessfully) Benedict Arnold in a dramatization for $5,000. And he earned a nice fee from Hollywood for narrating a motion picture documentary on biology called
The Mystery of Life
. Its profoundly untitillating explanation of reproduction nonetheless drew the attention, and the scissors, of the censors. But “because of the recent Darrow-Massie trial in Hawaii,” the documentary “is far more valuable than it was a year ago,” its distributor told its salesmen.

“Remember that you are selling Darrow (America’s biggest draw according to
Variety)
and you are selling him to the MASSES, not the CLASSES,” Universal Pictures told theater owners. “Remember to sell DARROW, and do not stress the evolution angle of the thing or make it sound educational.”

“I really need the money,” Darrow told the critic
George Nathan, showing him the advertising copy for the movie. “If you don’t believe I needed the money, look what I let myself in for. Good God.”

Darrow’s uncertain health and finances did not prevent him, at the
age of seventy-five, from returning to court in two last capital cases, and saving two boys from execution.

James “Iggy” Varecha was seventeen when he shot and killed a salesman in a robbery and, an hour later, kidnapped and raped the twenty-year-old niece of a Chicago police commissioner. Though Varecha was an escapee from a mental hospital, he was judged sane by the state’s doctors. Varecha pled guilty, thinking his life would be spared, but his lawyer had not obtained assurances from the judge. Varecha was sentenced to die in the electric chair. It took three bailiffs to restrain him in court.

Darrow was aghast that the state would execute someone with the stated mental capacity of an eleven-year-old and took the appeal. Stooped and gray, his voice barely a whisper, Darrow strode back and forth in the well of the court, waving his arms as he pleaded for Varecha’s life. “His father and mother are illiterate. All his brothers and sisters, with one exception, are defective,” he argued. “This boy is not to blame. Organized society had its chance to keep him off the streets, but it failed to do so. He was just a young animal, turned loose on the streets in the shape of a boy.” In time, the
Illinois Supreme Court granted Varecha a new trial. This time, the plea bargain was properly sealed. He was sentenced to one hundred years in prison.

Darrow fought, as well, for the life of
Russell McWilliams, who had also been but seventeen when he killed a streetcar operator in a Rockford robbery. McWilliams was drunk when he shot the man five times. Like Varecha, he had made the mistake of pleading guilty and asking for mercy from a court, which sentenced him to die. Three times Darrow won McWilliams a reprieve, and three times a judge confirmed the penalty. So Darrow begged the state pardon board to urge the governor to commute the sentence. His strength was failing that day, and he asked to speak from a chair. “It is not the policy of this state to kill children,” Darrow told the board. “The mind of the child is not the mind of the man.” On Darrow’s seventy-sixth birthday, Governor
Henry Horner spared the boy’s life, three days before he was scheduled to be electrocuted. McWilliams was a model prisoner, and was paroled in 1951.

“The powers seemed bent on taking his life,” Darrow wrote
Graham Taylor. “I just can’t understand them. I am much alarmed for fear they will cut down what we have so far made the limit of taking life, which is
still 18. I am sure it will take the efforts of all of us to keep back the tide of hatred that seems to be overwhelming us.”
¹⁷

I
T WAS ABSOLUTELY
fitting that, before he died, Darrow took bold stands for individual liberty in the face of political and corporate gigantism. “Ideas have come and gone, but I have always been a champion of the individual as against the majority and the State,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “Of all the political leaders of the past, Thomas Jefferson made the strongest appeal to me.” It was a thought that
Franklin Roosevelt and his aides might have pondered before giving Darrow a public platform, resources, and license to critique the president’s New Deal.

Darrow had supported and spoken for Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential campaign. Roosevelt had promised “bold persistent experimentation” to fight the effects of the Great Depression, which had left 13 million Americans out of work. President
Herbert Hoover’s mishandling of the crisis had led Darrow to quip that “I used to be taught that anybody could be President; it begins to look as if they could, too.”

And so it seemed to Roosevelt’s staff that Darrow was a safe choice to chair a special board to review the operation of the National Recovery Administration, which was established in the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s presidency. Its symbol was a blue eagle, which shops and businesses—even dancing girls—displayed to show that they were following “codes” of behavior drawn up and administered by the NRA and its industrial councils. It was, said one historian, the center ring in the New Deal circus, and its ringmaster—a retired army cavalry officer who combined the qualities of military leader and sideshow barker—was the colorful, irrepressible, and impetuous General
Hugh Johnson. His deputy was
Donald Richberg, one of Darrow’s old pals from the Chicago reform movement. At a time when the country needed a cause to join, the NRA offered hope.

Yet, as with any government agency, particularly one that invited commercial interests to help draft its codes, the NRA’s operations reflected the influence of the bigger corporate lobbies. The agency allowed companies to join together to fix prices, wages, and hours. This soon led other businesses, unions, and consumers to squawk. Evasion and cheating were reported. “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit,” wrote
Walter Lippmann, “are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American economic life.” Congress responded and, led by Senators William Borah of Idaho and
Gerald Nye of North Dakota, convinced the White House to name a National Recovery Review Board, with Darrow as its chair.

Masters tried to warn Roosevelt of what was to come. Via a friend, the poet got a letter to the president’s private secretary,
Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, savaging his former law partner.

“Money and publicity have been his life objects and to get them he has sacrificed parties and friends and principles all along,” Masters wrote. “I do not refer to Darrow’s malodorous career, to his indictment for jury bribing in California, nor to his dubious reputation as a lawyer in Chicago, but rather to his insidious and subtle faculty of playing fast and loose with labor and capital,” said Masters, “to his bewildering shifts and changes in which he has flirted with democracy, socialism, the single tax and anarchism; to his faithless attitude toward friends, leaders like Bryan and others.”

Darrow had spent a lifetime “winding serpent-like where there was food, and winding safely away when there was danger, and never shot, or so completely exposed, that he was ended,” said Masters. He was sure to turn and “fang” the administration now that they had let him “inside the breastworks … clothed in the armor of a pretended intellectual independence.”

Masters conveyed similar sentiments to Mencken. It can’t be that bad, Mencken replied. Richberg had suggested Darrow. And surely FDR, the sly fox, had “a Machiavellian purpose” in appointing an aged gent whose faculties were eroded and whose time was clearly past, and whose thoughts would not be taken seriously. Darrow was just an old pussycat, entranced by the “catnip” of the press, Mencken said.

The “Darrow review board” began its work in March 1934. He and Ruby installed themselves in a suite at the Willard Hotel, where the staff, led by Washington lawyer
Lowell Mason, held nearly sixty public hearings and reviewed three thousand complaints. The first report, released in May, exploded on Washington like an artillery round. It charged the NRA with fostering monopolistic practices that favored influential interests at the cost of the little guy. It didn’t matter that, as Richberg, Mencken, and others pointed out, the report was philosophically incoherent. So was much of the reasoning behind the NRA. The slap to Roosevelt was a
great political story and the two loquacious and leathery foes—Darrow and Johnson—were irresistible copy, especially when they took a car ride together around Arlington, ostensibly to bury the hatchet, and discussed anthropology, murder, religion, and the hereafter.

Darrow’s mandate expired in June, and he got a cold shoulder from Roosevelt. A White House assistant was delegated to write Darrow that “the President asks me to acknowledge receipt of your final report, which he did not have a chance to look into before his departure, and to act for him in accepting your resignation.”

“I hear from Washington that Darrow is wandering around in a fog, scarcely knowing where he is at or what he is doing,” Mencken wrote Masters. “His report will take its place among the comic documents of all time. When it came in the Brain Trust boys threw back their ears and howled with delight. They took two weeks to answer it, not because answering it was difficult, but because they were constantly impeded by their own laughter.”

That was the White House spin. But reforms were enacted and by the end of the summer Johnson was on his way out of office. The NRA never recovered its élan. And in the spring of 1935, a year after Darrow’s report, the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that the NRA represented an unconstitutional excess of federal power.
¹⁸

D
ARROW WAS EXHAUSTED
by the NRA assignment. But Hays pleaded with him to take on one more duty. After getting assurances that he could rest at Hays’s Long Island home during the trip, Darrow agreed to serve as the chair of the
American Inquiry Commission, an ad hoc group opposed to Hitler and Nazi rule, at hearings in New York City in early July. The Nazis “threaten the lives of some of the leading men in Germany who are now in concentration camps,” Hays had written Darrow. “Now is the time for the inquiry to be held.”

Darrow’s had been a public voice against fascism for years. It was a prime reason he defended Carillo and Greco. The previous December, Darrow had joined
Preston Bradley and
Louis Mann at Chicago’s Washington Boulevard Temple in a forum on
Nazism.

Hitler had taken power in January 1933. He immediately issued
emergency decrees, claiming dictatorial powers “for the protection of the People and the State.” The Führer never hid where he was going. “Curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of associations, and of assembly; surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible,” the Nazis declared. Opposition parties were dissolved. Political foes were assassinated. The first concentration camp was opened at Dachau that spring. The Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship, and the nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht were still months or years away, but Darrow and the others recognized what was happening.