Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (81 page)

The Idaho State Historical Society has most of the important papers from the Steunenberg case, including transcripts from the Bill Haywood and second Steve Adams trials and the Pinkerton reports to Governor Gooding. The College of Idaho has put selections of the George Crookham papers online, including the Steunenberg family correspondence describing the assassination.

In Hawaii, the folks at the Hawaii State Archives were most helpful and patient, as I plowed through the papers of Lawrence Judd, Victor Houston, and John Kelley, the Pinkerton investigative files, and the surviving trial transcripts from the Ala Moana case. The archivists at the Bishop Museum opened the Walter Dillingham papers to me.

The New York Public Library has the leading collection of Henry L. Mencken’s letters, small selections on Katherine Leckie and Edgar Lee Masters, and court files from the Red Scare, including transcripts or excerpts from the Benjamin Gitlow and William B. Lloyd trials. The Lincoln Steffens and Charles Yale Harrison papers are at Columbia University. And Princeton University holds the ACLU, Scribner’s, Julian Street, Louis Adamic, and Arthur Garfield Hays papers, and another Mencken collection. Alice Beal Parsons left her papers on the Person trial to Syracuse University. The papers of Hugo Munsterberg and of Sacco and Vanzetti are cared for by the excellent staff of the Boston Public Library. The records at the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library give a unique glimpse at the relationship between Darrow and FDR.

The McNamara papers are at the University of Cincinnati, and the E. W. Scripps collection is at Ohio University in Athens. The Toledo-Lucas County Public Library maintains the papers of Samuel Jones and Negley Cochran. The University of Colorado has an excellent collection on the Western Federation of Miners.

The University of Michigan has many important collections that I used, including the Alex Baskin, Frank Murphy, Cash Asher, Joseph Labadie, Ossian Sweet, Josephine Gomon, Moses Walker, and Walter Drew collections, and a copy of the Ossian Sweet trial transcript. The Labadie collection’s acquisition of the notes of journalist Margherita Hamm, who covered the Haywood trial for
Wilshire’s Magazine
, offers a fresh perspective to the Steunenberg case.

The courthouse still stands, and the courtroom is much as it was, in Dayton, Tennessee. In the basement is an exhibit where the famous table from Robinson’s drug store is displayed. The John Neal and Sue Hicks papers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville were helpful. The staff at the University of Texas, where the Edgar Lee Masters papers reside, were their usual expert, friendly selves.

Darrow’s papers and cases are scattered around the country, but the travel and time it took to tap these collections allows me to assure readers that there are no manufactured conversations or novelistic assumptions in this book. I relied first on official court transcripts and, only when they were not available, on edited versions of Darrow’s courtroom addresses, or on contemporary newspaper coverage. The correspondence, autobiographies, and memoirs of Darrow and his friends and associates supply the remaining quotations. In chronicling Darrow’s childhood, I relied on both
Farmington
and
The Story of My Life
. One is a novel and the other an autobiography, but I am confident that Darrow would agree that the selections I chose are accurate.

I also received help, in person or via e-mail or regular mail, from scholars and librarians at Colby College, the University of Wyoming, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Eastern Washington State Historical Society, the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, the University of Pennsylvania, the Western Reserve Historical Society library, the Ohio Historical Society, Radcliffe College, the Indiana Historical Society, the American Jewish Archives, the Trumbull County Public Library, Cornell University, the University of Rochester, New York University, the City University of New York, Dartmouth College, the University of Oklahoma, the Nebraska State Historical Society, the University of Missouri, Harvard University, the Minnesota Historical Society, Smith College, Northeastern University, the University of Iowa, Indiana University, Indiana State University, the University of Illinois, the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court, Boise State University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Idaho State University, Brigham Young University, Emory University, the University of Denver, Berea College, Southern Illinois University, the Colorado Historical Society, the University of Colorado, Pittsburg State University, Penn State University, the Sherman Library, the Siouxland Heritage Museums, and the University of Virginia. To all these archivists, I offer immense thanks.

I owe thanks, as well, to those who gave me a platform, a paycheck, a reference, permission, sound advice, a kindness, good company on the road, or the well-timed dose of wine, including Marjorie Farrell, Caledonia Kearns, Craig Baker, Jill James, Marie Reilly, the Anspach clan, Brian and Ellen Donadio, Carlos Mejia, Greg Moore, Randall Tietjen, Geoffrey Cowan, Kenneth Ackerman, Adam Clymer, David Stannard, Paul Morella, Edward Larson, Jim Lighthizer, Steve Jacobs, George Mitrovich, Susan Page, Carl Leubsdorf, Peter Blodgett, Kathy Kupka, Tom Coakley, Bob, Tom and Pete Hughes, Dick Ryan, Pat Poole, Stan Penczak, Scott Sherman, Bob Selim, Steve Kurkjian, Gerard O’Neill, Jack Beatty, Walter Robinson, Matt Storin, Anne Kornblut, Bill Tranghese, Tod O’Connor, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephanie Cutter, James Alexander, Sandy Johnson, John Solomon, Bill Buzenberg, Bill Hamilton, Marith Fisher, Norm Ornstein, Tom Oliphant, David Maraniss, John Donovan, Roy Black, Douglas Brinkley, Alan Dershowitz, Peter Carlson, John Harris, John Kerry, Terry Anderson, Mike Riddick, Drex and Ann Knight, Beth Frerking, Janet Schrader, Douglas Trant, Lawrence O’Donnell, Dee Dee Myers, Charlie Sennott, Phil Balboni, Ray Ring, Rob Schlesinger, Laura Longsworth, Ben Loeterman, Jonathan Eig, David Shribman, David Morehouse, Michael Kranish, Judy Pasternak, Steve Braun, Joel and Lisa Benenson, Anita Weinberg, Carl Cannon, David Von Drehle, Doyle McManus, Marty Nolan, Bill Walker, Sharon Williams, Alex Beam, Barry Rosenbaum, Mary McGarvey, Jonathan White, Alan Partin and, most especially, Peter, Jake and Nora Gosselin and the late Robin Toner.

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS IN NOTES

AB—Alex Baskin papers, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

ACLU—American Civil Liberties Union papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

ALW—Arthur and Lila Weinberg papers, Newberry Library, Chicago

BU—Leo Cherne papers, Boston University, Boston

BW—Brand Whitlock papers, Library of Congress

CD-CHI—Clarence Darrow papers, University of Chicago

CD-LOC—Clarence Darrow papers, Library of Congress

CD-UML—Clarence Darrow papers, University of Minnesota Law Library, Minneapolis

CDMFP-NL—Clarence Darrow and Mary Field Parton papers, Newberry Library

CESW-HL—C. E. S. and Sara Wood papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

CESW-UC—C. E. S. and Sara Wood papers, University of California, Berkeley

ELM—Edgar Lee Masters papers, University of Texas, Austin

HDL—Henry Demarest Lloyd papers, Library of Congress

IHS—Idaho State Historical Society, Boise

JG—Josephine Gomon papers, University of Michigan

JK—John Kelley papers, Hawaii State Archives, Honolulu

KD—Karl Darrow papers, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland

LAL—Los Angeles Law Library

MFP—Mary Field Parton papers, University of Oregon, Eugene

NAACP—NAACP papers, Library of Congress

OHL—Jessie Ohl Darrow scrapbook, Newberry Library

PP—Pinkerton Papers, Library of Congress

WD—Walter Drew papers, University of Michigan

WJB—William Jennings Bryan papers, Library of Congress

INTRODUCTION: JEFFERSON’S HEIR

1.
Chicago Tribune
, Jan. 21, 1893. Adjusted for inflation, $500,000 in 1893 would be worth $11 million today.

2.
Edgar Lee Masters in the
Mirror
, May 16, 1907.

3.
Chicago Tribune
, Apr. 28, 1893.

4.
President
Woodrow Wilson would tell his contemporaries: “You may think Cleveland’s administration was Democratic. It was not. Cleveland was a conservative Republican.”
New York Times
, Nov. 27, 1894.
Plessy v. Ferguson
was decided in 1896. The income tax case was
Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co
. (1895). Monopolies were protected in
United States v. E.C. Knight Co
. (1895), and in
Lochner v. New York
(1905) the court struck down an 1895 New York law that limited the workday to ten hours.

5.
Chicago Tribune
, Apr. 28, 1893;
Chicago Daily News
, Apr. 28, 1893;
Chicago Times
, Apr. 28, 1893; Matthew Josephson,
The Politicos
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938).

6.
Chicago Times
, Feb. 16, 1892, Feb. 24, 1893; William T. Stead,
If Christ Came to Chicago
(Chicago: Laird, 1894).

7.
Brand Whitlock to Octavia Roberts, Aug. 2, 1898, BW; Darrow to Older, July 26, 1911, ALW.

8.
Darrow to Jane Addams, Sept. 11, 1901, ALW; Mary Field Parton diary, MFP.

9.
Forrest quoted in Stead,
If Christ Came
.

10.
Chicago Times
, Dec. 14, 1894. The visiting socialist was John Burns, and his comparison of Chicago to hell was widely cited around the turn of the century.

11.
Darrow to Henry Demarest Lloyd, Dec. 28, 1891, HDL.

12.
Chicago Tribune
, Apr. 28, 1893;
Chicago Daily News
, Apr. 28, 1893;
Chicago Times
, Apr. 28, 1893; Lincoln Steffens, “Attorney for the Damned,”
Saturday Review
, Feb. 27, 1932.

13.
Natalie Schretter, “I Remember Darrow,” unpublished manuscript, Lilly Library, Indiana University; Francis Wilson, Stone interviews, CD-LOC.

14.
Ruby Darrow, letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Steffens, “Attorney for the Damned.”

15.
William Allen White,
The Autobiography of William Allen White
(New York: Macmillan, 1946).

16.
Ben Hecht,
Gaily, Gaily
(New York: Doubleday, 1963).

17.
Darrow, “The Rights and Wrongs of Ireland,” in
Verdicts Out of Court
, ed. Arthur and Lila Weinberg (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1963).

18.
Darrow file, Louis Adamic papers, Princeton University.

19.
C. E. S. Wood to Melvin Levy, Feb. 6, 1932, NAACP; Ruby Darrow, letter to Stone, CD-LOC; Herb Graffis to Elmer Gertz, Mar. 8, 1957, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; Lt. Com. L. Johnson to Stone, Aug. 26, 1940, Irving Stone papers, University of California, Berkeley; Arthur Garfield Hays,
City Lawyer
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942).

20.
Kansas City Star
, May 17, 1925.

21.
Arthur Garfield Hays,
Trial by Prejudice
(New York: Covici, Friede, 1933).

22.
Attorney General Thomas Stewart, in Scopes trial transcript;
Kansas City Star
, May 17, 1925; Arthur Garfield Hays, remembrance of Darrow,
Unity
, Darrow memorial issue, May 16, 1938.

23.
Nathan Leopold,
Life Plus Ninety-nine Years
(New York: Doubleday, 1958).

24.
Darrow to Mary Field Parton, July 4, 1913, CD-LOC; Mary Field Parton, journal, MFP.

25.
Darrow remarks at sixty-first birthday banquet, Apr. 18, 1918; Darrow, “Is Life Worth Living?” Dec. 17, 1916, CD-LOC; W. W. Catlin to Wood, Aug. 5, 1907, Wood to Levy, Feb. 6, 1932, CESW-UC; S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Clarence Darrow’s Fight Against the Death Penalty,”
Success
, Dec. 1924.

26.
Frederic Howe,
Confessions of a Reformer
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925); Victor Yarros,
My Eleven Years with Clarence Darrow
(Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1950); Steffens,
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931); Clarence Darrow,
The Story of My Life
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).

27.
Darrow,
The Story of My Life;
Victor Yarros, remembrance of Darrow,
Unity
, Darrow memorial issue, May 16, 1938; Gertrude Barnum, “Darrow, the Enigma,”
The Ladies’ Garment Worker
, Nov. 1912; Harold Mulks, Stone interviews, CD-LOC; Mary Bell Decker, “The Man Clarence Darrow,”
University Review
, summer 1938; Darrow file, Louis Adamic papers, Princeton University; E. W. Scripps to Neg Cochran, Nov. 20, 1911, E. W. Scripps papers, Ohio University.

28.
The World
, Feb. 19, 1928; Mark Sullivan,
Our Times
, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927).

29.
C. Vann Woodward, “What the War Made Us,” in Geoffrey Ward,
The Civil War
(New York: Knopf, 1990); Henry J. Abraham,
Justices, Presidents, and Senators
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Paul Johnson,
A History of the American People
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Frederick Turner,
The Frontier in American History
(New York: Henry Holt, 1920).