Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (97 page)

20.
Julian Street, journal, July 11, 1934, Street papers, Princeton University; Helen to Jennie, July 18, 1934, KD; Mary Field diary, Jan. 18, 1934, MFP; ACLU to Darrow, July 25, 1934, Darrow to ACLU with Baldwin notation, July 30, 1934, ACLU.

21.
Older to Lem Parton, Aug. 31, 1934, Fremont Older papers, University of California, Berkeley.

22.
Ruby to J. B. McNamara, Oct. 1, Nov. 13, undated circa 1934 or 1935, James and John McNamara papers, University of Cincinnati.

23.
Senate Finance Committee testimony, Mar. 20, 1935;
New York Times
, Mar. 21, 1935;
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 21, 1935.

24.
For church remarks see reprint of “Warren Ave. Congregational Church Sunday Evening Forum,” Sept. 29, 1935, CD-LOC. Darrow said he was sad to get the news but that Loeb was probably “better off dead”
(New York Times
, Jan. 29, 1936), told an audience of University of Chicago students that Capone’s conviction on tax charges was “a terribly wrong … outrageous deal”
(Time
magazine, Nov. 2, 1936), and told a United Press reporter that
Bruno Hauptmann should get another trial because his conviction was “a farce”
(Rockford Morning Star
, March 29, 1936);
Chicago Daily News
, April 4, 1936; Paul Darrow to Fay Lewis, included in Lewis to Gerson, Feb. 2, 1938, Perceval Gerson papers, UCLA; Paul Darrow to Karl Darrow, Mar. 20, 1938, and Nov. 20, 1937, courtesy of William Lyon.

25.
Lewis to Gerson, Feb. 2, 1938, Gerson papers;
Chicago Daily News
, March 5, 1938;
Akron Times Press
, Mar. 15, 1938. On Feb. 27, 1938,
Mary Field Parton wrote to her sister Sara, “I have tragic word from Chicago; namely that Mr. Darrow has lost his mind, just walks up and down, up and down, mumbling and muttering. Paul, his son, writes that they have no hope of his recapturing his memory. Intimate friends are strangers. I personally think he has retreated from a world that was too inhuman and cruel for him to bear. Unlike you, he had no … refuge into which to escape: a world of beauty. He knew nothing of the solace of music. Science only confirmed his beliefs in the fixed pattern of homo-sapiens, his fundamental brutality, cruelty. Art was an unknown door. Nature alone comforted him. Of all the people I have met in a lifetime of meeting people I never knew a soul that shrank so before cruelty” (Mary to Sara, Feb. 27, 1938, CESW-HL). When she received word of his death, Mary wrote in her diary, “Good bye dear friend. We spoke the same language, the inarticulate language of the heart” (MFP). The Darrow obituaries are on March 14, 1938, in the Chicago newspapers. In Baltimore, Mencken hailed the “Gladiator of the Law” in the
Evening Sun:
“In his private life and philosophy he was singularly gentle and even sentimental, but when he enlisted for a cause he was a terror. It was to his credit that he was most often a terror to quacks and dolts, hypocrites and scoundrels.”

26.
Chicago Tribune
, May 17, 1938;
Chicago Daily News
, May 16, 1938;
Chicago American
, Mar. 15, 1938; the
Chicago Herald Examiner
account of the scattering of Darrow’s ashes is from
Unity
magazine, which published a memorial issue on May 16, 1938, that included tributes from James Weldon Johnson, Arthur Garfield Hays, Victor Yarros, and others, as well as Judge William Holly’s funeral address.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Irving Stone, the author of
Clarence Darrow for the Defense
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1941), said that telling the story of Darrow’s life was like writing about Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and other folk heroes. And he did so, magnificently. Stone used all his skills as a novelist and biographer, and the Darrow who emerges in his work is wry, compassionate, idealistic, folksy, and heroic. Written with the aid of Ruby and Paul Darrow, the book reinforced Darrow’s iconic status, and looms above all subsequent titles.

But in working so soon after Darrow’s death, Stone faced hurdles. Folks then were more reticent, and many of Darrow’s friends and acquaintances were grieving. There were relatively few collections of important letters and documents open to researchers. And Ruby’s cooperation came with a price. In her correspondence with Stone she spoke of the book as “their” project and pressured him to gloss over Darrow’s flaws. “It would be regrettable if the biography should become a thorn for the rest of my life, something to be sensitive about instead of proud of,” she told him. When Stone asked about Darrow’s love affair with Mary Field Parton, for instance, Ruby replied: “She is the one you seem bent on injecting into your story. Please do not.” Nor did Paul have an interest in challenging the myth.

Stone’s work, then, was seriously flawed. To cite one lasting error, he begins his story with a great set piece of American biography: the vivid and detailed description, complete with dialogue, of Darrow resigning from the Chicago & North Western Railway in protest over the government’s persecution of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union. It places Darrow at the center of things in July 1894, confronting railroad president Marvin Hughitt, rushing back and forth between strife-torn Chicago and Governor Altgeld’s office in Springfield, and conferring with Debs in prison. Stone cites the “Darrow family” as his source, and his account has been accepted and repeated by authors ever since. It makes for great reading, but it is fiction. Darrow left the railroad after the death of his patron, William Goudy, in May 1893, worked at City Hall and then went into private practice, and in 1894 was preoccupied by the Eugene Prendergast case—which Stone calls “Pendergast” and erroneously places in 1895. Darrow was certainly restless at the railroad and ultimately did represent Debs, and his departure marked the start of a brave and principled career—but he did not quit in protest in 1894. Stone made other errors, and left out Darrow’s more unsavory clients and tactics. I have tried to correct the record in the text and footnotes.

The other great pillar of Darrow lore was set in place in 1954, when
Inherit the Wind
hit Broadway. The play, based on the Monkey Trial, became a sturdy favorite—to this day—of high school English classes, Broadway revivals, and community theater. Borrowing heavily from the trial transcript, the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee drama—and the 1960 motion picture starring Spencer Tracy—has at its climax the famous confrontation between Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Lawrence and Lee wrote their play to sound a warning about McCarthyism and the suppression of free thought and expression. They acknowledged in their Playwrights’ Note that
“Inherit the Wind
is not history … It is theatre.” But the power of the imagery has lingered and cemented Darrow’s status.

It is a challenging task for a biographer to escape the shadows cast by such totemic works, even more so if, as I do, he or she also sees Darrow as a heroic individual. Yet time passes. Men and women die. Their papers are left to university libraries; documents are rescued from attics or cellars. The opening of new collections of Darrow’s correspondence in 2010 and 2011, including hundreds of previously unpublished letters to his friends and loved ones, and of other archives in recent years, gives today’s historian advantages that Stone, no doubt, would appreciate. So call me a loving revisionist, one who believes that the story of Darrow’s life is no less rich when grounded in the grays and contradictions of truth. Darrow’s flaws, and his great fall in Los Angeles, make his subsequent struggles for freedom, civil rights, and liberty that much more admirable. I am fortunate to be the first to use these new resources in a biography of the Attorney for the Damned.

DARROW BIOGRAPHIES

Stone was not Darrow’s first biographer: Charles Yale Harrison wrote the admiring
Clarence Darrow
(New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931) with some help from his subject. And of course there was Darrow’s own
The Story of My Life
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932). Darrow scholarship made a huge leap during the Cold War, when Arthur and Lila Weinberg, two feisty liberals from Chicago, published three landmark volumes. The first,
Attorney for the Damned
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), was a book of Darrow’s courtroom addresses. Next came
Verdicts Out of Court
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), a gathering of excerpts from his speeches, writings, lectures, and debates. Then, in
Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), the Weinbergs gave their take on Darrow’s life. Most notably, they persuaded Margaret Parton to let them publish selected excerpts from Darrow’s letters to her mother, Mary Field Parton, and portions of Mary’s diaries. Without this material, Kevin Tierney’s
Darrow: A Biography
(New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979) suffered in comparison but, especially because its author was a practicing attorney, it offered a unique perspective.

Several authors have examined Darrow’s life in shorter forms, or from select angles. I found especially compelling insight in Ray Ginger’s 1953 essay on Darrow in
The Antioch Review;
in unpublished works I found in the papers of Edgar Lee Masters at the University of Texas, and of Louis Adamic at Princeton University; and in Martin Maloney’s chapter on Darrow in
A History and Criticism of American Public Address
(1960).

“Born into a society of independent men, he lived to see his country pass under the sway of vast impersonal bureaucracies. The process was brutal, and he was trapped in it,” Ginger wrote. “But Darrow would not give up his battle for the rights of any individual, all individuals.” Sadly, Ginger never completed a full-scale biography of Darrow, but
Altgeld’s America
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958) captured Darrow’s partnership with his great friend and mentor, John Peter Altgeld.

Abe Ravitz traced Darrow’s philosophical journey in
Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition
(Cleveland: The Press of Western Reserve University, 1962), as did John Livingston in
Clarence Darrow: The Mind of a Sentimental Rebel
(New York: Garland, 1988). Susan Jacoby’s study
Freethinkers
(New York: Henry Holt, 2004) described Darrow’s place in American secularism. Richard Jensen examined Darrow’s oratory in
Clarence Darrow: The Creation of an American Myth
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992). And Willard D. Hunsberger took on the arduous task of tracking Darrow’s writings in
Clarence Darrow: A Bibliography
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981).

Jack Marshall and Edward Larson offered a worthy sampling in
The Essential Writings of Clarence Darrow
(New York: Random House, 2007), as did S. T. Joshi in
Closing Arguments
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005). More speeches by Darrow, and his contemporaries, can be found in
Echoes of the Sunset Club
(Chicago: Sunset Club, 1891) and the club yearbooks of the era. Many of Darrow’s talks were printed as pamphlets during his life and are available, along with the text of or excerpts from his books, on the Internet or at the Library of Congress and other major libraries.

Darrow’s
Story of My Life
and his biographical novel
Farmington
(Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1904) are the primary sources for his childhood. Lincoln Steffens’s
Autobiography
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931) and Hamlin Garland’s
Companions on the Trail
(New York: Macmillan, 1931) offer glimpses of Darrow in middle age, as does Hutchins Hapgood in
The Spirit of Labor
(New York: Duffield, 1907) and
A Victorian in the Modern World
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934). The
Unity
memorial issue of May 16, 1938, is quite valuable, as is the newspaper and magazine journalism of Henry L. Mencken, David Lilienthal, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius.

DARROW’S CASES

Ray Ginger’s
Six Days or Forever
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) and L. Sprague De Camp’s
The Great Monkey Trial
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968) captured the circus in Dayton, as did Edward Larson in
Summer for the Gods
(New York: Basic Books, 1997) and John Scopes in
Center of the Storm
(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967). Jerry Tompkins edited the very useful
D-Days at Dayton
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), and Leslie Allen did the same for
Bryan and Darrow at Dayton
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1925). The
New Yorker
, the
New Republic
, the
Spectator
, the
Literary Digest
, and the
Nation
offered lively coverage of the trial.

Given the impact of the Leopold and Loeb case on the American imagination, it is surprising that not until Hal Higdon wrote
The Crime of the Century
(New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974) did the trial receive an in-depth look. Before Higdon, readers had to settle for Meyer Levin’s novel
Compulsion
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). Nathan Leopold’s
Life Plus 99 Years
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958) told the story of the crime and his rehabilitation. See also Simon Baatz’s
For the Thrill of It
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
Liberty
magazine gave notable coverage to the trial in 1924.

In Geoffrey Cowan’s
The People v. Clarence Darrow
(New York: Times Books, 1993) we get the finest account of the McNamara fiasco and Darrow’s first bribery trial, and the first literary application of Sara and Erskine Wood’s extensive archives, which also form the spine of Robert Hamburger’s biography of Wood,
Two Rooms
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). See also
Bombs and Bribery
(Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1969) by W. W. Robinson, Grace Stimson’s
Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955), and Luke Grant’s account of the Los Angeles troubles in the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations report
The National Erectors’ Association and the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers
(Washington, D.C., 1915).