So what I do is this: every now and then I stop drinking for a year. I swim a mile a day (which I do in under thirty minutes, on the wagon or off) and when I come back—back to the thousand gloriously depraved memories conjured by the lush sensation of red wine flooding my sinuses, one of which is the curious phenomenon that no matter where I am, all I can smell is cheap scent and nicotine-saturated nightclub banquettes—I return with a store of other memories, of a year of clarity devoid of guilt, and I find that the next year I drink in moderation. This seesaw behaviour is the essence of who I am: a stable individual if you take the long view.
I’m about due for some abstinence. Shortly before I came down here to Dayton I was arrested for drunk-driving in upstate New York. I was merely speeding. I was not very much over the limit. But it is embarrassing. I’m married now. I have a daughter. A twenty-year-old drunk can be amusing. A forty-seven-year-old drunk is merely forlorn. I’m not a drunk, you understand, not since I had my daughter, but I have the fear of it. To make matters worse, I’m applying for American citizenship and this doesn’t look good. A second offence while awaiting trial, even down here in Tennessee, would be disastrous.
Another glass?
Of course.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Clarence Darrow
When Gloria goes off to dinner, I drive cautiously to Ayola’s, which is just outside of town, towards the La-Z-Boy factory. The low-slung restaurant stands alone on the left side of the road and I’ve already pulled into the middle lane to make the turn when I see the place is surrounded by cop cars. If I drive on now it will look suspicious. I cross oncoming traffic and park. Now, obviously, I have to go in. Where else would I be going?
Six cops feed at a large table facing the door. They watch me as I enter. I take a table as far away as possible without looking as if I’m taking a table as far away as possible, and order some burritos from a Mexican waiter with one dead eye. When I look up again, the cops are still watching me. I nod. They don’t nod back. After a while, three of them leave and stand outside. The oldest of them, a tough little cracker with an enviable head of dark, slicked-back hair, takes out some chewing tobacco, thrusts a wad inside his cheek, chews once or twice, spits on the ground, and meets my eye.
A consequence of my battle with education is a deep and real fear of authority. No amount of defiant contempt can quell a surge of adrenaline during moments such as these. My entire childhood was one protracted sin against the system. I have sinned so much it’s still spilling out of the pockets of my psyche, metaphorical condoms and burning cigarettes visible to anyone who’s looking. Even to visit my daughter’s school, an Upper East Side girls’ school where most of the fathers are bankers in suits, and where I used to get stopped from entering—‘Where do you think you’re going?’ ‘I’m a father. I have a daughter here’—even here, where I’ve come to realise I’m now almost liked, I start to sweat with fear as soon as I enter, and once I’m in I’ll always find a way to make some inappropriate crack to someone, just to show I’m not afraid, this habit making every trip to school sheer torture for Denise, who, though outspoken and with her own fund of illicit peccadilloes, was always a good girl in school and remains a woman who would rather fit in than not.
The other cops now lumber to their feet, pay laboriously, and leave the restaurant. But then they too hang around outside, laughing and glancing at me. I order another glass of iced tea from the one-eyed waiter to kill more time. Somebody must commit a crime in Dayton sooner or later. Some hick must crash his pickup, prostrate himself upon the tracks, or detonate his shack while brewing moonshine. Something has to happen to distract these cops from their endless spitting and strutting. And finally it does. Their radios crackle and they all jump into their ‘veehickles’ and rush off.
Confident that adrenaline must by now have flushed my system of alcohol, I leave the restaurant and drive into town. In the humid evening, its quiet, tree-lined streets allow one to imagine a more peaceful era, the small-town America of myth, a predelinquent time when—so long as you weren’t black—you had a better chance of dying of typhoid than from a bullet. I stop outside the courthouse and listen to summer sounds not unlike those of my village childhood in England, lawn mowers, a distant shout, the crack of a ball against a bat. I drive across Main Street and find the high school where John Scopes taught. It’s still light, so I park the car, get out, and stroll around. The school is two storeys high, a squat, long building, municipal and uninteresting. I know, however, that it has been considerably rebuilt in the last seventy-five years. I wonder how it looked on the afternoon of May 5, 1925, when the twenty-four-year-old John Scopes was playing tennis on one of the courts behind the main building.
School term had ended four days earlier, but Scopes, who came from Kentucky, had stuck around because of a girl. Having never seen her around town before, he asked flirtatiously if this was because she spent her whole life in church, singing hymns and praying. She replied that indeed her family was involved in the church and if he wanted to see her again he’d have to attend a church social which would take place a few days after school let out.
John stayed and became, in the curious and sometimes painful way of these things, famous. His autobiography’s title, Center of the Storm, accurately describes his role in the affair, but only if you think of a storm as having an eye. His name became known all over the world, but in the trial itself he never took the stand and anything he said was overshadowed by the grand figures who paraded around him. Nonetheless, he was perfectly cast for the role. His father, a machinist on the railroads and an important member of the recently formed Machinists Union, was an agnostic and freethinker. A self-educated working-class man, he often read to John at night. Together, they had even read some of Darwin’s work.
John had already had one memorable encounter with William Jennings Bryan when he delivered the commencement address at Scopes’ high school graduation. The Sunday before, John and some friends had been preached to by a minister whose loose false teeth caused him to whistle his sibilants. This had caused an outbreak of giggles, and when Bryan began his speech a week later and whistled his first s, John and three others laughed. So unused was Bryan to being laughed at that when he met Scopes in 1925, six years later, he recognised him and reminded him of the occasion.
Between high school and college, John worked on the railroads and spent a while as a hobo before finally enrolling at the University of Kentucky. He had been teaching at Dayton High School only a year and was not a biology teacher but a general science teacher and football coach. Good-looking, charming, funny, free-spirited, and athletic, he was well liked by his students. The daily assemblies so bored him he found a way to take a group of students down into the science lab, where he let them discuss whatever they liked while he smoked cigarettes and listened. On Saturday nights he went to the dance up at Morgan Springs, a resort in the hills above town. Amusingly, in light of current attitudes, he says in his autobiography, without a trace of shame, that his dates were usually high school seniors.
About halfway through the match, as Scopes was about to serve, he noticed a small boy arrive and sit quietly beside the court to watch the game. When it was time to change sides, he came over to Scopes and told him Fred Robinson would like to see him down at the drugstore as soon as it was convenient. John finished the set and then, still sweating, strolled through town toward the drugstore.
When he arrived, he found a group of men gathered around one of the tables. Apart from Rappleyea and Robinson there was now Sue Hicks, city attorney (and subject of the song ‘A Boy Named Sue’), Wallace Haggard, known as ‘Mr. Dayton,’ banker and lawyer, and a Mr. Brady, who owned the town’s other drugstore. Several more people would claim to have been there, but these are the ones Scopes remembers.
Rappleyea asked if it was possible to teach biology without teaching evolution. Scopes said no and took down a textbook from one of Robinson’s shelves, Hunter’s Civic Biology. This had been used in Tennes
see schools since 1909 and Scopes showed the men the book’s explanation of evolution. Robinson asked him if he’d ever used the book and Scopes said he had, although he wasn’t sure if he’d taught evolution from it, even when he was subbing for the biology teacher toward the end of the year.
This did not seem to bother anyone. This would do for the moment. Robinson asked Scopes if he’d be willing to let his ‘name be used’ in a test of the constitutionality of the Butler Act forbidding such teaching. Scopes said okay. He could not possibly have imagined how profoundly his life would be changed by this casual decision.
Sue Hicks and his brother, Herbert Hicks, also an attorney for the city, were dubious about the teaching of evolution, but were equally dubious about the law’s constitutionality. However, they agreed to prosecute the case and a warrant was sworn out charging Scopes with violating the law. The ‘Hustling Druggist,’ wanting to get the publicity going immediately, called the Chattanooga Times and told them Dayton had ‘arrested’ one of its teachers for teaching evolution. Rappleyea wired the ACLU.
John Scopes walked back to the high school and continued playing tennis. Within a few years, an academic life would become impossible for him.
On May 13, 1925, William Jennings Bryan offered his services to the prosecution. He hadn’t practised law for forty years, but he was a big draw and Dayton was not about to turn him down. The town was already puffing itself up for the big event. A Scopes Trial Entertainment Committee had been formed to find housing for the expected visitors and press, and the merchants were already rubbing their hands together in glee.
At this point, the most famous lawyer in America, Clarence Darrow, entered the picture. Darrow is one of my heroes, a compassionate humanist with a sense of humour. Enraged by injustice and wary of superstition, he loathed pomposity, cruelty, and hypocrisy and carried a linguistic sword capable of puncturing them all.
Darrow was born in 1857 and raised in Kinsman, Ohio. His father, rather like Scopes’ father, was an agnostic freethinker, an outsider in a rural religious community. Clarence, though clearly bright, did not do particularly well in school. In his late teens, he was, however, sufficiently qualified to teach young children in his hometown. In his biography of him, Clarence Darrow for the Defense, Irving Stone describes how Darrow was much loved by his students for abolishing all corporal punishment. On Saturday nights there was a debate in town, followed by a dance. Darrow, alone in his agnostic views, relished being an absolute minority in these debates, some of which were staged in front of as many as five hundred people. Again like Scopes, he loved to dance. It was at one of the dances which followed these debates that he met his first wife, Jessie.
After three years of teaching, he decided he might be interested in law and with financial help from two of his six siblings went to law college at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He found his teachers boring and preferred to work alone and formulate his own opinions. After less than a year, he came home. He took a menial job in an attorney’s office in a nearby town, and began teaching himself the law. At twenty-one he went before a committee of local lawyers who pronounced him qualified.
He married Jessie and for a few years was an ordinary country lawyer. One day, someone he didn’t like asked him in a patronising tone how he was doing. He told him he was doing so well he was moving to Chicago. Having said this, he felt compelled to follow through.
During his first year in Chicago, he had almost no work. Partly as a way of looking for cases and partly out of genuine interest, he got involved in Democratic politics and social issues. A local judge named John P. Altgeld had written a book which greatly impressed him. Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims made the case that social injustice in the form of poverty and lack of opportunity was what caused crime and that harsh punishment not only compounded the injury but created further resentment leading to further crime. Darrow eventually met with Altgeld and the two became friends. With Altgeld’s help, Darrow got a job as special-assessment attorney for the city. Four years later, he was offered a job with the Chicago and North Western Railway, which he took for the money.
He bought a house, repaid the brother and sister from whom he’d borrowed money, and kept the job until 1894, when the American Railway Union went on strike in sympathy with workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company. When Darrow heard about the strike, he went out to where George Pullman had built a town for his workers.
Named eponymously by its creator, the town of Pullman was advertised as ‘a perfectly equipped town of twelve thousand inhabitants … bordered by bright beds of flowers and green velvety stretches of lawn … the homes, even to the most modest, are bright and wholesome and filled with pure air and light.’ What Darrow found was a fiefdom. The workers were forced to rent the substandard houses at 25 per cent above the going rate; all savings had to be deposited in the company bank; and anyone trying to join or form a union was fired and his name put on a blacklist which was then distributed to every railroad in the country.
Since the panic of 1893, the same one that speeded the decline of Dayton Coal and Iron, a Pullman worker’s set wages of $3.20 a day had dropped to a maximum piecework rate of $1.20 a day. Hungry and exhausted men fainted on the production line. When Pullman was asked to lower rents on the houses, he refused in spite of the fact that the Pullman Company was doing good business and was valued at $36 million. In desperation, with their children on the verge of starvation, the Pullman employees organised. Extracting a promise from Pullman that he would not fire them, they sent a delegation of forty-three men to petition him in person. After they had spoken to the vice-president, Pullman stormed into the room and told them he had nothing to say to them and the next day they were all fired.
The workers struck and shortly thereafter the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, joined the strike, refusing to move any train with a Pullman car on it.
Having visited the town of Pullman, Darrow went down to the stockyards and watched the strikers. They had been portrayed in the press as lawless, violent anarchists and socialists. Darrow found them determined but peaceful. When, in clear violation of law, federal troops became strike-breakers and started moving trains out of the yard, fighting broke out and shots were fired. Three men died immediately and many others, women included, were beaten and bayoneted.
Darrow, who was now thirty-seven, resigned his railroad job. When Eugene Debs was arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy, Darrow took on his defence. The strike continued until, out of money and with the church and the press against them, the men finally gave in and went back to work for the same wages.
In a Senate hearing to investigate the cause of the riot, Pullman was forced to admit that during the year in which he had slashed wages below subsistence level his company had declared a profit dividend of $2,800,000. ‘My duty is to my stockholders and to my company,’ he stated. ‘There was no reason to give those working men a gift of money.’ This was the climate in which both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan were formed.
Darrow lost the case and Debs was sentenced to six months in jail. Debs became a hero and Darrow found the kind of law he wanted to practise. Over the next two decades, he represented poor criminals, underdogs of all kinds, unions, and working men. He established the legal right of workers to strike in the Woodworkers’ Conspiracy Trial. Through his work with the United Mine Workers, he revealed the use of child labour in the mines and the terrible conditions under which all miners worked.
Although his views were ‘radical’ his style was folksy and conversational. Scruffy, rumpled, snapping at his suspenders, slouching against the rail, he came across like a country lawyer, a man you could trust, a simple man bemused at how ‘cleverer folk’ couldn’t see obvious human truth at the heart of things. As an agnostic, he despised the hypocritical cruelty and rigidity of organised religion. More interested in compassion than condemnation, in understanding than vengeance, he was passionately opposed to the death penalty.
In 1924, he undertook the d
efence of Leopold and Loeb, two Chicago rich kids who had kidnapped and murdered another boy just to see if they could get away with it. They had been caught, eventually confessed, and now faced the death penalty. Darrow by this time was sixty-seven and had been involved in 102 death penalty cases.
Guilt or innocence was not in question. The best Darrow could do was stop the boys from being hanged and instead get them life in prison. This was all their families asked for and they begged him to help, promising him any amount of money for his services. Darrow, champion of the poor, knew he’d be attacked on all sides as a sellout if he took the case. On the other hand, it was an opportunity not only to save the lives of the boys, but to widely publicise the issue of capital punishment. He suggested his fee should be left to the Bar Association to decide after the event and signed on, taking only a $10,000 retainer.
If ever two people deserved execution, Leopold and Loeb would seem to be they. The crime was premeditated and perverse. Both boys were rich and highly intelligent. Richard Loeb, an athletic, handsome boy of seventeen, was the youngest-ever graduate of the University of Michigan. Since the age of fourteen, he had been obsessed with crime and had conceived the murder/ kidnapping as a way of proving he was capable of ‘the perfect crime.’ During the investigation, he hung around with the police, offering advice. Nathan Leopold, who was eighteen, was the youngest graduate of the University of Chicago. He was as ugly as Richard was handsome, but according to Darrow had ‘the most brilliant intellect’ he had ever encountered in a boy. He spoke nine languages, was an advanced botanist, and had read all of Nietzsche’s books. He believed himself to be a Nietzschean superman, a man so superior to others that moral codes did not apply to him.
Unfortunately, he fell in love with Richard, who consented to a homosexual relationship so long as Nathan became his sidekick in petty crime and finally murder. Neither boy showed any remorse.
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