Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  “Many of his most passionate interests were rooted not merely in his moral idealism and his human pity, but … in his distrust of government,” wrote his friend the theologian John Haynes Holmes. “He hated and denounced Prohibition because it was an invasion by the State of the liberties of the individual. He fought capital punishment because it was the State laying its bloody hand upon some poor forlorn individual who it had earlier betrayed by neglect or oppression.”

  THE GREAT THEME of Darrow’s life, the long war he fought in his march through courtrooms and cases, was the defense of individual liberty from modernity’s relentless, crushing, impersonal forces. “No era of the world has ever witnessed such a rapid concentration of wealth and power as this one in which we live,” Darrow warned. “History furnishes … abundant lessons of the inevitable result.”

  “All the greatness of America, all her marvelous wealth, all the wonders … are a monument to the wisdom of liberty,” Darrow said. But “our liberty produced prosperity, and this prosperity looks with doubting eye upon the mother who gave it breath, and threatens to strangle her to death.”

  Americans needed a new sustaining myth. In his defense of the underdog Darrow helped create one. He gave it a narrative voice, kept it supplied with sympathetic characters, and forged his own place in folklore. “If the underdog got on top he would probably be just as rotten as the upper dog, but in the meantime I am for him,” Darrow said. “He needs friends a damn sight more than the other fellow.”30

  Americans drew strength watching Darrow rage against the machine. They can again today. There is something grand and epic in his fierce resistance to those inexorable oppressive forces that, in varying guises, inspired the rebels in his ancestry and the abolitionists of his boyhood, imperiled freedom in his lifetime, and pose a threat to liberty today.

  “The marks of battle are all over his face,” wrote the journalist H. L. Mencken. “He has been through more wars than a whole regiment of Pershings. And most of them have been struggles to the death, without codes or quarter.

  “Has he always won?” Mencken asked. “Actually, no. His cause seems lost among us.”

  “Imbecilities, you say, live on? They do,” wrote Mencken. “But they are not as safe as they used to be.”31

  Chapter 1

  REBELLIONS

  I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd.

  Samuel Eddy, the son of an English vicar, was in his early twenties in August of 1630, when he went aboard the good ship Handmaid and embarked from London for the New World. The young tailor was headed for Plymouth, where the Mayflower had landed ten years before. The journey was marked by savage storms and the ship lost all its masts, and ten of the twenty-eight cows it carried, before limping into port in late October. Samuel and his brother John intended to join a family friend, John Winthrop, who had left four months earlier with the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, intent on building their city on a hill. But only John joined Winthrop in Boston. Samuel found a wife in Plymouth, a peppery lass named Elizabeth Savery, and stayed with the Pilgrims.

  The descendants of John and Samuel spread throughout New England, where they were known for sturdy physiques, long lives, and many sons. “This extraordinary multiplication accounts for the fact that, while the Eddys as a family are not poor, not many of them are very rich,” said the Reverend Zachary Eddy at a family reunion in 1880. “Estates … have been divided among many heirs.”

  “We are a large-brained family, but … there have been but few manifestations of remarkable intellectual power,” Eddy said, with a candor seldom exhibited on such occasions. “Our family has produced no great statesman, or philosopher, or orator, or poet, or historian, or man of science.” Somewhat wistfully, he said: “We have been at a dead level of respectability for three hundred years.”1

  That was soon to change. A line of the family had rooted in what is now northeast Ohio when Moore Eddy arrived from Connecticut in 1830. There, he married Elizabeth Whittaker, whose parents had made the six-week trip from New England in a wagon drawn by oxen. Moore and his wife lived in a log cabin, cleared land in the virgin forest, and raised five children. At school, their daughter Emily met a dreamy young man named Amirus Darrow. They were married and on April 18, 1857, welcomed their fifth child, Clarence, to the world.2 He would be everything but respectable.

  THE FIRST DARROW to arrive in America, according to the family genealogists, was George Darrow, who came to Connecticut in the late seventeenth century. It’s said he was snatched by a press gang and forced into service in the Royal Navy, but jumped ship in the Americas and made his way to New London, a port with a reputation for unruly behavior. “It was easy to raise a mob here; easy to get up a feast, a frolick or a fracas,” an early town historian wrote. “Men who had long been rovers, and unaccustomed to restraint, gathered here … Violations of modesty and purity before marriage, were but too frequent.”

  There was sufficient sport and opportunity, and enough Indians in the forests, to keep the family in New London for two more generations. But by the middle of the next century the Darrow clan, like the Eddys, was generating too many children. A number of Darrows left Connecticut and made their way up the Hudson River valley in New York. Their wandering was interrupted, and then accelerated, by the great events of the American Revolution.3

  Clarence Darrow took pride in his rebel ancestors. Several fought in the Revolution, at storied places like Lexington and Saratoga. His great-grandfather Ammirus joined George Washington’s army in 1778, at the age of seventeen, as an aide-de-camp for a cousin, Captain Christopher Darrow, who had served at Bunker Hill. Ammirus and his brother Jedediah were at the battle of Monmouth that summer, but their service with Washington ended when Christopher was court-martialed after challenging the actions of an incompetent superior. Christopher was ultimately vindicated, but Ammirus and his brother returned to New York, where they joined in one of the Revolution’s grislier chapters.4

  The Loyalists and their Iroquois allies in upstate New York had taken to raiding—murdering settlers, scalping, and hauling women and children off as slaves. The death of one of Ammirus’s comrades, Lieutenant Thomas Boyd, illustrates the savagery of the frontier war. The Iroquois nailed an end of his intestines to a tree, and forced their captive to trudge around its trunk until he was eviscerated. Then they cut off his head and mounted it on a pole. The Americans responded in kind. One patriot who served with Ammirus, a marksman named Tim Murphy, was known for his collection of scalps. In the fall of 1780, the Darrow brothers were stationed with Murphy in the Schoharie River valley when the army of Loyalist colonel Sir John Johnson invaded the region. Ammirus’s term of service was up, but he volunteered to remain—a decision that looked dubious when the patriots were cornered in a fort at Middleburgh. Their commander panicked and tried to surrender, but Murphy pushed him aside and fired on the British officers who approached under a white flag to parlay. Johnson’s Indian allies had no patience for a siege, and he led them to plunder elsewhere.

  The war took Ammirus west and north of Albany, deep into the woods and mountains, where the Mohawk Valley patriots fought a series of battles against Loyalist forces led by Captain Walter Butler, hated by the settlers for his role in earlier massacres. Ammirus was there when Butler, defying his enemies from across a creek, was shot from his horse in the Black River country. Word of Butler’s death thrilled the American settlers in New York, perhaps as much as the news then arriving from Virginia, where General Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown.5

  Ammirus returned to New London after the war, where he wooed his wife-to-be, Sarah Malona.6 Within a few years he and his family were making their way to the Black River region he had visited during the war. Sarah bore twelve children. Jedediah, the oldest boy, was Clarence Darrow’s grandfather. He was a furniture maker, known for his skill as a craftsman and his happy disposition. Clarence’s aunt Sarah recalled a strict Methodist upbringing, the frightful cold of the north woods, and the warm
maple syrup of her grandfather’s sugar house. The countryside was covered with hemlock, pine, and balsam, and the streams were alive with fish. She liked to gather wildflowers, and spruce gum to chew, and to feed the tamed bears at Graves Tavern. In winter, she and her brother Amirus would go sledding on snow so deep it covered the fences, “making the country look like one vast field.”7

  Ammirus passed away in 1824, with Jedediah and young Amirus at his bedside. Then Jedediah and his family moved on and settled in the Western Reserve.

  THE WESTERN RESERVE, where Clarence Darrow was born and lived until the age of thirty, was a rectangular block of land west of the Pennsylvania border, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie. It was granted to Connecticut after the Revolution to resolve a violent border dispute with Pennsylvania. Coming from Connecticut, the most radical of the Puritan colonies, the Western Reserve’s inhabitants shared a fierce commitment to liberty. Their relatives in New England, dispatching fishing fleets and clipper ships around the globe, grew more cosmopolitan in the nineteenth century, but the inhabitants of the Reserve were, politically, frozen in time. If anything, their radical vision grew stronger, fueled by a Puritan sense of duty. Many were abolitionists, risking life and property to smuggle fugitive slaves to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

  Amirus Darrow was the oldest of Jedediah’s sons. He learned carpentry from his father, then set out to become a preacher, studying first with the Methodists at Allegheny College and then at the new Unitarian seminary in Meadville, Pennsylvania. “This ambition was born of [his] intense love of books,” his son Clarence would recall. “The trade of a parson was thought to be an intellectual calling.” The Eddy clan, sound farming folk who valued shrewdness and hard labor, thought Emily’s new husband was impractical. For although he displayed some characteristic Darrow traits—restlessness, rebelliousness, fertility—Amirus stood out mostly for his inefficacious thirst for learning. He had wide-ranging interests in literature, theology, and political theory, and Clarence and his brothers and sisters were raised in a home crammed with books and ideas. “How my father managed to buy the books I cannot tell,” Darrow wrote. “Neither by nature nor by training had he any business ability or any faculty for getting money.”

  Amirus would study at four colleges and acquire two postsecondary degrees, but he never became more than a shopkeeper.

  “Nature had some grudge against my father,” Darrow recalled. “Day after day and year after year he was compelled to walk the short and narrow path … while his mind was roving over scenes of great battles, decayed empires, dead languages and the starry heavens above … To his dying day, he lived in a walking trance.”

  Amirus was a disciple of Thomas Jefferson and savored the works of the atheist pamphleteer Tom Paine, the heretical David Hume, the infidel Volney’s ruminations on natural law, and the writings of the French libertarian and skewer of religious orthodoxy, Voltaire. He read, as well, from the evolutionists Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. His love for scholarship and disputatious nature appear to have cost Amirus his faith, for he never did practice as a minister of the Lord. He became a freethinker, one of a class of American rationalists who put no faith in organized religion, or in a Supreme Being who ordered the lives of men. “He began to doubt. He doubted Hell, and he even questioned Heaven and God,” Darrow remembered. Amirus forsook the pulpit, acquired a degree from Cleveland University, then chose to practice his father’s craft, making furniture in tiny Farmdale, Ohio.

  Amirus and the wide-eyed Emily, who was five or six years younger than her husband, labored as well at the happy business of procreation. After Everett and Channing came Mary, and a baby boy who died in infancy; then Clarence and Hubert and Herman and Jennie.8 When Clarence Seward Darrow arrived in the world on that spring morning in 1857, Amirus was still naming sons after his heroes. Everett and Channing had been christened after prominent Unitarian leaders; William Seward was a militant abolitionist, a lawyer, a U.S. senator, and former governor of New York.

  Seward was an “agitator,” known for his defense of immigrants and fugitive blacks and for his pioneering use of the insanity defense. In 1846, he showed moral—even physical—courage when he defied the local mobs and agreed to represent William Freeman, a deranged black man who had invaded the home of a prosperous farmer and murdered the man and his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and mother-in-law. The case was political strychnine, but “a higher law and a louder voice called him to the defense of the demented, forsaken wretch,” wrote Seward’s biographer in 1853, in a volume that no doubt had a place in Amirus Darrow’s library. Seward hired medical experts and carried the defense through the courts. “And all this for whom? For a Negro!—the poorest and lowest of his degraded caste,” one commentator wrote.

  “I am not the prisoner’s lawyer—I am the lawyer for society, for mankind,” Seward told the jurors, in a closing argument whose format and fire would be matched by his namesake in years ahead. “The color of the prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual immortal mind which works beneath … He is still your brother, and mine.”

  Such was the hero whom Amirus honored, and hoped his son would emulate.9

  Everett recalled that Amirus “took a prominent part in the antislavery agitation.” And in Darrow’s accounts of his boyhood, he recalls his father speaking admiringly of men like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and writes of how members of the abolitionist “army,” when passing through town, would “make my father’s home their stopping place.” In his later years, Darrow told people that his father had helped shelter runaway slaves.10

  Three of Clarence’s uncles served in the Union Army in the Civil War—one was wounded, another survived captivity—but Amirus did not join them. He was well past forty, and had that growing brood to support. In 1864, Amirus enrolled at the University of Michigan to study law, but he failed to complete his studies and returned to Ohio. He moved his family a few miles to Kinsman where, on the main road leading north from town, Amirus invested in a furniture store, set up a barnlike “machine shop” to make cabinets, chairs, coffins, and cupboards, and installed his wife and children in a strange, octagonal home that sang of nonconformity.11

  KINSMAN WAS ONE of the thousands of such midwestern towns: a homogeneous community of several hundred souls, a dusty village square, and some tall shade trees on the banks of a shallow river—the Pymatuning, in this case—that supplied its boys with the requisite fishing holes and a sandy bend for swimming. It had woods and fields to roam and hills to coast, a graveyard with an iron gate, and a Presbyterian church with a tall white steeple that commanded the skyline like the spires of New England.

  “It would be hard to make a town better fitted for boys,” Darrow remembered. He and his brothers and their friends ran barefoot in all but the coldest months, playing games like fox and geese, or skin the cat. They clapped gunpowder between the blacksmith’s anvils for the required salutes on Independence Day, went skating when the ponds and creeks froze, and plucked tiny gifts from Christmas trees lit by wax candles at church. They walked to the local schoolhouse with dinner pails of lunch and pie, and were generally tardy because, as Darrow recalled, “there were always birds in the trees and stones in the road and no child ever knew any pain except his own.”

  Clarence had a sloppy demeanor, with a lock of lanky hair that invariably fell upon his forehead, and a lazy, easygoing personality. One prissy classmate remembered turning in her seat and gasping at his arithmetic: barely legible and blotted with ink. “I never seemed able to finish any work that I began; some more alluring prospect ever beckoned me,” Darrow would confess. He was a dedicated whittler, aimlessly shaving sticks until “it became as mechanical as breathing.” A favorite book was The Story of a Bad Boy, a tale of mischievous youth. As he grew older, he became devoted to the adventure novels of Thomas Mayne Reid and Frederick Marryat. One of Kinsman’s most “alluring prospects” was baseball, a sport that acquired
its modern rules and format at midcentury, caught the popular imagination, and swept across the land. “I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life,” Darrow said. Skills and equipment were rudimentary; scores of forty runs were not uncommon. Darrow was sturdy and broad-shouldered as he reached adolescence: a good-enough first baseman, and good-enough-looking, his sister Jennie recalled, to acquire the attention of Kinsman’s girls.

  The Darrows’ eight-sided home, a relic of an eighteenth-century architectural fad, was made of chestnut beams and concrete, with large rooms and closets and a wraparound veranda. Clarence and three brothers shared two beds in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Downstairs was a kitchen, a parlor, and his father’s study, lit at night by kerosene lamps. The yard was sheltered by a towering elm, and across the street was a tin shop whose proprietor, Cliff Fitch, doubled as a justice of the peace. Nearby was Lorenzo Roberts, the blacksmith who knew some law, and Collin’s grocery, where, as a boy, Darrow took a nickel he’d received for Christmas, mumbled a request for almonds—a treat he’d heard of but never tasted—and was sold a small bag of alum. He went home with puckered lips and told his mother that he could not understand why people liked the stuff.12

  Its Puritan roots made Kinsman a “narrow and smug community,” Darrow remembered. Material success was seen as proof of character and not—as was often the case—of avarice, or luck, or intrigue. Conformity was a smothering virtue. Clarence preferred the approach of some Darrow relatives who never amounted to much of anything, but seemed to have a good time doing so. “I had an uncle or two—not very prominent,” he would recall. “They were engaged largely in fiddling and drinking whiskey, which is not a bad way to kill time while we are here.” To their children, Amirus and Emily were distant and demanding. “They were New England people, raised in the Puritan school of life … demonstrations of affection were signs of weakness rather than of love,” Darrow remembered.13