Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  THE YEARS OF Darrow’s upbringing were a volatile era in American government, and Amirus’s interests ensured that the household was immersed in the turmoil. Jefferson and other members of the Revolutionary generation were still living when Amirus was born, but the nation had already begun its transformation from Arcadian domain to commercial giant. The pace of change, wrought by wondrous inventions, cheap labor, and new sources of energy, accelerated after the Civil War. The status of the individual was diminished in this increasingly mechanistic world, as Americans struggled to apply the principles of liberty in the industrial age.

  The Republicans of the Gilded Age had a concise theory: government was a guarantor of property rights. If but one man in a thousand took the liberty conferred by the Constitution, clawed his way up from the factory floor, and built a business empire, the others did not have a right to deprive him of his gains. If the Morgan family were better bankers, or the Vanderbilts more adept at running railroads, so be it. And if a mill worker or a railway switchman didn’t like the wages offered, well, they had the right to quit.

  Liberals like Amirus thought it preposterous that an Ohio farm boy or a seamstress from eastern Europe could negotiate with a corporation. Workers penned up in company towns, by industries whose ownership was clustered in trusts, had no leverage. Nor did farmers, who were forced to ship crops on monopolistic railroads. The American economy was producing huge extremes of poverty and wealth, and quaked with recurring “panics” and depressions. But the government’s power to regulate and tax, and the workers’ right to take collective action, were curbed by the courts.

  Amirus subscribed to the New York Weekly Tribune, whose exuberant editor, Horace Greeley, championed westward expansion, abolitionism, and the interests of the workingman. The paper, with its eclectic mix of correspondents and coverage of political fads, became the Darrow household’s “political and social Bible,” Clarence recalled. Amirus was a supporter—one of the few in Trumbull County—when Greeley made his unsuccessful run for president as a Republican liberal aligned with the Democrats in 1872. The household’s hopes were doused again in 1876 when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote for the presidency, but lost the White House to skullduggery.

  Amirus was an admirer, as well, of Peter Cooper, a Unitarian philosopher who ran for president as the candidate of the Greenback Party. It was just the sort of hopeless cause to attract Amirus, and he joined the movement, an insurrection of farmers and laborers united in their opposition to Republican tight-money policies. “He had moved his soiled and tattered tent to a new battlefield and was fighting the same stubborn sullen threatening public opinion for a new and yet more doubtful cause,” Clarence recalled. The “determined band of agitators” that visited during the abolitionist days now returned to the Darrow home. “They were always poor, often ragged, and a far-off look seemed to haunt their eyes, as if gazing into space at something beyond the stars,” he recalled. “They would sit with my father for hours in his little study, where they told each other of their vision and their hopes.”

  In 1883, Amirus ran for the state senate. He finished fourth in a field of five candidates, with 146 votes.14

  CLARENCE DARROW LOVED his father, and admired the courage and the wit that Amirus displayed when besting his neighbors in arguments about politics or religion. “My father had directed my thought and reading. He had taught me to question rather than accept,” he remembered. “I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd. My instinct was to doubt the majority.”

  Darrow had, as well, a particularly keen sense of compassion. As a boy, he was known for sticking up for the weaker children of the town, his sister Mary recalled, and her family was astonished when, after their mother slaughtered and cooked a chicken that Clarence had favored, he fled the house and refused to eat fowl ever again. He had nursed the frail thing as a chick, carried it around on his shoulder, and named it “David.” Later in life, he would add veal and lamb to his list of forsaken foods. Not surprisingly, this empathetic soul was moved by his father’s talk about injustice. “I listened so rapturously and believed so strongly,” he recalled, and “looked with the same unflagging hope for the promised star … the brilliant rainbow.”

  Yet it was not easy, in that small town, to be the son of the local apostate. The good people in the Kinsman congregations shunned the Darrow furniture shop, and their children eyed the family warily. For their father’s strange ways, Darrow and his siblings faced “the social boycott that the Godly … enforced” against the “children of darkness,” he recalled. As Darrow made his way through adolescence, he began to view his father as harebrained and weak—a man who had “pathetically” come to “glory in his reputation as the village infidel.” Amirus had raised his children to be skeptics, and Clarence turned that skepticism toward his father. He was angry, and ashamed of being angry, as he watched Amirus consign himself to failure. “A simple child he always was”: this was Darrow’s ultimate, dismissive verdict. He would be different. He would show them. He would show them all.15

  IN THE SUMMER of 1872, Emily Darrow died.

  Everett had gone to Europe to study and that spring he received a letter from Clarence, alerting him that their mother was ill. Before Everett could leave for home, Amirus wrote him with the awful news. “The doctors have finally pronounced it a cancer,” he told his son. “There is no chance for her recovery.”

  “Try to bear up and be reconciled,” Amirus wrote. “She does not suffer so much as she did.”

  As the tumor grew, blocking her small intestine, Emily was confined to bed. “I feel so ready to go,” she told Mary. “Death is nothing for sure but rest, and if I might get well now it would only be a few years longer that I could live, for life is so short.”

  “It is just a dream, and you will all find it so when your time comes,” she told her frightened children.

  Emily’s death came during hard times for the family, when Amirus had been forced to take a second job teaching school. The days of Clarence’s childhood were over, as he picked up the slack in the furniture shop. “Clarence is almost a man and does a man’s work,” Mary reported to Everett, and she postponed her own plans to attend the University of Michigan. Clarence described the “blank despair” that settled over the house, and Mary told Everett how “everything that made it bright and pleasant is gone.”

  Clarence was fifteen when his mother died. But he described himself in memoirs as a “little child” and “very young” and “quite little” when he lost her. Her death fed his hunger for affection. He was the fifth of eight children in that Puritan home, and had “no feeling of a time when either my father or my mother took me, or any other member of our family, in their arms,” he wrote. “I cannot recall that my mother ever gave me a kiss or a caress.” Years later, Darrow would joke that he never could master the verb love. He would rush into an early marriage, cheat, divorce, marry again, and never stop reaching for women’s hands, or waists, for comfort. “That verb has never grown easier,” he wrote.

  Emily’s rites were agony for Clarence. She was laid out in the parlor of their home. As was customary in small towns, Amirus’s line of hardwood furniture also included coffins, which led him to double as the local undertaker. Between funerals, the Darrow chickens roosted on the hearse, which now needed to be cleaned and its black flowers attached, and Black Hawk, the mare, hitched to take it to the graveyard. Clarence was overwhelmed by “shudder and horror” and an “endless regret that I did not tell her that I loved her.” In the years after, he visited her grave but once.16

  Amirus did no draining or embalming; in those years the relatives would simply wash and clothe a corpse for burial. But there were recurring funerals, and the coffins stored in a corner of the shop that Clarence refused to visit after dark. Intellectually, he confronted the questions of existence, always declining the easy solace of religion. Emotionally, he was scared. Friends knew not to raise the subject with him. He visited seers and mediums, and at one point
near the end of life Darrow asked his wife to kill herself on his deathbed, because he could not face the crossing alone. As with many other essential matters—politics, money, and his relationships with women, to cite just a few—Darrow’s feelings toward death were rife with contradiction. As a lawyer, his greatest fear was to lose a client to the gallows. And yet he did not shy away. Darrow repeatedly took on capital cases, many seemingly hopeless, where his private terrors inspired some of his greatest performances.17

  THE LAW GAVE Darrow his ticket out of Kinsman. He was a student in secondary school when Emily died, studying at the local public “academy.” A year later, his family scraped together enough money to send him to a preparatory course at Allegheny College. He did not last long. The “Panic of 1873” plunged the nation into depression, and ended Darrow’s college days. Like Everett and Mary and Amirus before him, Clarence took a job as a schoolteacher, in his case at the District No. 3 school, a few miles away in the town of Vernon. He received $100 for the three-month autumn term. He was a colorful sight in those days of the “Long Depression,” wearing a bowler and driving through town in a shabby contraption: an old sleigh that his father had converted into a buggy. He was a lax instructor who refused to employ corporal discipline and let the boys stretch their hour of recess. The choicest part of the job, he’d say, was the good meals and pie he got when invited to supper by the families of his students.

  Oratory was part of the curriculum, and as a student Clarence had excelled at memorizing his “pieces” and presenting them with dramatic flourish. His own classmates would long remember his recitation of “Darius Green and His Flying Machine” (“Darius was clearly of the opinion / That the air is also man’s dominion / And that, with paddle or fin or pinion / We soon or late / Shall navigate”). The Darrows had a custom of reading aloud for one another at the dining room table or while gathered in the sitting room on winter nights. He attended, and soon was entering, the speaking contests held at town picnics and the evening declamation series in the local schoolhouse. He liked to sit in, as well, on the arguments held before “Justice” Fitch. “Every time there was a lawsuit I used to go to the tinsmith’s law shop and listen to those country pettifoggers abuse each other,” he recalled. “They talked so much and abused each other and the witnesses so violently that I thought I would rather be a lawyer than anything else in the world.” The blacksmith, Lorenzo Roberts, let Darrow read his law books.

  He taught for three years, but the legal profession seemed a better way to make money, and he nurtured a conceit that “I was made for better things.” His father had studied law and so, Darrow decided, should he.18

  THE DARROWS PLACED great faith in education. As each child graduated from college, he or she devoted a share of their earnings to help the next pay tuition. As times got better, it was Clarence’s turn for higher learning. Amirus, Mary, and Everett contributed, and he set off for the University of Michigan school of law in the fall of 1877, at the age of twenty. He made no significant impression in his year in Ann Arbor, did not graduate, and never acquired a law degree. His only notoriety was not the best kind. He got in a spat with his landlady. Darrow “could not or would not pay for his rooms, and accordingly left them one day last week, telling Mrs. Foley that he had left his trunk and its contents and those he said would pay his indebtedness to her. She was, of course, glad to get even this from him. But on opening the trunk it was found to be filled with “wood, burnt boots and other things of equal value,” the local paper reported. “This should warn all others from trusting him.”

  Darrow replied with a letter to the editor, calling Mrs. Foley’s account “nearly all an entire fabrication.” He had paid his rent, and was moving out, when they bickered over alleged damage to his room. She had seized his trunk, said Darrow, and half of the wood heating fuel he left behind. “Although poor, I value my reputation too highly to dispose of it for the small sum in controversy,” Darrow said. “I will prove by witnesses the above facts, as stated by me, to be true, to any one who will call at my present boarding place.”19

  The costs of law school were not terribly high—$50 covered tuition and fees—but still an obstacle for Darrow. And for American lawyers in that era, a law degree was an exception. Most took jobs as clerks in a local attorney’s office and “read law” to prepare for the bar exam. So Darrow found work in a Youngstown, Ohio, firm and studied there. He remembered sitting through one libel case with his mentor, and being puzzled when that learned man pronounced the newspaper’s action as “libeelious.”

  “Libelous, correctly pronounced, has a dry technical, colorless sound, but when pronounced libeelious it sounds frightfully evil,” the attorney told him. “I know the men on the jury. I have grown up with some of them. I know how they feel about evil wicked things and I knew just what response that evil-sounding word would evoke.” In later years, Darrow told fanciful stories about the bar examination (most of them involving alcohol), which took place at a room in the Tod House, a local tavern. The general theme of his tales, that his examination was a casual ceremony given by genial members of the local legal fraternity, is credible. “They were all good fellows and wanted to help us through,” he recalled.

  Darrow returned to Kinsman, which had, in the blacksmith, all the lawyers it needed. So he heeded Greeley’s famous advice. The twenty-one-year-old lawyer had gone west, the local press reported, to make a start in “the territories.” Custer had but recently died at Little Big Horn, and the cattle drives and wagon trains were still toting cowboys, sodbusters, and gunslingers to the Wild West when Darrow passed through a scenic part of central Kansas, along the Chisholm Trail. In the town of McPherson a group of two dozen Ohio families had founded a settlement called the “Ashtabula Colony.” Darrow visited, liked what he saw, and rented an office, intent on making his fortune on the rolling Kansas plains. But something changed his mind, and he moved on. Maybe the risk and the isolation were daunting. Or maybe the something was a woman.

  In the spring of 1880, Darrow married Jessie Ohl. She was a little younger than he, a rural lass he had known in Kinsman and courted for years. He made her laugh and took her to dances in the town hall, and she went to see him lecture and debate. She came from a prosperous farming family that owned land in Ohio and Minnesota. Her money helped pay for Darrow’s law books, and they settled in Andover, a tiny community a dozen miles from Kinsman.

  Andover was a hick burg, with a square of buildings, wood sidewalks, and hitching racks surrounded by fields. Darrow and Jessie roomed above a store, in a second-floor apartment that doubled as an office and a home. He took, as a helper, James Roberts, the son of Lorenzo the blacksmith. Roberts read law with Darrow and went on to become a judge. In time the town acquired a pool hall and a tavern, where the blind barmaid ascertained what mugs were full by sticking her thumb in the beer. Darrow found a kindred spirit in Wat Morley, the freethinking owner of a clothing store, whose feud with the barmaid and her husband—Morley had suggested that they lacked a marriage license—bloomed into a slander suit that provided the town with invaluable diversion.

  A lawsuit, in those days, was like a medieval tournament, Darrow recalled. “Every one, for miles around, had heard of the case and taken sides … Neighborhoods, churches, lodges and entire communities were divided as if in war … Audiences assembled from far and near.” It was Morley who, in one of Darrow’s first showdowns, gave him some memorable advice. Get to the justice of the peace’s home early on the morning of the trial, Morley said, and introduce yourself with a jug of whiskey. Darrow did so, only to find that the opposing attorney had gotten there the evening before, and caroused with the jurist all night.20

  The law gave Darrow a glimpse at the sins of his neighbors, which they labored so hard to hide. The experience confirmed what his father had taught him about “the right sort” of people. “The only way I got any money was defending farmers who sold hard cider, because we had a prohibition law in those days in northern Ohio,” said Darrow. “Then
I used to defend deacons for watering the milk before they sent it to the factory.”

  “Membership in a church in no way affected these cases of dilution,” he noted.

  Darrow’s talents as an orator made him a popular guest at patriotic events and other celebrations, and the speech-making was good advertising for his law practice. In 1881, the farmers in Wayne celebrated the end-of-summer harvest with a September picnic. Rigs stirred the dust on the county roads and families gathered for backslaps and hugs, home-cooked suppers, music from a brass band, songs, and Darrow’s speech. He gave them what they wanted to hear, with an ode to Manifest Destiny.

  “Friends and Neighbors … Your presence and appearance here today, on this occasion, means that you are all contented with your lot,” he said. “It means happiness, prosperity and peace; it means that you exist under the protecting arm of a Government which guarantees to you the legitimate product of your industry and your toil.

  “One hundred years ago, nay, eighty years ago, naught but the giant oak and other forest trees stood where the bright and yellow grain in golden wreath was harvested but yesterday; the untutored savage of the wood had pitched his tent upon the spot where you are living now; the tomahawk and scalping knife did their barbarous deeds of cruelty and blood.

  “But destiny, whose laws we all obey, had decreed that another and a better race should find these treasures … And so today we meet to celebrate this golden harvest time.”

  In 1883, Darrow became a father when Jessie gave birth to a son, whom they named Paul. Darrow felt that he was ready for a bigger stage and was urged to seek one by an admiring judge who had heard him try cases. They moved to Ashtabula.21