Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  He had been drinking Chicago in gulps; his days filled with law and politics, his nights and weekends with legal homework, club meetings, campaigns, and public speaking. But “Mother wasn’t interested in the things he was interested in, and vice versa,” Paul recalled. Jessie “didn’t care for discussion, argument, free-thinking. She wanted to pay social calls to homes and relatives.”

  Darrow had tried to stick it out, but ultimately concluded that Jessie was “utterly unsuitable” for him. In a letter to his wife, he gave his reasons for leaving. “We have not been happy, and I suppose neither of us are to blame,” he wrote. “I presume that we never in any way were fitted for each other … Of course we were too young to know it then and it is always terribly hard to correct such mistakes.”

  Darrow’s sexual experience had been constrained by his early marriage, but now he was intoxicated by Chicago’s libertine ways. “We … talked free love, sex and every imaginable thing,” his friend and fellow lawyer Edgar Lee Masters recalled. Darrow was “full of boyishness,” with a “gorgeous chuckle,” said Jessie’s cousin Francis Wilson. He “got into the company of the intellectual and beautiful and didn’t feel that Jessie contributed to what he wanted.”

  Divorce was an option in Victorian America, but Darrow would need a considerable income to maintain a cosmopolitan lifestyle while still providing, as he promised, for Jessie and Paul. He had gotten valuable publicity but earned little else when representing Prendergast and Debs, and lost a financial anchor when his law firm broke apart. When asked to donate to a liberal cause in January 1895, he declined. “I … do not think I ought to use my money in that way,” he told the solicitor. “I have not much to use.”1

  Darrow’s first brush with scandal helped balance the books. In early 1895 he had joined, and profited from, one of Chicago’s more notorious acts of municipal corruption. It was known as the “Ogden Gas” deal, and Altgeld’s cousin, John Lanehart, helped push it through the city council. On February 26 the Tribune alerted Chicagoans that the Ogden Gas Company and Cosmopolitan Electric Company had each been granted fifty-year municipal franchises “that will stand for all time … as monuments of corruption.” More than five thousand people attended a rowdy protest meeting, where squads of police were summoned to contain the crowd, and speakers denounced the aldermen as wolves, hyenas, scorpions, reptiles, freebooters, and scoundrels.

  It was an archetypical bit of boodling. At the end of the nineteenth century private companies supplied the public utilities—gas for heat and light, telephones, streetcars, electric power—under franchise agreements awarded by local governments. Elected officials grew rich taking bribes to grant the franchises, or by extorting payoffs from existing utilities that wished to ward off competition. In the Ogden Gas deal, franchises for gas and electric and telephone service were awarded to corporate fronts for an elite group of Democratic politicians. “When work has been carried far enough to convince other companies that the new concern may be a serious competitor, the speculative individuals … will be bought out by the companies they compete with and will withdraw … with a handsome rake-off,” the Tribune predicted.

  John Hopkins, the city’s first Irish Catholic mayor, was leaving office and looking for a sinecure. Roger Sullivan, the boss of the machine Democrats, and Levy Mayer, one of the city’s sharpest lawyers, were also in on the deal. Darrow had participated in the big protest meeting, but when the boodlers needed help from an expert in municipal law, he switched sides. The Civic Federation, a good government group, sued to stop the deal, claiming the aldermen were “corruptly influenced,” and Darrow and Mayer teamed up to beat the reformers in court.

  “I have no doubt that many good citizens believe money was used to secure the passage of these ordinances, as during the last few years nearly everything they own has been given away,” Darrow told the judge. But the separation of powers precluded judicial interference, he said. “When the City Council performs its duties carelessly or corruptly—but within its own rights—it is not the province of a court … The court cannot ask an alderman, ‘Why did you vote for that measure?’ That is for his conscience, whether he has one or not.”

  The court ruled for Darrow. He and Lanehart secured the operating permits for Ogden Gas and Cosmopolitan Electric. As was predicted, after several years both firms were bought out by the trusts that furnished power and light to the city, and the boodlers reaped their profits. When bought, Darrow stayed bought. He was there at the finish in 1900, leading a legal and political crusade—bankrolled by Sullivan—to put pressure on the gas trust during the final negotiations.2

  Darrow may have received a cut, or merely earned an unsavory legal fee when saving the deal in court. He was candid enough not to make the distinction. “I undertook to serve this company … believing they had an ordinance procured by the aid of boodle,” he admitted. “I am satisfied that judged by the higher law … I am practically a thief.

  “I am taking money that I did not earn, which comes to me from men who did not earn it, but who get it because they have the chance to get it. I take it without performing any useful service to the world, and I take a thousand times as much as my services are worth even assuming they were useful and honest.”

  Darrow made this confession to Ellen Gates Starr, one of the founders of Hull House, who had scolded him in a scathing note, which he answered with a long, revealing letter. “I believe now that society is organized injustice,” Darrow told Starr. In such circumstances, how does a just man live his life? There were those who believed that Morrison Swift, a mutual friend who renounced a family fortune and joined the Commonweal protests, had taken the moral path. Swift “has perhaps done some good in his way by refusing to compromise with evil,” Darrow said. But in the end Swift’s ways were impractical and he and other absolutists were “shunned.” Darrow had chosen a different course. “I came to Chicago. I determined to take my chances with the rest, to get what I could out of the system and use it to destroy the system,” he said.

  He was not a child of a well-off family, like Swift and Starr. And “society provides no fund out of which … people can live while preaching heresy,” said Darrow. So “I have … sold my professional services to every corporation or individual who cared to buy,” said Darrow. “I have taken their ill-gotten gains and have tried to use it to prevent suffering.

  “I have defended the poor and weak, have done it without pay, will do it again,” he said. “I cannot defend them without bread, I cannot get this except from those who have it.”3

  NOW DARROW HAD the money to flee his unhappy home. He left Jessie and Paul in Chicago, and roamed Europe for two months. He toured the English countryside, saw Shakespeare’s grave, and wandered among the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The collapse of his marriage and his political defeats weighed on him, and he was in a gloomy mood when composing a dispatch for the Chicago Chronicle. “The man who believes in the cause and has the courage of his convictions finds … the way very lonely,” he wrote. “The tide of progress … leaves the long coast strewn with shattered hopes, ruined plans, defeated purposes and despondent men.”

  Darrow was happier in France. He delighted in the whitewashed houses, the medieval nooks, and the broad boulevards of Paris. He took a boat ride on the Seine, saw Notre Dame, and visited the grave of a favorite author, Victor Hugo, at the Pantheon. Above all stood Eiffel’s tower, rising “so light and graceful,” like “a cobweb fastened to the earth and spun from a star.” In the streets and cafés, Darrow fell hard for the French. “They laugh at the grotesque and absurd, and see all there is of life and light, of form and color, and find diversions and pleasures in little things,” he wrote. “This is the philosophy of life, to make the most out of the small things that are ever near us.

  “The large things are very rare, and existence would be much happier if they were rarer still,” said Darrow. “The great events are deaths … blood and war.”

  In Switzerland, Darrow climbed the Lauberhorn and joined the
family of a vacationing Iroquois club mate, Judge Barnum, for dinner. Darrow was a finicky eater who could not understand why tourists wasted “two mortal hours” each day at an elaborate evening meal. To her lasting delight, he grabbed the hand of Barnum’s daughter Gertrude and broke from the table. “He and I took a bob-tail car to its high destination, enjoyed cottage cheese and … wine with a goat herd and his wife and saw the Jungfrau at her noblest,” she recalled. Barnum insisted that no more happened, but of course she had to, as she was a single maid and he a married man. But there was a romantic something there, for she loved him deeply all her life.

  Darrow next wrote from Venice, where he found brigades of beggars, scenes of soul-wrenching poverty, and other evidence of imperial entropy wrapped in hypnotic sensuality. “When the sun goes down and the stars and moon come out then the spell of the past falls over the magic city and all the poetry and loveliness and romance of her ancient glory comes again,” he wrote. The lights of St. Mark’s Square “like a fairy scene” danced upon the water. “You step into a gondola, lie back … [and] muse upon the glories of the past, the splendors of the ancient world, the flight of time, the mutability of human things. You think and dream and dream and think until you do not know whether you dream or think or whether perchance all that is and all that was may be but a dream.”

  Delight and dread danced in turn. Out on the Grand Canal, he passed a black, shrouded gondola and asked his boatman to follow it. Away from the fairy city, they came to an island graveyard, where he had the “grim satisfaction” of confronting oblivion “while I yet could come away.”

  “Death is too common to deserve much space,” he wrote. “There was no reason why I should not meet it on the Grand Canal. For there is no island so remote, no mountain so inaccessible and no forest so dense to hide man from his all-searching gaze.” All the riches of Europe were but a “digression” from the inevitability of the grave. All art a distraction. All commerce a narcotic. Darrow left his readers with a final scene of “two old, beat, yellow women, one washing chicken’s gizzards and the other her feet” in the sewerage of the Grand Canal. The “shriveled crones” did “darkly stand out as the true Venice,” he wrote, “against the fading luster.”

  On the steamship home, this latter-day Odysseus passed the time with a shipmate, the politico Chauncey Depew, who spoke of what he had witnessed at the sacred grotto in Lourdes, where a seventeen-year-old girl, her leg swollen and covered in sores, had been dipped in the holy pool and pronounced cured. “I believe the miracles of the New Testament,” Depew said solemnly. “But until now I thought none like them had been wrought after that time.”

  “I don’t believe in any miracles at all,” Darrow said.4

  Darrow was still brooding a few weeks later when he gave a speech to the United Irish Societies of Chicago. A great war would soon grip Europe, he predicted, and in that cataclysm, for Irish and Marxist and other revolutionaries, “the opportunity of the disinherited will come.” Then he turned his vision toward America. “Civilization means something more than producing wealth, something besides inventing new ways to make buildings higher and kill hogs faster,” he said. “All the wealth of a great city cannot weigh against the barbarism of hanging one lunatic in Chicago or burning one Negro in Texas.” If war and revolution came, he told his listeners, they should “remember the long years in which the storm was rising,” and “not blame the thunderbolt.”5

  IN 1896, it was Paul and Jessie’s turn to tour Europe, as part of Darrow’s plan to obtain the divorce on the grounds that Jessie had deserted him. She was gracious, and agreed to be cited as the offending partner to preserve his professional standing. Darrow pledged to pay $150 a month—a generous amount—to support her. He signed over their house and other property, and gave her $25,000. He promised her custody of Paul, for “he is yours more than mine and he loves you more than he does me.”

  Jessie had seen signs. Her husband was “a man of the world,” she would recall. “He wanted to be free, to have no ties.” Years later, she told how “he was always good to me … always generous … I could never say anything against him in the world.” But she was devastated, after seventeen years of marriage, when he walked out. “It nearly killed me to give him up,” Jessie said. “But he never knew that. I never let him know.”

  Paul let him know. He was twelve when he and his mother were dispatched to Europe. Darrow saw them off at the station. When the divorce was filed, Paul told his father that he never wanted to see him again. Darrow had his freedom, but was racked with guilt, and wept when it was done.6

  HAD THERE BEEN a corespondent in Darrow’s divorce, it would probably have been Katherine Leckie, a spirited newspaper reporter who entered his life in Chicago. She was a few years younger than Darrow, the Canadian-born daughter of an English immigrant, who was working as a stenographer for the law department at City Hall when Darrow arrived there in 1889. She broke into journalism with the help of her cousin Archibald, one of the founders of the City News Bureau, who thought she was “brilliant” and “magnetic.”

  A friend recalled Leckie as the “warmest-hearted, reckless-souled idealist” working in Chicago’s newsrooms. The anarchistic Emma Goldman valued Leckie as a “strong and ardent” soldier in radical causes. When President McKinley was shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, authorities across the country cracked down on radicals, and Goldman was arrested and given the third degree. The press joined the hunt, except for Leckie, who called on Goldman in jail and pled her case with police officials. “He should be tried and convicted!” Leckie said of an officer who had struck Goldman. When her newspaper declined to print Leckie’s account, she resigned.

  Leckie’s strength and spirit may have attracted Darrow initially, but then put him off. After leaving Jessie, he savored bachelorhood and ardently resisted when women pressed him for commitment. He became infatuated with the daughter of John W. Dowd, a family friend of Darrow’s political and literary pal Brand Whitlock, who was then working in Toledo. Darrow started spending time there and urged Whitlock to commend him to “Miss Dowd,” to invite her to their outings, and to accompany them on an Adirondack vacation. Darrow was dallying, as well, with the young ladies who came to Chicago to work at Hull House and the other settlements. He had bounced about town after leaving home, ultimately settling in an apartment at the Langdon—a new “model tenement” building on Desplaines Street, not far from Hull House. Several of the young women of the settlement movement—Gertrude Barnum, Mary Field, Helen Todd, Amanda Johnson, and others—were enthralled by Darrow, and the wolf in him took advantage of it. Ultimately, Leckie left Chicago for New York, for a job with a friend of Darrow’s, the journalist and author Theodore Dreiser, at the Delineator magazine, and a life as an editor, pacifist, and suffragist.7

  Rambling about the social and political circuit, Darrow had discovered that his roguish complexity was a lure for ladies with a taste for Byronic heroes. Many were of a breed of “new women”—bright and self-reliant girls who wanted the freedom to develop their talents in art, journalism, or other fields and fell for this mysterious, defiant soul. “No man ever had more women friends or admirers,” said Natalie Schretter, who would join Darrow and his radical crowd at downtown saloons, drinking beer and eating cheese sandwiches and arguing about literature and politics as the baffled prostitutes and gamblers looked on from nearby tables. “All the gay levities Darrow had missed through a young marriage and a small town youth came to him.”

  Darrow relished sex, and savored the chase. His friend was “very highly sexed,” said pastor Preston Bradley, who led a liberal congregation called the People’s Church in Chicago. “I don’t think there was one Madame X. I think there were many because Darrow did enjoy feminine company, and he looked at it as a conquest.” Darrow saw sex as evidence of vitality, as well. “Hell, can he still fuck a woman?” he would ask, when judging an aged acquaintance.

  Some of these young feminists embraced the doctrines of the free love mov
ement, which called for relationships based on sexual and emotional compatibility, not repressive statutes. In Victorian America, “love as usually practiced and understood means possession—the obvious possession of the wife’s person, all the way … to the subtle possession of her mind,” wrote Mary Field. The new women sought to change that.

  “The choice was between a despised, lonely and childless future, or marriage on the terms of a ‘man’s world,’ ” Gertrude Barnum recalled. She and the others “chose not to surrender our own integrity.” They insisted on “a marriage of true minds” and, while searching, “took strenuous part in campaigns for the political and economic independence of women, and helped greatly in changing the status of the female of the day.” But, she recalled: “What a price we paid.” Darrow was a rake, but not a heel. He bedded these starry-eyed idealists, but he did not mislead them. He would “declare himself liberal-minded about associations twixt men and women, single or married,” said Ruby Hamerstrom, a journalist whom he wooed, and gave them fair warning that he would “never succumb to any one woman.”8

  Darrow opened a new law office with two former associates, William Thompson and Morris St. P. Thomas, and offered a desk to Francis Wilson, his ex-wife’s cousin. He and Wilson rented two adjacent flats at the Langdon and, after pulling down a dividing wall, had the Gilded Age version of a bachelor pad. The Langdon had hardwood floors, enameled bathtubs and marble sinks, fireplaces flanked by bookshelves, and an open interior courtyard that brought in air and light. They added a red rug and drapes, an incandescent painting by the Norwegian American impressionist Svend Svendsen, and two andirons in the shape of cats, whose glass eyes flashed with each flare of the fire.

  Darrow reveled in his bohemian lifestyle. “These were the days of the Roycroft influence in furniture and book binding, of stuffed chairs, fumed oak and soft leather formats; of the Ballad of Reading Gaol, of Omar Khayyám, of the rights of labor; of the melting pots,” Masters wrote. “Of the rights of the misunderstood harlot … of the muck rake.” Darrow’s friends were “ramshackle star gazers; twisted and aborted sprouts of genius; world savers,” Masters recalled, and “many women from thirty to forty … swept under the influence … by amorous hopes and fulfillments.”