Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  “It is well for them to say we are anarchists and criminals, that we are drunkards, that we are profligates, that we cannot speak the English language, that we are unruly boys,” Darrow responded. “But it would come with far better grace from them if they could show that ever once, ever once in all their administration of these lands and of these natural bounties which Mr. Baer thinks the Lord gave to him to administer, that ever once they have considered anyone but themselves.”

  At times Darrow stood there, in his swallow-tailed coat, vest, and black tie, talking in conversational tones. But then he would crouch and stride across the floor, wheel toward the crowd, and thunder. He would pose, with his right hand in his pocket and his left arm raised, or wag his index finger like a rapier. As he built toward a climax he’d raise his voice, wave his right arm high, form a fist, and bring it crashing down. “In the vicinity of Scranton are at least twenty mills—silk mills, knitting mills, thread mills—where little girls from twelve to thirteen or fourteen years of age are working ten hours a day, twelve hours a day, and twelve hours at night as well,” he said. “Is there any man so blind that he does not know why that anthracite region is dotted with silk mills?

  “They went there because the miners were there,” Darrow said. “They went there just as naturally as the wild beast goes to find its prey; they went there as the hunter goes where he can find game. Every mill in that region is a testimony to the fact that the wages that you pay are so low that you sell your boys to be slaves of the breaker and your girls to be slaves in the mills.

  “I have no doubt the railroad president loves children,” Darrow said. “Neither have I any doubt that the wolf loves mutton.”

  If it was an industrial war, if there was violence, then the operators must share the blame, Darrow said. Eight or nine men may have been killed, and “here and there dynamite was used, never once to destroy life, always to frighten,” he acknowledged. But what of the widows and children of the miners killed beneath the earth, and of the Coll family and others who suffered at the hands of the industry and its stooges?

  “There are all kinds of violence in this world,” he said.

  “I KNOW THAT we speak in a way against things that are. I believe that we dream of things that are yet to come,” Darrow said, as he neared the end of his plea.

  “Judge us in the light of all the impossibilities that confronted us; in the light of the severe travail through which we passed; in the light of the material which we were bound to use; in the light of the fearful, appalling odds that we faced,” he asked.

  “The blunders are theirs,” he said, referring to Baer and the other operators. “The blunders are theirs because, in this old, old strife, they are fighting for slavery, while we are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the rule of man over man, for despotism, for darkness, for the past. We are striving to build up man. We are working for democracy, for humanity, for the future.”

  When he was done, the transcript says, there was “great and long continued applause.” The demonstration lasted five minutes or more, as folks crowded around Darrow to congratulate him. Mitchell was the first, grasping his lawyer’s hand in thanks and approval. And “many of the capitalist women,” Lloyd noted, “were quite carried away.”

  Darrow “began the day before with … the commission … almost openly against him. He closed with their undivided interest and admiration,” said Lloyd. His friend was a man of “iron nerves and steel strength,” he wrote. “After making that day and a half speech … he went out to dinner.”12

  The commission’s final report gave the UMW much of what it wanted. “A good, substantial victory,” Darrow told the press. “We didn’t get all we asked, but what we did get is better than what we agreed to take last winter.” There was a 10 percent raise and the adoption of an eight- or nine-hour day, depending on a man’s duties. The commission urged the state to replace the industry’s private police force with professional agencies answerable to the public, and to crack down on child labor abuses. But while happy with the decision, Darrow scorned the dicta. The commissioners chastised strikers for the violence and did not require that the coal operators recognize the union. In defending the “open shop” principles of industry, the commissioners had behaved in a “most cowardly” way, he told Lloyd.

  It was, nevertheless, a remarkable achievement. Unions were joining the American mainstream. “The opinion of the commission is that trade unionism has come to stay and that employers must deal with these conditions,” Darrow said. “That is a great victory.” When Samuel Gompers was asked, years later, to pick the most crucial battle in organized labor’s struggle in America, he chose the Great Strike of 1902. Mitchell’s leadership, the drama of the hearings, and the arrogant behavior of the coal barons had convinced the public, and even a Republican president, that labor deserved a voice in American economic affairs.

  There was a feeling, among unionists, that a tide had turned. Roosevelt was going after the trusts, and would soon call for federal income and inheritance taxes on the men he called “the malefactors of great wealth.” But the robber barons would not be caught off guard again. There would be more industrial crises, and extremists on both sides, hardened in the war, would turn to kidnapping, murder, and dynamite.13

  DARROW RETURNED TO Chicago, where on February 16, six thousand people braved cold and snowy weather to welcome him, Lloyd, and Mitchell at the Auditorium. Darrow spoke, without a script, for ninety minutes. It was probably thirty minutes too long, Lloyd told his wife, but a marvelous feat of oratory just the same.

  Darrow now faced a choice he had postponed as the coal commission finished its work. There was a viable movement to elect him mayor of Chicago. He was forty-five years old. If he was serious about a career in politics, this was his great chance.

  It wasn’t only radicals who urged Darrow to run. Carter Harrison Jr., who had been elected mayor in 1897, had parted from the Svengali who had guided his career, the Democratic chieftain Robert “Bobbie” Burke, after the jovial rascal had been indicted for pocketing public funds. Seeking revenge, Burke joined the mayor’s enemies, and cast about for someone to defeat him. Darrow could win the votes of liberals and laborers, and yet the Democratic organization knew him as “a man you can talk to.” And so Darrow was approached by both radical unionists and machine Democrats and urged to run for mayor.

  “You now have an opportunity in this city such as comes to but few men in a generation, and seldom to the same man twice,” a socialist editor, A. M. Simons, told him. It was an appealing proposition, but Darrow—immersed in the coal hearings, hundreds of miles from Chicago—was in a terrible position to weigh it. “I am told that … I can have the Democratic nomination by saying the word and that election would surely follow,” Darrow told the Daily News. But “I do not know these things of my own knowledge.”

  Were the radical forces united and strong? His friend Thomas Kidd, the woodworkers’ chief, thought not. The unions in Chicago were split into factions, and engaged in a struggle for control of the local Federation of Labor, complete with “scenes of wild disorder,” the papers said, that featured “slugging and the firing of revolvers.” Could Darrow believe Burke’s sweet promises? Would he split the progressive vote and help elect a Republican? And, most important, did he really want to be mayor?

  “I hate the fight and trouble and worry of a political campaign. I am getting lazy and like my friends and books, etc., and would rather be left alone,” he told Daniel Cruice, a young labor lawyer who was helping to organize the boom. Darrow also knew that in order to be elected, he would have to forfeit his independence. “I do not believe that a fellow like me could get a Democratic nomination. By the time he got it, he would be so tied up that he would be like any other political hack.”

  Such questions could not be answered in Scranton or Philadelphia. So Darrow stalled. “I have been quoted as saying to friends of Mr. Harrison that I would not be a candidate,” Darrow told George Schilling in a letter
from Philadelphia. But Schilling should pass the word: “I have made no such statements, no pledges of any kind.” The crowd of young radicals took this as a “yes,” and ordered fifty thousand “Darrow for Mayor” campaign buttons. If Gompers and Mitchell supported him, and Hearst’s American pushed his candidacy, he might even be elected.14

  The capitalists were aghast. Should Darrow be elected, warned the National Manufacturers Association, Chicago would see “the red flower of anarchy in perfect political bloom.” But many radicals also showed a lack of enthusiasm. “Mr. Darrow … is essentially a sentimentalist,” wrote the socialist leader Daniel De Leon in the Daily People. “He is of that sympathetic class, among the well-to-do and professional men, whose heart does more bleeding for the woes of the workingman than its head does thinking.” The working class needed to elect its own leaders, said De Leon, not look to be saved by the feckless bourgeoisie. “The road that leads over the Darrows must be blocked.”15 And Gompers and Mitchell were cool to the idea. “You ought not be wasted,” said Gompers, urging Darrow to devote his “great gifts of heart and brain” to the labor movement. “Poor Darrow … he cannot make up his mind,” Lloyd wrote, after joining an all-day meeting of Darrow’s advisers at his law office on February 21. “He thinks this may be his ‘opportunity.’ ”

  As Hamlet brooded, the Harrison forces were not idle. The mayor took a bold stance on municipal ownership of the streetcar lines, depriving Darrow of that popular issue. A businessman working for Harrison paid $9,000 to teamster boss John Driscoll to undermine Darrow’s union support. And word came to Darrow that the American would not be with him. Hearst had his own political ambitions—to win the White House in 1904—and needed Harrison in Illinois.16 “If the American had seen fit to be with me, it could have been accomplished,” Darrow told Cruice. But “the American would support Harrison to satisfy some of Mr. Hearst’s political ambitions.”

  Darrow announced that he would not run, and Cruice was nominated by the unionists instead. In assessing the episode, it is hard not to believe that Darrow made the right choice. “I value my independence more than I do any office,” he said. And that was surely true.17

  DARROW’S PERFORMANCE IN the coal strike had brought him fame and prominence. He was now the nation’s leading labor lawyer. But notoriety made Darrow a target, as well. His actions were spotlighted and his flaws magnified. When announcing that he would not run for mayor, Darrow had promised Cruice not to endorse another candidate, and “to do you some good at the right time.” It was a hasty pledge, which he almost immediately broke, inspiring withering criticism.

  The quandary was the streetcar war. The transit companies were maneuvering to kill all legislation that would give the city the authority to own and operate its streetcars. Darrow was a leader in the movement for municipal ownership. He knew Cruice could not win and that Harrison was far stronger on the issue than the Republican candidate. Judge Edward Dunne, a colleague in the movement, asked Darrow to endorse the mayor. In return, Darrow would get patronage jobs for his friends, and Harrison’s backing should he choose to make a run for higher office. Cruice and his supporters were stunned, and then incensed, by the news. DARROW BRANDED A LABOR TRAITOR … A STAB IN THE BACK, read the headlines in the Tribune.

  “When Clarence S. Darrow was defending men who had bribed juries in cases where crippled children were asking for justice from the traction companies which had injured them, it was explained in extenuation that he was acting as ‘a lawyer.’ I suppose it will be explained he is acting as ‘a lawyer’ now,” an angry unionist, William Burns, sputtered at a rally. Another old ally, Altgeld’s friend Joe Martin, called Darrow “a creature of purchase.”

  In a letter to Cruice, Darrow tried to explain. “It [was] a promise which, if I should keep … would mean that I would help sacrifice the rights of the people of Chicago,” he wrote. Responding to accusations that he defended unions only for fat fees, Darrow offered a public accounting. He received $1,000 for his months of work in the Debs case, he said, and $10,000 in the coal arbitration. “I closed my office for four months” to represent the miners, Darrow noted. “I told them that ordinarily I would charge $100 a day but that I would take their case and when I got through they could pay me what they liked, or nothing at all. I got them a raise of $8 million and $3 million in back pay and I sent them a bill for $10,000 … I would have sent a corporation a bill for $50,000 for the same work.”

  Harrison won a fourth term. The Democrats kept control of City Hall. The results were tight enough that Darrow’s decisions not to run and to endorse the mayor almost certainly made the difference. But Darrow’s radical friends felt betrayed, and the episode stoked his reputation for guile and trickery.18

  Chapter 7

  RUBY, ED, AND CITIZEN HEARST

  Ruby and me, we both love Darrow.

  In July 1903, Darrow married Ruby Hamerstrom. For years he had vowed that no new wife would claim his freedom, and so his friends were stunned by the news. A private ceremony was performed by Judge Edward Dunne, attended only by Ruby’s brother Fred and Darrow’s law partner and roommate, Francis Wilson, who had been charged with quietly securing the marriage license, slipping through the doors of the bureau just before they shut for the day. There were champagne toasts and then Darrow and Ruby, evading the press, took a train to Montreal, where they boarded the steamship Bavarian for Europe. Darrow spent much of the voyage seasick in his berth, as Ruby read to him from a history of France. She had dreams of a six-month, or longer, trip around the world. But Darrow’s investments were faring poorly, and they returned to Chicago in mid-October.

  Ruby was “incurably in love,” she confessed. “He seemed to be all sorts and all ages, from the boy that he never outgrew to the old man that he never became.” And he was smitten. She was not a striking beauty, but pretty and fashionable. She qualified as a new woman but not so militant and, once married, content to be, as she described herself, “the weed in the knot of the tail of The Kite.” She wrote for the women’s sections, not the front page, and of trends and fashions, not politics or crime. “You can’t really expect good Irish wit from a Swede … that wears French heels, I s’pose,” she told Darrow’s sister Jennie.1

  Yet Ruby had wit enough to land him. “He said … that I was the only girl he ever liked that much who didn’t take the courting out of his hands,” she said proudly. In Darrow’s divorce, he had to “relinquish his every last dollar’s worth of property for his release,” Ruby noted, but she promised she would never ask for alimony.

  At eighteen, Ruby had rebelled against the dour strictures of her Lutheran home, where she had been expected to help her mother raise her six siblings. She fled from Galesburg to Chicago and the life of a newspaperwoman. Ruby had not finished high school but got work as a bookkeeper, looked for freelance assignments, and discovered a demand for stories about the doings of middle-class women—their clubs and trips and causes. She and Darrow had decided to marry in 1902, and she hoped to buy a nice house, with elm trees and a lawn.

  “Just a word tonight, instead of a Christmas present, to tell you that I think you are the dearest, sweetest girl on earth,” Darrow wrote her on Christmas Eve. “I love you with my whole heart and want you all to myself and I hope that this is the last Christmas so long as I live that I can not have you as I want you—all for my own.”

  “Goodnight dearest sweetheart,” he signed the note. “Remember that you are always loved by your crazy old Clarence Darrow.”

  Ruby was not ruled by social conventions. She accepted Darrow’s Negro friends. She liked to have a drink or two at parties or a restaurant. As women gave up their corseted, floor-sweeping gowns for more liberating fashions, Ruby was an early enthusiast. And she had a modern view of marriage. “My informant … told me that in addition to Darrow being a Socialist, both he and his wife are free lovers,” wrote a Pinkerton detective, spying on the couple. “The wife made the statement this evening that a man had a right to desert his wife and fa
mily if he felt like it.” As long as no rival made a serious claim on Ruby’s place in Darrow’s life (“You’ve got the certificate, and no one will ever get that away from you,” he told her), she tolerated his infidelities. But she was conventional enough to fret about social standing, and she could be snobbish and catty; she liked nice things, and prized the wealthy and prominent company he kept.

  Darrow’s brothers and sisters, who had maintained a warm relationship with Jessie and Paul, tried to make Ruby feel welcome. They were open-minded; the aged Amirus had taken a far younger second wife as well. But Paul did not warm to Ruby, and she thought he was spoiled and stubborn and manipulative when exploiting his father’s guilt over the divorce. Paul “appropriated every dollar available that his father permitted him to help himself to,” she griped. Ruby was jealous, as well, of the hooks that Jessie still had in Darrow. She sulked after learning that Jessie left the marriage with real estate and a lovely set of diamonds and told Darrow’s sisters that Jessie’s controlling nature was the cause of the breakup.

  Nor did Jessie much like Ruby, whom she instantly identified as a threat to her financial well-being. Darrow was still supporting Jessie with monthly payments, and would until she remarried, late in life. From Europe he wrote to assure her that there was enough money for them all, and that the stipends would continue. “I shall live where I did before or in some cheap house nearby and shall not spend money or be extravagant in any way,” he promised Jessie. “So long as I live you will both come first.” Ruby accepted this, Darrow promised Jessie. It was a dubious claim. The cost of maintaining a wife and an ex-wife is a reason why, though Darrow earned high fees, he was generally on edge about money. He took to speculating in the stock market, and in banks and gold mines and other ventures, but had no gift for it.