AS DARROW WORKED his way out of debt, his client list was the usual assortment—a rich glimpse of the social, legal, and economic disputes at the century’s turn.
On behalf of his friend William O. Thompson—who was married to one of the young ladies—Darrow conducted shuttle diplomacy among the three comely daughters of a local King Lear, a wealthy capitalist whose fortune needed dividing. One brother-in-law took to loitering near the mansion with a revolver. When he was banished by the family, his wife rushed to join him, crying, “I still love him” and—to the delight of the gossips of tony Hinsdale—“suffered a heart shock and fell in a swoon” on the lawn. The affair seemed destined for a scandalous legal confrontation until Darrow helped them reach a settlement.
Sex and money were the culprits again when Darrow went to the aid of the wealthy Anna Boysen, who had been arrested in a rooming house with her young skating instructor, Rudolph Hough, and charged with illegal cohabitation. The warrants for the arrest had been procured by Boysen’s mother, Helen Leet, who insisted that Anna was a floozy given to drink, drugs, and carousing and could not be trusted to administer her finances. But Darrow told reporters that Anna had been deserted by her husband, and that Leet was taking advantage of her daughter’s predicament to steal her money. Anna and Rudolph were just good friends, Darrow insisted. Once again, he got the warring sides to settle.
Darrow took the case of lawyer Charles F. Davies, who was charged with blackmail after accepting a $3,200 payment from Charles Foster, a prominent Cadillac car executive who had four wives. And then there was the juicy divorce of Sidney Love, a broker whose spectacular financial collapse was accompanied by accusations that he married an English heiress for her money, and whose story delighted headline writers (“Love Will Try Again”). Darrow represented William Henley, a former judge and railroad president accused of embezzlement, and John Ericson, the city engineer, who allegedly distributed public funds to his friends. He defended distillery operators charged in federal court with tax evasion. He took a $500 fee from local theatrical interests that wanted to have underage actors exempted from child labor rules. And he unsuccessfully represented the crooked directors of a Kankakee, Illinois, manufacturing firm that was sued for defrauding investors. Some clients were seriously unsavory. Darrow represented Willis Rayburn, one of three men—including Nicholas Martin, the private secretary to Alderman Hinky Dink Kenna—charged with bribing juries. And he went to court for Simon Tuckhorn, a pimp, gambler, and lieutenant of Mont Tennes, the gambling kingpin.8
THE ARMIES OF the Progressive movement were finding it hard to know what to think about Darrow. He was invariably crossing them up—heroic one day, contemptible the next.
In November 1908, the criminal court clerk, Abram Harris, and a number of hangers-on were indicted for election fraud. Harris hired Darrow, who noted that the charges were filed under the new statute that created a direct primary election system. He decided to challenge the law. VOTE TAINTERS SEEK LOOPHOLE, the Tribune declared. The direct primary was a prized accomplishment of reformers in the Progressive Era, for opening up the party nominating process to the voters. Now Darrow was arguing for the other side.
“A decision favorable to Attorney Darrow’s contention means the death of the primary law … and a chaos in Chicago and Cook County politics,” the paper reported. Darrow, “who has been rated as one of the leading high brows in political thought, has permitted himself to fall into a condition of skepticism.” When the trial judge rejected Darrow’s argument, he and his partners took the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, and won. The law was overturned, the special prosecutor was dismissed, and Darrow’s clients walked free.
But in the same weeks that Darrow was undermining electoral reform, he endeared himself to liberals by representing a Russian revolutionary named Christian Rudowitz.
The case had its roots in the doomed Revolution of 1905, when workers rose against the czar, Nicholas II. Hundreds of protesters were killed outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg when the imperial guard opened fire. Martial law was declared, and Cossacks were dispatched to slaughter socialist sympathizers.
A month after the Cossack raids, on a gloomy night in January 1906, three horse-drawn sleighs crossed the snowcapped Baltic landscape to the home of Theodore Kinze. Masked men armed with muskets entered the house, accused Kinze’s wife of being a government spy, shot her and her parents, and set the place on fire. Rudowitz, a young carpenter, fled to Chicago to escape the subsequent reprisals.
The czarist government asked U.S. officials to extradite Rudowitz, and he was arrested in November 1908. He admitted that he had participated in the socialist meeting that condemned the Kinze family to death. Informers were shot and their houses burned, he said, in retaliation for the Cossack atrocities: “It was right that they should die also.” But he insisted that he had not been one of the executioners.
The evidence against Rudowitz was weak. Mrs. Kinze’s brother declared at the time of the murders that he could not identify the killers, but “official Russia reached the conclusion that this deposition … did not prove as much as was desirable,” an immigration expert noted, and recollections were “refreshed.” The facts “which seem truthful are vague and those which are definite have the earmarks of having been manufactured.”
A movement to free Rudowitz was organized in Chicago. Debs, Addams, and others enlisted. The Political Refugee Defense League was established, with headquarters at Hull House, to circulate tens of thousands of pamphlets with the title: “Shall America Soil Her Hands in Blood?” Darrow led a team of lawyers and law professors. They filled the three-hundred-page record with authenticated accounts of czarist torture, killings, and other cruelties. At the extradition hearing, Darrow took on the job of examining Rudowitz and made the closing statement. The room was crowded with adults and children, “many of them carrying scars of the Cossack’s lash,” the papers reported.
“It has been the policy of this government since its birth to grant political exiles an asylum,” Darrow said. “If that rule cannot hold in this case, then … none of the oppressed who have rebelled against tyrannical rules of other countries can look to this country.”
The record proved that the killings were a revolutionary act, he argued, and that Rudowitz deserved asylum. “The struggle for freedom now in progress in Russia is the greatest revolution in the history of the world,” Darrow said. “It is the greatest drama and tragedy of modern times, and will not end until the people of that country have been given freedom.”
The U.S. immigration commissioner was unmoved. But the case was now a national cause. Addams wrote to Roosevelt. Sam Gompers led a delegation of AFL officials to the White House. There were protest meetings on college campuses and some four thousand socialists held a masquerade ball in Chicago—young women in scandalous short-skirted costumes or even “Turkish trousers”—singing out the “Marseillaise” and heckling actors portraying Uncle Sam, the czar, and his executioners. Darrow traveled to Washington and submitted a long brief to the State Department. On January 26, as one of the Roosevelt administration’s final actions, Secretary of State Elihu Root announced that Rudowitz would be freed.9
IT WAS AROUND this time—in the latter part of 1908 or early 1909—that the fifty-one-year-old Darrow met the thirty-year-old Mary Field. They were introduced at a protest rally. It may have been a Rudowitz meeting; in later years, she could not remember. (“Somebody was jailed, or somebody was striking or somebody wanted higher wages.”) After Darrow finished his speech, his old Desplaines Street neighbor Helen Todd brought them together.
Todd was working with the Elm Street settlement house, trying to save young David Anderson from the gallows. She prevailed on Darrow to take the case, and he argued that the state should not be executing a nineteen-year-old who, even if guilty of shooting a policeman, had been represented by a disbarred lawyer. Days before the hanging, the governor and the parole board heard Darrow’s plea, and commuted the sentence to life im
prisonment.
Mary was a veteran of the settlement world, a social worker with literary ambitions and socialistic leanings. She was spirited, clever, idealistic, and pretty—just the kind of independent “new woman” to whom Darrow was drawn. Darrow cheated on his “silly little” wife, and had “many affairs,” Mary’s sister Sara recalled. “But always his … love affairs were with intellectual women.”
In a letter to a friend, Columbia University professor Randolph Bourne described the “new woman” of the era as if he were writing about Mary. “They are all social workers, or magazine writers in a small way. They are decidedly emancipated and advanced, and … thoroughly healthy and zestful,” he said. “They shock you constantly … They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, and innocence and self-reliance, which absolutely belies everything you will read in the story-books or any other description of womankind … They enjoy the adventure of life; the full, reliant audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new woman isn’t to be a very splendid sort of person.”
Mary was one of three daughters of a rigid Baptist father and a devout Quaker mother. The girls inherited their mother’s gentle idealism and their father’s will. Mary defied his order that she attend a small religious college, borrowed money, and enrolled at the University of Michigan—a stunning act of independence for a young woman in the 1890s. He banished her from their home.10
Like Darrow, Mary worked as a teacher for a time, in a one-room school in rural Michigan. After hearing Debs speak one night, she applied to Hull House, where Addams passed her name to Graham Taylor at the Chicago Commons. There, she gave English classes, and taught parenting to immigrant mothers and helped deliver babies. “I came to the Commons in a glow of enthusiasm for service among the plain people,” she recalled. “I was so happy.” She thought Addams was “very wise,” but Saint Jane did not return her regard—she viewed Mary as saucy and irreverent.
Mary had several suitors in Chicago, including a Russian diplomat, a police inspector who presented her with the comb of a notorious murderess, and a wealthy young man who gave her a set of pearl-handled golf clubs and an engagement ring. She called off the marriage when, in an argument at a party, he slapped a cocktail from her hands; it reminded her of her father’s cruelty. Another affair ended ruinously when her lover—a black-haired Irish newspaperman who lived at the Commons and took her to anarchist lectures—disclosed he was betrothed to another woman. Mary had “peaks of ecstasy and elation” that could be followed by “descents into the valley of despondency,” her sister Sara said.
Mary’s breakup with the journalist helped feed a disillusionment with settlement life. “I grew to doubt everything,” she wrote Taylor. Charity work seemed but a palliative, insufficient without greater social change. She feared that the “good is the enemy of the best.” Taylor hoped a move would do Mary good, and she was named co-director of the Maxwell Street Settlement House, in a neighborhood of impoverished Jewish immigrants known as “Little Russia.” There, in the spring of 1908, she gained some notoriety when Lazarus Averbuch, a student in her English class, was shot five times on the doorstep of the city police chief.
Chief George Shippy claimed Averbuch forced his way into his vestibule and attacked him. But Chicago’s radicals raged at what they suspected was an unjustified shooting of an innocent beggar. Mary joined in the legal strategy meetings, helped arrange for the disinterment and autopsy of Averbuch’s body, and sheltered his sister Olga at the settlement.11 “Chicago had its spree and its excitement and its hysterics … things quieted down … [and] it was forgotten,” Mary recalled. But the Averbuch incident had been a “blow upon the settlements. They were criticized for harboring young radicals, and particularly anarchists,” she said. “It gave them the name of nurseries of communism.” Concluding that her “usefulness had been impaired,” she left Maxwell Street and the Commons.
Mary knew Darrow by reputation. But though he topped the bill at big public rallies, he was not a daily part of settlement activities, nor did he attend the endless sessions where protests or programs were planned. “He was always called the lone wolf. He never went to those meetings,” she recalled. “He used to go off with a little group of people and read Tolstoy … a group of fellow travelers in the suburbs that has sympathy with the poor people.”
Mary was entering her thirties now, considered herself a modern woman, and agreed with Darrow that enlightened adults should be able to pair up, unfettered by religious and social conventions. She was drawn to him, turned to him for favors, and aided him in his work. When an itinerant gypsy family begged her for money to avoid arrest, Mary asked Darrow for the $10 or $25 they needed. He laughed at the uselessness of jailing gypsies, and reached into his pocket. “He never carried money in a billfold. He always had it rolled in funny little bunches in his pocket,” Mary recalled. “I always asked him if he blew his nose on his money because it always came out like a dirty handkerchief.”12
Mary took dictation, typed his letters, and helped him with clients. They stole away to join Sara on a holiday and visited her in Cleveland, where her liberal beliefs and charity work as the wife of a Baptist minister had brought her to the attention of Progressive mayor Tom Johnson and his circle. Mary saw Darrow’s flaws. He was “inclined to be stingy” with money—making her take streetcars instead of cabs—and could be sloppy, short-tempered, and crude. But all that paled before his “infinite compassion.” Moreover, he was famous and his life was exciting, and he shared her militancy for the cause of labor. “I have never known anybody like him,” she recalled. “You couldn’t help but love a person like that.”
Darrow took her to lunch at workingmen’s cafés, and occasionally to dinner, and, ultimately, to bed. He called her Moll or Molly. She called him Darrow. “He had lots of girls,” she recalled. “Women all liked him. And he understood women.” At the same time, he was a married man, wary of scandal and “very cautious.” There was a tension in Darrow’s marriage. He “often used the phrase, ‘women’s biological excuse for existence’ and was contemptuous of childless women,” his friend Natalie Schretter recalled. “Women who otherwise adored him bristled with distaste when he would make those biting remarks, especially as everyone guessed that the dearest dream of his wife—to have a child—could never be fulfilled.”
Mary had few illusions about their relationship; she was a convenience. On a sweltering day in July 1909, she was overwhelmed with panic when, after fainting on a downtown sidewalk, she realized she had no proof of identity aside from some papers she was carrying for Darrow. She phoned him, but he had left for the day, for home and Ruby. She was alone and hungry and could not even afford to buy a train ticket to Cleveland to see Sara. She wept hysterically at “the sudden and blinding realization that my life meant nothing to anyone.”
Mary resolved to leave. Darrow was gracious, and caring in his way. He gave her money to move to New York, sent her cash to live on, and called on Dreiser and other friends to get her assignments as a magazine writer. She found a flat overlooking the East River and joined the bohemians of Greenwich Village, alive with “atheists, cubists, poets, free-thinkers, free-lovers, women with bobbed hair and intellectuals … philosophers, artists, reporters and musicians,” one writer observed. Here were Goldman and Ben Reitman, Steffens, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Mabel Dodge, and Max Eastman. Mary and her friends stayed up late, debating momentous issues over cheap red wine or cups of strong coffee in the city’s cafés. She sold three stories for $1,200 and vacationed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she shared a house with Gertrude Barnum and met Eugene O’Neill. In time, she was invited to join the feminist Heterodoxy Club. “This is a precarious living, off the fruits of one’s pen, yet there are always the friends who come to one’s help,” she told Sara. “I know I can always ask Clarence Darrow freely for aid.”
Darrow teased her in his letters (“We will have to stop praising you pretty soon, or you will lose your head
, poor little Miss Field”) and said how much he missed her (“Damn if I wouldn’t like to see you, Molly dear”) and visited her in New York when he could. He and a friend picked up Mary and an actress for a weekend of Broadway, dinners, and a picnic in the country where Mary and the men took off their shoes and strolled barefoot through the grass. They listened to Darrow read from Bret Harte’s Western tales, and he stopped her from plucking violets because “It’s a shame to break up their little love affairs.” And “so we left them,” Mary reported to Sara, “aching demurely as violets do.”
Then Darrow returned to Chicago, and once more she felt the pain of “having no one who cares a damn.”
SO THE LOVERS parted—for a time. Mary was more than just one of Darrow’s “girls.” She had come to represent vitality and ardor to an aging, somewhat lost, hero who had just returned from a brush with death. The reminders of his own mortality were insistent. In September 1909, while on a speaking tour in the state of Washington, he was again seriously ill. And in November 1909, his sister Mary passed away. For a year she had lost sleep over a lawsuit she had filed against their late brother Hubert’s business partners; Darrow took over the case, and won the judgment. A few days after her death, he hosted a séance at his apartment, trying to make contact with her spirit. With a group of other radicals, he welcomed and listened to Swami Abhedananda, an Indian holy man. Darrow began to daydream about founding a “colony” in California, where intellectuals could write and reflect and practice their free love creed.
“He talks at some length to me regarding coming to Southern California to live, in a sort of retirement, and of purchasing a place where he could live and work, surrounded by such congenial friends as he might choose,” said Henry Coit, a California banker in a letter to a friend. Darrow hoped to build the retreat along the path of a planned streetcar line from Pasadena or in the mission town of San Juan Capistrano, and profit as the value of the real estate grew. “If I had the courage I would move to California,” Darrow wrote his friend, San Francisco editor Fremont Older, “but I still have to earn some money and am a little afraid to make the change.”
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 25
