ONE OLD FRIEND who was tainted by scandal did not get Darrow’s help. Edgar Lee Masters had stewed for a decade over the $9,000 he claimed he was owed from the Haywood case. Although Darrow “seemed generous, in fact he was inordinately selfish, penurious and greedy,” Masters said. “He was fleet, false and perjured and had boxed every compass in Chicago.”
In early 1916, Masters lashed at Darrow in verse. He sent a poem called “On a Bust” to Reedy at the Mirror.
A giant as we hoped, in truth, a dwarf;
A barrel of slop that shines on Lethe’s wharf,
Which at first seemed a vessel with sweet wine
For thirsty lips. So down the swift decline
You went through sloven spirit, craven heart
And cynic indolence. And here the art
Of molding clay has caught you for the nonce
And made your shame our shame—Your head in bronze!
“I get ‘The Bust.’ It means Clarence Darrow or nobody,” Reedy wrote Masters. “It is a scathing thing and, while I recognize its truth, somehow I feel sorry that you did it.”
Masters was riding high at the time—in late 1914 Reedy had announced that the lawyer-poet was the author of the Spoon River poems, which were published to critical acclaim and phenomenal commercial success. Masters finally had his fame. He bought himself a country home and hired more servants. The attack on Darrow was published in the eagerly anticipated follow-up, Songs and Satires, which every critic in America would see.6
Darrow was furious, but with formidable—Masters would say “reptilian”—cunning, he took revenge in actions whose malice were all the more impressive for the long sweep of time in which they unfolded. Darrow steeped Masters in flattery, bought copies of his books, talked him up in the growing literary circles of the Chicago Renaissance, and sent adoring women his way. “He seemed magnanimous,” Masters recalled. But the poet’s marriage was not surviving what he dismissed as “lighthearted adulteries.” He left his wife, Helen, but she refused to divorce him. It was at this point that Darrow, assuring Masters that he had nothing but affection toward him, started acting as a confessor and adviser to them both.
Masters wrote Darrow, worrying that “in a time of storm, rain is likely to fall and flowers can be splotched from the spatter.”
“Of course you know me well enough to know that I would never … try to make you any trouble in court or out,” Darrow told his old partner. “My relations with both parties might make it possible for me to assist both of you which of course I will do without any thought of compensation, except friendship.”
Masters discovered what was in store for him when Helen filed suit for support. The dispute—and the poet’s womanizing—were splashed in the press. Masters staged a reconciliation, but he and Helen quarreled and he struck her. That too made the newspapers. In the final divorce agreement, the author lost his house, his country home, his children, and his fortune. Darrow “unquestionably waited for a chance to revenge himself,” Masters concluded. “He approached me extending his hand with an ingratiating smile.” Too late, Masters saw what happened. Helen “is in the hands of Darrow, avaricious and sordid,” the poet told a friend. “He is revenging himself for the poems I wrote on him … I’ll make that son of a bitch the most detestable figure in American history.”
There were lulls in Masters’s hatred. In 1922 he wrote two laudatory poems, the shorter of which read:
This is Darrow,
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart,
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox
And his sadness, and kindness,
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.
More characteristic was what Masters told Carter Harrison Jr. of Darrow some twenty years later. “He was a dishonest mind and man. He was a quitter and a betrayer both of men and women and causes,” the poet wrote. “They will try to get a bust of him and make him an heir of fame, but what he did in life, his dishonesty and his treachery and his selfish grabbing and living will seep up from the grass of any pedestal and fill the circumambient air with feculence.”7
When he wrote his autobiography, Masters never mentioned Darrow by name. In Darrow’s autobiography, Masters is not mentioned at all.
Time was dealing harshly with all of Darrow’s friends. Mary suffered an emotional breakdown after the birth of her daughter, and her husband, Lem, left her for a time, to be treated for depression. And Sara, while on an outing with Wood in the fall of 1918, drove her car off a cliff in California. Her leg was almost severed, and her son Albert was killed.
“That which is overtaking you is retribution, nemesis … a vindication of those fundamental truths you so ruthlessly cast aside,” her former husband, the Reverend Ehrgott, told the despondent Sara. He blamed her, Darrow, Wood, and Mary for killing his son and shattering his family with their careless theories.
“You remember that day when like two happy children we were digging together in our garden back of our splendid new home, suddenly a shadow fell over us—it was Clarence Darrow. That fateful night he introduced us to CES Wood,” Ehrgott wrote Sara. “But for your infatuation for CES Wood and his scandalous conduct toward you … Albert would be with us still, abounding with life to his very finger tips. He is sacrificed on the altar of Anarchy, Atheism and Free Love.”
“Poor girl,” Darrow wrote to Sara. “Life is nothing but foolishness, a burden and a tragedy. Death is peace. It is nothing.” He offered Sara the wisdom of his long-dead mother: “All the rest is a delusion and a dream.”
His own marriage remained troubled. “I am lonely—loneliness all the time,” he wrote Mary.8
MILLIONS WERE SLAUGHTERED in the shambles of Flanders, Picardy, and the other battlegrounds of World War I. America entered the war late and its civilian population was spared, yet still it suffered 300,000 casualties.
The advances of recent decades—the airplane, the car, the telephone, and the radio—were no longer novelties; they were in general use, serving as accelerants, shrinking time and distance. And in war, when mixed with more insidious technology, they brought death on a heretofore unimagined scale.
Against this backdrop, scientists and philosophers offered disconcerting propositions. In 1905, Albert Einstein had proposed his Special Theory of Relativity. When it was confirmed by scientists in 1919, it assailed the notion of absolute truths. The writings of Dr. Sigmund Freud gave psychological causes—excuses, the righteous called them—for human behavior. Nietzsche’s readings of a godless world, built in part on the works of Darwin, took his disciples “beyond good and evil.” In its deterministic vision of a struggle among classes, Marxism-Leninism discarded the concepts of religion, rights, and individual liberty. In popular culture, dizzying social change occurred. Joyce and Eliot and Stravinsky and Picasso and others brought a new sensibility to the arts. Women and blacks began their march toward full emancipation. And the “Roaring” decade, as it came to be known, shocked traditionalists with its jazz joints, short skirts, movies, and speakeasies.
America had caught up to Darrow. He would spend the 1920s defending Reds and Negroes, corrupt politicians, bootleggers, and criminal fiends. He made cynical wisecracks and promoted his humanistic strain of atheism and—instead of being condemned—was lauded for it. In the Roaring Twenties, he fit right in.
DARROW BROKE WITH the Wilson administration in a speech in Chicago in late 1919. The existential threat of war had passed, he told his audience, but the government retained the habit of repression. On the two days before he spoke, federal and state authorities had raided homes and meeting places in fifteen cities in search of communists and anarchists, in what came to be known as the Palmer Raids. It was the beginning of the Red Scare.
“A strong element of society, under the cry of a sort of super-patriotism, is today doing all that can be done to crush the liberties of the American people,” Darrow warned. “They wo
uld leave it an offense to speak and to write and to print … they would seize those whom they believe to be against them, send them to jail, because they are violating the powers that be.…
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!” Darrow told the audience, quoting Thomas Jefferson and Wendell Phillips. “No man can speak his convictions, no man can write them, and no man can print them with the fear of the jail in his heart! He must speak them freely and unafraid. Even if he speaks extravagantly and wildly and foolishly, he must be left to do it freely.”9
It was a gutsy speech, which Darrow backed with action. When a band of violent anarchists asked for help, he went to their aid. The case had its roots in a bloody incident in Milwaukee during the war when, as an organist played “America,” the anarchists and police exchanged gunfire at a loyalty rally organized by an evangelical minister. Two anarchists died. Several weeks later, the police were called to the minister’s church after a suspicious package was found on the property. The parcel was taken to the station house, where, as police milled around, it exploded, killing eleven people.
In this enflamed atmosphere eleven Italian anarchists were put on trial, not for the bombing, but on assault charges stemming from the initial shootout. Though only two of them had been seen with guns, all were convicted of assault with intent to murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Darrow and Sissman took the appeal, and Darrow made the oral arguments before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It reversed the verdicts of nine of the defendants. The sentences of the two remaining anarchists were commuted by the governor three years later.10
Anarchism returned to the news in June 1919, when a soft spring night in Washington, D.C., was ripped by an explosion on the doorstep of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. The police concluded that an assassin had tripped and blown himself to pieces. Scattered in the debris were copies of a handbill from “The Anarchist Fighters” with the promise “There will have to be bloodshed.” Reports soon reached Palmer of other explosions around the country at the homes of judges and other prominent men.11 The June bombings were not the only sign of disorder. A wave of mail bombs aimed at members of Wilson’s cabinet, U.S. senators, and others had been stopped by an alert postal inspector. Race riots ripped Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Wobblies fired on a parade in the state of Washington, and in the resultant chaos one of the union gunmen was hauled from jail by a lynch mob and hanged. A general strike in Seattle, national coal and steel strikes, and a police strike in Boston led a long list of ugly labor disputes. And in 1920, a bomb killed twenty-nine people on Wall Street.
Palmer was a square-jawed former congressman and judge who hoped to succeed Wilson in the White House. The bombing of his R Street townhouse gave him a personal motive and a political opportunity to crack down on American radicals. Federal and state authorities raided meeting places, seized and deported immigrants, and put U.S. citizens on trial for treason. “America won’t be a safe place to live in after a while,” Darrow told his old friend Neg Cochran after a second set of mass raids on New Year’s Day in 1920. By mid-January Darrow was in Washington, lobbying against “this mad crusade against freedom,” as he described it in a letter to Debs.
America’s Reds, inspired by the revolution in Russia, welcomed the confrontation. Meeting in Chicago in the summer of 1919, in characteristic disarray, the militants broke from the staid old socialists. The new American Communist Labor Party was led by native-born Reds like millionaire William Bross Lloyd, journalist John Reed, and former New York State assemblyman Benjamin Gitlow, and dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist rule. Emma Goldman and other noncitizens had been herded out to Ellis Island and put on a “Soviet ark” for Europe, but the Americans had rights and looked to Darrow to defend them. He quickly agreed, not because he shared their beliefs (“I am getting afraid of everyone who has conviction,” he told Mary. “I presume when the Soviets get to boss the world they will snuff out what little freedom is left”), but because of the bedrock liberties at risk.12
The first to go to trial, in early 1920, was Gitlow, who had been charged by New York officials with “criminal anarchy” for writing and publishing a “Left Wing Manifesto” in a radical newspaper. The essay outlined Marxist beliefs and predicted that the workers would one day rise against the capitalist order, but stopped short of urging its readers to start building barricades, shooting police, or throwing bombs themselves. Gitlow was the son of Russian immigrants, raised on the Lower East Side of New York in a home and community steeped in radical ideas. At their first meeting, he made it clear to Darrow that he would not recant. “I know you are innocent,” Darrow warned him. “But they have the country steamed up.” He persuaded Gitlow not to take the stand, where he would be subject to cross-examination, but his client insisted on exercising his right to address the jury. Darrow knew what that would mean. “Well, I suppose a revolutionist must have his say in court even if it kills him,” he concluded.
Darrow expected the prosecution to excite the jurors with fearful descriptions of revolution, and so he tried to move the case along. “I want to say … so that it may save time, that my client was the business manager and on the board of this paper, and there will be no attempt on his part to deny legal responsibility for it,” he announced. But Judge Bartow Weeks allowed the prosecutor to call witnesses to Gitlow’s actions (one of whom was arrested for her beliefs as she stepped down from the stand) and others to describe the violence inherent in revolutionary doctrine. Darrow then told the court that, though the defense would offer no testimony, Gitlow wished to address the jury.
It did not go well. Gitlow rambled on in the pedantry of a true believer (“Now, the Russian workers set up a form of government known as the dictatorship of the proletariat …”), which spurred Judge Weeks to repeatedly interrupt him, causing Darrow to object, over and again. Finally, Gitlow ended with a brave flourish: “I am not going to evade the issue. My whole life has been dedicated to the movement which I am in. No jails will change my opinion.”
Darrow tried to sway the jury with a closing argument that portrayed Gitlow as an intellectual whose ideas posed no threat, were protected by the First Amendment, and stood within American traditions. George Washington was a revolutionary, he reminded the jurors. So were Jesus Christ and John Brown. “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right to amend it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it,” said Darrow, quoting Lincoln’s first inaugural address.
“That was Lincoln,” Darrow said. “If Lincoln would have been here today, Mr. Palmer, the Attorney General of the United States, would send his night-riders to invade his office and the privacy of his home and send him to jail.
“I would place no fetters on thought and actions and dreams and ideals of men, even the most despised of them,” Darrow continued. “Whatever I may think of their prudence, whatever I may think of their judgment, I am for the dreamers. I would rather that every practical man shall die if the dreamer be saved.”
But if Darrow made an impact with his closing address, it did not survive the bracketing it got between Gitlow’s talk and the prosecutor’s patriotic exhortation. The jurors were mannequins and the judge “a fiend,” Darrow told Mary. “There was no chance.”13
The jurors took just three hours to find Gitlow guilty, and Judge Weeks sentenced him to five to seven years of hard labor.14
DARROW RETURNED TO Chicago, but he was back in the courtroom in April, defending Reds in nearby Rockford.
The Rockford case showed how far the government was prepared to go with its witch hunts. The Palmer Raids in that small factory town began at five p.m. on Friday, January 2, and continued into the predawn hours of Saturday. The police found no guns or bullets or dynamite, just a large number of immigrants, including young girls and teenage boys whose names—like Lukashevich—the locals had difficulty spelling. By the middle of the followin
g week, the dragnet had expanded to include the town’s “intellectuals,” targeting a socialist former alderman; Dr. Alfred Olson, a town physician whose “reading has been along the line of works of a radical and Socialist character”; and Alice Beal Parson, a local club woman.
The account of Parson’s arrest offered a glimpse of what the good people thought was dangerous behavior. “The radical utterances of Mrs. Parson have been town talk for a long time,” the local newspaper reported. “Her activities and associations with those inclined toward revolutionary proceedings were known to all her acquaintances and friends who deplored the situation deeply, but their admonitions and friendly counsel are said to have been of no avail. She appeared to glory in her fanaticism, they said, and to live largely for the purpose of devouring ‘Red’ literature.” For this, she was prosecuted.15
The immigrants were held for deportation and the American citizens were charged under an Illinois law—a newly passed statute that prohibited citizens from advocating not just violent revolution, but “reformation” of their government via writing, speaking, joining a group, organizing meetings, or carrying banners and flags.
The prosecutors and the defense lawyers agreed to a test case, and Arthur Person was chosen to stand trial. He was a simple factory hand, a Swedish American immigrant who was arrested without resistance as he returned home from work one day and, when asked why he was a communist, told the police that he believed the United States should be run for the workingman. He had become interested in communism through conversations with Dr. Olson, his family doctor. His wife was “known as an extremist also” and “would have been taken into custody too, but for the fact that her … little children needed her care,” the paper reported.
The prosecution put on witnesses—a newspaper reporter and a government investigator—who had attended the chaotic birth of the Communist Labor Party the previous summer but knew nothing of Person. Darrow got a laugh—and scored a point—when a local stenographer told the jury that the treasury of the Rockford communists had been all of thirty cents. “That would be only a dime apiece for the lawyers,” Darrow said, nodding at his two co-counsels, “if the treasury has not been swelled to any extent since.”
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 38
