Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Occasionally, Darrow’s success would have tragic repercussions. Joseph Kyle, a wealthy Realtor, left the mob-owned Derby Cafe in the early morning hours with a couple of pals and three young women who were variously described as “dancers” or “cabaret girls.” His racy Templar speedster careened through Chicago before caroming into a farm truck, killing the aged driver, C. C. Hudson. When the police arrived at the scene, Kyle tried to bribe them.

  A coroner’s jury cleared Kyle of wrongdoing and the state’s attorney stepped in, suspecting that the Colosimo gang had corrupted the inquiry. Kyle hired Darrow, whose closing argument—that his client had spent most of the night in question washing his yacht—somehow failed to win the jury’s sympathy. Kyle was sentenced to the penitentiary, but freed after Darrow persuaded a judge to overturn the verdict as part of a negotiated settlement in which Hudson’s family received $12,500.

  “Well,” Darrow told reporters, “everybody seems to be satisfied.” Not everyone. Five years later, after another all-night tour of roadhouses with a young lady, Kyle crashed into a milk wagon, critically injuring another innocent driver.13

  Some of Darrow’s gangland clients, like Murphy and Cosmano, had Runyonesque qualities. But the hellions of Rock Island, Illinois, were downright Gothic. For more than two decades, the warring factions filled the streets with bullets and bombs as the dead-eyed John Looney, in the guise of a newspaperman, sought to install himself as thane.

  Looney was “the stormy petrel of Rock Island politics and journalism—an eccentric, brilliant man, posing as reformer and moralist, who kept the town in terror,” said the Tribune. He ate raw liver, spread on soda crackers, and believed he had demonic protection. He ran whorehouses and speakeasies. Looney shot it out on a downtown street with a rival publisher, whose presses were dynamited. A few years later, he was hauled into City Hall and beaten by a corrupt rival—the mayor—as the police looked on. The next night a riotous mob incited by Looney besieged the police station. The governor had to send in the National Guard.

  In 1922, Looney’s son was killed when rival gangsters drove up in two automobiles and opened fire on a busy downtown street. “It’s come,” Looney shouted and ran for cover to a nearby doorway. His son pulled a pistol but wasn’t fast enough. It is hard to see what motive lured Darrow to Rock Island to defend the men who killed Looney’s boy, other than the $30,000 that reportedly was paid him. In any event, he couldn’t do much for George “Crimps” Holsapple and Anthony Billburg and their accomplices. Darrow tried to play “the part of the grand old man, gentle in every respect,” a newspaper reported. But the whole town had seen the attack, and the jury was not swayed.14

  DARROW MARKED HIS seventh decade with some fine diversions. He took two months off in the summer of 1921 and retreated to Fish Creek, Wisconsin, to write a book on the causes of crime. He had been suffering from a digestive ailment and was told he might need surgery, but the rest seemed to cure him. In 1922, Darrow celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday by touring Europe and the Holy Land, traveling across Canada to visit Paul and his family in Colorado, and wintering in Florida. He attended World Series games and, in 1923, in the middle of a trial, took off on a junket to the Kentucky Derby.

  Darrow joined in the effort to kill the proposed new Illinois constitution, which called, among other things, for Bible reading in public schools. He wrote an article for H. L. Mencken’s magazine, the American Mercury, on the “ordeal of Prohibition” and spoke out against the city health board’s new regulations on venereal disease, which allowed its inspectors to arrest and publicly stigmatize the infected. And he and Ruby opened their apartment to Sinclair Lewis when the Nobel Prize–winning author visited Chicago to conduct research for his novel Arrowsmith. “When many people imagine I’m in a secret and sinister conference with the Reds, or indignantly fighting the censorship of burlesque show posters … or lecturing with a flushed face on capital punishment,” Darrow told editor George Nathan, “what I’m really doing—and having a grand time doing it—is getting a lot of friends over to my house in Chicago and reading aloud to them.”15

  Then, at sixty-six, Darrow returned to the arena for the biggest political corruption trial yet. The prosecutors in the state’s attorney’s office had worked their way up the ladder and nailed Lundin himself. The Chicago school board was the venue for his larceny. He and the boys demanded kickbacks for just about everything that it purchased: land, buses, boilers, doors, insurance, furniture, coal—even lightbulbs.

  The “Poor Swede,” as he was known, was a goggle-eyed salesman of patent medicines who had risen through Republican ranks to become a master political strategist and a congressman. The newspapers called him “the silent power” behind Thompson and “the long-recognized czar” of city and state politics. “To hell with the public,” Lundin said, when one school board member questioned the size of a kickback on textbooks. “We are at the trough now and we are going to feed.”

  Lundin was done in by a double cross. In 1920, to get rid of Maclay Hoyne, the Thompson-Lundin team had promoted the candidacy of Robert Crowe, a young judge, for state’s attorney. Crowe replaced Hoyne but almost immediately turned on his benefactors, and Lundin and a dozen cronies were indicted.

  Darrow’s liberal allies were distressed by his willingness to defend a chiseler like Lundin. It was then that his old friend from Hull House came to his office and demanded to know why he took such clients. “I said that I had fought for many things that her people believed in but I had never seen the time that one of them had sent me a case where there was a fee,” he told Mary. “They had sent poor men to me, that no one else would look after, but if one had money they sent them to a respectable lawyer.…

  “Any how,” he wrote, “it never occurred to me that I should refuse to defend anyone. All I care about is the hard work … it is awful to have nothing to do but to think … It is better to love money, and try to get it.”

  The trial was a long humiliation for Lundin. The prosecutors portrayed him as corrupt, and his lawyers cast him as a dupe. With his shrugs and quips, Darrow created an atmosphere of “sympathy and amused tolerance,” wrote the Tribune’s Kinsley. But Darrow’s cross-examinations were fierce, unearthing the motives of the prosecution’s witnesses. The case was nothing but a “political persecution,” Darrow said.

  And, indeed, the evidence tying Lundin to the scams was thin. Day after day, as temperatures soared, the prosecutors offered evidence that the school board overpaid its suppliers. But “the supposed captain of this piratical ship is mentioned so seldom in the evidence that it is hard to remember that he is the chief defendant,” the Tribune admitted. Thompson flew back from a Hawaiian vacation to testify for the defense. And Lundin took the stand, speaking directly to the jurors, denying wrongdoing. Darrow closed for the defense.

  The prosecution’s case, he said, was all “cobwebs, doubt, mystery, haze … a weird, intangible composite, a mythical nothing,” said Darrow. Prosecutors take the scent like hunting dogs. Politicians claw for power. Lawyers twist the truth. “We all do it,” Darrow told the jury. “I am too honest to tell you that I’m not dishonest.” But this was different. “I never knew Lundin until I came into this case. I am not going to tell you he is the best man I ever saw. I don’t know. Some men fool you,” Darrow said. But “I heard his story here. He never once hedged, sidestepped or ran away. He met his accusers face to face.”

  The jurors ordered lunch, and cigars, and returned not-guilty verdicts for Lundin and his fourteen codefendants. “Shouts burst from a hundred throats” as the verdicts were read, wrote Kinsley. “Men climbed on chairs and yelled. Women cried.”

  “What’s the matter with Lundin?” someone shouted, and the boys chanted the customary response: “He’s all right!”

  The reporters gathered around. “Truth crushed to earth will rise again,” Lundin told them. Then he turned to his weeping wife and said, “C’mon, kid. Let’s go home.”16

  Thompson, wounded by the scandals, decided
not to run for reelection.17 But Crowe, smarting from his loss in the Lundin trial, soon had a case that, he was certain, even Darrow could not win.

  Chapter 17

  LOEB AND LEOPOLD

  But fetch the county kerchief, and noose me in the knot.

  Of the infamous villains whom Darrow defended, none were so patently evil in the eyes of Americans as the teenaged killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They were spoiled geniuses—rich kids who claimed no God but Self and insisted, by virtue of their intellectual primacy, on living free from any moral code. They were homosexuals. They were Jews. They kidnapped and murdered a child whose body, the state alleged, was molested before and after death. They did it, they said, for the thrill. In the course of their trial came hints of other grisly offenses they were said to have committed—abduction, murder, mutilation. Leopold and Loeb were truly heartless fiends.

  And celebrities. Once Loeb and Leopold were captured, newspapers across the country relentlessly pumped the story of the wealthy thrill killers. Crowds cheered them and girls swooned at the sight of handsome Dickie Loeb, with his hair slicked back like Valentino. Ruby Darrow thought they were “adorable.” Thousands of people tried to get seats in the courtroom, pushing against a line of police and tearing a door from its hinges. It was another “crime of the century,” with the riddle not whodunit—but why.

  “Babe” Leopold was nineteen, the scion of a rich shipping and manufacturing family, a University of Chicago law student about to transfer to Harvard. He was short and slight and brilliant, a promising ornithologist and linguist. “Dickie” Loeb was eighteen, the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. His father was a wealthy lawyer and executive at Sears, Roebuck. Dickie was taller, better looking, and charming.

  The two young men, with their stylish suits, luxury automobiles, and pompadours, had been handed every opportunity that a fulsome nation, victorious in war and awash in prosperity, could give them. And so the death of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, the boy from their Kenwood neighborhood whom they lured into a car and bludgeoned and strangled in May 1924, became an emblem of modern times.

  The postwar era had brought fast girls and cars, hip flasks, and speakeasies. The Franks murder “stirred in everybody a shivering suspicion that the kind of civilization that we have set up is producing more problems than we can handle,” said the editors at Life magazine. Here was the fruit of surrender to sensation. Here, said respectable folk, is where the teachings of Darwin and Freud and Einstein—where moral relativity, science, and atheism—must lead. Leopold “denies any feeling of remorse,” the defense psychiatrists noted. “He states that he has no feeling of having done anything morally wrong as he doesn’t feel that there is any such thing as morals … Anything which gives him pleasure is right.”

  “I did it because I wanted to,” said Loeb.1

  THEY HAD BEEN drawn to each other as precocious undergraduates—sixteen and fifteen years old—at the University of Chicago. Both had been raised by cold and distant parents and abused by governesses. Loeb needed no justification for his acts, but Leopold had constructed an elaborate rationale. He was a weakling and socially inept—it was one reason he idolized Dickie, the frat man and garrulous carouser. To console himself, Leopold fell back on his intellectual superiority. He had studied Nietzsche, who proposed that superior individuals were exempt from the rules constraining the average man. He and Loeb, Babe decided, were beings of just that sort. They would show the world by committing the “perfect” crime.

  But the Nietzschean “supermen” managed to drop Leopold’s eyeglasses—with their distinctive frame—near the culvert where they hid Franks’s body, in a nature preserve by the Indiana border. The police traced the spectacles and brought Leopold in for questioning. As a bird-watcher who regularly tramped the preserve, he had already emerged as a figure of interest. Babe told the prosecutors he had tripped on a hike and no doubt lost his glasses when they slipped from his breast pocket. But no matter how he threw himself to the floor, he could not re-create the accident—the eyeglasses stayed in his coat.

  Two resourceful Daily News reporters, meanwhile, interviewed the members of Leopold’s law school study group, obtained notes typed on Babe’s Underwood typewriter, and matched them to the typing on a ransom note sent to the victim’s family. And the Leopold family’s chauffeur undermined the killers’ alibi. In the early morning hours of Saturday, May 31, they confessed. For the next two days, Leopold and Loeb chatted freely with the detectives and newsmen who accompanied them on grisly scavenger hunts around town, as spectators gathered to watch. “They had a great day of it yesterday, and they responded to the trailing crowds’ morbid interest by showing off in sophomoric fashion,” the News reported. “They quarreled for the spotlight, aired their young eruditions, swaggered and posed before the worshipful Boswells, talked the cant of their intellectual set.”

  Here was the bridge over the Jackson Park lagoon, where they tossed the typewriter into the water. Here was the hardware store where they bought the murder weapons: a heavy chisel and some rope. Here was where they buried the bloody blanket that they had used to lug Bobby’s body to its hiding place. The corpse lay in a foot of water for only a night before it was discovered by a passing workman in the first light of morning.

  “We have a hanging case,” Robert Crowe announced.2

  THE CRIME HAD no overt allurement for Darrow. These defendants were young men of privilege, not underdogs. Besides, he was sixty-seven years old. But he was a ferocious foe of hanging, and then there was that fathomless empathy. When Darrow spoke at the Lincoln Center settlement house in Chicago that weekend he was no doubt thinking of the teenaged suspects when he chose to recite the A. E. Housman poem “The Culprit.”

  Housman’s work was “thought, and it is poetry, and it is music,” he told the crowd, then softly chanted:

  The night my father got me

  His mind was not on me;

  He did not plague his fancy

  To muse if I should be

  The son you see.

  The day my mother bore me

  She was a fool and glad,

  For all the pain I cost her,

  That she had borne the lad

  That borne she had.

  My mother and my father

  Out of the light they lie;

  The warrant would not find them,

  And here ’tis only I

  Shall hang so high.

  Oh let not man remember

  The soul that God forgot

  But fetch the county kerchief

  And noose me in the knot

  And I will rot.

  For so the game is ended

  That should not have begun.

  My father and my mother

  They had a likely son,

  And I have none.

  The newspapers had aroused the good folks of Chicago with the ghastly news that Bobby Franks was the victim of a pedophile. Darrow spoke, nonetheless, for compassion and understanding. “Sex … is the strongest and the deepest emotion of life excepting possibly one,” he said. “And, its very strength and its very depth and its very eternity makes it one that often goes awry.”

  Character is just “a different tip of the balance one way or the other; a little change in the elements,” he told the audience. There but for the grace of God goes any man’s beloved son.

  That night the Darrows were awakened by the doorbell. As Ruby later told it, she got up from bed and found “four men seeming like masked desperados, clutching at their upturned coat-collars … forcing themselves forward.” It was a delegation from the boys’ families, led by Jacob Loeb, Dickie’s uncle. They crowded into Darrow’s bedroom and pressed him to take the case.3

  Darrow knew Loeb. He also knew Jacob Franks, the father of the victim, a former pawnbroker who had grown rich, in part, by the money he made buying John Altgeld’s shares in the Ogden Gas deal. And Darrow knew, without doubt, that he would be bucking the mob. But he p
ersuaded himself that the youths were “kindly” and the victims of “strange and unfortunate circumstances.” In his account of the trial in his memoirs, he would slice a year off their ages. He took the case, agreeing to serve with Benjamin and Walter Bachrach, the Loeb family lawyers.

  “I went in to do what I could, for sanity and humanity,” Darrow recalled. He viewed the case as a vehicle with which to assault America’s treatment of crime, and in particular its use of capital punishment. And he certainly looked forward to getting paid by two wealthy families. “I will of course get a fair and substantial fee,” he told Paul. “The families are fine people and will do what is right.”4

  AND SO LEOPOLD and Loeb met their lawyer. “My first impression was horror,” Leopold recalled. “On the other side of the bars stood one of the least … impressive-looking human beings I have ever seen.

  “The day was warm and Darrow was wearing a light seersucker jacket,” said Leopold. “Only this one looked as if he had slept in it. His shirt was wrinkled, too, and he must have had eggs for breakfast that morning. I could see the vestiges. Or perhaps he hadn’t changed shirts since the day before. His tie was askew … and his unruly shock of lusterless, almost mousey hair kept falling over his right eye. Impatiently he’d brush it back with his hand … He looked for all the world like an innocent hayseed, a bumpkin.…

  “Could this scarecrow know anything about the law?” Leopold asked himself. “He didn’t look as if he knew much of anything!”