“All Hawaii recognizes this is the best way out,” wrote Owen. Others were not sure. Wright, the Hochi editor, expressed a different opinion in a letter to Darrow. “You are right as between human beings, right in the desire to save from suffering, in the denial of society’s right to punish,” Wright wrote. “You have been consistent to the end. And you have won your fight—won it with distinction.”
“But in every battle won there are the vanquished,” said Wright. “I belong to Hawaii, and Hawaii has been beaten and shamed and outraged.”
“I think Mrs. Massie was mistaken in her identification, and that Massie lied when he said Kahahawai confessed,” said Wright.
“The Navy in this case typifies arrogance, intolerance, superiority. It has lied and slandered Hawaii,” said Wright. “They could not afford to lose face and yield to what they so contemptuously regarded as ‘nigger justice.’ ”13
THALIA, IN A festive blue dress, had beamed on the day of her sentencing. But she had told her story from the stand twice, and neither jury had wholly believed her.
Now something needed to be done about the outstanding charges against the remaining rape defendants. Kelley and Judd agreed to have an independent review conducted by the Pinkerton agency, whose detectives interviewed dozens of people in Hawaii and across the United States in a three-month investigation. Its verdict was definitive. “We have found nothing in the record of this case, nor have we through our own efforts been able to find … sufficient corroboration of the statements of Mrs. Massie to establish the occurrence of rape,” the agency concluded.
Massie’s close friends told the Pinkertons that “the thought is now that she may not have been raped at all … and has told the story to excite sympathy from her husband, and having told the story stuck to it, believing her husband, who is a southerner, would not leave her under such conditions.” In February 1933, after the findings of the Pinkerton investigation were made public, Kelley made a motion to drop the charges against the remaining Ala Moana defendants.
Judd was still being pressed, from Capitol Hill, for a pardon. He noted, when deciding against it, Darrow’s tactics in the trial: “There is no credible evidence—no evidence at all—that Lieutenant Massie was the person who fired the shot that killed.…
“Honesty of defense required a disclosure of the fact … The indulgence of pardon should not be extended to people who have consistently refused to disclose, on oath or otherwise, what really transpired,” he concluded. “Punishment has been relieved. Vindication is not due.”
Darrow always insisted that Thalia told the truth. And certainly someone had taken her from Waikiki to the isolated clearing along Ala Moana Road, where she was assaulted. Did a Hawaiian or navy patron of the tavern offer her a ride and press her for sex, then strike her when she refused? Did she cry rape to cloak a romantic assignation that turned ugly? Was Tommie furious at her escapade, and did he add to her injuries? The Pinkertons could not say. But Darrow felt sorry for her, and thought she was smart, and liked her sass. And she shared his distaste for the good people.14
When she heard the news that Kelley had dropped the charges, Thalia griped to reporters. Darrow urged her to keep still, but she refused. “Naturally it made me mad when Judd and Kelley and the Pinkertons and the rest of the tribe practically called me a liar and cast all sorts of innuendos in the newspapers,” she told him. “Silence on my part looked suspicious.
“I am sure that you will agree that I was right,” she wrote. “I mean, darling, you’re so idealistic and believe in turning the other cheek, but one must be practical.”
As the years passed, Tommie and Thalia showed themselves to be very troubled individuals. They had not been away from Hawaii for long before Tommie wrote Darrow, informing him that the couple would separate. “For five years and more I have tolerated more from Thalia than any human being would have,” he said. She had a “marvelous” intellect, Massie wrote, but there was “a massive difference in her moral code and mine.…
“She feels great malice because I have never believed in her,” Massie wrote. The two of them now pelted Darrow with letters, each arguing their case. She called Tommie a “selfish weakling” and chronicled his excessive drinking, physical abuse, and fling with one of her distant relatives, a “dreadful little slut.”
“You probably won’t believe the things I have told you,” Thalia wrote Darrow. “You have always thought Tommie was a little tin god. Just because he has beautiful manners! That’s how he gets by … I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not; I don’t give a damn about anything any more … we’ll all be dead pretty soon, and who will care? …
“I do not, at the present time, intend to divorce him,” she told Darrow. “If I do everyone will … say I’m rotten to do such a thing after what they think he did for me.”
But Thalia relented, and the couple announced their separation in October 1933 and were divorced in Reno, Nevada, four months later. She was hospitalized that night, after becoming hysterical and collapsing at a nightclub. In April, on an ocean liner bound for Italy, she slashed her wrists but survived. In June 1934, Thalia was examined by Dr. William White, the superintendent at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. She confessed to several suicide attempts and he found that she suffered “attacks of great fear … accompanied by feelings of unreality.” She remarried, divorced, and ultimately took an overdose of pills in 1962.
Tommie’s career in the navy came to a dismal end when he suffered a mental breakdown in 1940 while serving on the battleship Texas. His medical records show a succession of symptoms and illnesses—hallucination, paranoia, delusion, schizophrenia, psychosis, and manic depression—which rendered him unfit for service. He was discharged before the war began, lived uneventfully in southern California, and died in 1987.15
DARROW’S FINANCIAL WOES were eased by his fee in the Massie case, as well as by the publication of a bestselling autobiography, The Story of My Life. The book was well received by reviewers despite the fact that, as Darrow conceded to a friend, it was as much “propaganda” as biography. Scribner’s had outbid several publishing houses for the rights, and the famous Max Perkins was the editor. He flattered Darrow profusely, then suggested that the philosophical sections were a bit repetitious, and could he thin them out? Darrow had started working on the book in 1929, writing chapters in longhand. These penciled first drafts were not heavily edited, at least by Darrow; many went right into print, a testament to his lucidity of thought and powers of concentration. Ruby did the typing and conveyed messages to the publishers. “This quality of thought and expression seems so much a part of the author that he is unable (and unwilling!) to rearrange—or reform—parts and passages—just as he would not know how to remold himself; and would not allow anyone else to alter beyond changes that now appear on galleys herewith returned,” she informed them.
There were no great revelations, and a lot of philosophizing. Chapters were devoted to his most famous cases—the Debs, Haywood, McNamara, Leopold and Loeb, Scopes, and Sweet trials—but as many were given to his beliefs on crime, law, capital punishment, Prohibition, religion, and other matters. He was careless when relating dates, spelling people’s names, and telling how things went. (It is McParland, not McPartland; Hughitt, not Hewitt; he came to Chicago in 1887, not 1888; he didn’t call Bryan to the stand in Dayton, Hays did, etc.) Darrow promised a “plain, unvarnished account of how things really have happened,” but his readers are as served by his warning that “autobiography is never entirely true.”
The Kinsman chapters were charming, and reminiscent of Farmington. “The house was small, the family large, the furnishing meager, but there were books whichever way one turned,” he remembered. But his account of his resignation from the Chicago & North Western railroad was fictitious. His repeated defeats in election campaigns, and involvement in lost causes, went unmentioned. An extra chapter on the Massie trial was published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1932 and added to later editions of the b
ook. He continued to insist, knowing it was not true, that Massie fired the shot that killed Joe Kahahawai.
An interesting feature of Darrow’s autobiography is what, and whom, he chose to leave out. There is no mention of Gertrude Barnum, Mary Field, and his other loves, though that’s to be expected. But Darrow also omits, in the telling of his story, all the sociopaths he saved, the women who shot their cheating husbands, the con men, the gangsters, drunk drivers, labor sluggers, corrupt businessmen, and crooked politicians who were his clients. Forgotten or omitted are William Goudy, Edgar Lee Masters, Cy Simon, Olav Tvietmoe, Anton Johannsen, Samuel Gompers, William Randolph Hearst, Robert Crowe, Mayors Carter Harrison Jr. and Big Bill Thompson, Fred Lundin, Chief Charles Healey, “Three-fingered Jack” White, Mont Tennes, Vincenzo Cosmano and the boys, Emma Simpson and the other homicidal ladies, the Bank of America, the Scottsboro Boys, the Iroquois Theatre fire, the Eastland disaster, and the Ogden Gas scandal. Darrow’s two wives and son are mentioned, but almost as afterthoughts.
Darrow’s account of the McNamara case was curt and defensive. “Before I left Chicago I knew nothing about the facts,” he claimed. After arriving in Los Angeles, he wrote, it quickly became clear that the case was hopeless, and more so after Bert Franklin was arrested for bribery. Darrow’s foremost obligation was to save his clients’ lives, he argued. “By every emotion of my life, by the rule of my profession, by every human instinct, I was bound to act as I did, and consider my clients only, and I am glad that I did not stop to think of consequences,” he said. “My life is made up, and must stand as it is. But I was in a terrible crisis that I faced almost alone.”
Darrow did reveal how, during his first bribery trial, a hulking cop killer named George Bissett whom Darrow had once defended in Chicago arrived in Los Angeles and offered to murder Franklin. Darrow gently dissuaded him and sent him home. But as for the bribery charge, “I feel confident that no reader will blame me if I do not unduly dwell on this part of my story,” Darrow wrote. “As I write the old ghosts creep out of the dimming past and dance around me as if in glee, and I am anxious to drive them back and lock them up where I cannot see their haunting faces or hear their mocking jeers.”16
THE MASSIE TRIAL had further fanned Darrow’s fame, and made his name quite marketable. He performed on the radio, defending (unsuccessfully) Benedict Arnold in a dramatization for $5,000. And he earned a nice fee from Hollywood for narrating a motion picture documentary on biology called The Mystery of Life. Its profoundly untitillating explanation of reproduction nonetheless drew the attention, and the scissors, of the censors. But “because of the recent Darrow-Massie trial in Hawaii,” the documentary “is far more valuable than it was a year ago,” its distributor told its salesmen.
“Remember that you are selling Darrow (America’s biggest draw according to Variety) and you are selling him to the MASSES, not the CLASSES,” Universal Pictures told theater owners. “Remember to sell DARROW, and do not stress the evolution angle of the thing or make it sound educational.”
“I really need the money,” Darrow told the critic George Nathan, showing him the advertising copy for the movie. “If you don’t believe I needed the money, look what I let myself in for. Good God.”
Darrow’s uncertain health and finances did not prevent him, at the age of seventy-five, from returning to court in two last capital cases, and saving two boys from execution.
James “Iggy” Varecha was seventeen when he shot and killed a salesman in a robbery and, an hour later, kidnapped and raped the twenty-year-old niece of a Chicago police commissioner. Though Varecha was an escapee from a mental hospital, he was judged sane by the state’s doctors. Varecha pled guilty, thinking his life would be spared, but his lawyer had not obtained assurances from the judge. Varecha was sentenced to die in the electric chair. It took three bailiffs to restrain him in court.
Darrow was aghast that the state would execute someone with the stated mental capacity of an eleven-year-old and took the appeal. Stooped and gray, his voice barely a whisper, Darrow strode back and forth in the well of the court, waving his arms as he pleaded for Varecha’s life. “His father and mother are illiterate. All his brothers and sisters, with one exception, are defective,” he argued. “This boy is not to blame. Organized society had its chance to keep him off the streets, but it failed to do so. He was just a young animal, turned loose on the streets in the shape of a boy.” In time, the Illinois Supreme Court granted Varecha a new trial. This time, the plea bargain was properly sealed. He was sentenced to one hundred years in prison.
Darrow fought, as well, for the life of Russell McWilliams, who had also been but seventeen when he killed a streetcar operator in a Rockford robbery. McWilliams was drunk when he shot the man five times. Like Varecha, he had made the mistake of pleading guilty and asking for mercy from a court, which sentenced him to die. Three times Darrow won McWilliams a reprieve, and three times a judge confirmed the penalty. So Darrow begged the state pardon board to urge the governor to commute the sentence. His strength was failing that day, and he asked to speak from a chair. “It is not the policy of this state to kill children,” Darrow told the board. “The mind of the child is not the mind of the man.” On Darrow’s seventy-sixth birthday, Governor Henry Horner spared the boy’s life, three days before he was scheduled to be electrocuted. McWilliams was a model prisoner, and was paroled in 1951.
“The powers seemed bent on taking his life,” Darrow wrote Graham Taylor. “I just can’t understand them. I am much alarmed for fear they will cut down what we have so far made the limit of taking life, which is still 18. I am sure it will take the efforts of all of us to keep back the tide of hatred that seems to be overwhelming us.”17
IT WAS ABSOLUTELY fitting that, before he died, Darrow took bold stands for individual liberty in the face of political and corporate gigantism. “Ideas have come and gone, but I have always been a champion of the individual as against the majority and the State,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “Of all the political leaders of the past, Thomas Jefferson made the strongest appeal to me.” It was a thought that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides might have pondered before giving Darrow a public platform, resources, and license to critique the president’s New Deal.
Darrow had supported and spoken for Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential campaign. Roosevelt had promised “bold persistent experimentation” to fight the effects of the Great Depression, which had left 13 million Americans out of work. President Herbert Hoover’s mishandling of the crisis had led Darrow to quip that “I used to be taught that anybody could be President; it begins to look as if they could, too.”
And so it seemed to Roosevelt’s staff that Darrow was a safe choice to chair a special board to review the operation of the National Recovery Administration, which was established in the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s presidency. Its symbol was a blue eagle, which shops and businesses—even dancing girls—displayed to show that they were following “codes” of behavior drawn up and administered by the NRA and its industrial councils. It was, said one historian, the center ring in the New Deal circus, and its ringmaster—a retired army cavalry officer who combined the qualities of military leader and sideshow barker—was the colorful, irrepressible, and impetuous General Hugh Johnson. His deputy was Donald Richberg, one of Darrow’s old pals from the Chicago reform movement. At a time when the country needed a cause to join, the NRA offered hope.
Yet, as with any government agency, particularly one that invited commercial interests to help draft its codes, the NRA’s operations reflected the influence of the bigger corporate lobbies. The agency allowed companies to join together to fix prices, wages, and hours. This soon led other businesses, unions, and consumers to squawk. Evasion and cheating were reported. “The excessive centralization and the dictatorial spirit,” wrote Walter Lippmann, “are producing a revulsion of feeling against bureaucratic control of American economic life.” Congress responded and, led by Senators William Borah of Idaho and Ger
ald Nye of North Dakota, convinced the White House to name a National Recovery Review Board, with Darrow as its chair.
Masters tried to warn Roosevelt of what was to come. Via a friend, the poet got a letter to the president’s private secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, savaging his former law partner.
“Money and publicity have been his life objects and to get them he has sacrificed parties and friends and principles all along,” Masters wrote. “I do not refer to Darrow’s malodorous career, to his indictment for jury bribing in California, nor to his dubious reputation as a lawyer in Chicago, but rather to his insidious and subtle faculty of playing fast and loose with labor and capital,” said Masters, “to his bewildering shifts and changes in which he has flirted with democracy, socialism, the single tax and anarchism; to his faithless attitude toward friends, leaders like Bryan and others.”
Darrow had spent a lifetime “winding serpent-like where there was food, and winding safely away when there was danger, and never shot, or so completely exposed, that he was ended,” said Masters. He was sure to turn and “fang” the administration now that they had let him “inside the breastworks … clothed in the armor of a pretended intellectual independence.”
Masters conveyed similar sentiments to Mencken. It can’t be that bad, Mencken replied. Richberg had suggested Darrow. And surely FDR, the sly fox, had “a Machiavellian purpose” in appointing an aged gent whose faculties were eroded and whose time was clearly past, and whose thoughts would not be taken seriously. Darrow was just an old pussycat, entranced by the “catnip” of the press, Mencken said.
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 56
