Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  The “Darrow review board” began its work in March 1934. He and Ruby installed themselves in a suite at the Willard Hotel, where the staff, led by Washington lawyer Lowell Mason, held nearly sixty public hearings and reviewed three thousand complaints. The first report, released in May, exploded on Washington like an artillery round. It charged the NRA with fostering monopolistic practices that favored influential interests at the cost of the little guy. It didn’t matter that, as Richberg, Mencken, and others pointed out, the report was philosophically incoherent. So was much of the reasoning behind the NRA. The slap to Roosevelt was a great political story and the two loquacious and leathery foes—Darrow and Johnson—were irresistible copy, especially when they took a car ride together around Arlington, ostensibly to bury the hatchet, and discussed anthropology, murder, religion, and the hereafter.

  Darrow’s mandate expired in June, and he got a cold shoulder from Roosevelt. A White House assistant was delegated to write Darrow that “the President asks me to acknowledge receipt of your final report, which he did not have a chance to look into before his departure, and to act for him in accepting your resignation.”

  “I hear from Washington that Darrow is wandering around in a fog, scarcely knowing where he is at or what he is doing,” Mencken wrote Masters. “His report will take its place among the comic documents of all time. When it came in the Brain Trust boys threw back their ears and howled with delight. They took two weeks to answer it, not because answering it was difficult, but because they were constantly impeded by their own laughter.”

  That was the White House spin. But reforms were enacted and by the end of the summer Johnson was on his way out of office. The NRA never recovered its élan. And in the spring of 1935, a year after Darrow’s report, the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that the NRA represented an unconstitutional excess of federal power.18

  DARROW WAS EXHAUSTED by the NRA assignment. But Hays pleaded with him to take on one more duty. After getting assurances that he could rest at Hays’s Long Island home during the trip, Darrow agreed to serve as the chair of the American Inquiry Commission, an ad hoc group opposed to Hitler and Nazi rule, at hearings in New York City in early July. The Nazis “threaten the lives of some of the leading men in Germany who are now in concentration camps,” Hays had written Darrow. “Now is the time for the inquiry to be held.”

  Darrow’s had been a public voice against fascism for years. It was a prime reason he defended Carillo and Greco. The previous December, Darrow had joined Preston Bradley and Louis Mann at Chicago’s Washington Boulevard Temple in a forum on Nazism.

  Hitler had taken power in January 1933. He immediately issued emergency decrees, claiming dictatorial powers “for the protection of the People and the State.” The Führer never hid where he was going. “Curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of associations, and of assembly; surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible,” the Nazis declared. Opposition parties were dissolved. Political foes were assassinated. The first concentration camp was opened at Dachau that spring. The Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship, and the nationwide pogrom called Kristallnacht were still months or years away, but Darrow and the others recognized what was happening.

  “One inferior man, with energy and daring and nerve, is able to convert Germany almost into a morgue filled with Jews,” Darrow warned. “The thing which shocks me … when many people have thought that human beings were growing more intelligent, when we believed that men and women were broader and more understanding and more liberal, there should come a man with the power and strength to make a warfare upon a race out of the clear sky; and the most destructive warfare, as I read of it, that has ever been carried on against the Jews.…

  “It amazes me and scares me,” he said. “For where it can be done against any people or any religion, no people of any sort or of any religions can be safe.”

  In July, with Hays and Malone, a U.S. senator, and other notables beside him, Darrow listened as a series of witnesses before the commission told of Nazi outrages in a hearing room in downtown Manhattan.

  “Hitler is a very dangerous man, and should be destroyed,” Darrow told reporters as the members of the commission paid a visit on Mayor La Guardia during its lunchtime break.19

  THOSE WHO SAW him were struck by how tired Darrow looked. He had to write to Baldwin and beg off a simple assignment when the ACLU asked him to sign a petition protesting labor conditions on the West Coast. He was “scandalously old,” Darrow told Baldwin, and in ill health. He did not have the strength to study the controversy and “did not dare go into a matter that I so vaguely understood.”

  “Darrow is right,” Baldwin told his staff. “He is too old to go into such matters. Let him alone after this.”20

  Darrow was suffering from arterial blockages and damage from his earlier heart trouble, which sapped his strength. The effects of arteriosclerosis and lapses in the flow of oxygen began to affect his brain.

  “What a tragedy it is—Darrow with his mind gone, groping around trying to make a living lecturing,” Older wrote Lem Parton. “That is the worst news I have had in years.”21

  Ruby wrote to Jim McNamara at San Quentin, describing their stay in Washington. It was “a Big Comeback indeed,” she said, but it was the last time Darrow would be “mingling with and being counted in with those who help to make the wheels go around.” Darrow’s health was so “variable,” said Ruby, that they never knew which mornings he could rise, and which days he’d be forced to stay in bed. Often, he found it impossible to climb stairs, or an incline. At times, even at rest, he gasped for breath “in a quiet little way, trying not to admit his trouble.” Other times he felt stronger. In November, Darrow was back east on the lecture circuit “to keep the poor bank balance from sinking too far,” she reported.

  Darrow had never recovered his full hearing after the mastoid operation. Now his eyes were dimming. He felt too frail to take the train to the Loop, where the crowds might knock him down. They had moved his big black desk and the other office furniture to the apartment on the Midway, but his hip ached, which made it hard to sit. Ruby took control of his correspondence.

  “He comes home and welcomes the bed in the back room, where he almost lives, with books and papers and what mail he cannot shirk,” she told McNamara. “I have a little typewriter that I tuck under my arm and trot to his bedside balancing it on my lap, letting him tell me what to say.”22

  In March 1935, Darrow summoned the will to make the trip to Washington and testify before Congress on the NRA. It did not go well. He drifted, and snapped like a turtle.

  Darrow sensed he was rambling. “If you get tired, I wish you would tell me. I am getting to the garrulous age,” he told the committee.23 In September, he kept a lecture engagement at a local church, but asked if he could remain in his chair as he spoke.

  From time to time, he made a bit of a stir. The reporters called him up for a comment when Dickie Loeb was murdered in prison. He criticized the prosecutorial tactics that led to the convictions of Al Capone and Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. And, in 1936, a few days short of his seventy-ninth birthday, he argued his last case—that of Jesse Binga, a black banker convicted of fraud.

  There were few bright spots in the last months of Darrow’s life. His friend Fay Lewis came to call in February 1938, but was alarmed when no one answered the door.

  “I imagine father was home, but they never answer the door because he is in no condition to see anyone,” Paul wrote Lewis. “His mind is practically gone and it is necessary to have a day and night nurse. He is up almost every day around the house—most of the time walking alone [I mean without help] but some one is with him constantly to see that he does not fall.

  “He talks considerably but says nothing that we can understand. Once in a while
I can catch a word or two but no connected words that give me any idea of what he means. He has been this way for most of the last six months. I took him out for a ride the last Sunday in January. The last two Sundays he has not been well enough to go.”24

  He needed around-the-clock care, as his once tall and broad-shouldered frame withered, in his dying, to ninety pounds. He was given morphine, at first at night, then all the time. The cruelest stroke, for those who loved him, was the loss of his powers of analysis and expression. “The wonderful intellect has crashed,” one friend wrote another. For six months, Darrow rambled about his Hyde Park apartment, raving and muttering.

  On March 5, 1938, Binga was freed. The great lawyer had won his final appeal. But Darrow was too ill, and senescent, to comprehend the news.

  He left the living on March 13, a few weeks short of his eighty-first birthday—a small, wizened corpse of just a few score pounds.

  IN OHIO, AN enterprising newspaper editor dispatched a reporter to Kinsman, which “never really understood” the “gaunt village lad who grew up to a strange greatness.”

  Ruth Root, who had sat beside young Clarence in class at school, allowed that “he was a good man, I reckon, but folks didn’t like the way he believed. Myself, I never could see how he could plead for those murderers.”

  “Funeral service?” said her friend Florence Flowers. “I thought they’d just toss him off a cliff.”25

  IN THE WEEKS after his death, Ruby Darrow was compelled to give up their Midway flat and to sell his library and belongings. She was stunned to discover, in those Depression days, how little the estate commanded. The books, well pawed and annotated, went to Kroch’s Bookstore on Michigan Avenue for a few hundred dollars. The grandfather clock that Ruby thought was worth hundreds sold for $50 at auction. The Oriental rug she had valued at $300 was bought for $70. His pocket knife, which he used to sharpen pencils for the crossword puzzles he enjoyed, went for $1.50.

  A WINTER RAIN was falling on March 19 as an automobile braked to a halt on a stone bridge spanning the lagoon in Jackson Park, on the lakefront in Chicago. The weather fit the season, which was grim with news of war; the newspapers carried photographs of Londoners in gas masks at civil defense drills, and told how the Nazi legions had marched into Vienna.

  One of the passengers—the lawyer’s son—stayed in the car; the other, his business manager, emerged and walked to the rail, where he opened a metal box, leaned out, and spilled cinders and ash and cremated bone into the water below. He returned to the car and it rode away, and was swallowed in the lakeside traffic.26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not be, except for the love of my wife Catharina. It is dedicated to my son John and daughter Caitlin. They are a generous and supportive family, fine traveling companions, and not too bad as research assistants.

  I have a wonderful friend and agent in David Black, and I benefited from the help of a remarkably talented team at Doubleday, led by Kris Puopolo, Bill Thomas, Stephanie Bowen, Nora Reichard, and Rosalie Wieder. I thank Kris, especially, for her exacting standards, literary vision, and unflagging encouragement.

  I thank the Darrow family for its help, especially William and Judy Lyon, who opened their basement archives to me.

  At the Library of Congress, Jeff Flannery and his colleagues in the manuscript reading room and its companion divisions were superb guides. With their help, I explored the Clarence Darrow Papers and the microfilm or original collections of the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, Sam Gompers and the AFL-CIO, the Pinkerton detective agency, Theodore Roosevelt, Brand Whitlock, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, Louis Brandeis, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Elmer Gertz, and others. At the Library I found essential resources like the transcript of the Anthracite Strike Commission hearings, Harry Orchard’s confession and detective James McParland’s correspondence from the Steunenberg murder case, the Pinkerton report from the Massie case, the original transcript of Darrow’s closing remarks (with his edits for publication) from his second bribery trial, and, among the Gertz papers, the transcript of the second and third day of Darrow’s closing address in the Leopold and Loeb trial, which some scholars thought was lost.

  Since I was a boy of twelve, I have owned a copy of Irving Stone’s biography of Darrow. I was moved to write my own story of the great man’s life after discovering in 2005 that the University of Minnesota had acquired a huge cache of his private correspondence from his heirs. It was found, along with a subsequent collection held by Ruby Darrow’s family, by Minneapolis attorney Randall Tietjen, who is editing a forthcoming book of Darrow letters. The lion’s share of the correspondence came online in 2010 when the university’s law library opened hundreds of these documents—most of them previously unavailable to scholars—to the public. Katherine Hedin and Michael Hannon and their colleagues have done a first-rate job assembling their collection as a digital archive that includes letters, trial transcripts, photographs, and secondary sources. It was there, for example, that I found Darrow’s instruction to his son Paul to pay $4,500 to a juror from the bribery trial.

  The treasure hunt provides much of the fun when writing a biography. After Darrow’s death, his wife Ruby sold his papers to Irving Stone, who then sold the collection to philanthropist Leo Cherne, who donated most of it to the Library of Congress. At Boston University, I discovered that Cherne’s papers contain a trove of correspondence that he did not give to the Library, including revealing letters from Tommie and Thalia Massie, and from Darrow’s friends and family during the bribery trials. Another invaluable resource for Darrow scholars is the papers of Mary Field Parton, his longtime friend and lover. The full collection, including her diaries, is at the University of Oregon, and has never been used in a full-scale life of Darrow. Going page by page through her diaries, I found Mary’s acknowledgment, to herself, that the man she so loved and admired may indeed have bribed the McNamara jury. In the Karl Darrow papers at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, I found poignant accounts of Darrow’s mother’s death from cancer, and other glimpses of the Darrow family, related in letters from Amirus and Mary Darrow.

  Chicago is an essential stop for a Darrow scholar. A smaller selection of Mary’s correspondence with Darrow, which includes his long and expressive letters, is at the Newberry Library. The Newberry also has his first wife Jessie Ohl’s scrapbooks, a file of correspondence by Edgar Lee Masters, and the papers of Darrow scholars Arthur and Lila Weinberg. I made use of other collections there as well, including those of Eunice Tietjens, Ben Hecht, Wallace Rice, May Walden, Graham Taylor, Robert Bergstrom, Bernard Brommel, and Mayor Carter Harrison II. Along the way, I came to know and enjoy the city and its people. The University of Chicago has a small Darrow collection and papers of George Schilling. Northwestern University has a second Gertz collection, with a set of Leopold and Loeb transcripts. The Chicago Historical Society holds more Leopold and Loeb material, including the papers of Hal Higdon and Nathan Leopold, and other fascinating collections. The Chicago Public Library has a minor Darrow collection as well.

  The National Archives in Chicago and in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland, hold important files on the Red Scare, the Pullman Strike, Leopold and Loeb, the Massie case, the Haywood and McNamara prosecutions, and the Eastland disaster. John Mitchell’s papers are at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

  Darrow’s disastrous California experience is well chronicled there. I read the 10,000-page transcript of the first bribery trial, and volumes from the prosecution of David Caplan and Matt Schmidt, at the Los Angeles Law Library, just a few feet across Broadway from where the Los Angeles Times Building was destroyed by James McNamara’s bomb in 1910. The Huntington Library in San Marino holds the papers of Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his wife Sara, which contain many letters from Darrow and Mary Field and their associates. More Wood papers, and Sara’s oral history, are available at the University of California at Berkeley, which also has the pap
ers of Irving Stone, Hiram Johnson, Fremont and Cora Older, James Barry, Paul Scharrenberg, and Tom Mooney. Across the bay, at Stanford University, I made use of the Walter Bordwell and Meyer Lissner collections. UCLA holds the papers of LeCompte Davis, James Harlan Pope, and Dr. Perceval Gerson, as well as several oral histories from the period, most notably that of Oscar Lawler. Another Lawler oral history can be found at Claremont College.

  The Idaho State Historical Society has most of the important papers from the Steunenberg case, including transcripts from the Bill Haywood and second Steve Adams trials and the Pinkerton reports to Governor Gooding. The College of Idaho has put selections of the George Crookham papers online, including the Steunenberg family correspondence describing the assassination.

  In Hawaii, the folks at the Hawaii State Archives were most helpful and patient, as I plowed through the papers of Lawrence Judd, Victor Houston, and John Kelley, the Pinkerton investigative files, and the surviving trial transcripts from the Ala Moana case. The archivists at the Bishop Museum opened the Walter Dillingham papers to me.

  The New York Public Library has the leading collection of Henry L. Mencken’s letters, small selections on Katherine Leckie and Edgar Lee Masters, and court files from the Red Scare, including transcripts or excerpts from the Benjamin Gitlow and William B. Lloyd trials. The Lincoln Steffens and Charles Yale Harrison papers are at Columbia University. And Princeton University holds the ACLU, Scribner’s, Julian Street, Louis Adamic, and Arthur Garfield Hays papers, and another Mencken collection. Alice Beal Parsons left her papers on the Person trial to Syracuse University. The papers of Hugo Munsterberg and of Sacco and Vanzetti are cared for by the excellent staff of the Boston Public Library. The records at the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library give a unique glimpse at the relationship between Darrow and FDR.