Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  2. If a judge “doesn’t watch him in the early stages of a lawsuit,” said Landis, “Darrow will ask some innocent question and get an answer in the record that will support some otherwise insupportable trick that he’s going to pull on you later.” Stanley F. Horn, oral history, Forest History Society, Santa Cruz, California, 1978; Chicago Tribune, Sept. 27, 1907, Aug. 27, 1911, Oct. 2, 3, 4, 5, 1916, Jan. 25, 1953; Masters to Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, ELM.

  3. Chicago Tribune, Nov. 28, 1914, Feb. 28, June 14, 1916, Jan. 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, June 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 1917, Nov. 8, 1928; New York Times, Aug. 3, 1919; Robert Lombardo, “The Black Mafia: African-American organized crime in Chicago 1890-1960,” Crime, Law & Social Change 38 (2002): 33–65.

  4. For the cigar story see New York Times, Apr. 28, 1957. Darrow to Paul, Aug. 18, 1918, CD-UML; Darrow to Mary, Jan. 29, 1918, CDMFP-NL; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 15, 18, 24, 1916, Sept. 13, Oct. 15, 19, 21, 27, Nov. 13, 18, 22, Dec. 2, 3, 8, 24, 27, 1917, Jan. 1, 11, 13, 1918, May 17, 1922, Jan. 16, 19, 23, 27, 29, 1923; Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954); Charles Erbstein, The Show-up: Stories Before the Bar (Chicago: Covici, 1926).

  5. According to Erbstein, at one point in the Healey trial, to relieve the tedium while the lawyers argued points of law, the judge gave the jurors a phonograph. One of Healey’s codefendants, the mischievous Bill Skidmore, plunged the trial into chaos with a rumor that a record store owner had been “reached” and the jury was listening to the popular song “Please Don’t Send My Darling Boy Away.” On another occasion, says Erbstein, the courtroom water cooler was filled with alcohol, and all the participants glowed with loquacious goodwill. See Erbstein, The Show-up.

  6. Darrow to Paul, Oct. 10 and Dec. 9, 1917, June 28, 1920, CD-UML; Sissman interview with Stone, CD-LOC; Darrow to Mary, Nov. 16, 1921, CDMFP-NL.

  7. The Kid outlived them all, and died at the age of one hundred in 1976, after a career during which, by his estimation, he made and spent $10 million. In one classic con, Weil told his victim that he had devised a way to tap the racing wire and delay the results just long enough to get a bet down on the winner. To seal the deal, the Kid escorted his prey to a phony betting parlor, built and manned by a coterie of con men. There, the victim “won” a $20 bet and became convinced that Weil was telling the truth. The next day, the mark returned with $12,000 and was told to place it on a chosen horse. He bet the horse to win and when it came in second demanded to know why. You didn’t listen, Weil said—the bet was to place, not win. They agreed to try again the next day, but when the mark went looking for the Kid—and the betting parlor—they both had vanished. Weil’s antics, and those of his colleagues, inspired the motion picture The Sting. Henry R. Chamberlin, “50-50, Fighting Chicago’s Crime Trusts,” 1916, CD-UML; J. R. Weil, with W. T. Brannon, Con Man: A Master Swindler’s Own Story (Broadway Books, 2004); Chicago Tribune, Oct. 30, Nov. 21, Dec. 27, 1917, Jan. 19, Oct. 25, 26, Nov. 26, 28, Dec. 1, 1918, Feb. 8, 1924, Dec. 12, 1948, Feb. 27, 1976.

  8. “Where did you get that stuff about my losing Simpson case?” Darrow asked Paul. “I won it,” he boasted, and accurately predicted that Simpson would be freed from the asylum before long. Darrow to Paul, Oct. 4, 1919, CD-UML; Ruby letters and Sissman interviews with Stone, CD-LOC; Chicago Tribune, Dec. 20, 1920, Apr. 26, 27, May 19, Sept. 2, 9, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, Oct. 3, Nov. 22, 24, 1919; July 15, 1921, Sept. 30. 1924, Feb. 27, 1925, Apr. 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 1925; New York Times, July 2, Aug. 21, 1920, Apr. 9, 1925; Chicago Herald Examiner, Apr. 9, 1925; Chicago Daily News, Apr. 10, 1925; Bloomington Sunday Bulletin, Apr. 19, 1925. The McCormick divorce alone brought the firm $25,000, Sissman told Stone.

  9. Darrow to Mary, June 10, 1921, CDMFP-NL; New York Times, Oct. 8, 1923; Boston Globe, Oct. 8, 1923; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 23, 25, 1917, Jan. 22, 1918, Feb. 17, 18, 20, June 12, 14, 1919, Apr. 13, Sept. 15, 1920, Jan. 25, Feb. 24, 1921, June 22, 1922, Oct. 8, 9, 11, 1923, Mar. 12, 1924, Mar. 6, July 10, 1927, Mar. 7, 1939; Florence Stauffer, “Darrow for the Defense,” Warsaw Times-Union, Nov. 13, 1975.

  10. Transcript of remarks at Darrow’s sixty-first birthday dinner, CD-LOC.

  11. Chicago Daily News, Feb. 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, May 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 1920; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 11, 13, 16, Mar. 5, Apr. 2, May 11, 12, 22, 26, July 28, 31, 1920, June 14, 1921, Sept. 13, 1922, Feb. 16, 19, 26, 1923, June 27, 1928, Mar. 10, June 9, 1929, Nov. 13, 19, 1960.

  12. Heitler was a whoremonger who was put to work by Al Capone and ended up murdered, his corpse incinerated, when he crossed the Outfit. Chicago Tribune, Oct. 6, 9, 27, Nov. 13, 1920, Feb. 16, 19, 25, Mar. 4, 6, 9, May 18, 1921, Apr. 27, Nov. 15, 17, 27, Dec. 2, 1923, Oct. 11, 1924; San Juan Prospector, May 9, 1914.

  13. Darrow’s support for the rumrunners fit with popular sentiment in Chicago. At one political banquet he lauded the anti-Prohibition stand of Anton Cermak, the president of the Cook County board of commissioners, and could not finish his speech because, after stating, “I thank God bootleggers exist,” he was drowned out by the audience, who stood on their chairs and cheered. Chicago Tribune, July 22, Aug. 24, Sept. 6, 7, 10, 1923, Jan. 13, 14, 18, 20, June 7, 1925, May 31, 1929.

  14. Looney’s story inspired a graphic novel, and a motion picture, The Road to Perdition. Dispatch/Argus, June 17, 1971, July 13, 2002; Quad City Times, July 2002; “John Looney Legend Tour,” Rock Island Preservation Commission, 2008; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 1909, Mar. 27, 1912, Oct. 7, 8, 11, 26, 27, 1922, Sept. 15, 1923, Nov. 13, 20, 29, 1924; Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26, 1912, Oct. 7, 1922, Nov. 14, 26, 1924; New York Times, Mar. 24, 1908, Mar. 28, 29, 1912.

  15. Ruby Darrow note, June 21, 1920, CD-LOC; Ruby to Gerson, Jan. 21, 1922, Perceval Gerson papers, UCLA; Darrow to Older, Mar. 22, 1922, ALW; Darrow to Paul, June 28, 1920, July 19, 1921, CD-UML; Darrow to Mary, Nov. 16, 1921, June 17, 1922, Sept. 8, 1922, Feb. 1, 1923, Feb. 19, 1925, Aug. 25, 1928, CDMFP-NL; George Nathan, The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Knopf, 1932); Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1922, Dec. 6, 1922; Darrow, “The Ordeal of Prohibition,” American Mercury, Aug. 1924.

  16. New York Times, Jan. 30, 1923; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 30, Mar. 4, 1923, Apr. 11, 23, June 5, 9, 12, 13, 20, 30, July 11, 12, 13, 14, 1923; Darrow to Paul, July 19, 1921, and spring 1924, CD-UML; Darrow to Mary, Feb. 1, 1923, CDMFP-NL.

  17. Thompson would return to office in 1927, but by then he and Lundin had fallen out. In one of the great stunts of Chicago politics, Thompson appeared on stage at a campaign rally with a caged rat he called “Fred.” Wasn’t it true, Thompson asked the rat, that it took Clarence Darrow and an all-star defense team to save him from the penitentiary? Hadn’t he himself traveled all the way back from Honolulu to testify? “Wasn’t I the best friend you ever had?”

  The state and Darrow dueled on one more corruption case, in early 1924, when Thompson appointee Michael Faherty, who chaired the Board of Local Improvements, was charged with making an overpayment of $28,000 to a favored contractor. It was a simple case, and the jury settled it quickly, in Faherty’s favor. The $28,000 overage was a legitimate bonus to spur the contractors to finish the job faster, Darrow had told the jurors.

  CHAPTER 17: LOEB AND LEOPOLD

  1. The press has promiscuously conferred the accolade. The McNamara, Haywood, and Scopes cases were all called crimes or trials of the century, as was the 1906 murder of architect Stanford White by millionaire Harry Thaw and a dozen sensational cases that followed, including the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Rosenberg spy case, the O. J. Simpson murder trial, etc. “In Re Nathan Leopold, Junior,” psychiatric report of Dr. Karl M. Bowman and Dr. Charles Hulbert, 1925, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; report of Dr. James Whitney Hall, Chicago Herald Examiner, June 5, Aug. 11, 1924; Erie Dispatch, Mar. 10, 1926; Life editorial quoted in the Literary Digest, July 5, 1924; Paula Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,” Journal of American History, Dec. 1993. The public perception was that the victim and kil
lers were all Jewish boys from the same community. Loeb’s mother was from a Catholic family, but he had been raised as a reform Jew, like Leopold. The Frankses were Jews who had left the faith and become Christian Scientists.

  2. Trial transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; Chicago Daily News, May 31, June 2, 1924; Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1924.

  3. New York Times, June 2, 1924. See undated letter, Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC. Ruby did not catch all their names. Accompanying Jacob Loeb were, probably, attorney Benjamin Bachrach and Nathan’s brother Michael Leopold and maybe Nathan Leopold Sr., who was with the others for much of that weekend as they tried to organize a defense. Based on the overheated account from Ruby, who described the event in the third person (“Twas as quiet as the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse—when suddenly out of a sound sleep the Darrows were startled by a frightening ringing of their front-door bell like a place afire or some other catastrophe”), Irving Stone re-created a scene, and dialogue, in which Loeb throws his arms around Darrow, begging him to “Save their lives! Get them a life sentence” and promising, “Money’s no object. We’ll pay you anything you ask.” Stone and others place the nocturnal visit on June 2, but it was clearly June 1.

  4. Darrow to Paul, June 25, 1924, CD-UML.

  5. Darrow to Jessie, June 10, 1924, CD-UML. Years later, Darrow told a friend how, in one meeting with Leopold and Loeb, they had asked him if he could smuggle poison into the jail so that they might cheat the hangman. “I could,” he told them, “but it’s a little out of my line.” George Whitehead interview with Stone, CD-LOC.

  6. Chicago Daily News, June 11, 1924; Chicago Herald Examiner, July 23, 1924; Chicago Tribune, Dec. 23, 1903; Leopold, Life Plus Ninety-nine Years; Darrow, Story of My Life; Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Illinois Crime Survey; Leopold notes from “Compulsion” case, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; Leslie Fiedler, The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (New York: Stein and Day, 1971); Harrison, Growing Up. Darrow told author John W. Gunn in 1925 that he had favored giving the case to Caverly because the judge was Catholic, according to a letter that Gunn’s brother Harold wrote to Paul Douglas, Feb. 20, 1971.

  7. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Daily News, June 13, July 21, 22, 1924; Chicago Tribune, June 7, 13, July 22, 1924; New York Times, June 7, July 22, 1924; Chicago Herald Examiner, July 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 1925; Chicago Daily News, June 4, 7, 1924.

  8. Darrow to Paul, July 20 and Aug. 3, 1924, CD-UML.

  9. Mary Field Parton diary and Lem to Mary, early summer 1924, MFP; Ruby Darrow letter to Stone, CD-LOC.

  10. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Yarros, My Eleven Years; Chicago Daily News, July 23, 24, 25, 1924; Chicago Tribune, July 24, 25, 27, 1924; New York Times, July 27, 1924. To placate Leopold, Darrow briefly cross-examined one witness who said he saw Loeb driving the death car on the day of the murder. Though Loeb ultimately admitted that he was the one in the backseat who struck Franks with the chisel, at first the two defendants blamed each other for the fatal act. “It’s unimportant. It’s immaterial,” Darrow told Leopold, who replied, “It’s important to me … because this is the point on which Dick’s story and mine differ, and I insist that you cross-examine. If you won’t, I’m going to ask Judge Caverly to permit me to cross-examine.” See Leopold notes for Life Plus Ninety-nine Years, in Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress.

  11. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Herald Examiner, July 28, 29, 1924; Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1924; Bowman-Hulbert, White, Healy, and Glueck reports, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; Leopold, Life Plus Ninety-nine Years; Leopold deposition, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress; New York Times, Sept. 7, 1924; Leopold testimony to Illinois parole board, 1958, quoted in Gertz, A Handful of Clients (Chicago: Follett, 1965). In keeping with his cracker-barrel persona in court, Darrow used “skizzyphratic” and other nonsense words for “schizophrenic.”

  12. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Tribune, July 31, Aug. 1, 1924; Chicago Herald Examiner, July 31, 1924. Pethick was the twenty-two-year-old delivery boy who had murdered Ella Coppersmith and her two-year-old son in 1915, then sexually abused her body. His name was also spelled, in the press, official records, and medical journals, as “Pethrick.”

  13. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Leopold, Life Plus Ninety-nine Years; New Statesman commentary, published in Living Age, Nov. 1, 1924; William White to Darrow, July 24, 1924, Ruby to White, undated, William White papers, National Archives; New York Times, Jan, 13, 2008. In light of recent research into the causes of psychopathy, it should also be noted that Loeb had suffered a serious head injury in an automobile accident at the age of fifteen. The talk about sex had its limits. When it came time to discuss the defendants’ sexual practices, Judge Caverly told the compliant newspapermen of the era: “This should not be published.” And prosecutor Crowe displayed his naïveté (or perhaps it was his calculation) when, after one witness testified that gay sex was a not-so-unusual practice, he asked the psychiatrist: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, doctor, to testify in that manner?”

  “No. I should say not,” the psychiatrist replied. “I have known of very nice children of very nice families who have gotten through with things of that sort.”

  14. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Herald Examiner, Aug. 23, 1924. The text of Darrow’s closing address has been pieced together from the surviving court transcripts. The first day’s transcript can be found at the University of Minnesota Law Library Web site; the second and third days’ in the Elmer Gertz collection at the Library of Congress. In his published version of the address, Darrow adjusted the number of guilty pleas from 350 to 450.

  15. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Loeb to Darrow, “Friday nite,” CD-LOC; Chicago Tribune, Aug. 23, 1924; Chicago Herald Examiner, Aug. 23, 1924; Chicago Daily News, Aug. 23, 1924; New York Times, Aug. 23, 1924.

  16. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Tribune, Aug. 26, 27, 28, 1924; Chicago Daily News, Aug. 26, 28, 1924.

  17. Transcript, Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Chicago Tribune, Aug. 28, 29, 1924; Chicago Daily News, Aug. 28, 1924; Washington Post, Aug. 29, 1924; New York Times, Aug. 29, 1924.

  18. Chicago Daily News, Sept. 10, 1924; Chicago Tribune, Sept. 11, 12, 1924; New York Times, Oct. 4, 1924; Los Angeles Times, Sept. 11, 1924; unnamed Omaha newspaper clipping, Jan. 5, 1925, CD-LOC; University Review, summer 1938; Leopold to Darrow, Sept. 10 or 11 (undated), Loeb to Darrow, Apr. 15, 1926, and Darrow to Leopold, Sept. 20, 1924, CD-LOC. A month later, from the hospital bed where he was treated for exhaustion, Caverly explained his reasoning. It was obvious that Darrow’s arguments had an impact. The defense had left it on him. They had no grounds for appeal and “burned their bridges behind them,” the judge told a reporter. “Why, Clarence Darrow … said himself: ‘If you say those two boys must die, they will die.’ ” Burdened by that responsibility, “I think I did right,” Caverly said. “There has never been a minor hanged on a plea of guilty … If I had hanged them, I would have been a great big fellow. I would have been praised on all sides. It would have been the path of least resistance. But my conscience told me what to do.”

  19. Charles Yale Harrison, Clarence Darrow (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931); Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense; Ruby letters to Irving Stone, CD-LOC; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 9, 1925. Ruby was sore, and her anti-Semitism flared. “That these two happened to be Jewish families proves nothing whatever against their race,” she told Stone, who was Jewish. But the episode had, she said, “added to the hateful stigma upon Jews as sharp dealers and dishonest people.” There was a sad footnote to the case. When claiming that the wealth of the killers’ families was distorting justice, Crowe taun
ted Darrow and asked why no tears were being shed for Bernard Grant, nineteen, who had been sentenced to death, along with Walter Krauser, twenty-one, for killing a policeman during a grocery store holdup. Surely a “boy” from a poor family deserved the aid that Babe and Dickie were getting. So Darrow joined the effort to win clemency for Grant and agreed to speak on his behalf to Illinois governor Len Small. The governor granted a reprieve, and things looked hopeful, until the mentally disturbed Krauser stabbed Grant to death with a shiv in the Cook County jail.

  CHAPTER 18: THE MONKEY TRIAL

  1. Darwin had published On the Origin of Species in 1859; his treatise persuaded scientists that life evolved from a common ancestry through a process known as natural selection. In 1871, the British naturalist followed up with The Descent of Man, which explicitly contended that human beings were animals descended from “a hairy, tailed quadruped.” Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin, applied evolutionary theory to social progress; it was he who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which laissez-faire capitalists used to justify their success. Bryan seemed willing to accept Darwin’s theory as it applied to animals, and to credit the findings of geologists that contradicted the biblical account of “days” of Creation. The Bible could “mean periods of indefinite lineage instead of twenty-four hour days,” he told an ally. What Bryan resolutely opposed was what Darwin had to say about man. If human beings were not divine creations, Bryan said, man lost all his nobler attributes and aspirations.

  2. Benjamin Kidd, a British writer, connected Darwinism and Nietzsche’s writings to German aggression. James Leuba, an American educator, persuaded Bryan that the growing secularism in American schools threatened the nation’s Christian character. See Scopes trial transcript for the text of Bryan’s “Proposed Address,” the great closing speech he had hoped to give, but was denied the chance, a copy of which was added as a courtesy to the record. See also Bryan’s speech, “Is the Bible True?” Jan. 24, 1924, Nashville, Tennessee.