Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  3. Debs to Darrow, June 4, 1925, Eugene Debs collection, Indiana State University; Chicago Tribune, July 4, 5, 1923; Bryan, “Proposed Address”; Bryan to Howard Kelly, June 22, 1925, WJB; for Bryan at the 1924 convention see Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero (New York: Borzoi, 2006) and Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Putnam’s, 1971).

  4. Kenneth K. Bailey, “The Enactment of Tennessee’s Antievolution Law,” Journal of Southern History, Nov. 1950; Bryan to Samuel Untermyer, June 11, 1925, WJB; George Hunter, A Civic Biology (New York: American Book Co., 1914).

  5. Darrow’s sentiments about Kinsman were mixed. “Once in a while I go back to Trumbull County, but most all the names I used to know are chiseled on gravestones, so I do not get much of a kick out of it,” he wrote to a fellow Ohioan, James Kennedy. “The last time I was there, I intended to spend a week. I got into Kinsman on the morning train and in an hour or two, thought I would want to spend two or three days. Along toward noon, I found there was an afternoon train out … But somehow I have a feeling for the old place and may possibly go back again this summer.” See Darrow to Kennedy, Mar. 21, 1925, Ohio Historical Society.

  6. Kinsman Journal, Oct. 3, 1924; Warren Chronicle, Oct. 1, 1924.

  7. Darrow straddled the choice between Democratic senator John W. Davis and Progressive senator Robert La Follette in the 1924 election. Either one would be better than Calvin Coolidge, he said. Both lost.

  8. Mary Field Parton diary, MFP; Darrow to Mary, Feb. 19, 1925, CDMFP-NL.

  9. Chattanooga Times, May 4, 6, 1925; Memphis Press and Sue Hicks telegrams, May 14, 1925, Sue Hicks papers, University of Tennessee. Sue Hicks was named in honor of his mother, who died in childbirth. He is said to have served as an inspiration for a country song by Johnny Cash. ACLU papers, Library of Congress; John T. Scopes, Center of the Storm (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); L. Sprague de Camp, The Great Monkey Trial (New York: Doubleday, 1968); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998); Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever (Boston: Beacon, 1958).

  10. John T. Scopes, Center of the Storm; New York Times, July 9, 1925; Washington Post, July 8, 1925; Chicago Tribune, July 8, 9, 1925; manuscript of a biography of Bryan, by his daughter Grace, WJB.

  11. Mary Field Parton oral history, MFP; Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1925; Scopes, Center of the Storm.

  12. Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1925.

  13. New York Times, June 7, 9, 10, 1925; Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1925; New York Post, June 11, 1925; George S. Thomas to Scopes, June 26, 1925, WJB; Mencken to “Garrison,” July 6, 1925, Mencken papers, Princeton University; Scopes, Center of the Storm; American Civil Liberties Union, Executive Committee minutes, May 11 and 25, June 1 and 8, 1925, Bailey to Lippmann, June 12, 1925, ACLU; Bryan to W. B. Marr, June 11, 1925, WJB; Chattanooga Times, July 9, 1925; Mary Field Parton diaries, MFP; Mary to Sara, June 4, 1925, CESW-HL.

  14. Dayton’s cultural amenities were “Agri-cultural!” it boasted, and its resistance to change was represented in the promotional brochure Why Dayton of All Places? by the motto “Consistency Indeed a Jewel.” Ignoring the satire, Dayton likened itself to Gopher Prairie, the hidebound setting of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. “This is America—a town of a few thousand, in a region of fruit and corn and dairies and little groves,” the pamphlet said. “Come on. Come to Main Street. Show us. Make the town—well—make it artistic. It’s mighty pretty … Probably the lumber yard isn’t as scrumptious as all these Greek temples. But go to it! Make us change!”

  15. Mencken to “Garrison,” July 6, 1925, Mencken papers, Princeton University; Mencken to Sara Haardt, May 27, 1925, quoted in Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987); Mencken to Masters, May 25, 1925, ELM.

  16. Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1925.

  17. “Light vs. Darkness,” Time magazine, May 25, 1925; Chicago Tribune, May 26, 27, 1925; Ira Hicks to Herbert Hicks, June 5, 1925, and Ira Hicks to Sue Hicks, undated, Sue Hicks papers, University of Tennessee.

  18. William Jennings Bryan to W. B. Marr, June 15, 1925, CD-LOC; Bryan to W. B. Riley, J. Frank Norris, and George M. Price, all on June 7, 1925, Untermyer to Bryan, June 25, 1925, Alfred McCann to Bryan, June 30, 1925, WJB; Sue Hicks to Ira Hicks and to Reese Hicks, both June 8, 1925, Ira Hicks to Sue Hicks, undated, Sue Hicks to Bryan, June 12, 1925, Hicks to John Raulston, July 1, 1925, Sue Hicks papers, University of Tennessee. In a June 13 letter Sue Hicks objected to Bryan’s recruiting of Samuel Untermyer because “we somewhat doubt the advisability of having a Jew in the case for the reason that they reject part of the Bible.”

  19. Scopes, Center of the Storm; Sue Hicks to Bryan and Haggard to Bryan, June 23, 1925, and Bryan to Hicks, June 25, 1925, WJB; Jack Lait column in Knoxville Sentinel, July 10, 1925. Larson notes that a newsman traveling with Colby, Scopes, and Darrow described the trial as a murder case, not a rape; see Larson, Summer for the Gods.

  20. Masters to Mencken, May 23, 1925, and Mencken to Masters, May 27, 1925, ELM; see also Mary Field Parton to Sara Field Wood, July 1925, CESW-HL. “It seems to me a beautiful climax to Darrow’s life that he should transcend the particular … and defend Knowledge … as if it were his client,” Mary wrote Sara. “Darrow will not be able to save Knowledge from the mob in Dayton … But the seeds will blow from those isolated mountains all over the land.”

  21. Schretter, “I Remember Darrow,” Marcet Haldeman-Julius, Clarence Darrow’s Two Great Trials (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Co., 1927); Ruby Darrow letter to Stone, CD-LOC; Ruby to Helen Darrow, 1940, KD; Mary Bryan, “Bulletin No. 2,” July 20, 1925, WJB. Bryan’s wife Mary wrote a series of “bulletins” for her children, which were incorporated into an unpublished biography of Bryan written by his daughter, which can be found, along with some of the original bulletins, in the Bryan papers at the Library of Congress.

  22. Baltimore Evening Sun, July 9, 14, 1925; Mencken to Haardt, July 9, 1925 in Mencken and Sara; L. Sprague de Camp, The Great Monkey Trial.

  23. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Scopes,” in the Crisis, Sept. 1925.

  24. Trial transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes. The trial transcript was published as The World’s Greatest Court Trial (Cincinnati: National Book Co., 1925) and has been reprinted through the years. It can now be found on the Internet as well. New York Times, July 10, 11, 1925; Washington Post, July 11, 1925; Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1925; Chicago Tribune, July 9, 10, 11, 1925; Mary Bryan bulletin, WJB.

  25. Baltimore Evening Sun, July 13, 1925; Will Rogers column, Washington Post, July 13, 1925.

  26. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Mencken to Haardt, July 14, 1925, in Rogers, Mencken and Sara.

  27. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1925; Los Angeles Times, July 15, 1925; New York Times, July 14, 1925; Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1925; Masters to Monroe, July 16, 1925, ELM.

  28. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Curtis to Darrow, July 27, 1925, and excerpts from memoir, Winterton Curtis papers, University of Missouri.

  29. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes. “I reckon likely we never did get around to that evolution lesson. But the kids were good sports and wouldn’t squeal on me in court,” Scopes told Charles Potter. See Potter, “Ten Years After the Monkey Show I’m Going Back to Dayton,” Liberty Magazine, Sept. 28, 1935.

  30. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; John Scopes, “Reflections: Forty Years After,” in D-Days at Dayton, ed. Jerry Tompkins (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965); Mary Bryan, Bulletin No. 2, WJB; McGeehan Herald Tribune story reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1925.

  31. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Baltimore Evening Sun, July 17, 27, 1925; L. Sprague de Camp, The Great Monkey Trial.

  32. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Chattanooga Times, July 16, 1925; McGeehan in Los Angeles Times, July 17, 1925; Fay-Cooper Cole, “50 Years Ago: A Wit
ness at the Scopes Trial,” Scientific American, Jan. 1959; Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1925; Mary Bryan, Bulletin No. 2, WJB.

  33. Mencken to Haardt, July 19, 1925, in Rogers, Mencken and Sara.

  34. Mencken was not run out of town. Well before the townfolk gathered, Mencken had told Sara Haardt that he planned to leave on Saturday. Mencken to Harry Rickel, July 19, 1925, Henry Mencken papers, Princeton University; Baltimore Evening Sun, July 18, 1925.

  35. Potter, “Ten Years After”; Eli Ginzberg, Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginzberg (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1966).

  36. Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1925.

  37. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Mary Bryan, Bulletin No. 3, WJB; Scopes, Center of the Storm.

  38. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes. At this point in their exchange, both Darrow and Bryan confused Bishop Ussher’s date of creation with his date of the Flood. Darrow later misstated the age of Chinese civilization, but Bryan’s lack of knowledge of ancient history cost him an opportunity to correct his adversary.

  39. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Scopes, Center of the Storm; Hays, City Lawyer; Hays, “The Strategy of the Scopes Defense,” The Nation, Aug. 5, 1925.

  40. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Hays, City Lawyer.

  41. Darrow to Mencken, Aug. 5, 1925, Mencken papers, New York Public Library; Chattanooga News, July 21, 1925; New York Times, July 21, 1925; Mary Bryan, Bulletin No. 3, WJB. The face-saving reason for not giving Bryan his shot at Darrow, which Bryan’s loved ones clung to in the difficult days ahead, was that Dayton officials could not guarantee security. A gun-toting fundamentalist in the courtyard crowd had his hand on his weapon and was prepared to shoot Darrow, the Bryans were told. “Thus it will be seen,” wrote Bryan’s daughter Grace, “that my father relinquished his right to cross-examine the attorneys for the defense to prevent any tragedy.”

  42. Transcript, The State of Tennessee v. Scopes; Herbert Hicks to Ira Hicks, July 22, 1925, Sue Hicks papers, University of Tennessee; Russell Owen, Current History Magazine, Sept. 1925; New York Times, July 22, 1925.

  43. Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC; The Nation, Aug. 5, 1925. Some time later, Darrow learned that a newspaper editor he knew, wanting to honor the Bryan of 1896, was going to raise money for a memorial. “Sentimental poppycock,” Darrow told him. “It’s the Monkey Trial Bryan those damn bells will ring for. And you’ll pull the ropes … You’re the last man in the world who should perpetuate such bigotry, such religious fanaticism.” It was left to the fundamentalists to honor Bryan—at the site of his great humiliation. There is a single statue on the lawn of the Rhea County courthouse—it is of William Jennings Bryan.

  CHAPTER 19: SWEET

  1. Russell Owen, “The Significance of the Scopes Trial,” Current History, Sept. 1925; Lincoln Steffens, “Attorney for the Damned”; Vanity Fair, Mar. 1927. Darrow stalks American literature in many guises. Sinclair Lewis created the Darrow-like lawyer Seneca Doane in Babbitt and long worked on an unfinished “labor novel” with a Darrowesque hero. In Native Son, Richard Wright patterned attorney Boris Max on Darrow, whom the author called “the quintessence of all that was good and great in an America that is no more.” See Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright (New York: Henry Holt, 2001) and Robert Butler, “The Loeb and Leopold Case: A Neglected Source for Richard Wright’s Native Son,” African American Review, winter 2005. Theodore Dreiser told Darrow he was constantly in his thoughts as he wrote the trial section of An American Tragedy. Maureen Watkins reported on the Leopold and Loeb case for the Chicago Tribune, and the killers make a cameo appearance as clients of lawyer Billy Flynn in her 1926 play Chicago. The reference is explicit in the stage directions of the 1976 musical version (“Billy gets ready for his courtroom ‘scene’—pulling his shirt out, roughing up his hair, exposing some down-home suspenders—his ‘Clarence Darrow’ look”) as he sings “Give ’em the old Razzle Dazzle.” And Darrow is obviously Jonathan Wilk in the novel and motion picture Compulsion, based on the Franks murder, and Henry Drummond in the play and motion picture Inherit the Wind, which immortalized the Monkey Trial.

  2. Wood diary, July 16, 1925, CESW-HL; Masters to Mencken, July 21, 1925, ELM; Whitlock diary, Aug. 14, 1925, BW; see also Matt Schmidt to Fremont Older, Aug. 31, 1925, Fremont Older papers, University of California, Berkeley.

  3. Transcript, The People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet et al., University of Michigan. The Sweets bought the house from Ed Smith, a black man passing as white, and his white wife. “Only their close friends … seem to know that the Smiths are colored,” Walter White reported. Detroit News, Sept. 10, Nov. 18, 19, 20, 1925; Chicago Defender, July 18, 1925; NAACP correspondence, especially White to Johnson, Sept. 16, 1925, and letter, undated, from Gladys Sweet, NAACP.

  4. Transcript, The People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet et al.

  5. Transcript, People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet; Detroit Free Press, Sept. 10, Nov. 21, 1925; Detroit News, Sept. 10, Nov. 18, 21, 1925; “Address of Arthur Garfield Hays,” Jan. 3, 1926, NAACP; Detroit Times, May 5, 1926; Robert Toms, Otis Sweet, and Charles Mahoney, oral histories, AB; William Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970). For further details of Dr. Sweet’s background see Weinberg, A Man’s Home (New York: McCall, 1971); Phyllis Vine, One Man’s Castle (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

  6. Transcript, People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet; Detroit Evening Times, Oct. 16, 1925; Walter White, “The Burning of Jim McIlherron: An NAACP Investigation,” Crisis, May 1918, and “The Work of a Mob,” Crisis, Sept. 1918. White’s bravery as an investigator for the NAACP is chronicled in his autobiography, A Man Called White (New York: Viking, 1948) and in Kenneth Janken, White (New York: New Press, 2003). See also James Weldon Johnson, “Lynching: America’s National Disgrace,” in Current History, Jan. 1924, in which the NAACP executive placed the number of lynchings in the four decades around the turn of the century at four thousand, and the following reports in the Crisis: “The Waco Horror,” July 1916; “The Burning at Dyersburg,” Feb. 1918; “Memphis, May 22, A.D., 1917,” July 1917; and the NAACP publication “An American Lynching: Being the Burning at Stake of Henry Lowry at Nodena, Arkansas, January 26, 1921, as Told in American Newspapers” (New York: NAACP, 1921). The Sweet brothers were well aware of what happened at such events. There were claims by some defendants that shots were fired from the crowd on Garland Avenue, but no proof was ever offered at the trials. See White, A Man Called White, p. 74: “Instead of stones and bricks banging against the house, bullets pierced it.”

  7. Transcript, People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet; Detroit Free Press, Nov. 19, 1925; Gladys Sweet to White, Oct. 1925, NAACP.

  8. White, A Man Called White; Kenneth Janken, White. White became a good friend of Darrow’s and named a son Walter Carl Darrow White. Correspondence with Detroit branch and NAACP headquarters, NAACP.

  9. Darrow helped relieve the NAACP of the cost of his expenses in Detroit by making speeches. NAACP correspondence, records, and minutes. See especially “Memorandum of Expenses in Case of Dr. Ossian H. Sweet et al.,” Bagnall to Young, July 21, 1925, White to Johnson, Sept. 16, 1925, Johnson to Darrow, Oct. 7, 1925, Du Bois to Darrow, Oct. 7, 1925, White to Midgley, Oct. 22, 1925, Darrow to White, Oct. 22, 1925, and White to Seligmann, Oct. 22, 1925, NAACP; New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 5, 1925; Robert Toms oral history, AB. The story of Darrow’s meeting with NAACP officials is told in the memoirs of White and Hays.

  10. Detroit News, Oct. 16, 1925; Detroit Free Press, Oct. 16, 1925; David Lilienthal, “Has the Negro the Right of Self-Defense?” Nation, Dec. 23, 1925; White to Johnson, Sept. 17, 1925, and Walker to White, Oct. 27, 1925, NAACP; Josephine Gomon, unpublished biography of Frank Murphy, Josephine Gomon papers, University of Michigan; Otis Sweet oral history, AB.

  11. Detroit News, Oct. 31, Nov. 1, 1925; Detroit Free Press, Oct. 31, Nov. 5, 1925; Detroit Evening Times, Oct. 31, 1925; B
aker to White, Oct. 21, 1925, and White to Johnson (dated “Saturday night”), Oct. 31, 1925, Baker to White, Feb. 20, 1926, NAACP; Marcet Haldeman-Julius, “Clarence Darrow’s Defense of a Negro,” Haldeman-Julius Monthly, July 1926; Gomon diary, JG; Toms oral history, AB; Hays, Let Freedom Ring (New York: Liveright, 1928).

  12. White was tireless, wrangling press credentials, lunching with the judge, orchestrating the performance of the black spectators, and winning reporters to the Negro cause with his perceptive commentary and helpful favors.

  13. Transcript, People of Michigan v. Ossian Sweet; Detroit News, Nov. 11, 1925; New York World, Nov. 6, 1925; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 8, 1925; Detroit Evening Times, Nov. 6, 7, 10, 1925; White to Johnson, Nov. 13, 1925, NAACP; Cecil Rowlette and Mahoney oral histories, AB.

  14. White to Johnson, Nov. 15, 1925, NAACP; Toms oral history, AB.

  15. Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC. Actress and writer Anita Loos, in town for a production of her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, came to see Darrow, as did Jeanne Eagels, who was in Detroit performing a role she had made famous on Broadway, the free spirit Sadie Thompson, in the touring production of Rain. A very young actress, Ruth Wilcox, came by, and the somewhat notorious former Ziegfeld girl Peggy Joyce.

  16. Detroit Free Press, Nov. 9, Nov. 16, Nov. 18, 1925; New York Times, Nov. 9, 1925; Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (Louisville: Knox, 1990); Boyle, Arc of Justice.

  17. Gomon diary, JG; Gomon was a remarkable person. She helped found the National Planned Parenthood League, worked as executive secretary to Mayor Frank Murphy, was named director of the Detroit Housing Commission, and served as an adviser to Murphy, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Walter Reuther.