Philip Foner, in the multivolume History of the Labor Movement in the United States
(New York: International Publishers, Volumes II, III, IV, and V, 1955–1980), Louis Adamic in Dynamite (New York: Viking, 1931), and Graham Adams in The Age of Industrial Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) look at what drove the men and women of labor to violence.
Foner, Anthony Lukas in Big Trouble (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and David Grover in Debaters and Dynamiters (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1964) offer the best accounts of the Haywood and first Steve Adams trials. (Like Darrow’s second bribery trial, the Adams retrials and the Pettibone trial have been neglected by historians.) See also Fremont Wood’s The Introductory Chapter to the History of the Trials of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1931) and Vernon Jensen’s Heritage of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950). Morris Friedman, who testified at the Haywood trial, detailed his experiences in The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Book Company, 1907), and James Horan profiles the detective agency in The Pinkertons (New York: Crown, 1968). See, as well, the William Borah and Bill Haywood biographies listed below and The Rocky Mountain Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1956) by Stewart Holbrook. Francis X. Busch includes the Haywood case and the Leopold and Loeb trial in Prisoners at the Bar (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952). Fine magazine coverage was provided by Outlook, Current Literature, Collier’s, and McClure’s and subsequent editions of Idaho Yesterdays and Pacific Northwest Quarterly.
Almont Lindsey’s The Pullman Strike (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942) and the Report on the Chicago Strike (1895) by the United States Strike Commission best tell the story of the Debs Rebellion. See also David Ray Papke’s The Pullman Case (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999) and The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), edited by Richard Schneirov, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore. In telling the story of the fiendish Herman Mudgett in The Devil in the White City (New York: Crown, 2003), Erik Larson memorably paints Chicago during the days of the Prendergast case and the Pullman strike. Richard Ely’s piece “Pullman: A Social Study” ran in Harper’s Monthly in February 1885. See also Richard Morton’s “A Victorian Tragedy: The Strange Deaths of Mayor Carter Harrison and Patrick Eugene Prendergast” in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 2003, and Edward Burke on political homicide in Chicago in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Northwestern University, Spring–Summer 2002).
Two excellent accounts of the Sweet case are Arc of Justice (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) by Kevin Boyle and One Man’s Castle (New York: Amistad, 2004) by Phyllis Vine. See also A Man’s Home, A Man’s Castle (New York: McCall Publishing Co., 1971) by Kenneth Weinberg. The Haldeman-Julius company published many of Darrow’s writings, as well as valuable accounts of the Scopes and Sweet trials by Marcet Haldeman-Julius, which were collected as Clarence Darrow’s Two Great Trials (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Co., 1927). David Lilienthal’s coverage of the first trial, together with a 1927 profile, is in the Nation. See also Freedom’s Sword (New York: Routledge, 2005), the tale of the NAACP, by Julian Bond and Gilbert Jonas, and the biographies of Walter White, Judge Murphy, and James Johnson listed below. The Crisis offered heart-wrenching accounts of violence and hatred against African Americans in the time that Darrow was affiliated with the NAACP.
The Massie case has inspired several authors. The best accounts are Honor Killing (New York: Penguin, 2005) by David Stannard and Peter Van Slingerland’s Something Terrible Has Happened (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). See also Theon Wright’s Rape in Paradise (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966) and Cobey Black’s Hawaii Scandal (Honolulu: Island Heritage, 2002). Thalia’s mother wrote a multipart series for Liberty magazine in the summer of 1932. George Leisure wrote of his participation in the Virginia Law Review.
The story of Darrow and the Red Scare is told in Young J. Edgar (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007) by Kenneth Ackerman and in the autobiographical novel The Trial of Helen McLeod (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1938) by Alice Beal Parsons. Michael Belknap captures the tensions of the Gitlow and Debs trials, among others, in American Political Trials (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
Edmund Morris gives a lively description of Theodore Roosevelt’s involvement in the anthracite coal strike in Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001). The best overall account is by Robert Cornell in The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University, 1957). See also the Report to the President on the Anthracite Coal Strike (1903) by the federal commission, Robert Janosov et al. in The Great Strike: Perspectives on the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike (Easton, PA: Canal History and Technology Press, 2002), and The Kingdom of Coal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) by Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless. See, as well, the 1902 coverage by the American Monthly Review of Reviews and Public Opinion and Robert Wiebe’s “The Anthracite Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion” in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, no. 48, 1961.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in The Coming of the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1958) and James McGregor Burns in Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1956) give accounts of Darrow’s clash with Hugh Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt over the NRA. See also Johnson’s The Blue Eagle (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1935) and Lowell Mason’s “Darrow v. Johnson,” in the December 1934 edition of the North American Review.
Paul Avrich in The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and James Green in Death in the Haymarket (New York: Pantheon, 2006) re-create that tragic episode. The Oshkosh Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898 is profiled by Virginia Glenn Crane in her 1998 self-published book on that topic. Steve Lehto in Death’s Door (Troy, MI: Momentum Books, 2006) and Arthur Thurner in Rebels on the Range (Lake Linden, MI: John H. Forster Press, 1984) describe the Michigan copper strike and the Italian Hall tragedy.
In Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), George W. Hilton offers an authoritative account of the tragic sinking. See also Jay Bonansinga’s The Sinking of the Eastland (New York: Citadel Press, 2004). Anthony Hatch’s Tinder Box (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2003) tells the story of the Iroquois Theatre fire. Dan Carter’s Scottsboro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1969) traces that shameful saga.
Werner Troesken follows the history of the Chicago gas industry, in Why Regulate Utilities? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). The municipal ownership question was covered in April 1906 by Henry K. Webster in “From Yerkes to Dunne” for American Illustrated Magazine. Lincoln Steffens wrote about Chicago and other cities in several editions of McClure’s magazine in 1903 and collected and published these pieces as The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1904). See also John Fairlie in the May 1907 Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Ida Tarbell in the November and December 1908 issues of American Magazine.
CHICAGO AND THE TIMES
Donald Miller gives a panoramic view of Chicago’s early history in City of the Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), and William Cronon outlines the city’s economic rationale in Nature’s Metropolis (New York: Norton, 1991). Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan tell the story of Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin in Lords of the Levee (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2005), and of Mayor Bill Thompson in Big Bill of Chicago (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2005). Richard Lindberg gives glimpses of Chicago at the turn of the century in Chicago by Gaslight (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 2005). George Murray describes the Chicago newspaper world in The Madhouse on Madison Street (Chicago: Follett, 1965). Dale Kramer wrote on the Chicago Renaissance (New York: Appleton-Century, 1966). Karen Abbott described the Sin in the Second City (New York: Random House, 2007), as did Jeffrey Adler in First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Paul Green a
nd Melvin Holli profile the city’s mayoral history in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995). Charles Merriam wrote Chicago: A More Intimate View of Urban Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1929). James Merriner follows Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2004). Dick Simpson writes of Rogues, Rebels and Rubber Stamps: The Politics of the Chicago City Council (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).
Chicago’s gangsters are ably chronicled in The Wicked City (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998) by Curt Johnson and R. Craig Sautter, and by Jonathan Eig in Get Capone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) and Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of Chicago (New York: Knopf, 1940). Joseph Weil, the “Yellow Kid,” tells his story with the help of W. T. Brannon in Con Man (New York: Broadway Books, 2004). See also the report of the Chicago City Council Committee on Crime (1915) and The Illinois Crime Survey (1929), a report by the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice, as well as Leigh Bienen and Brandon Rottinghaus on homicide in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 92, nos. 3-4, 2002.
William Tuttle in Race Riot (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1970) and Allan Spear in Black Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) describe the African American community in Darrow’s era, as does The Negro in Chicago, the report of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922).
Thomas Pegram examines the impact of Partisans and Progressives (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992) on Chicago and Illinois, and Richard Schneirov that of Labor and Urban Politics (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998). John Keiser describes Illinois in the years after the Civil War in Building for the Centuries (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977). See also the History of the Illinois State Federation of Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930) by Eugene Staley.
Harriet Taylor Upton takes up The History of the Western Reserve (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1910). Daniel Walker Howe paints the world of Amirus Darrow’s youth in What Hath God Wrought (New York: Oxford, 2007) and H. W. Brands does the same for Clarence Darrow’s era in American Colossus (New York: Doubleday, 2010) and The Reckless Decade (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995). Matthew Josephson wrote delightful accounts of the Gilded Age in The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934) and The Politicos (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). See also The Age of Excess (New York: Macmillan, 1965) by Ray Ginger and Thomas Beer’s The Mauve Decade (New York: Knopf, 1926). The impact of the industrial age is portrayed by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), Nell Irvin Painter in Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: Norton, 1987), Alan Trachtenberg in The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), and Thomas Schlereth in Victorian America (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
Eric Goldman in Rendezvous With Destiny (New York: Vintage, 1956), Frederic Howe in The Confessions of a Reformer (New York: Scribner, 1925), John Chamberlain in Farewell to Reform (New York: Liveright, 1932), and Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955) trace the populist and progressive roots of the reform impulse and modern liberalism. Charles Postel examines the origins of populism in The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford, 2007), and Robert Durden writes about the 1896 presidential campaign in The Climax of Populism (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1965). Michael McGerr examines the Progressive Movement in A Fierce Discontent (New York: Oxford, 2003). I enjoyed George Mowry’s The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1958). See also C. Vann Woodward’s biography Tom Watson (New York: Oxford, 1963) and Harvey Wish on Altgeld and the 1896 campaign in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, March 1938.
Walter Lord profiles the period before World War I in The Good Years (New York: Harper, 1960). Lynn Dumenil’s The Modern Temper (New York: Macmillan, 1995) is a scholarly look at the Roaring Twenties, and Frederick Lewis Allen has entertained millions with his popular account of the decade, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Row, 1931). Another lively chronicle of an era is Our Times (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–1935) by Mark Sullivan, a multivolume set that covers the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century. David Kennedy captures the last decade of Darrow’s life in Freedom from Fear (New York: Oxford, 1999). As always, I should acknowledge the influence of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES
Lincoln Steffens’s two-volume autobiography leads the pack of self-portraits from Darrow’s friends and associates. Carter Harrison Jr. gave marvelous glimpses of Chicago in Darrow’s era in the autobiographical Stormy Years (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935) and Growing Up With Chicago (Chicago: R. F. Seymour, 1944), and Arthur Garfield Hays wrote several memoirs, including City Lawyer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942), Trial by Prejudice (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), and Let Freedom Ring (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928). Edgar Lee Masters lanced Darrow in Across Spoon River (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936).
For a wider taste of the times, and glimpses of Darrow, see the published autobiographies, memoirs, or diaries of Willis Abbott, Jane Addams, Hugh Baillie, Ethel Barrymore, William Jennings Bryan, William Burns, Oscar King Davis, Charles Erbstein, Hamlin Garland, Benjamin Gitlow, Emma Goldman, Samuel Gompers, Bill Haywood, Ben Hecht, John Jardine, James Weldon Johnson, Mother Jones (edited by Mary Field Parton), Lawrence Judd, Moses Koenigsberg, Adolf Kraus, Lucy Robins Lang, Ortie McManigal, H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, Fremont Older, Harry Orchard, Margaret Parton, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, E. W. Scripps, Charles Siringo, Melville Stone, Walter White, William Allen White, Brand Whitlock, Victor Yarros, and Stirling Yates.
See, as well, the published letters of Brand Whitlock, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln Steffens, Eugene Debs, H. L. Mencken, Hamlin Garland, Louis Brandeis, and Mother Jones.
Biographies of Darrow’s friends and associates include Herbert Russell’s Edgar Lee Masters (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001) and David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Macmillan, 2001), as well as Samuel Gompers (Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1963) by Bernard Mandel, Altgeld of Illinois (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1924) by Waldo Browne, and Harry Barnard on Altgeld in Eagle Forgotten (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938).
See also Craig Phelan’s biography of John Mitchell, Divided Loyalties (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), Robert Crunden’s book on Brand Whitlock, A Hero in Spite of Himself (New York: Knopf, 1969), Ray Ginger on Eugene Debs in The Bending Cross (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), Chester McArthur Destler’s Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), Henry Demarest Lloyd (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912) by Caroline Lloyd, and Lincoln Steffens (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974) by Justin Kaplan. Leroy Ashby writes on William Borah in The Spearless Leader (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972), as does Marian McKenna in Borah (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961).
W. A. Swanberg, in Citizen Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), and David Nasaw, in The Chief (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), tell the story of William Randolph Hearst. Accounts of Bill Haywood’s life are provided by Peter Carlson in Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), Joseph Conlin in Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969), and Melvyn Dubofsky in Big Bill Haywood (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987). Jane Addams’s story is told in Citizen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) by Louise Knight, and in American Heroine (New York: Oxford, 1973) by Allen Davis.
See also Sidney Fine’s Frank Murphy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975–1984) and his biography of Walter Drew, Without Blare of Trumpets (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); The Damndest Radical (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), Roger Bruns’s biography of Ben Reitman; John Fran
ch’s Robber Baron (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), on the life of Charles Yerkes; White (New York: The New Press, 2003), Kenneth Janken’s volume on Walter White; and Mencken: The American Iconoclast (New York: Oxford, 2005) by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
There are several good biographies of Bryan, including Louis Koenig’s Bryan: A Political Biography (New York: Putnam, 1971), A Godly Hero by Michael Kazin (New York: Knopf, 2006), and Paolo Coletta’s three-volume William Jennings Bryan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964–1969). Grover Cleveland’s life and presidency are ably portrayed by Allan Nevins in Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1934).
Other volumes that I found valuable in capturing Darrow’s times include Morgan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) by Jean Strouse; Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) by Carlos Baker; Lindbergh (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998) by A. Scott Berg; Ron Chernow’s Titan (New York: Random House, 1998), about John D. Rockefeller; and Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006) by David Nasaw. Also of interest are Triangle, David Von Drehle’s account of the tragic fire (New York: Grove Press, 2003); American Eve (New York: Riverhead, 2008), Paula Uruburu’s biography of Evelyn Nesbit; Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914); and Bruce Watson’s Sacco & Vanzetti (New York: Viking, 2007).
I was schooled in law by Henry J. Abraham and relied on the lessons he taught me and his book Freedom and the Court (New York: Oxford, 1972). Any errors are mine, not his. The novels of Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, E. L. Doctorow, Booth Tarkington, Gore Vidal, and Upton Sinclair helped me paint the backdrop, as did, of course, the verse of Carl Sandburg.
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