Clarence Darrow


Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and politician who became famous in the 19th century for high-profile representations of trade union causes, and in the 20th century for several criminal matters, including the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, the Scopes "monkey" trial, and the Ossian Sweet defense. He was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a prominent advocate for Georgist economic reform. Darrow was also a well-known public speaker, debater, and writer.
Darrow is considered by some legal analysts and lawyers to be the greatest lawyer of the 20th century. He was posthumously inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. Called a "sophisticated country lawyer", Darrow's wit and eloquence made him one of the most prominent attorneys and civil libertarians in the nation.

Early life

Clarence Darrow was born in the small town of Farmdale, Ohio, on April 18, 1857, the fifth son of Amirus and Emily Darrow, but grew up in nearby Kinsman, Ohio. Both the Darrow and Eddy families had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution. Darrow's father was an ardent abolitionist and a proud iconoclast and religious freethinker. He was known throughout the town as the "village infidel". Emily Darrow was an early supporter of female suffrage and a women's rights advocate.
The young Clarence attended Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School, but did not graduate from either institution. He attended Allegheny College for only one year before the Panic of 1873 struck, and Darrow was determined not to be a financial burden to his father any longer. Over the next three years he taught in the winter at the district school in a country community.
While teaching, Darrow also started to study the law on his own, and by the end of his third year of teaching, he was urged by his family to enter the law department at Ann Arbor. Darrow studied there for only a year when he decided that it would be much more cost-effective to read law in an actual law office. When he felt that he was ready, he took the Ohio bar exam and passed. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878, where he continued to practice. The Clarence Darrow Octagon House, his childhood home in Kinsman, contains a memorial to him.

Legal career

Following his departure from the University of Michigan Law School in late 1879 Darrow moved to the small village of Harvard, Illinois, with his classmate L.H. Stafford, who was from Harvard. It was in the McHenry County Courthouse that Darrow successfully tried one of his first cases in January 1880. Soon after, Darrow decided to return to Ohio and opened a law office in Andover, Ohio, a small farming town just from Kinsman. Having little experience, he started off slowly and gradually built up his career by dealing with the everyday complaints and problems of a farming community. After two years Darrow felt he was ready to take on new and different cases and moved his practice to Ashtabula, Ohio, which had a population of 5,000 people and was the largest city in the county. There he became involved in Democratic Party politics and served as the town counsel.
In 1880, he married Jessie Ohl, and eight years later he moved to Chicago with his wife and young son, Paul. He did not have much business when he first moved to Chicago, and spent as little as possible. He joined the Henry George Club and made some friends and connections in the city. Being part of the club also gave him an opportunity to speak for the Democratic Party on the upcoming election. He slowly made a name for himself through these speeches, eventually earning the standing to speak in whatever hall he liked. He was offered work as an attorney for the city of Chicago. Darrow worked in the city law department for two years when he resigned and took a position as a lawyer at the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company in 1891. In 1894, Darrow represented Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who was prosecuted by the federal government for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894. Darrow severed his ties with the railroad to represent Debs, making a financial sacrifice. He saved Debs in one trial but could not keep him from being jailed in another.
Also in 1894, Darrow took on the first murder case of his career, defending Patrick Eugene Prendergast, the "mentally deranged drifter" who had confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter Harrison III. Darrow's insanity defense of Prendergast failed and he was executed. Among fifty defenses in murder cases in Darrow's career, the Prendergast case was the only one that resulted in an execution, though Darrow did not join the defense team until after Prendergast's conviction, in an effort to spare him the noose.

From corporate lawyer to labor lawyer

Darrow soon became one of America's leading labor attorneys. He helped organize the Populist Party in Illinois and then ran for U.S. Congress as a Democrat in 1895 but lost to Hugh R. Belknap. In 1897, his marriage to Jessie Ohl ended in divorce. He joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 in opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. He represented the woodworkers of Wisconsin in a notable case in Oshkosh in 1898 and the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in the great anthracite coal strike of 1902. His former mentor, Governor John Peter Altgeld, joined Darrow's firm after his Chicago mayoral electoral defeat in 1899 and worked with Darrow until his death in 1902. Darrow flirted with the idea of running for mayor of Chicago in 1903, but he ultimately decided against it. In July of that year, he married Ruby Hammerstrom, a young Chicago journalist. From 1903 to 1911, Darrow was partners in the firm of Darrow, Masters and Wilson with Edgar Lee Masters, who became a famous poet, and Francis S. Wilson, who later served as Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.
From 1906 through 1908, Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone when they were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. Haywood and Pettibone were acquitted in separate trials, and the charges against Moyer were then dropped.
In 1911, the American Federation of Labor called on Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers, John and James, who were charged in the Los Angeles Times bombing on October 1, 1910, during the bitter struggle over the open shop in Southern California. The bomb had been placed in an alley behind the building, and although the explosion itself did not bring the building down, it ignited nearby ink barrels and natural gas main lines. In the ensuing fire, 20 people were killed. The AFL appealed to local, state, regional and national unions to donate 25 cents per capita to the defense fund, and set up defense committees in larger cities throughout the nation to accept donations.
In the weeks before the jury was seated, Darrow became increasingly concerned about the outcome of the trial and began negotiations for a plea bargain to spare the defendants' lives. During the weekend of November 19–20, 1911, he discussed with pro-labor journalist Lincoln Steffens and newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps the possibility of reaching out to the Times about the terms of a plea agreement. The prosecution had demands of its own, however, including an admission of guilt in open court and longer sentences than the defense proposed.
The defense's position weakened when, on November 28, Darrow was accused of orchestrating to bribe a prospective juror. The juror reported the offer to police, who set up a sting and observed the defense team's chief investigator, Bert Franklin, delivering $4,000 to the juror two blocks away from Darrow's office. After making payment, Franklin walked one block in the direction of Darrow's office before being arrested right in front of Darrow himself, who had just walked to that very intersection after receiving a phone call in his office. With Darrow himself on the verge of being discredited, the defense's hope for a simple plea agreement ended. On December 1, 1911, the McNamara brothers changed their pleas to guilty, in open court. The plea bargain Darrow helped arrange earned John fifteen years and James life imprisonment. Despite sparing the brothers the death penalty, Darrow was accused by many in organized labor of selling the movement out.

From defense lawyer to defendant

Two months later, Darrow was charged with two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in both cases. He faced two lengthy trials. In the first, defended by Earl Rogers and was ultimately acquitted. When Rogers became ill during the second trial and rarely came to court, Darrow represented himself for the remainder of the proceedings. The trial ended with a hung jury.
A deal was later struck in which the district attorney agreed not to retry Darrow if he promised not to practice law again in California. Darrow's early biographers, Irving Stone and Arthur and Lila Weinberg, argued that he was not involved in the bribery conspiracy. However, more recent authors, including Geoffrey Cowan and John A. Farrell, concluded based on newly uncovered evidence that Darrow almost certainly was involved.
In the biography of Earl Rogers by his daughter Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote: "I never had any doubts, even before one of my father's private conversations with Darrow included an admission of guilt to his lawyer."

From labor lawyer to criminal lawyer

As a consequence of the bribery charges, most labor unions dropped Darrow from their list of preferred attorneys. This effectively ended his career as a labor lawyer, and he switched to civil and criminal cases. He took the latter because he had become convinced that the criminal justice system could ruin people's lives if they were not adequately represented.
Throughout his career, Darrow devoted himself to opposing the death penalty, which he felt was incompatible with humanitarian progress. In more than 100 cases, only one of Darrow's clients was executed. He became renowned for moving juries, and even judges, to tears with his eloquence. Darrow had a keen intellect often obscured by his rumpled, unassuming appearance.
A July 23, 1915, article in the Chicago Tribune describes Darrow's effort on behalf of J.H. Fox, an Evanston, Illinois, landlord, to have Mary S. Brazelton committed to an insane asylum against the wishes of her family. Fox alleged that Brazelton owed him rent money, although other residents of Fox's boarding house testified to her sanity.