Clarence Darrow

Lawyer

• Born: April 18, 1857
• Birthplace: Kinsman, Ohio
• Died: March 13, 1938
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

American attorney

The most renowned defense attorney of his time, Darrow won a number of significant verdicts in difficult cases, including the Scopes trial, while espousing unpopular causes.

Areas of achievement Law, literature

Early Life

The fifth of eight children (one of whom died in infancy), Clarence Darrow (DAH-roh) was born in Kinsman, a small town in northeastern Ohio. His father, Amirus Darrow, was a carpenter who increasingly supplemented his income by working as an undertaker; he was also an avid reader who scattered books on all subjects throughout the house. In addition to his own commitment to reading and self-instruction, young Darrow owed some of his later outlook to his father’s unorthodoxy and skepticism toward revealed religion. His mother, Emily Eddy Darrow, bestowed much attention on him and, until her death when he was fifteen, had great hopes for his success. He was educated at a local school and spent his summers playing baseball or working on a farm. At the age of sixteen, Darrow enrolled at Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pennsylvania; he gave up his studies there after a year and for a time was employed as a schoolteacher. In 1877, he spent a year at the University of Michigan’s law school. Apparently, Darrow grew weary of formal education, and he spent a further year working and studying at a law office in Youngstown, Ohio. After a brief and apparently perfunctory oral examination, Darrow was admitted to the Ohio bar, at the age of twenty-one.

With his career now fairly started, Darrow took a fancy to Jessie Ohl, the daughter of a prosperous mill keeper, and after an involved courtship, they were married in 1880; their son Paul was born three years later. Darrow opened law offices in Andover and then in Ashtabula, Ohio; although few cases came his way, in 1884 he was elected borough solicitor, or prosecutor. Darrow had already campaigned actively for the national Democratic Party. He chafed at a small-town existence and thought it likely that his legal career would advance further in a large city. Accordingly, in 1887, he moved with his family to Chicago, where social and political strife had already given the city some notoriety.

Life’s Work

For a time, Darrow served on the legal staff of the city of Chicago, and he also obtained a position as corporation counsel for the Chicago and North Western Railway. Increasingly disaffected with the venality and easy ethics of his employer, he took another job with a law firm and began to specialize in cases with social implications. After the mayor of Chicago was shot to death, Darrow tried unsuccessfully, in an appeal, to save the assassin from the gallows. In 1894, widespread disorders accompanied a massive strike of the Pullman Company’s railroads; Darrow offered his services but was unsuccessful in his efforts to defend Eugene V. Debs from charges of criminal conspiracy. Darrow also attempted a sortie into national politics but was defeated when he ran for the U.S. Congress as a Democrat in 1896. As his professional commitments mounted, Darrow became estranged from his wife, Jessie, and they were quietly divorced in 1897. For a time, Darrow considered a literary career; he produced works that dealt with crime and social ills, as well as Farmington (1904), a semiautobiographical novel.

In 1898, Darrow took up another criminal conspiracy case, brought against Thomas I. Kidd and other leaders of a woodworkers’ union in Wisconsin; he persuaded a jury that Kidd could not be held responsible for incidental acts of union violence that the leaders had neither foreseen nor encouraged. Elected to the Illinois legislature in 1902, Darrow continued to take labor cases, and he served as counsel for the United Mine Workers of America at United States Anthracite Coal Arbitration Commission hearings in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His remarriage, to Ruby Hamerstrom in 1903, seemed to put his personal life on a firmer footing. Social concerns continued to attract him; in 1907, he won acquittal for William D. Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners, who had been charged with complicity in the bombing death of a former governor of Idaho. In 1911, in another case involving union violence, Darrow defended James B. and John J. McNamara, who had planted dynamite in the Los Angeles Times building; the resulting explosion had killed twenty-one people. Pleading his clients guilty and pointing out that they had not intended to cause any loss of life, Darrow prevailed on a jury to spare the lives of the defendants; one was sentenced to life imprisonment and the other received fifteen years in prison. After this trial, Darrow himself was charged with jury bribery, and he assisted in his own defense. During the proceedings, the testimony of detectives and police informants was discredited, and he retained his freedom.

Darrow often gave the impression of studied casualness; he was tall, large boned, with prominent cheekbones, a sharp beaklike nose, and an overhanging forehead. He had light-blue eyes that, according to his contemporaries, could be animated by kindness or contracted in anger and outrage. In his gait, he seemed to slump forward; frequently during arguments, an unruly shock of hair would fall over his eyes. His clothes, though well tailored, seemed invariably unpressed, and Darrow claimed that he usually slept in them. His voice was deep, resonant, and slightly rasping. He was a born debater, skilled at the parry and thrust of cross-examination. His summations were moving and masterfully devised treatises on morality and the law, which frequently attracted overflow audiences into the courtroom.

Darrow was a confirmed skeptic, whose views were tempered by humanity and an instinctive sympathy for the downtrodden. He inveighed against the death penalty, which he considered a barbaric relic of more intolerant ages. An openly avowed agnostic, he sometimes contended that life had no meaning. Frequently, he took controversial cases for the sake of defendants and ideas that were out of public favor. Much of his success derived neither from factual expertise nor from technical mastery of the law; rather, he was determined and generally able to sway juries and judges with deeply felt moral appeals.

As word of his prowess spread, Darrow attracted numerous clients. Many times, he took their cases simply because he did not have the heart to turn them away. About certain issues he felt deeply; in 1920, he invoked the guarantee of freedom of speech in his unsuccessful defense of twenty Chicago communists. Abhorrence of the death penalty prompted him, in 1924, to defend Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, who had carried out the wanton and senseless murder of a fourteen-year-old boy. Darrow pleaded his clients guilty and in a lengthy, heartfelt plea, kept them from execution. To protest the rising tide of fundamentalism, in 1925 he took the case of John T. Scopes, who was charged with violation of a Tennessee statute against teaching evolution in the public schools. Although ultimately the defendant was fined, Darrow arranged a dramatic courtroom confrontation by examining counsel for the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan; in the process, Darrow pointed up the inconsistencies that resulted when biblical literalism was applied to the problems of science. For many years, Darrow had been outraged by racial inequality; by his own account his most satisfying case came with his defense, in 1926, of a black family in Detroit. While defending their house against an angry, rampaging mob, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his sons had fired on their assailants, killing one man and wounding another. By evoking the atmosphere of extreme prejudice against them and demonstrating the severe provocation that beset the Sweets, Darrow obtained a verdict of self-defense. In 1927, he won acquittal for two antifascist Italian émigrés who had killed two of their political opponents during a quarrel in New York.

Darrow read widely and had an abiding interest in science, literature, and social thought; he also propounded his views readily and augmented his income by taking part in platform debates. Against some of the well-known figures of his day, Darrow defended agnosticism, condemned Prohibition and capital punishment, and morbidly contended that life was not worth living. He also considered retirement from the practice of law. By this time, his son Paul had established a career in business and was in no sense inclined to emulate his famous father’s professional pursuits. For nine months in 1929 and 1930, Darrow and his wife traveled extensively on a vacation in Europe.

Darrow’s last major case, which he claimed he took because he wanted to visit Hawaii, was a defense of Lieutenant Thomas Massie and three others in 1932. They had killed one of the men who had allegedly raped Massie’s wife. At length, verdicts of manslaughter were returned against the defendants; in an agreement with the prosecution, Darrow and his colleagues obtained executive clemency for their clients in return for dismissals of the indictments still pending in the rape cases. In 1934, Darrow was called to Washington and made chair of the National Recovery Administration Review Board. Decidedly uncomfortable in this position, he contended that the government was acting as much to sanction as to control the growth of combinations in business. After a year, he resigned. Failing health was accompanied by increasing despondency; Darrow made few public appearances, and some of those close to him felt that his death, when it came on March 13, 1938, must also have brought relief.

Significance

During his lifetime, Darrow served as defense attorney in nearly two thousand cases; more than one hundred of them were for charges of murder. At one time, Darrow estimated that he had represented one-third of his clients without payment; many other cases were taken to protest what he regarded as cruelty and injustice. His most celebrated cases have become a permanent part of the nation’s legal lore, and his summations have been taken as models of expository speaking.

In important respects, Darrow was unique, and he spoke for the unpopular and the outcast during an age before legal consensus had delineated the rights of the accused. Some of his abiding concerns, such as opposition to the death penalty, are still warmly debated. Although he did little to advance the technical growth of the law, his stance of strident advocacy is still cited in recalling some of the most memorable courtroom confrontations in American legal practice.

Further Reading

Darrow, Clarence. Closing Arguments: Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. A collection of Darrow’s writings on philosophy and religion, law and crime, and politics and society.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Crime, Its Cause and Treatment. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922. This work constitutes the most extensive single statement of Darrow’s views on crime and penology. He argues that heredity and environment create most criminals; crime would be reduced by improving social conditions. Darrow maintains that, for the most part, punishment is meant not to deter criminal acts, but to satisfy society’s primal longings for vengeance.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Story of My Life. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1932. Brash, irreverent retelling of Darrow’s life in law, which becomes markedly world-weary toward the end. Interspersed among accounts of his famous cases are excursions into science, religion, and criminology. This work is valuable not so much for its discussion of particular clients or trials some are dealt with rather sketchily as for its evocation of the issues and concerns that moved Darrow.

Leopold, Nathan F., Jr. Life Plus Ninety-Nine Years. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. The memoirs of one of Darrow’s most celebrated clients, this work deals largely with the author’s trials and imprisonment. Early in the book, Leopold writes admiringly of Darrow’s work during his Chicago murder trial of 1924; he also mentions Darrow’s visits and continuing concern during his incarceration.

Ravitz, Abe C. Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition. Cleveland, Ohio: Press of Western Reserve University, 1962. Early in his career, literature was a sometime avocation for Darrow, and this study points to the relationship between his legal theories and his ventures into fiction and literary criticism. Many of his early writings dealt with crime and industrial accidents; the themes of these now nearly forgotten productions foreshadowed concerns he also voiced in the courtroom and in his later, nonfiction works.

Scopes, John T., and James Presley. Center of the Storm. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. The defendant during the famous Tennessee trial of 1925, Scopes discusses his beliefs on evolution, science, and religion. He describes Darrow as the second most influential person in his life, after his father, and depicts at length the unusual but incisive defense his attorney offered.

Stone, Irving. Clarence Darrow for the Defense. 1941. New ed. New York: New American Library, 1971. A popular biography on a broad canvas, this work is dated in some ways but was also written close to the events it describes. It is sufficiently thorough and detailed still to warrant consultation. Darrow’s major trials and triumphs are set forth at length, at times projecting a heroic image. Darrow’s personal papers, published materials available at the time, and interviews with nearly two hundred contemporaries and associates of the great advocate were used in the preparation of this work.

Tierney, Kevin. Darrow: A Biography. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979. A sober and clear study that assesses Darrow’s limitations as well as his strengths. Factual problems in some of Darrow’s cases, and also his inconsistencies as a thinker, are presented along with his many achievements. While in no way disparaging, this closely argued and well-documented work delineates the one-sided qualities that indeed contributed so much to Darrow’s greatness.

Vine, Phyllis. One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream. New York: Amistad, 2004. Vine recounts the murder trial of Ossian Sweet, an African American physician who purchased a home in a white area of Detroit in the 1920’s.

Weinberg, Arthur, and Lila Weinberg. Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980. A thorough and well-rounded though somewhat uncritical modern biography. Darrow’s own trial for jury bribery is treated at some length. The relationship between his great cases and his manner of thinking is developed through each stage of his career; along the way tribute is paid to his espousal of unpopular causes. This work draws extensively on court records, Darrow’s own writings, and unpublished papers of Darrow and several of his associates.