Most commentators make a feature of Clarence Darrow's decision, in 1894, to step down from his high-paying position as corporation counsel for the Chicago and North-Western Railway in order to represent Eugene Debs, leader of the railroad union, and the many union workers he defended thereafter. Which isn't quite what happened.
For once Darrow himself does not contribute to the myth, in his autobiography, but rather helps to set the record straight.
In reality Darrow moved to Chicago and after a slow start became corporation counsel for the city of Chicago. After 2-3 years he went to work for the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company as general attorney. When he left this employer it was not simply to defend Eugene Debs, but because he (Darrow) felt uncomfortable working for the employers when he was (according to his own account) wholeheartedly in sympathy with the workers. Moreover Darrow did not give up his generous salary when he resigned - he only gave up half of his generous salary:
What the mythmakers also tend to conveniently overlook is the seamier side of Darrow's career which doesn't fit so neatly into the carefully nurtured myth of Darrow as "champion of the underdog" and "attorney for the damned." The Darrow for whom, as one biographer puts it: "Ends matter[ed] more than means."
In 1912, in Los Angeles, for example, Darrow himself went through two trials where he was both the defense lawyer and the defendant - on two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in the union-related murder case in which he was, as usual, counsel for the defense. In response to the first charge Darrow told the jury:
And at that first trial the verdict was in Darrow's favour, though it is now generally accepted - even by Darrowphiles - that he was in fact guilty on both counts, plus other similar activities that he was never charged with. At the second trial Darrow proved less able to "soft soap" his way out of trouble, and the proceedings ended with a hung jury. But although Darrow escaped being convicted, he certainly didn't escape the consequences of his actions.
Firstly he was made to leave California after undertaking never to practice law again in that state.
Secondly he was dropped by the unions as one of their regular attorneys - which is why he spent the last part of his career practising criminal law.
And thirdly, he reportedly suffered what would nowadays be described as a "nervous breakdown" and became, if it were possible, even more pessimistic and morose than had previously been the case.
Perhaps this explains why, just three years later, Darrow - self-proclaimed advocate for the "weak and poor" - was speaking out in favour of deliberately murdering the weakest members of society - newborn babies - if they failed to meet some arbitrary notion of "fit to live":
Incidentally, it should be noted that despite Darrow's self-righteous pose, the trial to which the bribery related involved the bombing of the offices of the Los Angeles Times by James B. MacNamara with the assistance of his brother, John J. MacNamara. An attack which resulted in the deaths of 20 employees. According to Cowan (The People vs. Clarence Darrow, 1993) Darrow knew before he accepted the case that his clients were guilty as charged, and that when he had sight of the evidence against the MacNamara brothers he persuaded them to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences rather than the death penalty.
The McNamaras were neither weak, nor poor, and huge sums of money were contributed to their defense fund by various union organisations. Darrow's fee alone was $50,000 - after expenses - which would be worth well over ten times as much at today's prices.
Nor was this the only occasion when Darrow's client list belied his sanctimonious claim. In fact the truth is that Darrow frequently appeared on behalf of those who preyed upon "the weak and poor."
He was closely associated with a pair of notorious Chicago politicians, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna and J.J. "Bath House John" Coughlin - not exactly "weak and poor," but definitely totally corrupt - who controlled the Loop district of the city, and much of the vice that went on in that area.
In 1903, when the Iroquoise Theater in Chicago burnt down during a matinee performance, 596 people, mainly children, were killed, primarily because 29 of the 30 fire exits were closed and locked. In the aftermath of the fire a number of grand jury indictments were handed down on those responsible for making the carnage possible: the theatre owners who had flouted the city fire laws; the fire inspectors who had failed to carry out regular fire checks; and even the mayor - to whom the city's fire chief was accountable.
Yet despite the indictments, not a single person was imprisoned for their part in the disaster - in many cases because Clarence Darrow, defender of "the weak and poor", had been beavering away in the background to get their indictments dismissed.
In April 1911, immediately before accepting the MacNamara case Darrow was involved in a fraud trial in which an elderly Civil War veteran was the plaintiff.
Charles Myerhoff made the mistake of assuming that a statement of assets, properties and revenues issued by the Kankakee Manufacturing Company was a true bill of goods, and consequently invested most of his life's savings in the company. When the contents of the investment brochure turned out to be a pack of lies, Myerhoff and many other small investors lost everything they had invested.
Clarence Darrow, self-styled defender of "the weak and poor" was acting for - the Kankakee Manufacturing Company; on the grounds that is was the investors' responsibility to check that the contents of the brochure were accurate.
And in the years that followed it was Clarence Darrow who regularly graced courtrooms as the legal representative of choice for not so "weak and poor" mobsters such as the Chicago-based "czar of racetrack gambling" - Jacob "Mont" Tennes (at the 1916 federal investigation into the "Race Wire Service") - and Second Ward alderman "King Oscar" De Priest.
In his autobiography Darrow made only one mention of De Priest, in a passage where, in the context of the trial of Ossian Sweet, he was describing how, "It is always hard for a colored man to find a decent living place in America...":
What he somehow forgot to mention in this offhand coupling of Sweet's name with that of De Priest, is the fact that De Priest's 1917 trial, where he was defended by Darrow:
Unlike the genuinely racist attack on Mr Sweet's home and family, attacks on Mr. De Priest were more likely to be due to conflict with rival criminals than to simple racial prejudice.
And in what sense was Darrow "[standing] for the weak and poor" in 1924 when he defended Leopold and Loeb, the sons of two of the richest families in Chicago, when they gratuitously murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks, just to see what it would be like to take a human life?
The truth of the matter is that Darrow enjoyed a very comfortable living throughout his career, so much so that one biographer described him as an out and out hedonist. And he could afford to be. Whilst it may be true that he took a number of cases on a pro bono (no fee) basis in the course of his career, by the 1920s it is reckoned that Darrow's fees were anything up to $250,000 per case. Yet despite that, as he emphasises in his book The Story of My Life, he never volunteered his services in single case in the whole of that life of "[standing] for the weak and poor" - apart from his defense of John Scopes.
In Part 9: Bryan and Darrow you will find a detailed study of the confrontation between Darrow and Bryan which, to be blunt, throws serious doubt on the myth that Darrow outmanoeuvred Bryan in any significant respect. In this next section we will examine Darrow's behaviour, beliefs and motives, specifically insofar as they dictated the course of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial.
Darrow for the Defense - Sort of
The trial of John Scopes would, without any doubt at all, have been a very different affair if it had not included Clarence Darrow as a member of the defense team. Not because his brilliant skills as a lawyer added any value to the proceedings, but because of his news value, and because of the way he took over and ran the defense entirely for his own ends.
As we saw in Part 11: Was Scopes Guilty? John Scopes was almost certainly innocent of the charge laid against him - yet Darrow just as certainly acted in such a way as to ensure that he was found guilty, not just on the last day but at crucial points during the first week of the trial as well.
Nor did Darrow achieve the original aim that had motivated the ACLU to support Scopes in the first place. Firstly because he failed to run the defense case in the correct way to challenge the constitutionality of the Butler Act, and secondly because he failed to make the case for the invalidity of the law when the case went to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
All of which seems to have been of no consequence at all for Darrow who, in his own mind at least, believed that he had achieved the sole aim that had motivated him to take part in the trial. And to understand where that motivation came from we need to take a brief detour.
My Father's Son
Born in Farmdale, Ohio on April 18th, 1857 to Amirus and Emily Darrow, Clarence was raised in nearby Kinsman until 1873 when, at the age of 16, he left home to study at Allegheny College. But, just like his father, Darrow only stayed for a year. Indeed, in every important respect Clarence Seward Darrow was forever his father's son, and it is arguable that Darrow's attack on Bryan merely demonstrates that Darrow's own thinking on religion and morals never emerged from the shadow of the emotive but ill thought through atheistic opinions of his father - something even Darrow seemed to acknowledge when he attributed his controversial views more to his genes than to his own imagination or experience:
"I, like all the rest of the boys, inherited my politics and my religion."
In all likelihood, having recently announced his retirement, Darrow's initial thoughts about the case were comparable with those of the journalist H.L. Mencken, who is said to have been rebuffed by Darrow when he originally suggested that Darrow take a hand in the trial. It was Mencken who wrote in his column for The Nation, only a week or so before the trial:
"No principle is at stake at Dayton save the principle that school teachers, like plumbers, should stick to the job that is set before them, and not go roving around the house, breaking windows, raiding the cellar, and demoralizing children.
"When a pedagogue takes his oath of office, he renounces his right to free speech quite as certainly as a bishop does, or a colonel in the army, or an editorial writer of a newspaper. He becomes a paid propagandist of certain definite doctrines, and every time he departs from them deliberately he deliberately swindles his employers."
Mencken also argued - whilst it still suited him - that the State was entirely justified in setting out what should or should not be included in the curriculum of public schools, so long as this was done on the basis of what was likely to have the greatest "utility" for students.
"What could be of greater utility to the son of a Tennessee mountaineer, than an education making him a good Tennesseean, content with his father, at peace with his neighbors, dutiful to the local religion, and docile under the local mores?"
But then William Jennings Bryan announced that he wished to offer his services to the prosecution - and everything changed. For Darrow this turned the Scopes trial into a chance to attack Bryan, his religious beliefs, and Christians and Christianity in general, Just one more skirmish in a running battle Darrow had been waging most of his life. A battle that almost certainly had its genesis many decades earlier, as indicated in this comment by Darrow reflecting on his boyhood years:
"The fact that my father was a heretic always put him on the defensive, And we children thought it was only right and loyal that we should defend his cause."
The wording in the second sentence is surely an important clue to Darrow's thinking. It does not suggest that the children supported the father's ideas because they viewed them as being right; only that they had a duty of blind, unquestioning loyalty - "My father, right or wrong."
There is a tragic implication behind these words - that Darrow had spent his entire adult career nurturing his mythical status as "champion of the underdog," when in fact all he was striving vainly to do was expunge the pity and hurt - and quite possibly the shame - he felt, both because of his father's situation and because of his own inability to do anything about it.
Was this why, according to one of his biographers, Darrow had what amounted to a nervous breakdown when his reputation was severely compromised by the bribery scandal of 1912 and the subsequent decision of the union movement to stop using his services?
Was this why his career was such a model of ambiguity. On the one hand there is Darrow's version of Darrow - the legal equivalent of a white knight on his charger, come, so he claimed, to defend "the weak and poor." The Darrow who rode into Dayton in July, 1925 (admittedly only on an "iron horse"), with the typically over-blown and self-deluding declaration:
"Scopes isn’t on trial; civilization is on trial."
On the other hand there is Darrow as he really was, the lawyer for whom "the ends justified the means." The "defender of the weak and poor" who supported the deliberate murder of "unfit" babies, whilst living what one biographer described as the lifestyle of a "hedonist," funded by those massive fees.
It would certainly help to explain why Darrow imagined himself to be well-read and intelligent with a good grasp of scientific matters, yet according to his biographers "[accepted] too unqualifiedly the impartiality of science and the soundness of its conclusions," As Professor Martin Pernick (University of Michigan) put it:
"Progressive Americans were convinced that scientists, physicians, could make objective, technically valid determinations, of who should live, who should die. They believed, probably more strongly than any group of Americans before or since that science was capable of making objectively true judgements."
Darrow most certainly regarded himself as a "progressive," and happily balanced his unquestioning faith in "science" with what another biographer refers to as his "childish conception of theology" such that he was still using the age-old arguments of the typical "village atheist" (i.e. his own father - the original "poor, weak underdog"), including questions like:
"Do you know anything about how many people there were on this earth 3,000 years ago?."
How does knowing how many people there were on Earth 3,000 years ago relate to the validity of someone's religious beliefs? Does it really make sense to suppose that someone who doesn't know the population of Egypt 3,500 years ago; or of China 5,000 years ago must therefore be an "ignoramus"? If it does, then Darrow surely shot himself in the foot on a grand scale since he clearly had no more idea than Bryan as to the answers of many of the questions he was asking.
How Darrow Stole the Show
When the ACLU decided to challenge the Butler Act it was not their intention to enter into a confrontation with the members of the Christian community, who made up well over 50% of the population. They wanted freedom for the teaching of evolution in schools, but they were prepared to be diplomatic about it. They wanted one teacher to break the law, but only in order to provide the basis for a legal challenge. They certainly weren't about to incite mass civil disobedience. As Arthur Hays, nominal manager of Scopes' defence and a full-time member of the ACLU explained:
"It was felt by us [i.e. the ACLU] that if the cause of free education was ever to be won, it would need the support of millions of intelligent churchgoing people who didn't question theological miracles."
Which is why it came as something of a shock when Clarence Darrow threw his hat into the ring. And not just a shock, but a very unwelcome shock.
Despite his pose as an agnostic, it was as plain then as it is now that Darrow was a fully paid up atheist, with a particular dislike of Christianity, and of the rural brand of literalist Christianity such as might be found in Dayton, Tennessee and in Darrow's home town of Kinsman, Ohio. Indeed, Darrow had a thriving second career as a public speaker, with ranting against Christianity as his favourite topic.
Edward B. Davis (Distinguished Professor of the History of Science at Messiah College) put the situation in a nutshell in his article Science and Religious Fundamentalism in the 1920s (American Scientist, May-June, 2005. page 254):
"Liberal theologians and scientists initially intended to use the [Scopes] case to prove that religious faith could be reconciled with the theory of natural selection. Then Clarence Darrow, the renowned attorney and atheist from Chicago, forced his way in and destroyed the effort to project a religious image from the Rhea County courthouse."
(It should also be noted that Darrow's corrosive religious bigotry seems to have rendered him completely blind to any differences between 'literalist' Christianity and 'fundamentalist' Christianity. This is indicated, for example, by the way he constantly harped on about Bryan's "literal" beliefs during the confrontation on July 20th, even though Bryan was actually a fundamentalist and not an all out literalist (as he explained in response to one of Darrow's early questions during that session).)
The fact is that most of us do not hold our ideas and beliefs for carefully thought through reasons. We hold them because in some way or other they "seem right." By the same token it is very difficult to change anyone's ideas or beliefs simply by the use of rational arguments.
So whilst Darrow apparently imagined that questioning Bryan's historical knowledge would somehow undermine his credibility, he was in fact talking to two quite separate audiences - and having a different impact on each - even amongst those people who actually saw the trial, and especially the Darrow-Bryan confrontation, first hand.
On the one side there was the "modernist" or "progressive" audience - which existed across the country, though they were predominantly located in the urban areas. For people in these groups, traditional religious ideas were quaint, ridiculous, out-of-date, etc. depending on the individual. For this audience, including many of the journalists reporting on the trial, the mere fact that:
- Darrow dared to attack the credibility of such a renowned figure as William Jennings Bryan , and
- Bryan was not a "scientist" and could not give sensible answers to Darrow's "sci-babble" questions
would be enough be taken as some kind of evidence that the new ideas - represented by Darrow - were better than the old ideas - represented by Bryan.
It was a pretty negative way of thinking - but it suited those who were in revolt against the Victorian values they had grown up with, and especially those who had seen the old values, and the credibility of those who preached them, buckle under the savage assault of the massive carnage of World War One.
(Ironically it was Bryan's own reaction against the horrors of WW1 that helped to fuel his opposition to the teaching of evolutionist ideas. But when Darrow waived the right to make any closing comments he thereby denied Bryan the opportunity to present his point of view.)
The second audience were those who still upheld the "old" values and beliefs, in one form or another and who were not, as yet, seduced by the flashy, though ultimately empty promises of modernism.
Here, too, it would be a mistake to assume that the members of this second audience could be neatly pigeon-holed as being located exclusively in the South and/or in rural areas.
Members of this "traditionalist" audience saw Darrow pretty much for what he was - ignorant, arrogant and abusive - and whilst it is claimed that Darrow was mobbed by supporters after the confrontation with Bryan, it was mainly by reporters. And if Bryan wasn't so mobbed, might it have been as simple as a mark of respect for the feelings of someone who had been treated in such a barbaric fashion?
