Law: Clarence Darrow

To a greater extent than that of any other lawyer in the history of American jurisprudence, the professional life of Clarence S. Darrow* has consisted in defending men standing in the shadow of the gallows with the hostile eyes of the country upon them.

Born at Kinsman, Ohio, Apr. 18, 1857, Darrow, without much education, in his early twenties made his way to Chicago. There he studied law at night; became the partner of Governor Altgeld. His first important murder case was as defender, in the 90’s, of the youth Prendergast, who had killed Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago. His client in this instance was hanged, but Darrow’s defense was characterized by no less an observer than Brand Whitlock as the “most eloquent appeal for mercy that he had ever heard.”

Then, in 1907, he became chief counsel for the defense in the trial of the labor leaders, “Big Bill” Haywood (now a fugitive in Russia), Moyer and Pettibone, indicted for the murder of ex-Governor Stuenenburg, of Idaho. He was brilliantly successful in this trial, and when, in April, 1911, the McNamara brothers were arrested for dynamiting the building of the Los Angeles Times and union labor the country over rallied to their support and raised a huge fund for their defense, it surprised nobody that Clarence Darrow, of Chicago, was retained as chief counsel.

The McNamaras pleaded guilty and were sentenced—one to life imprisonment, the other to 15 years in the penitentiary. Darrow himself was then tried for having bribed a juror and having attempted to bribe a prospective juror. He conducted his own defense and, after a trial lasting nearly three months, was acquitted. In his speech to the jury, characterized as masterful even by the prosecution, he touched upon his whole personal and professional philosophy. He said, in part:

“I have practised law for many years. I do not go to a client and say: ‘Are you guilty? Are you innocent?’ I would not say it to you. Every man on earth is both guilty and innocent. I know it. You may not know it, but I know it. I find a man in trouble. In a way his troubles may have come by his own fault. In a way they did not. He did not give himself birth. He did not make his own brain. He is not responsible for his ideas. He is the product of all the generations that have gone before. And he is the product of all the people who touch him directly and indirectly through life, and he is as he is, and the responsibility rests on the infinite God that made him. I do what I can for him, kindly, carefully, as fairly as I can. . . . Just as the doctor finds that his patient must die, so it came to me that this client was in deadly peril of his life. Do you think that if I had thought there was one chance in a thousand to save him I would not have taken that chance? You may say I should not. That if I believed he was guilty, I should not have tried to save him. You may say so. I do not.”

Darrow has been frequently characterized in the press as “a great stage artist, a greater artist than lawyer.” One M. L. Edgar, in the St. Louis Mirror, has described his personal appearance thus : “Of more than average height, a frame that ambles along carelessly, with toes kicked up in process of walking—movements that range from slowness of contemplation to mercurial quickness of sudden resolution—on broad shoulders, a round head, marked by an oppressively full brow which overarches the face like a crag—eyes, of gooseberry size and color, which roam restlessly or assume a fixed expression as if looking into the secrets of Fate. His complexion is sallow and leatherlike, and his face is shot through with lines, lines which he will never permit a photographer to erase because, as he says, ‘it cost me too much to get them.'”

It was a question in Mr. Darrow’s early life as to whether he would devote himself chiefly to literature or to law. He is the author, among other books, of Persian Pearls, a book of essays; Farmington, a novel depicting life in a small Ohio town, highly praised at the time of its publication by such critics as the late William Marion Reedy and recently reprinted by Huebsch; Crime, Its Cause and Treatment, and Resist Not Evil. He has also contributed many articles to magazines and reviews, and the current American Mercury has an article by him entitled The Ordeal of Prohibition, designed to show that it has been the practice of civilized countries to fail to enforce, rather than to repeal, unwise and unpopular laws.

*Mr. Darrow, as everyone knows, is chief counsel for the Leopold-Loeb defense.