CLARENCE DARROW: AN AMERICAN LEGEND

...His whole thesis in the Loeb-Leo-pold case, the crime of the 1920's, was that cruelty only bred cruelty, hatred bred hatred...

...Darrow would go up and down the land debating on such subjects as: Is the Human Will Free...

...I don't believe he will be remembered long...

...These people have a right to believe in the philosophic idea that they can free themselves by force," he declared in Milwaukee in a case involving Italian anarchists during World War I. "It is only when it can be proved that they have used force to injure people, when they have run counter to the criminal code, that they can be prosecuted...

...His friendly smile, his reassuring word, his gentle hand will linger long to strengthen our will to dare for the sake of a larger right...

...when the cry is the loudest the defendant needs the lawyer most...

...He hardly ever consulted a note...

...It is wiser, Darrow believed, to find and remove the cause of misconduct than to punish and create suffering...

...He would support bad individuals and bad causes, almost as easily as good ones...

...Had he been convicted, that would have been the end of him as man and as legend...

...He refused to offer any advice to the young, even if they were his own grandchildren...

...I have talked with some of the men who once discussed the issues of life and death with the great lawyer and they still glow with the recollection of his warmth and wisdom...

...The best was never too good for Harris...

...Legend, which writes many a name in water and not a few in blood—let legend spread Darrow's name in sympathy upon the vasty skies of memory and echo his tenderness across the limitless gulf of future years...

...that the only way to soften the human heart is through charity, love, and understanding...

...I think I got some glimmer of understanding of the man out of my own experience with him...

...envy he outlived...

...The book has been talked about so much that the government is almost certain to act and they are liable to turn up any evidence there is...

...In fact, I never admired him...

...And, as in the case of few other folk heroes— Lincoln for one—the popular verdict is basically the true one...

...I do not know anyone who does not need mercy," Darrow said in one of his greatest court pleas...

...And are you ready, gentlemen, in this day and generation, to take away the name and liberty of a human being upon the testimony of rogues, informers, crooks, vagabonds, immunity hunters, and detectives...

...When Harris died, my book about him was published...

...People ask what made Darrow tick...

...that I have never turned my back upon any defendant, no matter what the charge...

...What am I on trial for...

...He replied that he did when the subjects were: Is Civilization a Failure...

...those who lived, even if they drew contaminated breath, he could not turn from...

...After small triumphs in Ashtabula, he had gone to lean days in Chicago, Then he was rescued through John Peter Altgeld, not then the great governor of Illinois, and a man with Darrow's own compassion...

...He mused: "The world has just been through a great war...

...Not only did he have no> difficulty, but he actually met with members of President Coolidge's Cabinet and discussed Shakespeare and other subjects, including, of course, Frank Harris...

...It would take very little beyond that to connect him with the circulation here...

...The dead or absent, he could appraise coldly at times...

...He would be more likely to participate in a financially unprofitable case than in a remunerative one...

...Is the Human Race Getting Anywhere...

...He would discuss legal, literary, and personal problems as if I were the same man of the world he was...

...When I was a young man, in the 1920's, I was rather close to Frank Harris, the writer and adventurer...

...who knew the origin of every cell that went into the body...

...Let Darrow become our Paul Bunyan of pity...

...His pleas to juries were always a glowing combination of philosophy, psychology, poetry, sociology, autobiography, and drama—varied, moving, memorable...

...The list of his famous cases is a long one...

...In the first place it was printed in English...

...Loeb and Leopold owed their life sentence partly to me...

...Merely writing it is not enough...

...He would stoop down when talking to those shorter, and show a kind of unrehearsed tenderness...

...I always felt that he was unreliable, untruthful and not honest...

...Irving Stone tells a story that exemplifies this...

...Darrow represented Jews, Greeks, Italians, Swedes, Russians—and Anglo-Saxons—the whole ethnic rainbow...

...When he spoke in Houston, Texas, The Press carried a front-page story under the heading: Lovable Blasphemer Wins Heart of Crowd...

...He rejoiced when 'three old ladies sought to interest him in a pending lawsuit...

...He drew his own portrait, and it was a faithful one, at the lowest point in his dramatic career, in 1912, when he himself was on trial in Los Angeles, falsely charged with jury tampering in connection with the ill-fated McNamara case...

...He was always quick to respond, and helpful—and charged no fees...

...It is hard for me to realize that men of power and some intellect would seek to terrorize men and women into obedience to their opinions...

...a case involving the indefensible rather than the defensible...

...Some of them are among those who most devotedly planned the Centennial Celebration in Chicago...

...Two years after Darrow's death in 1938, T. V. Smith, who had won his first fame in debates with Darrow and was now a Congressman, spread a tribute to the great lawyer in the Congressional Record, It deserves to be remembered as the fittest epitaph for the man: "Darrow is dead...

...their story has often been told and need not be repeated here...

...There is no doubt whatever that the book is obscene under our law...

...Their words seemed made to order for the accused person he was defending...

...It was the great talent of Darrow to be able to limn the souls of all of his clients, himself included...

...He was a non-joiner, but he belonged to the N.A.A.C.P...

...In another man, this might sound like the self-praise which has an aroma not any pleasanter than the odor of sanctity...

...There is no such crime as a crime of thought...

...When few white lawyers would handle the cases of Negroes, Darrow took them gladly...

...when every man has turned against him 'the law provides that he should have a lawyer, one who can not only be his lawyer but his friend, and I have done that...

...Men are not perfect," he said when he was himself on trial in Los Angeles...

...Has Religion Ceased to Function...

...It was in 1894...

...I'm pretty sure nobody here ever changes his mind, if he ever had one," he told his neighbors...

...But I do know there is a reason for it...

...Is Life Worth Living...

...ONE HUNDRED years after his birth in Farmdale, near Kinsman, Ohio, on April 18, 1857, and nineteen years after his death in Chicago, on March 13, 1938, Clarence Darrow is an American legend...

...Later that year he revisited the area of his birth...

...whether or not he should handle a certain case, sure to entail a good deal of effort and expense...

...But he added: "I am not a sad man...

...Subsequently, I took up other matters for Harris with Darrow...

...He is the one lawyer remembered by the average American and by many elsewhere in the world...

...Still that would furnish a legal presumption...

...But money, wealth, greedily as ever, learning nothing by all the sorrow of the world, said, 'No, all of our privileges must remain...

...As he emphasized while defending some Communists in Rockford, IDj...

...and I can honestly say that I have kept my faith...

...If there were such a thing as justice it could only be administered by those who knew the inmost thoughts of the man to whom they were meting it out...

...Spingarn replied that the man was completely without money...

...Darrow and his wife both showed great personal courage at the time and did not hesitate to appear continuously in the company of colored people in a community violently opposed to them...

...Although I was many years his junior, there was nothing patronizing in his bearing to me, or to anyone else...

...But one after the other, old people whom he had known as a youth shuffled up to him to shake his hands and reminisce...

...He has written for a number of publications and is the co-author of Frank Harris: A Study in Black and White and the author of American Ghettos and The People Versus the Chicago Tribune__The Editors...

...Darrow did not hesitate to speak on such unpopular themes even in what H. L. Mencken dubbed the Bible Belt, where religious fundamentalism was general...

...Today the people of Dayton, Tennessee, the scene of the Scopes trial, hold Darrow in cherished memory...

...The newspaper reported that Darrow was cheered 34 times as he expounded his agnostic philosophy, while his three devout opponents received relatively little applause...

...If he had any connection with their circulation they would stick him...

...By choice, he aided the unprivileged, but he believed that the rich, too, have their rights as human beings and he did not hesitate to represent them, particularly when principle was involved...

...He told Judge Caverly that he stood between the future and the past...

...You may hang these boys," he repeatedly reminded the Judge, but warned: "In doing it, you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows...

...In explaining his defense of the Communists in a celebrated case at the end of World War I, Darrow said that when he entered the practice of law years before, he determined "that there never should be a case, however unpopular or whatever the feeling, that I would refuse to do my duty and defend that case...

...Will you tell me why the Erectors' Association and the Steel Trust are interested in this case way out here in Los Angeles...

...He resigned as Chicago 8c North Western counsel and plunged into the defense of Debs and his cohorts...

...It would not be possible to defend that part of the case...

...Someone asked if Darrow ever took the affirmative side...

...I have lived my life and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and the poor—anybody can do that—but against power, injustice, against oppression . . ." He had been weary and discouraged until he rose to make this final plea in his own defense...

...The truth changes...

...After I had talked with Darrow at some length, he wrote to me June 3, 1927, giving his legal opinion of My Life and Loves in his own hand, and warning of the dangers inherent in Harris' coming here...

...Darrow went to the absolute limit in his belief in freedom of expression—far, indeed, beyond Brandeis and Holmes and Cardozo in his tolerance of all expressions of ideas...

...Why, then, had Darrow gone to such trouble on Harris' behalf...

...This precipitated an armed siege in which men died...

...who could understand the structure and how it acted...

...I think the chances would be decidedly against him...

...Well, that settles it," Darrow said, resignedly...

...The day ended in the kind of human triumph that always filled the pessimist with joy...

...Clarence Darrow: An American Legend by ELMER GERTZ The centenary of the birth of Clarence Darrow will be celebrated at a day-long program in Chicago May 1 under the auspices of the Adult Education Council of greater Chicago...

...he survives as the common man's concept of the great and glamorous courtroom advocate...

...It is a story never before published...

...and even when he escaped conviction, after two trials and the threat of a third, suspicion hung over him for years, deepening his already pronounced pessimism...

...they had an imperfect origin and they are imperfect today, and the long struggle of the human race from darkness to comparative civilization has been filled with clash and discord and murder and war and violence and wrong, and it will be for years and years to come...

...Why did he constantly kick aside the temptation to succeed financially...

...I have still not lost faith that the poor and oppressed all over the earth will have a chance to try and better their conditions...

...I have been one of those dreamers who has felt that from the fire and the smoke and the ashes of the battlefield of Europe there might arise a fairer, a better, a juster civilization than this world has ever known...

...When he reached his seventy-sixth birthday, he said to his first visitor: "Congratulate me on not having to stay in this fool world much longer...

...But ever we are going onward and upward toward the sunshine, where the hatred and war and cruelty and violence of the world will disappear...

...Governor Horner of Illinois commuted the death sentence of an eighteen year old boy, for whom Darrow had pleaded before the state pardon board...

...his memory for details was always amazing...

...A desperate railroad strike was being fought, led by a man little known then—Eugene Victor Debs...

...I have committed one crime which I cannot be forgiven...

...Through Altgeld he became a special assessment attorney for the city of Chicago, then acting corporation counsel, and, still encouraged by Altgeld, counsel for the Chicago & North Western Railway...

...He would quote from Schopenhauer, Whitman, Khayyam, Housman, and his other favorites...

...It takes a long time to get a new idea through the minds of people, and when you do, it is no longer true...

...Darrow was discussing with Arthur Spingarn of the N.A.A.C.P...

...Said Darrow, with his usual acumen and clarity: "If he concludes to come I will do everything I can to help him...

...I am on trial because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I have stood for labor all these years and have brought down upon my head the wrath of the criminal interests in this country...

...It would be assumed that it was written to sell and was published in English to sell in English speaking countries...

...As Dan-row talked before juries, he would sometimes slip his thumbs behind his galluses, which would distend as if they were about to burst...

...It means that you must appraise every influence that moves them, the civilization where they live and all society which enters into the making of the child or the man...

...I do not know what made him do this act," he said of another defendant who stood in the shadow of the gallows...

...At the end, Darrow was given an ovation from the very people who loved the Bible from cover to cover...

...I don't want to live in a world where such men can cause the undoing of an American citizen...

...I hate to think that we went through it all for nothing...

...It was not difficult to recall Darrow's rural beginnings in Ohio, where he studied law, as he used to say with humorous exaggeration, in a blacksmith's shop...

...Will Democracy Cure the Social Ills of the World...

...That is the reason I have been pursued by as cruel a gang as ever followed a man...

...I may be very wrong in my estimate but this is the way I sized him up...

...Over and over again, he declared that the danger to the country was not from workers, but from the greedy, "those who are so blind and devoted to their idol of gold that they would destroy the Constitution of the United States, would destroy freedom of speech and freedom of the press...

...Aye, who knew the father and mother and the grandparents and the infinite number of people back of him...

...there are only crimes of action...

...Strangely, he was, if anything, more popular among those who disagreed with him than with some who were supposedly in his camp...

...The usually dour Housman once wrote to his brother about a visit from Darrow who "so often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair...

...The easy thing and the popular thing to do is to hang my clients," Darrow admitted in open court...

...nothing shall be gained by the war for all the blood that has been shed, and whenever a man dares to raise his voice for new conditions or for a better world we will send him to jail.'" Darrow remained one of the few who fought against the forces of sup pression even when the going was roughest...

...The railroad interests had the assistance of the Attorney General of the United States and the ear of President Cleveland in what appeared to Darrow to be an unholy conspiracy...

...who could tell how the emotions that sway the human being affected that particular frail piece of clay...

...All that is left is the question did he have anything to do with its circulation...

...Whoever through courage and high emprise has earned the right to live can never wholly die...

...The world has been crazy, all of us...

...Having reason to feel that Darrow admired Harris—had he not repeatedly befriended him?—I wrote to the famous lawyer...

...Chicago and 'the whole country cried for the blood of the two young millionaires who had wantonly slain a younger boy...

...He seemed headed for a prosperous career as a corporation attorney, when his instincts got in the way...

...Harris asked me to find out whether Darrow would defend him if he got into trouble...

...I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in his mind...

...I would not want to speak at a memorial for Harris or to help raise funds," Darrow wrote...

...He was likewise an egotist to the point of paranoia . . . The only thing I could say for him is that he was brilliant but this is not a virtue unless coupled with other things...

...Ossian Sweet, a prominent Negro physician in Detroit, moved into a neighborhood regarded by the whites as their own...

...The copies were sent here, I don't know whether it was advertised here, or who sent them or what relations he had with his publisher...

...nois, following the end of the war, he was engaged in the truly tough task of trying to preserve a Constitution from those who would destroy it...

...in token of his special determination that the most deprived of persons should have the greatest amount of help...

...I was shocked to receive a letter in which Darrow expressed amazingly conventional views about artists and morality and unexpected animus against Harris...

...In these debates Darrow would take the negative side and propound his pessimistic philosophy of doubt...

...Just because I don't believe I'm going to live in another world and have wings, is no reason for being sad...

...Harris was eager to return to this country in 1927, but feared to do so because of his excessively outspoken autobiography, My Life and Loves, which had been barred everywhere, including France...

...I am not on trial for having sought to bribe a man named Lockwood...

...In his last years there was something almost patriarchal in Darrow's appearance...

...He loved to sit down on a bench on the campus of the University of Chicago, which was near his home, and discuss everything under the sun with the students who would congregate around him...

...Despite Darrow's warning, Harris came here secretly, carrying with him a vial of poison for use in case of danger...

...Tell him I expect to be over this summer or fall and can talk with him more specifically about the facts...

...that out of the infinite sufferings of the human race men might grow kinder and more humane and give a better chance to the common man...

...He lived down the perverse malice, so his friends hope, of such twisted piety as made death a poisoned dagger to Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, our earlier heroes of a mind too free to enslave itself with a faith more weak than honest doubt...

...he asked the jury...

...I am seeking to save for the people of this country such liberties as they have left," he said...

...If so, I don't want to live...

...They were wiser than their elders, he thought...

...And he did, defraying the heavy expenses out of his own not too full purse...

...Show me, in all their watching and their spying, show me, with all the money they have spent, with all the efforts of the strong and the poi^f erf ul to get me—show me in all these long, weary months where one honest man has raised his voice to testify against me," he demanded...

...He wrote books and essays, delivered speeches, tried cases, all towards this end...

...Gertz, who was long associated with Darrow, is a Chicago attorney and author who has headed a variety of organizations including the Public Housing Association, the Civil War Round Table, and the Shaw Society of Chicago...

...then it was suggested that there be a memorial meeting for him...

...The explanation, I think, was that Darrow always found it impossible to say "No" to any personal appeal made to him, in behalf of the living...

...He was then living in self-exile in Nice, France, and I used to do chores for him in the States...

...Darrow made magnificent pleas for human brotherhood and a lasting contribution to racial equality...

...Darrow asked, "What fee can the accused pay...

...Some are almost ready to confess that they esteem him beyond William Jennings Bryan, with whom Darrow dueled in the epochal anti-evolution trial...

...But he outlived gossip...

...Still he should think it over carefully...

...He would be sure to place himself in danger...

...If you can do it—if you can do it you are wise, and with wisdom goes mercy...

...This practice reached its climax at a time when racial restrictive housing covenants were lawful everywhere and rigidly enforced by courts...

...It was here that he began his sensational career as an advocate...

...Just one...

...Let him be our Robin Hood of courage against the heartless strong . . . "Now and ever will memory of him strengthen the hands of those who in his spirit work to soften the blows of fate and to even the score for the weak against cruel injustice and high-placed wrong...

...I will have to take the case...

...The Sweets, who were the targets of this armed terror, were indicted for murder, and Darow was the natural selection to defend them...

...He gained strength as he reviewed the flimsy evidence against him...