A Courtroom Great

...RUSSEL B. NYE is chairman of the English department at Michigan State College and the author of "A Baker's Dozen...

...THE REVIEWERS FREDERICK J. HOFFMAN is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin...

...In every bank in the world, where men hate Haywood because he fights for the poor and against that accursed system upon which the favored live and grow rich and fat—from all those you will receive blessings and unstinted praise...

...If you kill him your act will be applauded by many...

...Then, as the class war deepened, as bombs began to substitute ominously for words, Darrow was drawn to Idaho in 1907 to defend Steve Adams and Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone, mining union officials, charged with the murder of the renegade former Governor Steunenberg, and to Los Angeles in 1911 to defend the McNamaras in the dynamiting of the Times Building...

...ARTHUR SCHLESING-ER, JR...

...And Darrow knew, too...

...Reviewed by Elmer Gertz This stirring book, deftly edited by Arthur Weinberg, who originated the Darrow Centennial Commemoration, gives one all of the material that is required for a just appraisal of the Attorney for the Damned who occupied the center of the stage even when he was nominally in a subordinate position...

...Then, too, Darrow deliberately created obstacles for the court or jury to hurdle...

...his books include "The Modern Novel in America, 1900-1950...

...What an array of cases they were...

...There was the arbitration before President Theodore Roosevelt's Anthracite Mine Commission in 1903, when Darrow again represented the union...

...All the world was made to see the effect of greed, intolerance, and power drives...

...Those were Darrow's learning years, when he was finding himself, as man and advocate...

...A few ideas were developed and left to simmer, then re-developed and again left to contemplation...

...But if your verdict should be 'Not Guilty' in this case, there are still those who will reverently bow their heads and thank these twelve men for the life and reputation you have saved...

...Basically, each plea, despite its length and the piling up of details, was quite simple...

...His new book, "Russian Liberalism," will be reviewed in an early issue by Justice William O. Douglas...

...ELMER GERTZ is a Chicago attorney who was long associated with Darrow...

...They would return to their families and friends sustained by the certainty that they had done the right thing...

...In the Haywood case he expressed the matter better, perhaps, than it has ever been stated: "Gentlemen, it is not for him alone that I speak...

...Those were the words that often came to his lips when defending others in trials for their lives...

...There was the Kidd case at Osh-kosh, Wisconsin, in 1898, when a union organizer was charged, like Debs, with conspiracy, growing out of a strike...

...He knew the feeble little straws to which all of us cling in our efforts to leap over the abysmal depths of sorrow, ignorance, hate, and envy which lie before us...

...As Justice Douglas sums it up in his cogent foreword, "Darrow, working through the law, brought prestige and honor to it during a long era of intolerance...

...Darrow deplored violence, but he hated, even more, the grinding down of the poor by the greedy...

...By the time of the last repetition of these ideas, the jury was generally persuaded that they had thought of these irresistible ideas first and that they had no choice except to do the unpopular, just, and generous thing that Darrow had suggested to them...

...I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men, who, in darkness and despair, have borne the labors of the human race...

...ROBERT E. FITCH is dean of the Pacific School of Religion and author of "The Decline and Fall of Sex...

...is professor of history at Harvard...

...Darrow put the employers on trial, rather than the defendants...

...This was an appeal few courts or juries could resist...

...In darkness and despair"—those were the keywords of D arrow's plea...

...Weinberg does not include the first halting pleas in behalf of Eugene Victor Debs and his co-workers of the American Railway Union, nor the futile and belated efforts to save Prendergast, the demented slayer of Carter Harrison, from the gallows...

...Weinberg chooses and expounds upon the cases of Darrow's years of mastery, telling in brief compass the whys and wherefores of those cases, but letting Darrow himself hold the center of the stage...

...In the Loeb-Leopold case he pleaded "for every other boy who, in ignorance and darkness, must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows...

...Justice Douglas rightly says, "Nothing gives quite the full flavor of the man as do these addresses...

...GEORGE FISCHER is a professor of history at Brandeis University and an associate at Harvard's Russian Research Center...

...The eyes of the world are upon you— upon you twelve men of Idaho tonight...

...All they had to do in order to decide rightly, and in his favor, was to be brave, intelligent, and fair, to go against the mob in its blindness...

...Thirteen Unusual Americans...

...If you should decree Bill Haywood's death, in the railroad offices of our great cities men will applaud your names...

...his most recent book is "The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order...

...Out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide ocean where men are tossed and buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth, thousands of men, and of women and children—men who labor, men who suffer, women and children weary with care and toil—these men and these women and these children will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your hearts—these men and these women and these little children, the poor, the weak, and the suffering of the world, are stretching out their helpless hands to this jury in mute appeal for Bill Haywood's life...

...In each case JDarrow would make it appear easier for the jury or judge to decide against his clients rather than for them...

...One cannot even list all of the great cases in which Darrow participated...

...He would challenge them to be true to their manhood...

...He had to make an impression so potent as to overcome all that the states attorney said and would say, aided only by the American presumption of innocence which is too often a technical formality rather than a reality...

...Thereafter they cherished Darrow as the great man of the courtrooms, a feeling that will be shared by the readers of this book...

...Wherever the English language is spoken or wherever any tongue makes known the thoughts of men in any portion of the civilized world, men are talking, and wondering and dreaming about the verdict of these twelve men that I see before me now...

...Some of the prosecution pleas he had to overcome, as in the instance of State's Attorney Crowe's clever and cruel utterances in the Loeb-Leopold case were formidable indeed...

...Here is Darrow in the raw —as fresh as the day he spoke...

...Finally, in a great peroration, in which wit, wisdom, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology and all of the sciences and arts were intermingled and spliced together, the few basic ideas were put in their ultimate form...

...If you decree his death, amongst the spiders of Wall Street will go up paeans of praise for these twelve good men and true...

...This book does not give all of them, but it gives some of the best in their proper setting, as well as typical utterances by Darrow in the course of a debate on capital punishment, an address before the inmates of the Cook County jail, a eulogy of Governor Altgeld, and an oration on John Brown, A word about the great lawyer's technique: since Darrow invariably represented the defense, his pleas must be considered in the context of being preceded and followed by the addresses of the prosecution...