Clarence Seward Darrow

Clarence Seward Darrow 1857-1938, American lawyer, b. Kinsman, Ohio. He first practiced law in Ashtabula, Ohio. In 1887 he moved to Chicago, where he was corporation counsel for several years and conducted the cases that the city brought to reduce transit rates. Later, as general counsel for the Chicago and Northwestern RR, he resigned (1894) to defend Eugene V. Debs and others in connection with the Pullman strike. The defense was unsuccessful. Darrow soon renounced his lucrative practice to defend the "underdog." A staunch opponent of capital punishment, he exerted his tremendous courtroom skill in behalf of those charged with murder; none of his murder trial clients was ever sentenced to death, although he failed to win a reprieve (1894) for Robert Prendergast, who had already been convicted of murdering Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison before Darrow took his case. Darrow procured, in 1906, the acquittal of William D. Haywood and his associates on the charge of murdering former Governor Steunenberg of Idaho. He offended many socialists (with whom he had been popularly identified) by introducing a plea of guilty in his defense of the McNamara brothers in the Los Angeles Times dynamiting case (1911). Darrow was himself tried for allegedly bribing a juror in the trial, but he was acquitted. In the Chicago "thrill" murder trial (1924) of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb he saved the defendants from execution by a plea of temporary insanity. Long an agnostic, Darrow fought fundamentalist religious tenets in the Scopes evolution case (1925; see Scopes trial ). Pitted against William Jennings Bryan , he defended without success a schoolteacher charged with violating a Tennessee statute prohibiting teaching that man descended from other forms of life. Many felt, nevertheless, that Darrow's examination of Bryan on the witness stand did much to discredit fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Among Darrow's books are a novel, Farmington (1904); Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922); and Attorney for the Damned, a collection of his defense summations, ed. by Arthur Weinberg (1957).

Bibliography: See his autobiography (1932); biographies by I. Stone (1941, repr. 1971) and M. Gurko (1965).

Darrow, Clarence Seward (1857–1938) US lawyer. Known as the “attorney for the damned”, in 1894 he defended the railway leader Eugene DEBS for his part in the PULLMAN STRIKE; although he lost, he earned a reputation for taking on controversial cases. This flair for controversy brought him to the verge of bankruptcy (1911), when he was tried, but acquitted, of conspiring to bribe jurors. He defended over 50 people charged with murder, but only once did he lose a client to the executioner. In 1925 he defended the evolutionist biology teacher in the SCOPES Trial but lost the case.

Darrow, Clarence Seward (1857–1938), Ohio‐born lawyer, mainly associated with Chicago, was noted for his defense of labor organizations, acting as counsel for Debs in the case resulting from the Pullman strike; for William D. Haywood, accused of instigating the murder of the governor of Idaho; and for the McNamara brothers, accused of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building. He was also known as a criminal lawyer in such cases as the trial of Loeb and Leopold (1924) and the Fortescue‐Massie case in Honolulu. His agnosticism was strikingly revealed in the Scopes trial. He wrote several books, including A Persian Pearl (1898), literary essays; Farmington (1904), a novel about his own youth; An Eye for an Eye (1905), a novel concerned with the fallacy of the Mosaic law; Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922); and The Story of My Life (1932). Attorney for the Damned (1957) collects 13 major speeches.