Clarence Darrow

Born April 18, 1857 (Kinsman, Ohio)
Died March 13, 1938 (Chicago, Illinois)

Lawyer

"Your honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past."

Clarence Darrow was one of the most famous lawyers in U.S. history. Always a strong defender of the underdog and a winner of seemingly lost causes, Darrow played a leading role in some of the most extraordinary courtroom dramas of the 1920s. A lifelong opponent of capital punishment, he used testimony based on the new, modern science of psychology in a successful attempt to save murderers Nathan Leopold (1904–1971) and Richard Loeb (1905–1936) from execution. In the famous court battle known as the Monkey Trial, which involved the clash of religious and scientific views of the origin of humanity, Darrow defended the right of educator John Scopes (1900–1970) to teach his students about the theory of evolution.

A young Ohio lawyer

Born in the northeastern Ohio town of Kinsman in April 1857, Darrow was the son of Amirus and Emily Darrow. His father had once been a Unitarian minister but after losing his religious faith became a carpenter and furniture maker. The elder Darrow was a book-loving agnostic (someone who doubts but does not

deny the existence of God), and his wife was a supporter of women's rights. They passed their liberal social views and concern for the less privileged members of society to their son.

As a boy, Darrow enjoyed participating in outdoor activities such as fishing, sledding, and baseball with his seven brothers and sisters. He also developed a fear of death that seems to have grown out of his discomfort with his father making coffins as a carpenter. Some historians have even linked Darrow's hatred for the death penalty to this part of his past. The death of his mother when he was fourteen also cast a shadow over his youth.

Darrow was never an enthusiastic student, even though he loved to read books. After spending a year at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, he returned to Kinsman and took a job as a teacher. He enjoyed the experience of addressing a class, but soon he decided to become an attorney. Darrow attended the University of Michigan law school for a year, and then, like many law students of the period, completed his education by working in a law office.

In 1878, when Darrow was twenty-one, he passed Ohio's bar examination (a test of qualifications for practicing law). For the next ten years he worked as an attorney in the small towns of Kinsman, Andover, and Ashtabula, Ohio. He married a quiet, reserved young woman named Jessie Ohl in 1880 (the couple would divorce in 1897, and six years later Darrow would begin a happy thirty-five-year marriage to Ruby Hamerstrom). In 1887 Darrow moved his family, which now included his only child Paul, to Chicago, Illinois, a lively, bustling city that seemed to hold exciting possibilities for a sharp young lawyer. Chicago would be Darrow's much-beloved home for the rest of his life.

Gaining fame as a labor lawyer

Darrow made many new contacts in Chicago, where he took part in Democratic Party politics and established a close friendship with John Peter Altgeld (1847–1902), a millionaire and judge who shared Darrow's interest in social reform. Following Altgeld's election as governor of Illinois in 1892, Darrow too became a prominent figure. In 1889 he was appointed the head of Chicago's legal department, but he left this job three years later to become an attorney for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Company.

Darrow's career as a corporate (company) lawyer was shortlived. By the middle of the 1890s, he was making a name for himself in labor law. As U.S. industry had expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the labor movement too had evolved as a way for workers to protect their interests. In addition to caring about such matters as fair wages and safe working conditions, Darrow believed that workers should be allowed to form unions in order to give themselves bargaining power in disagreements with owners and managers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, tensions between management and unions often resulted in conflict and even violence.

In 1894 Darrow agreed to represent labor leader Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926), a well-known Socialist (someone who believes in a political and economic system in which the means of production, distribution, and exchange are owned by the community as a whole, rather than by individuals) and president of the American Railway Union. With other union leaders, Debs had organized a massive railroad strike that made a significant impact on the nation. Lower courts had ruled that Debs and the others had conspired to obstruct trade between states and also violated a judge's order to end the strike.

Darrow took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the earlier rulings were upheld, and Debs spent six months in jail. Despite this loss, Darrow gained fame as a defender of labor. He worked on labor cases for the next seventeen years, always striving to bring attention to the problems of ordinary workers. For example, while serving as a defense counsel during arbitration (a way to resolve a dispute outside the court system) of a coal miners' strike, Darrow cast light on the dangers of this kind of work and the industry's reliance on underage laborers.

Other famous cases

Another of Darrow's most famous labor cases involved his defense of William D. "Big Bill" Haywood (1869–1928), the head of the newly formed International Workers of the World (IWW) Union. Former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg (1861–1905), who was well known for his antiunion stance, was killed when a bomb exploded outside his home. Haywood and two other union officials were charged with the murder. Despite a defense effort that was not up to the standard of most of Darrow's performances, the jury found the defendants not guilty. During the trial, Darrow had exposed the many efforts of mining company managers and local government leaders to harass union members.

Darrow tried his last labor law case in 1911, when he agreed to defend brothers Joseph and James McNamara, who were socialists and union activists. They had been charged with the October 1910 bombing of the building that housed the Los Angeles Times, whose publisher, Otis Chandler, was known to be antiunion. The blast killed twenty-one people and injured forty. A surprising turn of events came in the middle of the trial, when the brothers changed their plea from not guilty to guilty. Darrow had advised his clients to plead guilty so that he could work on helping them avoid the death penalty (a guilty plea meant that their fate would be decided by a judge, not a jury). This plan worked, but labor leaders were angry with Darrow. They felt he had tarnished the image of the labor movement by not winning a not guilty judgment for the McNamaras.

This was quickly followed by two charges that Darrow had tried to bribe members of the jury during the McNamara trial. Darrow was tried and found not guilty, but the publicity had damaged his reputation. He returned to Chicago to rebuild his career, a difficult task for a man already in his fifties. During the next decade, however, Darrow would make a remarkable recovery from this low point.

As World War I (1914–18; the United States entered the war in 1917) broke out in Europe, Darrow called for the United States to get involved. This was not a popular stance at first, but the United States did eventually enter the conflict on the side of the Allies (Great Britain, France, and Italy) against Germany. Before the war was over, however, Darrow had changed his mind. He disapproved of the American public's suspicion and intolerance of foreign-born people and their supposedly radical ideas that had been generated by the war, which resulted in the passage of several laws designed to keep people from expressing unpopular views. Darrow defended several clients charged with breaking these laws.

Gaining mercy for killers

Darrow gradually began taking more criminal cases, and this eventually became his specialty. Over the course of his career, he would defend more than fifty people accused of first-degree murder, and only one of these clients—his first, Robert Prendergast, whom Darrow represented only at the appeal stage—would receive the death penalty. Many of the trials took place in Chicago, but several would make front-page

Capital Punishment: Always Controversial

Clarence Darrow was one of the most eloquent opponents of capital punishment, the lawful use of death as a penalty for certain crimes. Although it has existed throughout the United States' history, this ultimate form of punishment has always been controversial.

The first European settlers to the American colonies brought with them the tradition of capital punishment. The earliest recorded execution took place in 1608 in Virginia's Jamestown colony. After gaining independence in the American Revolution (1773–89), the U.S. Constitution, under the Eighth Amendment, and the constitutions of nine of the eleven former colonies prohibited "cruel and unusual punishment," but permitted death as a penalty for crimes specified by law. This unwittingly set the stage for a debate that has continued into the twenty-first century.

What exactly did the nation's founders consider to be cruel and unusual punishment? Some maintain that the phrase prohibits torture and particularly brutal forms of execution, such as burning at the stake. Others believe the phrase includes any form of capital punishment. Critics often refer to the Eighth Amendment to support their arguments against the death penalty. Supporters claim that capital punishment deters crime, although studies are inconclusive.

Debate over capital punishment has existed since the nation's founding, but it has rarely affected the executions themselves. The number of people executed for a capital crime has grown over time, with one hundred and sixty recorded during the eighteenth century, almost fourteen hundred in the nineteenth century, and more than four thousand from 1930 to 2004. In 2002 more than three thousand prisoners awaited execution on death row.

In the 1960s opposition to the death penalty did interrupt executions while the issue was considered by the Supreme Court. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the court ruled that some state capital punishment laws were applied randomly and thus were unconstitutional. The court did not, however, determine the death penalty to be a cruel and unusual punishment, and the ruling did little to end the practice. States with questionable laws quickly changed them to comply with the court's ruling.

In addition to the cruel and unusual argument, capital punishment critics charge that the practice is racially biased. Figures from the U.S. Department of Justice show that in 1997, 42 percent of those on death row were African American, even though less than 15 percent of the total U.S. population was African American. Figures also showed that between 1977 and 1995, more than 80 percent of murder victims of those sentenced to death were white, while those who killed African Americans received lesser sentences. The Supreme Court, however, ruled in McKleskey v. Kemp (1987) that these inequalities were only unconstitutional if they resulted from intentional discrimination, which is difficult to prove.

By the end of the twentieth century, thirty-eight U.S. states, as well as the federal government, allowed capital punishment. By the mid-1990s, polls showed that more than 70 percent of U.S. citizens supported capital punishment. As the debate continued, several states in the early twenty-first century instituted stays of executions after some death row inmates were found to be not guilty.

headlines across the nation. These so-called "Crimes of the Century" would add even more excitement to a decade that seemed to thrive on sensationalism and controversy.

In 1924 Darrow was hired to defend Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, teenagers from wealthy Chicago families who had confessed to murdering a fourteen-year-old acquaintance. The young men had killed Bobby Franks for no other reason than to plan and execute the perfect crime, and they showed no remorse for what they had done. News of the murderers' cold-blooded approach to killing caused much public outrage, and many people believed that the boys' rich families were trying to buy their freedom.

Realizing that his only hope was to save his clients from execution, Darrow directed them to plead guilty. During the trial, he introduced an array of experts to establish that Leopold and Loeb were psychologically unstable and had never developed a sense of right and wrong. Darrow told the judge that the crime had been, as quoted in Nathan Miller's New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America, "the act of immature and diseased brains." This approach to criminal defense is now common, but in the 1920s, the field of psychology was in its infancy and Darrow's technique was unusual.

In an emotional and lengthy closing statement, Darrow asked the judge to spare the lives of Leopold and Loeb. He pointed out that his clients' wealth was actually a disadvantage, because it made people less sympathetic to them. Finally, he emphasized that capital punishment was a brutal, outdated practice that would someday be condemned. "Your Honor stands between the past and the future," Darrow declared. "You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past." The judge sentenced the young men to life in prison, not execution, giving Darrow another victory over capital punishment.

The Scopes Trial

About a year after the Leopold and Loeb case, Darrow was involved in one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. In early 1925 the state of Tennessee passed a law banning the teaching of the scientific theory of evolution, or any other theory that contradicted the biblical version of humanity's origin, in the public schools. A number of similar laws were being passed in other states, highlighting the struggle between traditional values and modern beliefs that was taking place in the 1920s.

Although many welcomed the technological and scientific advances that the twentieth century had brought, others feared that religious faith was threatened by scientists like Charles Darwin (1809–1882), whose theory of evolution traced the changes in human beings, animals, and plants over millions of years. Fundamentalists (those who believe that the stories told in the Bible are literally true) waged a fierce struggle against what they viewed as a coldhearted, immoral approach to humanity's origin.

A showdown between Bryan and Darrow

Soon after the passage of the Tennessee law, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) offered to defend any teacher who was willing to test its constitutionality, for they believed that such a ban violated the right of freedom of speech. A group of citizens in Dayton, Tennessee, who disapproved of the ban but also hoped to bring some fame and business to their small town, persuaded a high school teacher named John Scopes to purposely break the law. In April Scopes taught his students a lesson on evolution. He was arrested, and his trial was set for July.

Almost immediately, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925; see entry), a Nebraska politician, former presidential candidate, and ardent fundamentalist, agreed to join the prosecution. When he heard of Bryan's involvement, Darrow (who had sided with Bryan on many political issues and supported his presidential bids) volunteered to head the defense team. As the trial date approached, Dayton was overtaken by a circus-like atmosphere, as a host of outsiders—from reporters to street-corner preachers to souvenir sellers—invaded the town.

Bryan made a splashy arrival, stepping down from his train to an adoring crowd. He began to make appearances and speeches around town, proclaiming his willingness to stand up for religion against science. Arriving two days after Bryan, Darrow spoke at a dinner gathering where, in an attempt to stir up sympathy for his side of the issue, he recalled his own smalltown roots. Most of the townspeople, however, were on Bryan's side.

An emotional trial

Closely followed by people across the nation, the trial proved to be an emotional confrontation between tradition and modernity. Knowing that Scopes' violation of the law could not be disputed, Darrow planned to show that the law itself was unconstitutional. While Bryan called witnesses simply to prove that Scopes had taught evolution, such as students from his class, Darrow's witnesses included scientists with religious beliefs, who would show that there need be no conflict between religious faith and scientific truths. The judge, however, ruled this testimony invalid, because it was unrelated to the central issue of whether Scopes had violated the law.

Frustrated and desperate, Darrow made a bold move. He called Bryan himself to the witness stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Knowing Darrow's reputation for ruthless crossexaminations (questioning of prosecution witnesses), the other prosecutors urged Bryan not to testify. Bryan, however, readily accepted the challenge. At first he held up fairly well under Darrow's questioning, but by the end of the hour-and-ahalf session Darrow was in control. He grilled Bryan relentlessly about his religious beliefs, asking him, for example, if he truly believed that Jonah could have survived for three days inside the stomach of a whale. (This was a popular story in the Bible.)

Bryan ended up looking confused and foolish. The trial ended when Darrow asked the jury to find his client guilty, so that he could take the case to a higher court. The defense rested without making a final statement, which meant that Bryan was denied a chance to summarize the prosecution's position. Scopes was found guilty and fined one hundred dollars. (The sentence was later overturned, and no further attempt was made to enforce Tennessee's law. A 1968 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court made all such bans unconstitutional.)

To most observers, it appeared that despite the outcome of the trial, Darrow had won a moral victory, delivering a major blow to the fundamentalist movement while upholding freedom of speech. Five days after the trial ended, Bryan died in his sleep, and many suggested that the trial and especially Darrow's questioning had taken a fatal toll on his health.

A quiet life

In 1929 Darrow retired from his law practice. Three years later, however, he traveled to Hawaii to represent Lieutenant Thomas Massie, a U.S. Navy officer who, along with several other defendants, was charged with murder. A Hawaiian man who had been accused of raping Massie's wife had been kidnapped and killed. The defendants admitted to the crime and were found guilty, but the charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter. They served only one hour of a ten-year sentence.

Darrow lived quietly for the rest of his life. He was in demand for lectures and debates, however, and in these forums as well as in a number of publications he continued to express his liberal views, which included a defense of agnosticism, opposition to capital punishment, and calls for reforms to the court and prison systems. Darrow died of heart disease when he was eighty years old. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes sprinkled over a pond in a Chicago park.

For More Information

Books

Driemen, John E. Clarence Darrow. New York: Chelsea House, 1992.

Tierney, Kevin. Darrow: A Biography. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979.

Weinberg, Arthur, and Lila Weinberg. Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel. New York: Putnam, 1980.

Web Sites

"Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)." Eastland Memorial Society. Available online at http://www.inficad.com/~ksup/darrow.html. Accessed on June 22, 2005.

Linder, O. Douglas."Who Is Clarence Darrow?" Available online at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/DARESY.HTM. Accessed on June 22, 2005.