Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (35 page)

The riot commanded national attention, for the city was the site of Abraham Lincoln’s home and tomb. Darrow was among the first to express outrage. “Today, within the shadow of the monument raised to the great Liberator’s name, defenseless Negroes are murdered, families are driven from their homes … and the ruthless hand of vengeance and destruction is raised against every man, woman and child whose face is black,” Darrow wrote in the
American
. It would be easy to blame the riot on “hoodlums” and “drunkards,” Darrow wrote, but to do so would be a mistake. The Springfield riot was a sign that a “dark stain” of racism gripped all American society. “North and South—men of place and influence—have freely parroted words of venom and hate against a poor and helpless race, until in churches, clubs, factories, shops and on the streets the word is passed from mouth to mouth that life is not safe unless the black is hanged or burned by the righteous mob.

“Time was when these lynchings in the South awoke the righteous indignation of the North. But those days have passed. The friends of the Negro have gone to their last long sleep and on this question of color the North and South are one.”

Two weeks later,
William E. Walling, a wealthy socialist who had rushed to Springfield for a firsthand look at the scene, published an appeal for a “large and powerful body of citizens” to come to the aid of American blacks. He asked Darrow for his help, and liberals like
Jane Addams,
John Dewey,
Florence Kelley,
Lincoln Steffens,
William Dean Howells, and
Oswald Villard enlisted in the cause. Darrow was on the program when, at a conference in New York in May 1910, the NAACP was founded. He spoke in the evening at Cooper Union—the site of Lincoln’s landmark speech against slavery. The abolitionist
Theodore Parker had said, in the years before the Civil War, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr. would like the image; so did Amirus Darrow’s son. “God’s and nature’s laws are working, and working toward equality, and broadly and slowly and imperceptibly, perhaps, toward justice,” Darrow said.
⁷

A
S
D
ARROW WORKED
his way out of debt, his client list was the usual assortment—a rich glimpse of the social, legal, and economic disputes at the century’s turn.

On behalf of his friend
William O. Thompson—who was married to one of the young ladies—Darrow conducted shuttle diplomacy among the three comely daughters of a local King Lear, a wealthy capitalist whose fortune needed dividing. One brother-in-law took to loitering near the mansion with a revolver. When he was banished by the family, his wife rushed to join him, crying, “I still love him” and—to the delight of the gossips of tony Hinsdale—“suffered a heart shock and fell in a swoon” on the lawn. The affair seemed destined for a scandalous legal confrontation until Darrow helped them reach a settlement.

Sex and money were the culprits again when Darrow went to the aid of the wealthy
Anna Boysen, who had been arrested in a rooming house with her young skating instructor,
Rudolph Hough, and charged with illegal cohabitation. The warrants for the arrest had been procured by Boysen’s mother,
Helen Leet, who insisted that Anna was a floozy given to drink, drugs, and carousing and could not be trusted to administer her finances. But Darrow told reporters that Anna had been deserted by her husband, and that Leet was taking advantage of her daughter’s predicament to steal her money. Anna and Rudolph were just good friends, Darrow insisted. Once again, he got the warring sides to settle.

Darrow took the case of lawyer
Charles F. Davies, who was charged with blackmail after accepting a $3,200 payment from
Charles Foster, a prominent Cadillac car executive who had four wives. And then there was the juicy divorce of
Sidney Love, a broker whose spectacular financial collapse was accompanied by accusations that he married an English heiress for her money, and whose story delighted headline writers (“Love Will Try Again”). Darrow represented
William Henley, a former judge and railroad president accused of embezzlement, and
John Ericson, the city engineer, who allegedly distributed public funds to his friends. He defended distillery operators charged in federal court with tax evasion. He took a $500 fee from local theatrical interests that wanted to have underage actors exempted from child labor rules. And he unsuccessfully represented the crooked directors of a Kankakee, Illinois, manufacturing firm that was
sued for defrauding investors. Some clients were seriously unsavory. Darrow represented
Willis Rayburn, one of three men—including
Nicholas Martin, the private secretary to Alderman Hinky Dink Kenna—charged with bribing juries. And he went to court for
Simon Tuckhorn, a pimp, gambler, and lieutenant of
Mont Tennes, the gambling kingpin.
⁸

T
HE ARMIES OF
the
Progressive movement were finding it hard to know what to think about Darrow. He was invariably crossing them up—heroic one day, contemptible the next.

In November 1908, the criminal court clerk,
Abram Harris, and a number of hangers-on were indicted for election fraud. Harris hired Darrow, who noted that the charges were filed under the new statute that created a direct
primary election system. He decided to challenge the law.
VOTE TAINTERS SEEK LOOPHOLE
, the
Tribune
declared. The direct primary was a prized accomplishment of reformers in the Progressive Era, for opening up the party nominating process to the voters. Now Darrow was arguing for the other side.

“A decision favorable to Attorney Darrow’s contention means the death of the primary law … and a chaos in Chicago and Cook County politics,” the paper reported. Darrow, “who has been rated as one of the leading high brows in political thought, has permitted himself to fall into a condition of skepticism.” When the trial judge rejected Darrow’s argument, he and his partners took the case to the
Illinois Supreme Court, and won. The law was overturned, the special prosecutor was dismissed, and Darrow’s clients walked free.

But in the same weeks that Darrow was undermining
electoral reform, he endeared himself to liberals by representing a Russian revolutionary named
Christian Rudowitz.

The case had its roots in the doomed Revolution of 1905, when workers rose against the czar, Nicholas II. Hundreds of protesters were killed outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg when the imperial guard opened fire. Martial law was declared, and Cossacks were dispatched to slaughter socialist sympathizers.

A month after the Cossack raids, on a gloomy night in January 1906, three horse-drawn sleighs crossed the snowcapped Baltic landscape to the home of
Theodore Kinze. Masked men armed with muskets entered the
house, accused Kinze’s wife of being a government spy, shot her and her parents, and set the place on fire. Rudowitz, a young carpenter, fled to Chicago to escape the subsequent reprisals.

The czarist government asked U.S. officials to extradite Rudowitz, and he was arrested in November 1908. He admitted that he had participated in the socialist meeting that condemned the Kinze family to death. Informers were shot and their houses burned, he said, in retaliation for the Cossack atrocities: “It was right that they should die also.” But he insisted that he had not been one of the executioners.

The evidence against Rudowitz was weak. Mrs. Kinze’s brother declared at the time of the murders that he could not identify the killers, but “official Russia reached the conclusion that this deposition … did not prove as much as was desirable,” an immigration expert noted, and recollections were “refreshed.” The facts “which seem truthful are vague and those which are definite have the earmarks of having been manufactured.”

A movement to free Rudowitz was organized in Chicago. Debs, Addams, and others enlisted. The
Political Refugee Defense League was established, with headquarters at Hull House, to circulate tens of thousands of pamphlets with the title: “Shall America Soil Her Hands in Blood?” Darrow led a team of lawyers and law professors. They filled the three-hundred-page record with authenticated accounts of czarist torture, killings, and other cruelties. At the extradition hearing, Darrow took on the job of examining Rudowitz and made the closing statement. The room was crowded with adults and children, “many of them carrying scars of the Cossack’s lash,” the papers reported.

“It has been the policy of this government since its birth to grant political exiles an asylum,” Darrow said. “If that rule cannot hold in this case, then … none of the oppressed who have rebelled against tyrannical rules of other countries can look to this country.”

The record proved that the killings were a revolutionary act, he argued, and that Rudowitz deserved asylum. “The struggle for freedom now in progress in Russia is the greatest revolution in the history of the world,” Darrow said. “It is the greatest drama and tragedy of modern times, and will not end until the people of that country have been given freedom.”

The U.S. immigration commissioner was unmoved. But the case was now a national cause. Addams wrote to Roosevelt. Sam Gompers led a delegation of AFL officials to the White House. There were protest
meetings on college campuses and some four thousand socialists held a masquerade ball in Chicago—young women in scandalous short-skirted costumes or even “Turkish trousers”—singing out the “Marseillaise” and heckling actors portraying Uncle Sam, the czar, and his executioners. Darrow traveled to Washington and submitted a long brief to the State Department. On January 26, as one of the Roosevelt administration’s final actions, Secretary of State
Elihu Root announced that Rudowitz would be freed.
⁹

I
T WAS AROUND
this time—in the latter part of 1908 or early 1909—that the fifty-one-year-old Darrow met the thirty-year-old Mary Field. They were introduced at a protest rally. It may have been a Rudowitz meeting; in later years, she could not remember. (“Somebody was jailed, or somebody was striking or somebody wanted higher wages.”) After Darrow finished his speech, his old Desplaines Street neighbor
Helen Todd brought them together.

Todd was working with the Elm Street settlement house, trying to save young
David Anderson from the gallows. She prevailed on Darrow to take the case, and he argued that the state should not be executing a nineteen-year-old who, even if guilty of shooting a policeman, had been represented by a disbarred lawyer. Days before the hanging, the governor and the parole board heard Darrow’s plea, and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

Mary was a veteran of the settlement world, a social worker with literary ambitions and socialistic leanings. She was spirited, clever, idealistic, and pretty—just the kind of independent “new woman” to whom Darrow was drawn. Darrow cheated on his “silly little” wife, and had “many affairs,” Mary’s sister Sara recalled. “But always his … 
love affairs were with intellectual women.”

In a letter to a friend, Columbia University professor
Randolph Bourne described the “new woman” of the era as if he were writing about Mary. “They are all social workers, or magazine writers in a small way. They are decidedly emancipated and advanced, and … thoroughly healthy and zestful,” he said. “They shock you constantly … They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, and innocence and self-reliance, which absolutely belies everything you will read
in the story-books or any other description of womankind … They enjoy the adventure of life; the full, reliant audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new woman isn’t to be a very splendid sort of person.”

Mary was one of three daughters of a rigid Baptist father and a devout Quaker mother. The girls inherited their mother’s gentle idealism and their father’s will. Mary defied his order that she attend a small religious college, borrowed money, and enrolled at the University of Michigan—a stunning act of independence for a young woman in the 1890s. He banished her from their home.
¹⁰

Like Darrow, Mary worked as a teacher for a time, in a one-room school in rural Michigan. After hearing Debs speak one night, she applied to Hull House, where Addams passed her name to
Graham Taylor at the Chicago Commons. There, she gave English classes, and taught parenting to immigrant mothers and helped deliver babies. “I came to the Commons in a glow of enthusiasm for service among the plain people,” she recalled. “I was so happy.” She thought Addams was “very wise,” but Saint Jane did not return her regard—she viewed Mary as saucy and irreverent.

Mary had several suitors in Chicago, including a Russian diplomat, a police inspector who presented her with the comb of a notorious murderess, and a wealthy young man who gave her a set of pearl-handled golf clubs and an engagement ring. She called off the marriage when, in an argument at a party, he slapped a cocktail from her hands; it reminded her of her father’s cruelty. Another affair ended ruinously when her lover—a black-haired Irish newspaperman who lived at the Commons and took her to anarchist lectures—disclosed he was betrothed to another woman. Mary had “peaks of ecstasy and elation” that could be followed by “descents into the valley of despondency,” her sister Sara said.

Mary’s breakup with the journalist helped feed a disillusionment with settlement life. “I grew to doubt everything,” she wrote Taylor. Charity work seemed but a palliative, insufficient without greater social change. She feared that the “good is the enemy of the best.” Taylor hoped a move would do Mary good, and she was named co-director of the Maxwell Street Settlement House, in a neighborhood of impoverished Jewish immigrants known as “Little Russia.” There, in the spring of 1908, she gained some notoriety when
Lazarus Averbuch, a student in her English class, was shot five times on the doorstep of the city police chief.