Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (4 page)

The jurists who resisted—Brandeis, Holmes, Darrow—would be honored by history as great dissenters and mediocrities like Brewer forgotten, but that was no consolation to the working men and women of the time. And by the 1890s the great economic relief valve—the frontier—was gone. Its absence heightened “the sharp contrast between the traditional idea of America—as the land of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class distinctions, and from the power of wealth,” wrote historian
Frederick Turner, “and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal.”
²⁹

With the growth of the state came new, intrusive police powers and prescriptions for social remedy. Though Darrow spent decades in radical and populist politics, he had no illusions about the ability of liberalism, or socialism, or any other man-made “ism” to cure social ills. Well ahead of most of his contemporaries, Darrow foresaw the dangers posed by totalitarian creeds and regimes. He was an early foe of Italian and German fascism. But his
commitment to individual freedom left him wary of all government, and ultimately led him into clashes, as well, with the liberal presidents
Woodrow Wilson and
Franklin Roosevelt.

“It is the mediocre, the thimble-riggers, the cheap players to the crowd, the men who take the customs and thoughts of the common people, who weave them into song and oratory and feed them back to the crowd, who get their votes,” he said. “And from them nothing ever did come and I fear nothing can.”

“Many of his most passionate interests were rooted not merely in his moral idealism and his human pity, but … in his distrust of government,” wrote his friend the theologian
John Haynes Holmes. “He hated and denounced
Prohibition because it was an invasion by the State of the liberties of the individual. He fought capital punishment because it was the State laying its bloody hand upon some poor forlorn individual who it had earlier betrayed by neglect or oppression.”

T
HE GREAT THEME
of Darrow’s life, the long war he fought in his march through courtrooms and cases, was the defense of individual liberty from modernity’s relentless, crushing, impersonal forces. “No era of the world has ever witnessed such a rapid concentration of wealth and power as this one in which we live,” Darrow warned. “History furnishes … abundant lessons of the inevitable result.”

“All the greatness of America, all her marvelous wealth, all the wonders … are a monument to the wisdom of liberty,” Darrow said. But “our liberty produced prosperity, and this prosperity looks with doubting eye upon the mother who gave it breath, and threatens to strangle her to death.”

Americans needed a new sustaining myth. In his defense of the underdog Darrow helped create one. He gave it a narrative voice, kept it supplied with sympathetic characters, and forged his own place in folklore. “If the underdog got on top he would probably be just as rotten as the upper dog, but in the meantime I am for him,” Darrow said. “He needs friends a damn sight more than the other fellow.”
³⁰

Americans drew strength watching Darrow rage against the machine. They can again today. There is something grand and epic in his fierce resistance to those inexorable oppressive forces that, in varying guises, inspired the rebels in his ancestry and the abolitionists of his boyhood, imperiled freedom in his lifetime, and pose a threat to liberty today.

“The marks of battle are all over his face,” wrote the journalist
H. L. Mencken. “He has been through more wars than a whole regiment of Pershings. And most of them have been struggles to the death, without codes or quarter.

“Has he always won?” Mencken asked. “Actually, no. His cause seems lost among us.”

“Imbecilities, you say, live on? They do,” wrote Mencken. “But they are not as safe as they used to be.”
³¹

Chapter 1

REBELLIONS

I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd
.

S
amuel Eddy, the son of an English vicar, was in his early twenties in August of 1630, when he went aboard the good ship
Handmaid
and embarked from London for the New World. The young tailor was headed for Plymouth, where the
Mayflower
had landed ten years before. The journey was marked by savage storms and the ship lost all its masts, and ten of the twenty-eight cows it carried, before limping into port in late October. Samuel and his brother John intended to join a family friend,
John Winthrop, who had left four months earlier with the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, intent on building their city on a hill. But only John joined Winthrop in Boston. Samuel found a wife in Plymouth, a peppery lass named
Elizabeth Savery, and stayed with the Pilgrims.

The descendants of John and Samuel spread throughout New England, where they were known for sturdy physiques, long lives, and many sons. “This extraordinary multiplication accounts for the fact that, while the Eddys as a family are not poor, not many of them are very rich,” said the Reverend
Zachary Eddy at a family reunion in 1880. “Estates … have been divided among many heirs.”

“We are a large-brained family, but … there have been but few manifestations of remarkable intellectual power,” Eddy said, with a candor seldom exhibited on such occasions. “Our family has produced no great statesman, or philosopher, or orator, or poet, or historian, or man of science.” Somewhat wistfully, he said: “We have been at a dead level of respectability for three hundred years.”
¹

That was soon to change. A line of the family had rooted in what
is now northeast Ohio when
Moore Eddy arrived from Connecticut in 1830. There, he married
Elizabeth Whittaker, whose parents had made the six-week trip from New England in a wagon drawn by oxen. Moore and his wife lived in a log cabin, cleared land in the virgin forest, and raised five children. At school, their daughter Emily met a dreamy young man named Amirus Darrow. They were married and on April 18, 1857, welcomed their fifth child, Clarence, to the world.
²
He would be everything but respectable.

T
HE FIRST
D
ARROW
to arrive in America, according to the family genealogists, was George Darrow, who came to Connecticut in the late seventeenth century. It’s said he was snatched by a press gang and forced into service in the Royal Navy, but jumped ship in the Americas and made his way to New London, a port with a reputation for unruly behavior. “It was easy to raise a mob here; easy to get up a feast, a frolick or a fracas,” an early town historian wrote. “Men who had long been rovers, and unaccustomed to restraint, gathered here … Violations of modesty and purity before marriage, were but too frequent.”

There was sufficient sport and opportunity, and enough Indians in the forests, to keep the family in New London for two more generations. But by the middle of the next century the Darrow clan, like the Eddys, was generating too many children. A number of Darrows left Connecticut and made their way up the Hudson River valley in New York. Their wandering was interrupted, and then accelerated, by the great events of the
American Revolution.
³

Clarence Darrow took pride in his rebel ancestors. Several fought in the Revolution, at storied places like Lexington and Saratoga. His great-grandfather Ammirus joined George Washington’s army in 1778, at the age of seventeen, as an aide-de-camp for a cousin, Captain Christopher Darrow, who had served at Bunker Hill. Ammirus and his brother Jedediah were at the battle of Monmouth that summer, but their service with Washington ended when Christopher was court-martialed after challenging the actions of an incompetent superior. Christopher was ultimately vindicated, but Ammirus and his brother returned to New York, where they joined in one of the Revolution’s grislier chapters.
⁴

The Loyalists and their Iroquois allies in upstate New York had taken
to raiding—murdering settlers, scalping, and hauling women and children off as slaves. The death of one of Ammirus’s comrades, Lieutenant
Thomas Boyd, illustrates the savagery of the frontier war. The Iroquois nailed an end of his intestines to a tree, and forced their captive to trudge around its trunk until he was eviscerated. Then they cut off his head and mounted it on a pole. The Americans responded in kind. One patriot who served with Ammirus, a marksman named
Tim Murphy, was known for his collection of scalps. In the fall of 1780, the Darrow brothers were stationed with Murphy in the Schoharie River valley when the army of Loyalist colonel
Sir John Johnson invaded the region. Ammirus’s term of service was up, but he volunteered to remain—a decision that looked dubious when the patriots were cornered in a fort at Middleburgh. Their commander panicked and tried to surrender, but Murphy pushed him aside and fired on the British officers who approached under a white flag to parlay. Johnson’s Indian allies had no patience for a siege, and he led them to plunder elsewhere.

The war took Ammirus west and north of Albany, deep into the woods and mountains, where the Mohawk Valley patriots fought a series of battles against Loyalist forces led by Captain
Walter Butler, hated by the settlers for his role in earlier massacres. Ammirus was there when Butler, defying his enemies from across a creek, was shot from his horse in the Black River country. Word of Butler’s death thrilled the American settlers in New York, perhaps as much as the news then arriving from Virginia, where General Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown.
⁵

Ammirus returned to New London after the war, where he wooed his wife-to-be, Sarah Malona.
⁶
Within a few years he and his family were making their way to the Black River region he had visited during the war. Sarah bore twelve children. Jedediah, the oldest boy, was Clarence Darrow’s grandfather. He was a furniture maker, known for his skill as a craftsman and his happy disposition. Clarence’s aunt Sarah recalled a strict Methodist upbringing, the frightful cold of the north woods, and the warm maple syrup of her grandfather’s sugar house. The countryside was covered with hemlock, pine, and balsam, and the streams were alive with fish. She liked to gather wildflowers, and spruce gum to chew, and to feed the tamed bears at Graves Tavern. In winter, she and her brother Amirus would go sledding on snow so deep it covered the fences, “making the country look like one vast field.”
⁷

Ammirus passed away in 1824, with Jedediah and young Amirus at his bedside. Then Jedediah and his family moved on and settled in the Western Reserve.

T
HE
W
ESTERN
R
ESERVE
,
where Clarence Darrow was born and lived until the age of thirty, was a rectangular block of land west of the Pennsylvania border, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie. It was granted to Connecticut after the Revolution to resolve a violent border dispute with Pennsylvania. Coming from Connecticut, the most radical of the Puritan colonies, the Western Reserve’s inhabitants shared a fierce commitment to liberty. Their relatives in New England, dispatching fishing fleets and clipper ships around the globe, grew more cosmopolitan in the nineteenth century, but the inhabitants of the Reserve were, politically, frozen in time. If anything, their radical vision grew stronger, fueled by a Puritan sense of duty. Many were abolitionists, risking life and property to smuggle fugitive slaves to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Amirus Darrow was the oldest of Jedediah’s sons. He learned carpentry from his father, then set out to become a preacher, studying first with the Methodists at Allegheny College and then at the new Unitarian seminary in Meadville, Pennsylvania. “This ambition was born of [his] intense love of books,” his son Clarence would recall. “The trade of a parson was thought to be an intellectual calling.” The Eddy clan, sound farming folk who valued shrewdness and hard labor, thought Emily’s new husband was impractical. For although he displayed some characteristic Darrow traits—restlessness, rebelliousness, fertility—Amirus stood out mostly for his inefficacious thirst for learning. He had wide-ranging interests in literature, theology, and political theory, and Clarence and his brothers and sisters were raised in a home crammed with books and ideas. “How my father managed to buy the books I cannot tell,” Darrow wrote. “Neither by nature nor by training had he any business ability or any faculty for getting money.”