Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (53 page)

In the summer of 1918, Darrow was back to Washington again, “urging the officials to be more lenient and human” to the Wobblies and others “who, if they had the power, would be as cruel as the rest,” he acknowledged to Mary. “I don’t know if I did any good. I saw the president and the attorney general and others, but whether they remember what I said after the next visitor arrives I don’t know. Probably they will not.”

After the Armistice, Darrow went once more to the capital, to plead for Debs’s release. He came to Washington from Atlanta, where he had visited Debs in the federal penitentiary. He didn’t get an audience, but left
Wilson a letter. “I gave my time and energy without reserve to support the Allies’ cause,” Darrow reminded the president. “Debs … is courageous, honest, emotional and loving … He is sixty-four years old and in prison for speaking what he believed to be the truth and now, when the war is over and the danger is passed, he should be released.…

“I am most anxious that this Government, which has always tolerated differences and upheld the freedom of thought and speech, should show that stern measures were only used for self-protection,” Darrow wrote. But the Wilson administration, fearing that releasing Debs would make the president look soft and expose him to conservative criticism as he pushed for ratification of the Versailles peace treaty, rejected the appeal.
³

The autocratic trends in American life, a legacy of the war, bothered Darrow. “The modern policy of our government … has … brought on an era of centralization and power which is rapidly crushing the individual,” he told Erskine Wood. Darrow was settling in politically as a fervent libertarian. To the mechanizing effect of industry and the suffocating conformities of society, he added a new target: the state. He opposed Prohibition and picked up the tempo of his attacks on capital punishment. He maintained a high regard for Wilson, but opposed the president’s proposal to reshape the world with a
League of Nations.

“I am one of the old-time democrats who believe in states’ rights and abhor strong centralized governments,” Darrow told Wood. “Now it is proposed to virtually make one government that will reach around the world. It would be the death of liberty.”
⁴

In court, Darrow was an attorney of choice for nonconformists. He handled the divorce of Crystal Eastman, the suffragist lawyer who, as a feminist principle, insisted that she would take no alimony from her wayward husband, just as she had never taken his name. Darrow tried, but failed, to save
Ben Hecht, the Chicago reporter turned novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, from a hefty fine when he was charged with writing a “lewd, lascivious and filthy” novel. Darrow represented
Joseph Marino, a gypsy chieftain accused of selling one of his daughters for $2,000 and then stealing her back. He tried, without success, to win parole for
Evelyn Arthur See, the convicted leader of a “love cult,” who had been imprisoned for luring young girls to serve as “priestesses.” And, a decade after the courts ruled that New York officials could forcibly quarantine “Typhoid Mary” Mallon for carrying the typhoid bacilli, Darrow took a
similar case to the
Illinois Supreme Court, trying, without success, to get sixty-five-year-old
Jennie Barmore freed from indefinite house arrest.

It was Darrow who rescued
William Thomas, a fifty-five-year-old University of Chicago sociologist and author of the book
Sex and Society
, who had committed the decidedly unpatriotic act of dallying in a hotel room with the twenty-four-year-old wife of an army officer serving in Europe. Darrow could not save the professor’s job, but he won him an acquittal in court. He was outraged that a federal investigator, having seen Thomas and the young woman doing nothing more than cuddling on a train, would assign himself to ruin their lives. A week later, Darrow was back at it, trying to preserve the reputation of another kind of officer—a “major general” in a charity that, like the Salvation Army, organized itself along military lines—who had been charged with fraternizing with the wife of a subaltern. “He was supposed to be my spiritual adviser in time of trouble, he did it by making desperate love to me,” said the lady. “You know, I am of an affectionate disposition.”

Darrow’s most notable defense of sexual freedom occurred in November 1915 when he saved
Frank Lloyd Wright from prosecution for violating the Mann Act, a federal “white slavery” law that made it a crime for unmarried couples to travel across state lines. Wright was still recovering from the tragedy that took place at his Wisconsin bungalow, Taliesin, fifteen months earlier, when a crazed workman set fire to the house and, using a hand ax, slashed and killed Wright’s lover, two of her children, and four of Wright’s friends as they rushed from the flames. He had found solace in the love of a tempestuous sculptress,
Miriam Noel, but her haughty ways alienated a housekeeper, who tattled to federal authorities and turned over stolen love letters, which soon appeared in the newspapers.

Noel regally received reporters in a white Grecian gown and proclaimed her love. “It’s all true,” she told them. “Frank Wright and I are … capable of making laws of our own.” Darrow no doubt agreed, but the couple’s boldness was not helpful as he tried to persuade the federal government not to prosecute. He provided investigators with threatening notes that the housekeeper had written to Wright and the case was ultimately dropped.

In the midst of the Wright controversy, Darrow had his own lusty impulse. Sara came through town on a mission for the suffrage movement and stopped to see him at his office. Once again he propositioned her.
⁵

O
NE OLD FRIEND
who was tainted by scandal did not get Darrow’s help. Edgar Lee Masters had stewed for a decade over the $9,000 he claimed he was owed from the Haywood case. Although Darrow “seemed generous, in fact he was inordinately selfish, penurious and greedy,” Masters said. “He was fleet, false and perjured and had boxed every compass in Chicago.”

In early 1916, Masters lashed at Darrow in verse. He sent a poem called “On a Bust” to Reedy at the
Mirror
.

    
A giant as we hoped, in truth, a dwarf;

    
A barrel of slop that shines on Lethe’s wharf
,

    
Which at first seemed a vessel with sweet wine

    
For thirsty lips. So down the swift decline

    
You went through sloven spirit, craven heart

    
And cynic indolence. And here the art

    
Of molding clay has caught you for the nonce

    
And made your shame our shame—Your head in bronze!

“I get ‘The Bust.’ It means Clarence Darrow or nobody,” Reedy wrote Masters. “It is a scathing thing and, while I recognize its truth, somehow I feel sorry that you did it.”

Masters was riding high at the time—in late 1914 Reedy had announced that the lawyer-poet was the author of the Spoon River poems, which were published to critical acclaim and phenomenal commercial success. Masters finally had his fame. He bought himself a country home and hired more servants. The attack on Darrow was published in the eagerly anticipated follow-up,
Songs and Satires
, which every critic in America would see.
⁶

Darrow was furious, but with formidable—Masters would say “reptilian”—cunning, he took revenge in actions whose malice were all the more impressive for the long sweep of time in which they unfolded. Darrow steeped Masters in flattery, bought copies of his books, talked him up in the growing literary circles of the Chicago Renaissance, and sent adoring women his way. “He seemed magnanimous,” Masters recalled. But the poet’s marriage was not surviving what he dismissed as “lighthearted
adulteries.” He left his wife, Helen, but she refused to divorce him. It was at this point that Darrow, assuring Masters that he had nothing but affection toward him, started acting as a confessor and adviser to them both.

Masters wrote Darrow, worrying that “in a time of storm, rain is likely to fall and flowers can be splotched from the spatter.”

“Of course you know me well enough to know that I would never … try to make you any trouble in court or out,” Darrow told his old partner. “My relations with both parties might make it possible for me to assist both of you which of course I will do without any thought of compensation, except friendship.”

Masters discovered what was in store for him when Helen filed suit for support. The dispute—and the poet’s womanizing—were splashed in the press. Masters staged a reconciliation, but he and Helen quarreled and he struck her. That too made the newspapers. In the final divorce agreement, the author lost his house, his country home, his children, and his fortune. Darrow “unquestionably waited for a chance to revenge himself,” Masters concluded. “He approached me extending his hand with an ingratiating smile.” Too late, Masters saw what happened. Helen “is in the hands of Darrow, avaricious and sordid,” the poet told a friend. “He is revenging himself for the poems I wrote on him … I’ll make that son of a bitch the most detestable figure in American history.”

There were lulls in Masters’s hatred. In 1922 he wrote two laudatory poems, the shorter of which read:

    
This is Darrow
,

    
Inadequately scrawled, with his young, old heart
,

    
And his drawl, and his infinite paradox

    
And his sadness, and kindness
,

    
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life

    
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God
.

More characteristic was what Masters told Carter Harrison Jr. of Darrow some twenty years later. “He was a dishonest mind and man. He was a quitter and a betrayer both of men and women and causes,” the poet wrote. “They will try to get a bust of him and make him an heir of fame, but what he did in life, his dishonesty and his treachery and his selfish
grabbing and living will seep up from the grass of any pedestal and fill the circumambient air with feculence.”
⁷

When he wrote his autobiography, Masters never mentioned Darrow by name. In Darrow’s autobiography, Masters is not mentioned at all.

Time was dealing harshly with all of Darrow’s friends. Mary suffered an emotional breakdown after the birth of her daughter, and her husband, Lem, left her for a time, to be treated for depression. And Sara, while on an outing with Wood in the fall of 1918, drove her car off a cliff in California. Her leg was almost severed, and her son Albert was killed.

“That which is overtaking you is retribution, nemesis … a vindication of those fundamental truths you so ruthlessly cast aside,” her former husband, the Reverend Ehrgott, told the despondent Sara. He blamed her, Darrow, Wood, and Mary for killing his son and shattering his family with their careless theories.

“You remember that day when like two happy children we were digging together in our garden back of our splendid new home, suddenly a shadow fell over us—it was Clarence Darrow. That fateful night he introduced us to CES Wood,” Ehrgott wrote Sara. “But for your infatuation for CES Wood and his scandalous conduct toward you … Albert would be with us still, abounding with life to his very finger tips. He is sacrificed on the altar of Anarchy, Atheism and Free Love.”

“Poor girl,” Darrow wrote to Sara. “Life is nothing but foolishness, a burden and a tragedy. Death is peace. It is nothing.” He offered Sara the wisdom of his long-dead mother: “All the rest is a delusion and a dream.”

His own marriage remained troubled. “I am lonely—loneliness all the time,” he wrote Mary.
⁸

M
ILLIONS WERE SLAUGHTERED
in the shambles of Flanders, Picardy, and the other battlegrounds of
World War I. America entered the war late and its civilian population was spared, yet still it suffered 300,000 casualties.

The advances of recent decades—the airplane, the car, the telephone, and the radio—were no longer novelties; they were in general use, serving as accelerants, shrinking time and distance. And in war, when mixed with
more insidious technology, they brought death on a heretofore unimagined scale.

Against this backdrop, scientists and philosophers offered disconcerting propositions. In 1905,
Albert Einstein had proposed his Special Theory of Relativity. When it was confirmed by scientists in 1919, it assailed the notion of absolute truths. The writings of Dr.
Sigmund Freud gave psychological causes—excuses, the righteous called them—for human behavior. Nietzsche’s readings of a godless world, built in part on the works of Darwin, took his disciples “beyond good and evil.” In its deterministic vision of a struggle among classes, Marxism-Leninism discarded the concepts of religion, rights, and individual liberty. In popular culture, dizzying social change occurred. Joyce and Eliot and Stravinsky and Picasso and others brought a new sensibility to the arts. Women and blacks began their march toward full emancipation. And the “Roaring” decade, as it came to be known, shocked traditionalists with its jazz joints, short skirts, movies, and speakeasies.