Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (82 page)

30.
David Lilienthal, Darrow profile,
The Nation
, Apr. 20, 1927; John H. Holmes, remembrance of Darrow, Darrow memorial issue,
Unity
, May 16, 1938; Darrow, “Rights and Wrongs of Ireland”;
New York Sun
, Dec. 23, 1927.

31.
H. L. Mencken, tribute to Darrow,
Vanity Fair
, Mar. 1927.

CHAPTER 1: REBELLIONS

1.
The Eddy Family, Reunion at Providence to Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Landing of John and Samuel Eddy
(Boston: J. S. Cushing, 1881);
The New England Historical and Genealogical Register
, July 1854.

2.
Biographical History of Northeastern Ohio
(Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1893).

3.
In his autobiography, Darrow suggests that George Darrow was one of the founders of New London. This is not true. It was founded in 1646 by men from Massachusetts. Frances M. Caulkins,
History of New London
(New London, CT: H.D. Utley, 1895).

4.
Revolutionary War records show that several of Darrow’s ancestors, on both sides of his family, were Minutemen, KD;
History of New London;
Henry A. Baker,
History
of Montville, Connecticut
(Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1896); Merton Edwin Krug,
History of Reedsburg and the Upper Baraboo Valley
(1929); Revolutionary War Pension Applications for Ammirus and Jedediah Darrow, National Archives and Records Administration; John C. Fitzpatrick, ed.,
The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources
,
http://etext.virginia.edu/washington/fitzpatrick/index.html
.

5.
Darrow pension applications, National Archives and Records Administration; A. Tiffany Norton,
History of Sullivan’s Campaign Against the Iroquois
(Lima, NY: 1879); Fitzpatrick,
Writings; Public Papers of George Clinton, First Governor of New York
(Albany: State of New York, 1899); Daniel E. Wagner,
Col. Marinus Willett: The Hero of Mohawk Valley
(Utica, NY: Oneida Historical Society, 1891);
The New England Historical and Genealogical Register
, Oct. 1849, July 1854, Apr. 1868;
Record of Service of Connecticut Men in the War of the Revolution
(Hartford, CT: Adjutant-General’s Office, 1889).

6.
Commemorative and Biographical Record of Columbia, Sauk and Adams Counties, Wisconsin
(Chicago: Ogle, 1901); Krug,
History of Reedsburg
. Sarah is listed as Sarah Melona on Ammirus’s application for a Revolutionary War pension, but as Sarah Fisher in Krug and the
Commemorative and Biographical Record
, and as Sarah Fisher Malona and Sarah Malona Fisher in yet other sources. See Darrow collections at the Newberry Library and, for learned speculation on this and other matters, the online genealogy of the Darrow family compiled by Dean Hagen, one of George Darrow’s descendants. It contains a long letter on family history, written in 1923, by Clarence’s brother Everett.

7.
Ammirus Darrow was known as Amarius, Amirus, and Ammiras, and his grandson as Ammirus and Amirus. For simplicity, I refer to the elder as Ammirus, and the younger as Amirus. Untitled reminiscence of Sarah Darrow, KD.

8.
Grandfather Jedediah and several of his children settled in the Kinsman area as well.
Chicago Daily Chronicle
, Apr. 25, 1904;
Chicago Tribune
, Apr. 24, 1904; Darrow family records, KD; U.S. census, 1860; Clarence Darrow,
Story of My Life
and his short story “The Black Sheep,” CD-LOC. The University of Michigan “Catalogue” for 1864 credits Amirus with a BA from Cleveland University but does not give the date; the Ohio school, however, operated for only two academic years, from 1851 to 1853. The alumni record of the University of Illinois, in 1913, lists Cleveland as the place of Mary Darrow’s birth in 1852.

9.
Freeman was found guilty, but Seward convinced the state supreme court to grant him a new trial. The prisoner died in jail in 1847, of tuberculosis, before he could be tried again. An autopsy showed a diseased brain. At the time of Darrow’s birth, Seward was a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, which he lost to Abraham Lincoln. He served in Lincoln’s wartime cabinet as secretary of state, survived an assassination attempt by the plotters who killed the president, and went on to negotiate the treaty in which the United States acquired Alaska from Russia. His argument in the Freeman case was included in Seward’s
Works
and in Hall’s book (both cited below), and in pamphlets and collections of oratory of the day. It is unlikely that Amirus and Clarence did not know of it. Seward,
The Works of William H. Seward
(New York: Red-field, 1853); Benjamin Hall,
The Trial of William Freeman
(Auburn, NY: Derby, Miller, 1848).

10.
In the years after Darrow’s death, his son Paul spun a colorful but unlikely tale in which Amirus conveyed fugitive slaves under loads of hay in midnight wagon rides, with toddler Clarence at his side. The country lanes of the Western Reserve were indeed an important link in freedom’s railroad across Lake Erie to Canada, but the Darrow name does not appear in the surviving records of the movement. Given the clandestine nature of the work, however, that is not determinative. Darrow and Paul also claimed that Amirus was a friend of the militant abolitionist
John Brown. It is possible, as Brown’s son John Jr. was then living in nearby West Andover, Ohio, and helped gather men and arms for his father’s raid on Harpers Ferry. But there is also evidence that the Darrows exaggerated the relationship. In addition to embellishing Paul’s dubious account of the midnight wagon rides, Irving Stone conveyed, uncritically, a family tale in which Brown tells the solemn Clarence, age five, that “the Negro has too few friends; you and I must never desert him.” Brown was long dead when Darrow turned five in 1862, and critics pointed this out. Lilienthal, Darrow profile,
The Nation
, Apr. 20, 1927; Charlotte Kinney, “Clarence Darrow As He Is,”
Psychology
, Aug. 1932; Darrow,
Farmington
(Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1904); Darrow,
Story of My Life;
Irving Stone notes on interview with Paul Darrow, CD-LOC; Wilbur H. Siebert papers on the Underground Railroad, Ohio Historical Society.

11.
University of Michigan, “Catalogue,” listing of “Students of Law,” 1864.

12.
It is not surprising that this champion of the damned was, in his adult years, a Chicago Cubs fan. Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life;
Darrow, “Response to Birthday Greetings” and “The Myth of the Soul” in Weinberg,
Verdicts;
Darrow family records, KD;
Akron Times-Press
, Mar. 15, 1938;
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Apr. 18, 1937; Darrow to James Kennedy, Mar. 21, 1925, Ohio Historical Society;
Chicago Daily News
, May 20, 1925; Darrow, “Attorney for the Defense,”
Esquire
, May 1936; Darrow closing address, Arthur Person trial, Apr. 24, 1920.

13.
Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life;
Darrow, “Black Sheep”;
Akron Times-Press
, Mar. 15, 1938; Darrow to Julia Porter, Kinsman Library, Feb. 17, 1932; Jenny Darrow interview with Stone, CD-LOC; Darrow to Kennedy, Mar. 21, 1925;
Chicago Tribune
, Nov. 8, 1924;
Chicago Daily News
, May 20, 1925.

14.
Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life;
Ohio Secretary of State, annual report, results of Oct. 9, 1883, election; Darrow family records, KD.

15.
When asked, as an adult, why he didn’t eat chickens, Darrow replied, “They could never make up their minds.” Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life;
Darrow, “Black Sheep”; Ruby Darrow letters to Stone, CD-LOC;
Chicago Daily News
, May 20, 1925; Darrow testimony, Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915.

16.
The family correspondence from the summer of Emily’s death is in the Karl Darrow papers. Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life; Akron Times-Press
, Mar. 15, 1938;
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Apr. 18, 1937; Darrow, Stone, and Weinberg erroneously give Darrow’s age as fourteen when his mother died.

17.
Ruby Darrow’s story of her husband’s request comes from a letter to Stone in his papers at the University of California, Berkeley: “He not only could not bear to live without me, but he could not bear to die without me! In confidence when he realized that he had to go, he begged me to devise some manner whereby I could go with him,
sweetly saying that if we could go together, then he wouldn’t mind it much. I would have, but that I knew I had to remain to do everything to make his going as comfortable and painless as possible.”

18.
Darrow,
Farmington
and
Story of My Life; Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Apr. 18, 1937;
Boston Globe
, Mar. 17, 1927;
Akron Times-Press
, Mar. 15, 1938;
Kinsman Journal
, Sept. 11, 1936; Darrow to James Kennedy, Mar. 21, 1925, Ohio Historical Society; Robert Murphy to Elmer Gertz, Apr. 10, 1957, Elmer Gertz papers, Library of Congress.

19.
University of Michigan, general catalog, 1902;
Ann Arbor Courier
, Dec. 14, 1877.

20.
In one tale, Darrow said that he missed the bar exam because he and a man he met in the tavern went on an all-night bender. He passed the test, he said, after discovering the next morning that his drinking companion was the bar examiner. In his autobiography, Darrow erroneously says he was living in Ashtabula when he married Jessie Ohl. Stone relates a tale, told by Paul Darrow, alleging that Roberts was a ne’er-do-well who absconded with Darrow’s law books. In fact, Roberts went on to become a respected judge. U.S. Census, 1880;
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, Jan. 27, 1935, Apr. 18, 1937;
Warren Chronicle
, Sept. 30, 1924;
Democratic Standard
, Mar. 12, 1885;
Kinsman Journal
, Sept. 11, 1936;
Boston Globe
, Mar. 17, 1927; Charles B. Galbreath,
History of Ohio
(Chicago: American Historical Society, 1925); Clyde Miller,
The Process of Persuasion
(New York: Crown, 1946); unidentified newspaper clipping, Kinsman, Ohio, Dec. 1879, ALW.

21.
Darrow address to Society of Medical Jurisprudence, New York Academy of Medicine, Jan. 13, 1931;
Jefferson Gazette
, Sept. 2, 1881.

22.
Andover Citizen
, Apr. 22, 1884;
Democratic Standard
, June 4, 1886;
Painesville Democrat
, Aug. 21, 1886;
Cincinnati Enquirer
, Aug. 19, 1886; Darrow,
Story of My Life; Brockway v. Jewell
, 52 Ohio 187 (1894);
Chicago Tribune
, Sept. 3, 1900, Aug. 7, 1899.

23.
Ashtabula Standard
, Mar. 5, 1887; Darrow address to Society of Medical Jurisprudence, New York Academy of Medicine, Jan. 13, 1931.

CHAPTER 2: CHICAGO

1.
According to a March 1938 account in a Rockford, Illinois, newspaper, “for a brief period before he moved to Chicago in 1887, [Darrow] practiced at Harvard, Ill.” In a 1962 letter to Arthur Weinberg, lawyer Floyd Eckert recalled Darrow sitting in an empty office in Harvard, with no business to occupy his time, slowly feeding one stick at a time into a stove to keep warm. At least one of Darrow’s Harvard cases lodged in people’s memory. A hardware store owner, standing guard with a shotgun after two burglaries, shot and captured a youth who was trying to break into the store one night. Darrow defended the boy and won an acquittal by pleading that it was his first offense and that he had been led into crime by his companion. In an interview with Irving Stone, Jessie placed Darrow’s time in Harvard before their marriage. Lincoln Steffens, “Chicago: Half Free and Fighting On,”
McClure’s
, Oct. 1903.

2.
Chicago Times
, Dec. 14, 1894; Donald L. Miller, City of the Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

3.
The Storey incident won considerable attention when Union loyalists on the police force declined to arrest Eddy, but it should be noted that, on another occasion, Eddy defied a lynch mob and cut the noose from the neck of a “Rebel sympathizer” named Doolittle. The Eddy real estate case dragged on for more than a decade with various disputes about portions of the property. The bulk of the estate ultimately went to his daughter Clara, who, at her death, bequeathed what was left to her Darrow cousins.
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 4, 1865, Mar. 16, 1866, Feb. 19, 1874, July 9, 1876, Sept. 21, 1878, Jan. 27, 1878, May 2, 1888, Jan. 21, 1893, Feb. 22, 1896;
Chicago Times
, May 2, 1888, Jan. 30, Dec. 14, 1894; Besse Louise Pierce,
As Others See Chicago
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); Jeffrey Adler,
First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Edward Price Bell,
Seventy Years Deep
, unpublished autobiography, Bell papers, Newberry Library; George Ade,
Single Blessedness and Other Observations
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1922); Ida Tarbell, “How Chicago Is Finding Herself,”
American Magazine
, Nov. 1908; see Karl Darrow to Darrow, Oct. 23, 1927, and Karl Darrow to Bowen, Dec. 4, 1932, KD; John J. Flinn and John E. Wilkie,
History of the Chicago Police
(Chicago: Chicago Police Book Fund, 1887); Stead,
If Christ Came
. Darrow bounced all over town in his early years, renting and buying property, selling to cinch a profit, and rooming in the intervals with his family at 905 Sawyer Avenue and at 3559 Vernon Avenue, 4219 Vincennes Avenue, and 1321 Michigan Avenue.