Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell Narrated by Danny Campbell

Overview

Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, played by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind. His days-long closing arguments delivered without notes won miraculous reprieves for men doomed to hang.

Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts against big business, Jim Crow, and corrupt officials. He became famous defending union leader Eugene Debs in the land-mark Pullman Strike case and went from one headline case to the next-until he was nearly crushed by an indictment for bribing a jury. He redeemed himself in Dayton, Tennessee, defending schoolteacher John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial," cementing his place in history.

Now, John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and memoirs to offer a candid account of Darrow's divorce, affairs, and disastrous finances; new details of his feud with his law partner, the famous poet Edgar Lee Masters; a shocking disclosure about one of his most controversial cases; and explosive revelations of shady tactics he used in his own trial for bribery.

Clarence Darrow is a sweeping, surprising portrait of a leg-endary legal mind.

Editorial Reviews

Kevin Boyle

…vintage Darrow…inspiring, enraging, and in Farrell’s engrossing biography, marvelously alive.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Farrell's (Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century) latest book is an immensely personal ode to a fearlessly progressive maverick lawyer, larger than life socialite, and fiercely independent gentleman. Darrow's financial setbacks, domestic volatility, and public scandal seem trivial when compared to his consummate performances in the dock, where his overarching articulations, witticisms, and wisdom occasionally belied deceit. Making a name for himself in a late nineteenth century Chicago plagued with crime and bloodshed, American industrialism, and the railroad boom could have set him up for life. Instead, he chose to tackle social unrest, using his intellect and eloquence in the "defense of the underdog," representing gangsters, psychopaths, and crooked politicians with miraculous, if not always just, results. Darrow was an early proponent of Civil Rights, dealing with graphic cases of related atrocities, which Farrell meticulously relays. A master of the lengthy closing argument, Darrow cited Freud and Nietzsche in his radical and dramatic courtroom speeches, none more so than the infamous Monkey Trial in which he ridiculed closed-minded religious fundamentalists in championing "academic liberty, free thought, and scientific inquiry." Though Darrow was a man who walked with kings, he never lost the common touch, and Farrell's biography finally does him justice. (June)

From the Publisher

[This is] vintage Darrow, inspiring, enraging, and, in Farrell's engrossing biography, marvelously alive.” —The New York Times

“John A. Farrell, with access to previously unavailable materials, brings the 'grandest legal career in American history' to life again in a masterfully researched and elegantly written volume.” —The Boston Globe

“Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is inpeccably researched, beautifully written, and timely . . . Farrell gives us Darrow in all his brilliance, hypocrisy, and eccentricity. . . . As Farrell's riveting biography makes abundantly clear, there was no more powerful and incendiary thunderbolt than Clarence Darrow.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A clear-sighted, empathetic biography. . . . [Farrell] knows that he has a protagonist of Shakespearean richness and complexity, and this well-written, vividly atmospheric portrait captures Clarence Darrow with his faults and contradictions intact.” —Los Angeles Times

“A comprehensive biography of the storied defense attorney. Making elaborate use of transcripts, observers’ accounts, correspondence and newspaper reports, Farrell chronicles Darrow’s most celebrated trials in detail. . . . These cases—including two in which Darrow, almost surely guilty, was himself tried for jury tampering—dominate the narrative, but Farrell neatly places them within the larger context of this complicated man’s crowded life and practice. . . . Farrell unflinchingly addresses [Darrow’s] shortcomings, even as he underscores the genuine brilliance of a still-unmatched advocate for underdogs everywhere.” —Kirkus Starred Review
 
“Farrell offers excerpts from Darrow’s magnificent courtroom arguments as well as delicious details of his personal life (he was a hearty participant in the era’s free love movement). [He] gleans from previously undisclosed material to offer a completely engaging portrait of a flawed man of noble ideals.” —Booklist Starred Review

“John A. Farrell, in Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, goes farther into the archives and deeper into Darrow’s crags.” —New Yorker

“Masterful . . . a riveting piece of work and certain to be one of the most fascinating biographies of this or any other year.” —The Daily Beast

“Groundbreaking. . . . Attorney for the Damned is a well-balanced portrait of the private and public Darrow, giving the sweep of his life and times.” —The Washington Times

"Farrell draws from previously unpublished correspondence to give fresh insight into Darrow's remarkable career. . . . A thoughtful overview of Darrow, his life, and his many accomplishments.” —The Seattle Times

“It is almost impossible to conceive how so much living could have come in just one life, and Jack Farrell’s masterful new biography makes Clarence Darrow come alive. This is a wonderful, at times heart-pounding story, told with precision, sympathy, and insight.” —Ken Burns

“This book is a joy and a revelation. It is at once a rollicking tour through the mind of a legal genius and a spellbinding account of some of the most famous cases in American history. The chapter on Leopold and Loeb alone is worth waiting in line to get a seat in Jack Farrell's courtroom.” —David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered and They Marched into Sunlight

“John Farrell’s Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned is a riveting historical drama filled with strange twists and turns. Every page is a triumph of scholarship. A marvelous biography!” —Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

“People want heroes. But history demands truth. This gritty biography demystifies a deeply flawed legal hero, who 'almost assuredly' bribed jurors and witnesses in order to level the playing field against 'the rich and powerful.' Darrow was a giant of his corrupt times. His biography is a must-read for all Americans who care about both the means and ends of justice!” —Alan M. Dershowitz, author of The Trials of Zion

“Clarence Darrow confounded titles: he was a freethinker, hedonist, anarchist, populist, infidel, cynic, and master storyteller who became our greatest lawyer and a folk hero. Farrell’s masterful, sweeping new biography not only does justice to all his roles but joyously satisfies even a Darrow addict like me.” —Roy Black, Esq., criminal defense attorney

Library Journal - Audio

Attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) is remembered as a fearless defender of the weak and hopeless. In real life, he was both idolized and vilified, and Farrell explains why this man of contradictions should be forgiven his hard edges of egotism, manipulation, and greed. Darrow employed every bit of his heart and energy to fight the ugliness in the world around him. With his straightforward Midwestern accent and slightly husky voice, reader Danny Campbell gives a fine performance, which complements the subject's fascinating life. VERDICT Recommended for all audio collections. ["Like Andrew E. Kersten's Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast…this book succeeds in presenting Darrow in the fuller context of his life. Highly recommended," read the review of the Doubleday hc, LJ 6/15/11.—Ed.]—Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Colonial Williamsburg Fdn. Lib., VA

Library Journal

A brilliant legal strategist and dynamic courtroom attorney, Clarence Darrow is best remembered for his defense of union leader Eugene Debs in the 1894 Pullman Strike case, the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder case, and the Scopes "monkey trial" a year later. In this new biography, Farrell (senior writer, Ctr. for Public Integrity in Washington; Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century) claims to be a "loving revisionist" and the first to use recently released, previously unpublished Darrow correspondence to create a more accurate portrait of this complex individual. While there has been no shortage of Darrow biographies over the years, most either focus on his trials or paint him as a folk hero, glossing over or omitting his divorce, numerous affairs, and financial woes, all of which are covered in Farrell's well-researched and compelling book. VERDICT Like Andrew E. Kersten's Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast, published in April and also boasting access to new primary materials, this book succeeds in presenting Darrow in the fuller context of his life. Here is an American legal icon who deserves two new definitive biographies. Highly recommended.—Leslie Lewis, Duquesne Univ. Lib., Pittsburgh

MAY 2012 - AudioFile

Attorney Clarence Darrow is best known for defending a high school teacher in the “Scopes Monkey Trial” on the teaching of evolution in public schools. But he accomplished far more than that. He spent many years defending publicly despised defendants against a vengeful justice system. In fact, his life is so interesting that it would make for engaging listening under most circumstances. But when you add an adept reader, you have a production that will keep commuters listening in the driveway after returning home from work. Danny Campbell doesn’t read the story so much as tell it—much in the way Darrow might have spoken to a jury: with a studied casualness and familiarity designed to inform while clothed in the air of a polished raconteur. R.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Acomprehensive biography of the storied defense attorney.

At midlife, embarrassed by his comfortable railroad practice so at odds with his personal beliefs, Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) took on a series of high-profile cases whose underlying political, sociological and economic issues placed him at the white-hot center of the Progressive Era. His starring role in these courtroom dramas turned him into a legend. Making elaborate use of transcripts, observers' accounts, correspondence and newspaper reports, Farrell (Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century, 2002) chronicles Darrow's most celebrated trials in detail: the defense of labor leaders Eugene Debs and "Big Bill" Haywood; the McNamara brothers, charged with firebombing theLos Angeles Times headquarters; homosexual thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb; Ossian Sweet, accused of murder for defending his home against a racist mob; John Scopes for teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law; and the friends and family of Thalia Massie, on trial in Hawaii for a so-called "honor killing." These cases—including two in which Darrow, almost surely guilty, was himself tried for jury tampering—dominate the narrative, but Farrell neatly places them within the larger context of this complicated man's crowded life and practice. He covers Darrow's small-town upbringing, his brief country-lawyer career, his move to Chicago and his rise within the city's political and legal establishment. A puzzling mix of towering ego and bottomless compassion, Darrow was also an author and an in-demand lecturer who more than dabbled in politics. Also at home within bohemian circles, Darrow preferred the company of artists, professors and poets. (Edgar Lee Masters, who grew to despise him, was for a time his legal partner.) Twice-married, Darrow was also an inveterate womanizer, money grubber and shameless self-promoter who often bent the ethical code to combat what he saw as corrupt prosecutions. Farrell unflinchingly addresses these shortcomings, even as he underscores the genuine brilliance of a still-unmatched advocate for underdogs everywhere.

A warts-and-all portrait that leaves readers lamenting Darrow's private failings, while still in awe of his immensely consequential career.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171269296
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/27/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: Jefferson's Heir


Clarence Darrow, sitting at his desk in the law offices of the Chicago & North Western Railway Company on an April morning in 1893, had much to be pleased about. In the six years since he arrived in Chicago, he had carved a fine niche. The mayor and governor asked his advice. The newspapers covered his speeches. He had taken a real estate dispute to the Illinois Supreme Court and won his client a $500,000 award that, so large for its time, got front- page attention. He had a pleasant house, a proper wife, influential friends, and a son he loved. As first assistant counsel to a mighty railroad, he had a salary and social standing to be envied by the city’s glut of aspiring lawyers: dire, sepulchral figures, languishing in the courts, longing for the stroke of fortune that would land them such a choice position.

Darrow had just turned thirty-six. He was a tall man for his time, with high cheekbones and a formidable brow that could give him the look of a young Lincoln: no disadvantage in Illinois. His eyes were a soft blue and his smile, a law partner would recall, was “wreathed in good nature and irresistible charm.” He had a kind of rough charisma that, he was discovering, charmed the pretty girls who attended his talks and lectures.

Small-town Ohio could not hold him and so he had come to Chicago, to the flickering gaslight, the smoke and cinder, the clamor and hoot and honk of that most American city. He had applied himself, in the courts by day and by making the rounds of political clubs and debating societies in the evenings. And he had sought as mentors rich and famous men, and had prospered from their interest. If Darrow sought a template for success, he needed look no further than his boss and patron, the railroad’s general counsel, whose office was next to his in the law department at Fifth Avenue and Lake Street, in downtown Chicago.

William C. Goudy was a trailblazer in a new specialty of the industrial age: the “corporation lawyer.” With his bearded chin and stern demeanor, Goudy looked like an Amish elder, and though friends insisted that he had a warm heart, he was cold and direct in his professional affairs. He was said to be a millionaire, and Darrow knew him as “ultra conservative.” As a chieftain of the Illinois “silk- stocking” Democrats, Goudy served as an adviser to President Grover Cleveland, who had just been elected to a second term, and who shared his corporate sympathies. “No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President,” Cleveland boasted. Goudy was a close friend, as well, of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, a Chicagoan who led the era’s notoriously conservative Supreme Court, known for decisions shielding monopolies and trusts, outlawing the income tax, and, in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson, authorizing racial segregation.

In the Gilded Age, when the interests of politicians and industrialists ran in tandem—or could be made to do so with a timely payoff—Goudy’s political ties enhanced his appeal to the clients who secured his services. He represented the Vanderbilt railroad empire, the great Armour meatpacking firm, and other powerful interests in their wars against government regulation. It was said that Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in part to counteract Goudy, who so ably promoted the rights of corporations and monopolists to run their affairs as they saw fit, without regard to the public interest.

Goudy and the railroad were, this day, engaged in one such battle with the people of Chicago. That great midway between the crops and natural resources of the West and the markets and capital of the East was a wicker of railroad tracks. Five million engines and freight cars passed through Chicago each year, on 1,400 miles of rails. As the city’s population leaped, so did the number of those killed and injured by trains traversing its roads and alleys at the thousands of street-level crossings. It was Darrow’s duty to represent the railroad in court, fighting to limit the compensation sought by the victims or their families.

The carnage was ghastly. “A stranger’s first impression of Chicago is that of the barbarous gridironed streets,” a British visitor wrote, “his second is that of the multitude of mutilated people . . . the mangled remnant of the massacre.” In a single month that spring, there were forty-five deaths. One story suffices, that of the mother driving home, who froze at the roar of an approaching train. A passerby pulled her from the driver’s bench, but her two young daughters were left behind to be shattered and tossed in the shards of the carriage as their wounded horse bellowed in pain.

But the railroads were tough, and abetted by public officials who collected “lavish bribery . . . year after year,” the Chicago Times reported. When, finally, the city council voted to compel the railroads to raise their tracks, the companies went to court. “There is no power on earth which can compel us to elevate our tracks,” said a confident Marvin Hughitt, the president of the Chicago & North Western. “The opinions of the best lawyers in the country have been obtained.” A test case was pending at the Supreme Court, and earlier that month Goudy had traveled to Washington to speak to the chief justice and visit with his allies at the White House. He returned to Chicago cheered about his company’s prospects.



Here, then, was a blueprint for Darrow’s aspirations. He was no scion of a wealthy family like his liberal friends, the muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd or the philanthropist Jane Addams, who used her inheritance to found the Hull House settlement for immigrants in Chicago’s West Side ghetto. Darrow’s parents, though educated, were moneyless. He tasted want and shame as a child, and “I never have been able to get over the dread of being poor, and the fear of it,” he would confide to a friend. Nor were there government programs in this laissez-faire era for a man to fall back on in hard times, illness, or old age. The only social safety net was the free lunch offered in workingmen’s saloons, and a bit of floor space on which to sleep in municipal hallways during Chicago’s bitter winters. Darrow had a deep interest in learning, and in literature, “but he has been under the awful compulsion of the age, to make money,” his friend Brand Whitlock would tell a confidant. “Have you ever reflected that we of this time are kept so busy making a living that we never find time to live?”

Yet Darrow chafed in corporate harness. There was something missing in the Goudy model. If Darrow’s cunning was a defining attribute, more so was his empathy. He was “sensitiveness and egotism all twisted as the strands of a rope... a great character of wonderful sweetness, of profound intelligence, of Godlike patience and tenderness—shot through with queer pettiness—about money, about criticism,” one of his lovers, Mary Field Parton, would confide to her diary. What saved him was his “extraordinarily” acute compassion, she concluded, “the edges of his emotions sensitive as the antennae of insects.”

Darrow felt guilty working for a corporation, where his legal skills and his boss’s clout were employed at union busting, or to limit the relief sought by the pitiful victims of the railway crossings. He longed for peace of mind. “It seems to me, and for me, that I have no right to save myself when the injustice is so great,” he would tell Addams.

Around him was injustice in abundance. The slaughter at Chicago’s railway crossings was emblematic of conditions in the Gilded Age, when the United States grappled with economic and social transformations that many Americans feared, with some justification, might trigger revolution. Immigrants packed the tenements of the cities, where women  took piecework in squalid, ill-lit flats, while men and children labored in the factories, mills, mines, and collieries for twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, for cents. Unions were assailed; a political and corporate aristocracy employed the police, the state militia, and private armies of detectives to disperse—or gun down—striking workers. Blacks were condemned to lynch law. Congress, the judiciary, and the state legislatures were corrupted, and the criminal justice system was no such thing. “The rich and powerful are seldom indicted and never tried,” one of the city’s leading lawyers, W. S. Forrest, told an audience in 1892. “Manslaughter is committed by corporations with impunity. Men are convicted who are innocent. Even in ordinary trials, the forms of law are frequently set aside and the rules of evidence ignored.”

Chicago witnessed all the era’s ills. Drenched in blood, bone-weary workers slaughtered the illimitable herds of hogs and cattle that clanked by them on the assembly lines of the stockyards. At McCormick Reaper and other storied industrial works, union organizers fighting for higher wages or an eight-hour day were locked out, harassed, and beaten by police. The houses of prostitution never closed in Little Cheyenne and the Levee, nor the predatory gambling and drinking dens. The city was divided along class lines and still seething that spring from the 1886 bombing that killed seven policemen at a workers’ rally in the Haymarket, and the subsequent public delirium that sent four guiltless anarchists to the gallows. The city’s smokestacks cast a famous pall, to rival that of London, across the prairie sky, and the polluted water spurred outbreaks of cholera. A visitor from England, well versed in the miseries of the industrial age, was stunned. “Chicago is a pocket edition of hell,” he wrote, “and if it is not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.”

Darrow had delved into politics, joining the movement to assist the Haymarket defendants and employing his talents and political connections to persuade the Illinois legislature to pass a bill regulating sweatshops and child labor. More than a year before, he had written to Lloyd, confessing his shame at working for the railroad and praising a protest that his friend had led after a police raid on a union meeting. “You dare to say what is true,” Darrow told him. “Your speech...made me feel that I am a hypocrite and a slave, and added to my resolution to make my term of servitude short.” But he could not summon the will to act. The months passed, and his time of “servitude” dragged on.



Darrow’s conscience was still struggling with his comfort on the morning of Thursday, April 27, when, shortly after eleven a.m., Goudy finished dictating a letter, dismissed his secretary, and summoned his first visitor—a retired Civil War hero, General John McArthur—into his office. Darrow prepared to join them.

“Good morning, Judge,” McArthur said, greeting his friend Goudy. Then: “You don’t look very well...are you ill?”

Goudy seemed stricken, and gasped. McArthur cried out in alarm, and Darrow rushed in, as Goudy collapsed at his desk.

Darrow and McArthur carried the lawyer to a couch. Goudy stared up at Darrow with pleading eyes, said nothing, and died.

The great man’s heart attack was front-page news in Chicago. “He lived only a few minutes,” Darrow told the reporters. “It all happened so suddenly that we can scarcely appreciate that Mr. Goudy is really dead.” Darrow was a pallbearer at the funeral. He had lost his patron, and his paradigm.

Goudy’s death changed Darrow’s life. That weekend, the newspapers carried the story: C. S. Darrow was leaving his position as lawyer for the railroad to go to work for Mayor Carter Harrison. No one then perceived that this was the birth of the grandest legal career in American history. In 1893, of Darrow’s future clients, Eugene Debs was still an obscure labor leader with dreams of forming a national railway union. Patrick Prendergast was a mumbling paperboy, lost in delusions. Bill Haywood was a frontier ruffian. Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, Ossian Sweet, and John Scopes were not yet born.

And yet, in little more than a year, Darrow would be battling to keep Debs and the other ringleaders of a turbulent workers’ uprising out of prison, and to save the demented Prendergast, by then an infamous assassin, from the hangman. He would be on his way to becoming an American icon, his name synonymous with a passionate, eloquent, and miraculous defense of the underdog. Journalist Lincoln Steffens would cite Darrow’s departure from the railroad as the “turning point” in his friend’s life. “Darrow counted the cost; he seems always to have counted the cost,” Steffens wrote, but “he found himself off-side, and had to cross over to where he belonged.”

And so was born, said Steffens, “the attorney for the damned."

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