The Chris Moeller Archives

"Lies My Blogger Told Me"-- one that went missing

Attorney for the Damned

I've just finished reading the fine 2011 biography from Doubleday entitled "Clarence Darrow - Attorney for the Damned." Darrow, of course, was the most famous legal defense counsel of the first third of the 20th century, a tremendous small-d democrat in the most genuine sense of the word, as well as an orator of the finest reputation, in court victory or defeat, on the topics of right and human justice. His biographer, John A. Farrell, brings an even-handed approach to bear on his subject, humanistic experience as a long-time journalist and a writer at the Center for Public Integrity. 

A study of Darrow's legal cases is a walk through the American Experience (to borrow a PBS series title) from the Gilded Age until the depths of the Great Depression. He made his name first, in 1894, by defending labor titan Eugene Debs, my political hero and a tremendous orator in his own right, in the aftermath of the great workers strike of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Debs, an Indiana native like Darrow, had been charged with contempt of court for "inciting" workers to strike in violation of an injunction ordered by President Grover Cleveland and for interfering with interstate commerce. President Cleveland attacked the reformers with the full arm of the justice department. 

Before the U.S. Supreme Court, Darrow argued, "When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their own rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows, we have no right to say they are criminals." The appeal had seemingly little effect on the Fuller Court, which ruled on the side of the president, but forever after martyred Debs and his men. Two years later, almost the same group of justices would author the legal decision upholding "separate but equal" segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was not a golden era of American jurisprudence. 

Darrow represented unpopular and disenfranchised defendants throughout the first years of the new century-- anarchists, gangsters, unionists, "Bolshevik sympathizers," the very poor and hungry, the mentally unstable, and a whole host of teenage criminal perpetrators condemned to die. When a more unpopular figure could not be found anywhere, he defended the engineer of a boat that had capsized on the Chicago River, killing more than 800 people. 

In 1907, he defended to successful acquittal the labor militarist "Big Bill" Haywood, who was standing trial for the conspiracy murder of the anti-labor governor of Idaho. After this trial, The Sun paper in New York called Darrow "an infidel, a misanthrope, a revolutionist, a hater of the rich, a condemner of the educated and the polite, a hopeless cynic." He faced charges in the typically-hostile press of hucksterism. In his public pronouncements, he opposed Prohibition, advocated for "free love" and open sexual relationships, agnosticism, and equal rights for blacks. He caused public inflammation once by asking in a civic setting, "Is there any reason why a white girl should not marry a man with African blood in his veins? These lynchings in the South and these burnings in the South are not for the protection of the home and the fireside; they are to keep Negroes in their place." This was in 1901, the year in which violence broke out all across the South because Booker T. Washington had been invited to converse at the White House with President Teddy Roosevelt. 

In 1911, he defended two laborists accused of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building and killing 21 men in the process. Years later, in 1924, he would defend the wealthy, homosexual, University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the so-called "thrill" killings of a 14-year-old boy. These two cases, more than a decade apart, were similar in that the pair of defendants were certainly guilty of the accused crimes in both cases, but Darrow accepted the cases with the purpose of saving the men from "the hangman's rope." Darrow was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, and for a time during his professional career-- aided by his public advocacy-- it appeared a distinct possibility that civil punishment by death might become but a footnote in the nation's bloody history text, as it has in the world's more civilized countries. 

In cases involving labor violence, crimes committed by the underprivileged, or victims of abuse (Leopold and Loeb, the latter), Darrow always advocated compassion for perpetrators due to the social circumstances that had contributed to the crimes. He said of one of these last such defendants, "This boy is not to blame. Organized society had its chance to keep him off the streets, and failed to do so. He was just a young animal, turned loose on the streets in the shape of a boy." At the time, Darrow's opinions on the psychology of the criminal were seen as revolutionary, and in this respect, he was linked often pejoratively with "godless, soulless, anti-Christian, anti-individualist" thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. 

Each of his most well-known cases have relevancy that stretch to today, but none more than two of his last. Easily the most famous is the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, in which he defended a high school biology teacher in Tennessee named John Scopes of teaching the theory of evolution in violation of a state law. This public battle between science and superstition, which was broadcast at the time to a national radio audience, is still being waged in various forms by the party of the defeated in school board libraries from coast to coast. During that sweltering summer in Dayton, Tennessee, alternately in a county courthouse and, at times, in a nearby public park to allow for larger audiences and relief from inside temperatures, Darrow defended the teacher against the law that had been drawn by Christian Creationists. 

The trial culminated with 65-year-old fundamentalist preacher, opponent of "the Menace of Darwinism," former U.S. Secretary of State and three-time Democratic Party presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan agreeing to be cross-examined by Darrow on the witness stand about his religious beliefs. Proverbially speaking, Darrow tore him apart on the stage, ridiculing his hypotheses of Divine Creation of a timeline that was inconsistent with modern scientific study in every field from biology to geology to astronomy to physics to chemistry. It was "darkness vs. light," says Farrell, "modernity on trial." 

In a memorable sequence from the court record, Bryan remarked that he believed "everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there," clarifying that he believed in the literal Old Testament translation of Jonah being swallowed whole by a whale, living inside the belly for three days and three nights before being excised (for what it's worth, this whopper also appears in similar form in the Koran). 

"Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?" his examiner then asked. "I accept the Bible absolutely," the famously-pious Bryan responded, promoting the idea that the Book of Joshua was divinely inspired. But Darrow got Bryan to admit that the deity "had used language that could be understood at the time" to explain why the author of this ancient text seemed to believe that the sun revolved around the Earth, and not vice-versa. Then, when questioned about the Great Flood that purportedly caused Noah to hit the high seas accompanied by a male and female version of each of the planet's animal types, Bryan was forced to explain why that long ago flood was only 4000 years before the birth of Jesus, based on the biblical-defined generational timeline... 

Darrow, said mockingly: "When was that flood... about 4004 B.C.?" 
Bryan: "That has been the estimate. I never made a calculation." 
Darrow: "A calculation from what?" 
Bryan: "I could not say." 
Darrow: "From the generations of man?" 
Bryan: "I would not want to say that." 
Darrow: "What do you think?" 
Bryan: "I do not think about things I don't think about." 
Darrow: "Do you think about things you do think about?" 
Bryan: "Well, sometimes." 

The examination continued in earnest-- with additional questioning from Darrow about the evidence of older civilizations in the Far East, and the theoretical female siblings (and wives?) of Cain and Abel-- but with that previous exchange, just like that, an elder statesman of the United States, a great American spiritualist, had been exposed for all of his ignorance and superstition. Indeed, a pitiful Bryan would drop dead in his sleep within five days of the end of the trial. When asked by a reporter if Bryan died of a broken heart, Darrow, in his inimitable fashion of reasoning scientifically, replied, "Busted heart, nothing; he died of an overstuffed belly." The verbal sparring between the pair in this small Southern town would go down in history, being further popularized in 1955 by a fictionalized play entitled "Inherit the Wind," which has been performed countless times since by professional companies, and by high school and collegiate drama departments, also becoming a movie in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy as the Darrow-esque attorney Henry Drummond, and Fredric March as the Bryan-esque Matthew Harrison Brady. 

Within a year of Scopes, Clarence Darrow would participate in yet another sensational trial that has just as much resonance in America these days. Darrow went to Detroit to defend an African-American physician named Ossian Sweet, who had purchased a home for his family in an all-white middle-class section of the city. Only two summers earlier, thousands of the Ku Klux Klan's rank-and-file, hooded and gowned, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. (you gotta love this country). The Klan had come up from underground and was putting up candidates in general elections all across the nation, including Detroit's mayoral race, and when a white mob numbering in the hundreds started gathering daily outside the Sweet's house on the city's near-east side, little time passed before Sweet and a few of his relatives and friends had armed themselves. The second evening, after rocks had been thrown at the house windows, shots rang out from one of the upstairs windows, into the crowd, and a white man lay dead with another one wounded nearby. 

The NAACP called upon Darrow to join the Sweet defense team. The case raised issues of racial suspicion, neighborhood integration, and individual self-defense that can be just as uniquely felt today in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. During court proceedings, under harsh examination by Darrow, it was discovered that white witnesses had been encouraged by investigators to lie, both in their verbal accounts about the size of the crowd, as well as the crowd's intent and the lengths of its instigation to violence. All-white juries would find the 12 black defendants not guilty. Darrow had not held back during closing argument. He attacked the establishment justice system of the nation, and the original sin of its white citizens, with animus, challenging jury members to confront their prejudices head-on... 

"Every one of them (the witnesses)... perjured themselves over and over and over again to send twelve black people to prison for life. The almost instinctive hatred of the white for anything that approaches social equality is so deep and so abiding in the hearts of most white people that they are willing to perjure themselves on behalf of what they think is their noble, Nordic race... I don't need to take any pains to prove to you what was the cause of this trouble down at Charlevoix and Garland (street corner), do I? If you don't know it, you are stupider than any people I have ever seen in the jury box yet, and I have seen some daisies in my time." 

In his book, Farrell describes a man who was capable at times of crass opportunism, hypocrisy, or mean-spiritedness. He was charged with, but ultimately acquitted of, bribing a juror during his defense of the LA Times bombers. He would remark on occasion that such actions were justified when operating under a system in which competing powers were unequal, or when done to save a man's life. Like many of our geniuses, he invested money poorly (see Sam Clemens as another example), and was often taking legal cases with at least the partial motivation of rescuing his finances. 

On a much-larger scale, however, Clarence Darrow is generally considered to be the best friend that a defendant in the American criminal justice system ever had. And in a nation of unequal justice, religious and racial hysteria, not-fully-fathomable financial disparity, yet fully-formed national bloodlust, and one that is, itself, an all-powerful state, a man that can be that best friend with compassion, intellect, and foresight, and one that believes people are more intelligent, understanding, and liberal than they believe themselves, has no small or unimportant legacy to leave to us. 

Near the end of his book, Farrell reprints an enlightening quote from the occasion of Darrow's death in 1938, one that reveals to a person all you need to know about the Bizarro-existence of living a life of morality in a nation that is simultaneously too Christian and insufficiently Christian. A lady that had lived near him during his final days in the small town of Kinsman, Illinois, told the papers of Darrow after he was gone: "He was a good man, I reckon, but folks didn't like the way he believed. Myself, I never could see how he could plead for all those murderers."

posted by CM @ 11:04 PM 0 comments

"Lies My Blogger Told Me"-- a formal sampling

"Lies My Blogger Told Me" has only been on the market for a couple weeks, but I'd like to claim a couple cross-offs for it already. For example, in a blog post vilifying the NFL's Rams for leaving the city of St. Louis for Los Angeles (actually Inglewood, CA) back in 2016, I disparaged at the time the name of then-Rams quarterback Nick Foles. (This citation can be found on page 248.) Now in 2018, he's Philadelphia Eagles' Super Bowl MVP Nick Foles, but even my fresh introduction for the piece went to press before the Eagles' Foles-led playoff push. Oh well. Luckily, the subjects of all the celebrity obituaries found in the book are still dead. 

This is the 1,883rd blog post on this site, and roughly 130 of them appear in the book, most of them with fresh introductions. I'd like to reprint one of the winners today with your permission-- just so that one of them can be found up front again on the site-- and to let you all know that I'm available-- for a nominal fee-- to come read it aloud to your book club, historic preservation group, or secret society.

It's called "Fogle Fresh," and it's about Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. I choose it here not because it's aged so well, but because it has aged so poorly. I wrote and posted it three and a half years before the FBI raided Fogle's Indiana home and charged him with paying for sex with minors and distributing child pornography. That's why it reads so innocuously. At one point, I state that "most Americans would trade places with (him) in a Madison Avenue minute"-- which I still believe was true in 2012. At two points, I say that he's a decent man. I hit the nail too much on the head though when I suggested he probably chased "tail" at Subway corporate events, and that's another one of the cross-offs I'd like to have as it sure seems crass now. I want it on the record, however, that with no sources inside the FBI or the Indiana State Police in 2012, I was already-- rightfully-- in fear for Fogle's eternal soul-- and I found multiple ways to misspell his last name. Is it Fogle, Fogel, Fogler? I kept these spelling errors as they originally appeared. I also-- eerily-- found a way to link Jared to Bill Cosby before either man had been accused of horrendous sexual crimes-- or at least before the news media or law enforcement paid full heed to the allegations that had been made. Hell, I just knew they both liked sandwiches.


Reprinted with permission by me, from Saturday, February 4th, 2012...

Fogle fresh

Sometimes on "The Cosby Show," Cliff and Claire Huxtable would argue (playfully) about Cliff's diet. When his wife was too busy with her work of balancing a lovely home and family with a full-time legal career, Cliff would sneak into the kitchen and build himself a giant hoagie sandwich. "Hoagie" is a Philadelphia-in-origin colloquialism for the submarine-style sandwich, and Cliff, I think, was from Philadelphia. For sure, the famous comedian who portrayed him was from Philly. 

Point being, this was the 1980's and sub sandwiches, as evidenced by the actions of the characters on America's most popular show, were not considered good for your health. (The joke was that Cliff, a physician who should know better, couldn't keep himself away from these tasty foodstuffs and thus, aggravating his high blood pressure.) A funny thing started happening in the 1990s however. A large corporation called Subway came along, and began competing head-on with the existing fast food chain restaurants, the largest of which were primarily offering fried, preprocessed beef patties. My recollection of the conventional wisdom during that time period before Subway supplanted McDonald's as America's "leading" fast-food provider is that the Subway-brand sandwiches weren't necessarily healthier, but they were, we were told, at least "fresher." 

What was the single biggest event that caused the Subway brand to go into orbit while America was becoming increasingly diet- and nutrition-educated? A golden narrative fell into the company's proverbial lap in 1999, as if from the sky. Jared Fogel, a dweebish, almost-completely uncharismatic 22-year-old Indianapolis man reported that he had lost more than 200 pounds on an all-Subway sandwich diet. A Chicago franchisee picked up on the story after Men's Health Magazine confirmed it, and already by New Years Day 2000, Jared was the star of a national television advertising campaign. That first day, home audiences tuned in to college bowl games got a glimpse of an objectively average-looking man that no longer fit snugly into his 62-inch "fat pants." 

The diet elements of this story have never interested me that much, and I don't pretend to be an expert. From the beginning, we were told that Jared (can I call him "Jared"?) had also sharply reduced his portion sizes since his experience at other chains. He cut way back on the condiments and began vigorously walking. Also, consider that Subway's structured competition in this corporate pissing match has always been the Whopper, the Big Mac, the Double Quarter-Pounder, and more recently, something called the Double Down, a sandwich that doesn't even bother with the pretense of a bun. Subway has never considered its competition in this contest to be your neighborhood organic gardener or grocer. That food is too "slow" to be considered a hassle. 

What interests me more about it all is the now decade-long corporate branding of a man named Jared Fogler. It's more polite to call Jared a "spokesman" for Subway, as opposed to a "brand," but both labels are apt. He's a unique individual in American advertising. He's not playing a character. He's also not trading on the celebrity of a previous life lived in front of the public. Kirstie Alley could do a thousand commercials for Jenny Craig and never be the 'Jenny Craig lady" the way that Jared is positioned to forever be "the Subway guy." 

Most Americans would trade places with Jared Fogler in a Madison Avenue minute. He did even one better than a massive weight loss that in and of itself could improve his quality of life for years to come-- he also spun that loss into a lucrative job, into fame and fortune. He's been Subway's public representative at the Olympics. He runs in marathons where he finishes in 36,968th place but everybody hears about it. More than 12 years after his public ascendancy, you could place a safe bet that he would be a visible presence at tomorrow's Super Bowl even if it wasn't being hosted by his hometown. After all, Super Bowl Sunday, America's annual Corporation Day, was invented for brands like Jared. 

But what has Jared sacrificed? Take a look at this one-minute interview on YouTube from a couple years ago. Remember that Jared is never playing a character. This is his public identity, his reputation among his fellow humans. A very innocuous interview that, superficially, has nothing to do with sandwiches devolves into the image of the man having to spark up and prostitute himself once more for his "sugar daddy" (or should it be his "sodium daddy"?). I find this clip very depressing to watch. We're looking at a broken man. 

Nobody begrudged Jared's grab at the treasure chest a decade ago. He was a trumpeter swan unveiling his pure white plumage. I would have surely gone for that deal myself. Take the money and run. You all probably think of me as just a Trotskyite blogger, but I enjoy the creature comforts of life. Where is Jared in his life now though? I'm sure it's fun to banter with Terry, Howie, and the boys on FOX NFL Sunday, and a little of that high-end tail that's magnetically-pulled to large corporate events is probably still there for the taking. Am I right, Jared? But is it really a positive for this guy's emotional health at this point to still be hugging hoagies on television? 

The competitive world of fast-food marketing never slows down either. They just keep raising the bar. It's not enough anymore for Jared to just be the decent man he projects to be. Now you see him bouncing around on these commercials-- acting the clown, as my buddy Rob described it. I swear that late one night last week, I saw Jared wearing a diaper on my flat screen, but that might have just been a mirage brought on by the Irish Cream I was sipping. 

At the corporate level, of course, he's still just a brand. Perhaps more so now. His bosses consider him that. Their competitors consider him that. The business analysts consider him that. They write in the trades about how Jared (the man) is being replaced gradually on television by "the offer"-- that well-publicized $5 footlong deal. As the U.S. and global economy drives nearer to collapse under the weight of the top, the advertising focus at Subway is now on promoting the inexpensiveness of the product, not nutrition-- just another piece of evidence that Subway is, at the end of the day, selling the same basic product that McDonald's is under each of those individual plastic sandwich wrappers. (And by the way, you can keep the plastic bag, gang. I'm just going to be walking eight feet away to eat this thing. The two-by-two foot heavy paper wrapper you've wound this in should hold up fine.)

How low will Jared go? Is he willing to stay around for the fight against the next fast food upstart chain, the one that challenges the current king? Subway's been good to Jared, but Jared has been a damned good thing for Subway too. Does he work for the man, or is this a mutually-beneficial partnership? Does Jared see himself as the one in driver's seat. I really fear he doesn't because Americans are programmed to think this way. Now that he has much greater financial resource at his disposal, what could his life become now? A decent, generally-grounded, curly-haired, white man in America, combined with a lucky break, should be able to write his own ticket. He just needs to be told-- or hopefully, simply reminded--exactly who it was that was actually responsible for taking off that weight.

posted by CM @ 12:42 PM 0 comments