"Lies My Blogger Told Me"-- one that went missing
Absent from my new book-- besides about 1750 of the almost 1900
or so entries on this blog-- is one that I particularly liked and that just
missed the cut-- a summary of the life and times of one of my many historical heroes, attorney Clarence
Darrow. It was posted almost exactly six years ago-- on April 7th,
2012. When I was making decisions about inclusion for the book, I felt
it read too much like a book report, yet I think it does demonstrate that
I’m capable of taking good notes and then consulting them as reference when I read something. Like a bad penny, it’s back again…
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
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