Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (15 page)

Bryan barnstormed the country, halting at whistle-stops, shaking hands, giving speeches. But across the Midwest and Northeast, the factory owners told their workers that they would lose their jobs if Bryan was elected. The Republicans made Altgeld an issue, as well.

“For Mr. Bryan we can feel the contemptuous pity always felt for the small man unexpectedly thrust into a big place. But in Mr. Altgeld’s case we see all too clearly the jaws and hide of the wolf,” said
Theodore Roosevelt. “The one plans repudiation with a light heart and a bubbly eloquence, because he lacks intelligence … the other would connive at wholesale murder and would justify it by elaborate and cunning sophistry.”

When the Populists convened in St. Louis that summer, Darrow and Lloyd were there. The great question was whether to align with the Democrats. Lloyd, who hoped that the People’s Party would become an independent, radical organization, feared it would lose its soul. But Darrow worked for fusion and so did Debs, and they urged Lloyd not to resist. He came to regret it. The Populists endorsed Bryan and, just as Lloyd feared, the Democrats absorbed the People’s Party. The rising of the dirt farmers came to its end.

Darrow returned to Chicago, where, with Altgeld’s help, he was nominated as a “Popucratic” candidate for Congress. He spent much of the fall campaigning for Bryan and Altgeld outside the district. He was maligned by critics as a darling of the intellectuals while his opponent, Representative
Hugh Belknap, a Republican incumbent known for his campaigning skills, “goes right into the factories and among the laboring men.” And, truth be told, Darrow was a flaky politician. That spring he was invited to speak at a memorial meeting for the philanthropist
Baron Hirsch, a pillar of the Jewish community. The occasion called for some respectful remarks and a woeful shake of the head. Darrow would have none of it.

“The man whose picture draped in mourning stands at my side may have been great … but I would not select him as my patron saint,” he began. There were murmurs in the audience, and the sound of chairs shifting on the stage around him.

“I do not wish to be understood as not in sympathy with this meeting,” said Darrow. “But I cannot … understand how a man who makes millions by every scheme and financial trick can reconcile that with true humanity. Baron Hirsch gave millions to the poor, but his fortune came, ultimately, from the poor—and he never gave it all back.”

A young man named
S. A. Lewinsohn leaped to his feet in anger. “Fellow Jews,” he said, “it seems the height of impropriety that a corporation lawyer, a professional socialist and a man who never gave a dollar to charity in his life should presume at a time like this—or anytime—to criticize the noblest Jew of his generation!” In the resultant uproar a few in the crowd, socialists no doubt, came to Darrow’s rescue. But they were routed by overwhelming opposition and abandoned the hall.

Long before the election, it was clear that Bryan and Altgeld would lose. Hinky Dink Kenna, that incorrigible finagler, was caught fixing ballots for Darrow, but the Popucrats could not compete with Hanna’s gold, which had bought the allegiance of far more ward and precinct leaders. Darrow lost by five hundred votes, in a race he should have won. The electorate was made up of laborers, he said, who never hesitated to call on him for free legal help but were too apathetic, or tired, or too new to America to get to the polls.

Bryan carried twenty-six states, and polled a million more votes than the victorious Cleveland had received in 1892. A switch of twenty thousand votes in a handful of states would have given him victory in the Electoral College. But he got whipped in the Midwest, failed to carry a single industrial state, and lost the popular vote by a margin of 600,000 to
William McKinley.

Darrow blamed Bryan, in part, for the Democratic defeat. When they
met the following spring, Darrow was “terribly raw” to Bryan, said Masters.

“You’d better … study science, history, philosophy and quit this village religious stuff,” Darrow told Bryan before a group of fellow Democrats. “You’re a head of the party before you are ready and a leader should lead with thought.”

Bryan turned to the others and said, “Darrow’s the only man in the world who looks down on me for believing in God.”

“Your kind of a God,” Darrow replied.

Bryan’s success gnawed at Darrow. He despised Bryan’s dull intellect and complacency. Soon, Darrow would be telling a story of how Altgeld, on the day after the Cross of Gold speech, had labeled Bryan a “damn fool.”

“I’ve been thinking over Bryan’s speech,” Altgeld had sneered, according to Darrow. “What did he say anyhow?”

For thirty years, Darrow’s envy and antipathy toward Bryan would build—until he was given, and took, the opportunity to destroy him.
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Chapter 5

FREE LOVE

A marvelous inconsistency of mind.

D
arrow was almost forty. His life was as turbulent as the times. He had lost his race for Congress. His friend and patron John Altgeld had been booted from office. His law firm had dissolved. And his marriage was disintegrating.

He had been drinking Chicago in gulps; his days filled with law and politics, his nights and weekends with legal homework, club meetings, campaigns, and public speaking. But “Mother wasn’t interested in the things he was interested in, and vice versa,” Paul recalled. Jessie “didn’t care for discussion, argument, free-thinking. She wanted to pay social calls to homes and relatives.”

Darrow had tried to stick it out, but ultimately concluded that Jessie was “utterly unsuitable” for him. In a letter to his wife, he gave his reasons for leaving. “We have not been happy, and I suppose neither of us are to blame,” he wrote. “I presume that we never in any way were fitted for each other … Of course we were too young to know it then and it is always terribly hard to correct such mistakes.”

Darrow’s sexual experience had been constrained by his early marriage, but now he was intoxicated by Chicago’s libertine ways. “We … talked free love, sex and every imaginable thing,” his friend and fellow lawyer
Edgar Lee Masters recalled. Darrow was “full of boyishness,” with a “gorgeous chuckle,” said Jessie’s cousin
Francis Wilson. He “got into the company of the intellectual and beautiful and didn’t feel that Jessie contributed to what he wanted.”

Divorce was an option in Victorian America, but Darrow would need a
considerable income to maintain a cosmopolitan lifestyle while still providing, as he promised, for Jessie and Paul. He had gotten valuable publicity but earned little else when representing Prendergast and Debs, and lost a financial anchor when his law firm broke apart. When asked to donate to a liberal cause in January 1895, he declined. “I … do not think I ought to use my money in that way,” he told the solicitor. “I have not much to use.”
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Darrow’s first brush with scandal helped balance the books. In early 1895 he had joined, and profited from, one of Chicago’s more notorious acts of municipal corruption. It was known as the “Ogden Gas” deal, and Altgeld’s cousin,
John Lanehart, helped push it through the city council. On February 26 the
Tribune
alerted Chicagoans that the Ogden Gas Company and
Cosmopolitan Electric Company had each been granted fifty-year municipal franchises “that will stand for all time … as monuments of corruption.” More than five thousand people attended a rowdy protest meeting, where squads of police were summoned to contain the crowd, and speakers denounced the aldermen as wolves, hyenas, scorpions, reptiles, freebooters, and scoundrels.

It was an archetypical bit of boodling. At the end of the nineteenth century private companies supplied the public utilities—gas for heat and light, telephones, streetcars, electric power—under franchise agreements awarded by local governments. Elected officials grew rich taking bribes to grant the franchises, or by extorting payoffs from existing utilities that wished to ward off competition. In the
Ogden Gas deal, franchises for gas and electric and telephone service were awarded to corporate fronts for an elite group of Democratic politicians. “When work has been carried far enough to convince other companies that the new concern may be a serious competitor, the speculative individuals … will be bought out by the companies they compete with and will withdraw … with a handsome rake-off,” the
Tribune
predicted.

John Hopkins, the city’s first Irish Catholic mayor, was leaving office and looking for a sinecure.
Roger Sullivan, the boss of the machine Democrats, and
Levy Mayer, one of the city’s sharpest lawyers, were also in on the deal. Darrow had participated in the big protest meeting, but when the boodlers needed help from an expert in municipal law, he switched sides. The
Civic Federation, a good government group, sued to stop the deal, claiming the aldermen were “corruptly influenced,” and Darrow and Mayer teamed up to beat the reformers in court.

“I have no doubt that many good citizens believe money was used to secure the passage of these ordinances, as during the last few years nearly everything they own has been given away,” Darrow told the judge. But the separation of powers precluded judicial interference, he said. “When the City Council performs its duties carelessly or corruptly—but within its own rights—it is not the province of a court … The court cannot ask an alderman, ‘Why did you vote for that measure?’ That is for his conscience, whether he has one or not.”

The court ruled for Darrow. He and Lanehart secured the operating permits for Ogden Gas and Cosmopolitan Electric. As was predicted, after several years both firms were bought out by the trusts that furnished power and light to the city, and the boodlers reaped their profits. When bought, Darrow stayed bought. He was there at the finish in 1900, leading a legal and political crusade—bankrolled by Sullivan—to put pressure on the gas trust during the final negotiations.
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Darrow may have received a cut, or merely earned an unsavory legal fee when saving the deal in court. He was candid enough not to make the distinction. “I undertook to serve this company … believing they had an ordinance procured by the aid of boodle,” he admitted. “I am satisfied that judged by the higher law … I am practically a thief.

“I am taking money that I did not earn, which comes to me from men who did not earn it, but who get it because they have the chance to get it. I take it without performing any useful service to the world, and I take a thousand times as much as my services are worth even assuming they were useful and honest.”

Darrow made this confession to
Ellen Gates Starr, one of the founders of Hull House, who had scolded him in a scathing note, which he answered with a long, revealing letter. “I believe now that society is organized injustice,” Darrow told Starr. In such circumstances, how does a just man live his life? There were those who believed that
Morrison Swift, a mutual friend who renounced a family fortune and joined the Commonweal protests, had taken the moral path. Swift “has perhaps done some good in his way by refusing to compromise with evil,” Darrow said. But in the end Swift’s ways were impractical and he and other absolutists were “shunned.” Darrow had chosen a different course. “I came to Chicago. I determined to take my chances with the rest, to get what I could out of the system and use it to destroy the system,” he said.

He was not a child of a well-off family, like Swift and Starr. And “society provides no fund out of which … people can live while preaching heresy,” said Darrow. So “I have … sold my professional services to every corporation or individual who cared to buy,” said Darrow. “I have taken their ill-gotten gains and have tried to use it to prevent suffering.

“I have defended the poor and weak, have done it without pay, will do it again,” he said. “I cannot defend them without bread, I cannot get this except from those who have it.”
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