Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (52 page)

It was a rare case, Darrow would recall, in which he had a sudden flash of insight in court. The engineering and the mathematics were so daunting, Darrow realized, as to be far beyond the comprehension of a lake boat’s crew. “The prosecution wants to put these steamboat … sailors in prison” for not knowing what only a few experts in the world could explain, he argued. Judge
Clarence Sessions agreed. It was a terrible accident, he ruled, but “there is no proof which tends, even in a slight degree, to fasten such guilt on any of the respondents.”
¹⁵

T
HE
G
REAT
W
AR
cleaved wounds in the radical community. Socialists like Debs and pacifists like
Jane Addams decried the slaughter, which they blamed on militarists and industrialists from both sides. But other liberals and progressives, like Gompers and Darrow, condemned Germany. In the spring of 1915, Sara visited Chicago, and she and Darrow had a heated quarrel. “Imagine Sara and I fighting when either one of us would go to hell for the other,” he told Mary. But “here was Germany preparing for years to destroy civilization … to make the world Prussian. They trampled Belgium under foot violating their written word. They invaded France and Poland. They ran their submarines under ships and destroyed them without warning … The world had to submit to Germany and to go back to barbarism, or fight.…

“There can be no peace while Prussian militarism lives,” he wrote, “and I want to see it destroyed.”

Darrow’s old flame
Katherine Leckie, Addams, and other pacifists took advantage of
Henry Ford’s offer to finance the journey of a “peace ship” that would tour European ports. Darrow was asked to join them but turned down the invitation. “I can make a damned fool of myself without leaving Chicago,” he said.
¹⁶

“Can’t help being glad U.S. is getting into the war,” Darrow wrote Paul when President Wilson brought America into the conflict. “It is time Germany was licked.”
¹⁷

Darrow enlisted with Gompers in a campaign to rally labor behind the war. He joined groups like Labor’s Loyal Legion, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, and the National Security League. He
toured as a speaker, wrote essays, and contributed to a pamphlet called “The War for Peace,” published by the government’s new Committee on Public Information. Teddy Roosevelt praised his patriotism, and wealthy industrialists served beside him. He was “right in it with the fellows who have always been against me,” he told Paul, but if they needed to raise money for the gas business, he noted, that might be helpful.

A special target was Chicago’s Republican mayor
William “Big Bill” Thompson, who was pro-German and antiwar. Darrow compared him to “a biting adder … that lies lurking in the grass,” and said that Thompson and other opponents of the war were being used by German agents “in a conspiracy of treason.” In October, Darrow spoke on “Loyalty Day,” when 150,000 people gathered in Grant Park for fireworks, anthems, and martial rhetoric. “I believe in liberty; I believe in the greatest possible freedom of speech and of the press, but I know this: the rules for war and the rules for peace … cannot be the same,” Darrow said. “This country is at war and this country will win and you are playing with fire when you fight us in the rear.”

In a New York speech to the National Security League, Darrow sounded Prussian himself: “Be it said to the honor and glory and idealism of America, that she accepted the gage of battle from the German empire and prepared to fight! …

“It ill becomes any American to criticize the President in this great crisis,” he said. “The United States never had a greater, wiser, more patriotic President than
Woodrow Wilson, and it is for the people of the United States, not to condemn or criticize, but to support and uphold him in this, the greatest crisis of our nation’s life!”
¹⁸

Darrow’s friends were thunderstruck. They saw his stand as a betrayal, and some believed that Darrow, along with Gompers, had joined in the patriotic fever to bleach the stains of the McNamara debacle. Gene Debs was chagrined. Darrow “is war mad,” Johannsen reported. Dr. Gerson wrote Darrow a letter of protest. Austin Wright called Darrow “the prostitute.” Few felt so betrayed as Mary.

“Darrow is following the flag. Too bad. Too bad that old General Otis is dead, not to sit on the platform with Darrow!” she wrote Sara. “Oh, but now is Darrow thrice forgiven his sins! Though his sins be scarlet they shall be white as wool … once he bathes in the muddy waters of patriotism.”

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1918, Darrow took advantage of a British offer to speak in England and tour the battlefields of France. The trenches seemed a foolish destination for a sixty-one-year-old man. But he promised Paul he would “try to keep away from the submarines and bullets” and sent Jessie a letter with reassuring instructions about money, “in case anything happens.”

“I can’t miss it,” Darrow told Mary. “The lure is too strong.” As their ship skirted the German U-boats, he spent pleasant hours on board playing bridge with the young sculptress
Nancy Cox-McCormack, who delighted in his “droll” humor. Darrow gave speeches to labor crowds in England, met with
H. G. Wells, visited the fleet, and praised the quiet determination shown by the British. “They fought and died and held the invaders back,” he wrote, in one of a series of dispatches for the
Chicago Journal
. It is difficult to tell how much his writing was restrained by censors, or by self-censorship, but he labored dutifully as a propagandist. “It is true that our Allied airplanes are now dropping bombs on German cities,” he wrote. “But let it never be forgotten that the bombardment of open towns, the destruction of non-combatants, the violation of all the rules of the game was begun by Germany.”

Darrow did not mention the shock he had received at the site of so many young men in England with an empty sleeve or a trouser leg pinned up. Crossing the channel to France on a troop ship, he was struck by the quiet on board as the soldiers struggled to master their dread, except for the one despairing soul who hurled himself into the sea.

“France is beautiful even in her sorrow,” Darrow told his readers. But privately he noted the obliterated villages, so torn and blasted that he could not tell where the streets and buildings had once stood. He saw the ambulances with their shelves of wounded stacked in agony, and the filthy soldiers huddled in the trenches. For the
Journal
, he described the Allied warplanes as “uncanny birds, whose hearts are engines, whose bodies are wood and steel … and whose talons are machine guns.” In his private correspondence, he likened them to “great buzzards looking down on the carrion that was dead on every field.”

Aboard ship, on the way back to America, Darrow composed a long description of what he had seen, which he sent to Mary. The lands of France and Belgium “for endless miles were filled with shell holes, covered with broken guns, discarded helmets, empty shells—and graves, graves everywhere. Graves inside of barbed wire fences with a white cross marking the spot; graves alone in the fields and by the side of the road. Some soldiers, too, with no cross or grave.” He had eaten dinner in a dugout with a general and his staff, who paid no attention to the German artillery shells that fell nearby. “They were used to it, and had accepted it as one more way to die.” Darrow was frightened, but determined not to show it. “I hadn’t the courage to run—what would the others say?”

He was seduced by the immediacy of war, the intoxicating sense of life in the moment. “The battlefield haunts, the cannons and graves and trenches and supplies and hospitals haunt me. The waste and suffering and hatred haunt me … all the horrible hash of life and death,” he said, and still he felt an irresistible yearning to go “back into the maelstrom.”

“God, what a mad, wild fight it is!” he wrote, and wondered if he could obtain a position in a military hospital in France. “It … lures me—and makes me ask questions about life and wonder more and more why people take it so seriously—why I do above all of them—and why we shouldn’t want peace and death.”

Darrow contemplated the dreary existence that waited for him with Ruby in Chicago: toothaches and “nagging” and financial woes and meddlesome people.

“I felt when I left London that I was running away from a pestilence. Here I am a week out in the ocean thinking of it all and of the submarines under the ocean waiting to get us, of the million dead and half million worse than dead in England,” he wrote. “And I wish the ship would turn around and take me back.”
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Chapter 15

RED SCARE

You can only be free if I am free.

D
arrow’s contrarian nature, and his fearlessness expressing it, would ultimately win him absolution from his radical friends. For even as he publicly supported wartime restraints on speech, he was working behind the scenes to defend individual dissidents. And once the war was over, there was no stronger defender of individual liberty, sexual freedom, civil rights, and dissent.

The government’s enhanced powers to regulate speech and public protest were rooted in the
Espionage Act of 1917. The law and its companion legislation, the
Sedition Act of 1918, gave the authorities the power to ban newspapers and other undesirable material from the mail and made it a crime to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the flag. Its most noteworthy victim was Eugene Debs, who was tried and imprisoned for criticizing the war effort.

Darrow was not exempt from scrutiny. Using spies and informants, intercepting mail, searching without warrants, and tapping telephones, the government’s agents kept tabs on him and his friends and associates. “Radicalism was strongly injected into the convention of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union,” one intelligence agent reported to his superiors at the War Department. “Clarence Darrow, radical attorney, in his speech declared that Attorney General Palmer is ‘a liar, hypocrite and traitor to the people.’ “
¹

Darrow joined several civil liberties groups and served as legal adviser
to the most effective organization,
Roger Baldwin’s National Civil Liberties Bureau. It was an outgrowth of the pacifist American Union Against Militarism and would morph, over time, into the American Civil Liberties Union. On the ACLU’s behalf, and that of the Socialist Party, Darrow joined a delegation of lawyers who traveled to Washington in July 1917 to protest censorship. “Although Darrow supported the war and most of us concerned with the problems of civil liberties did not, he joined in without criticism,” Baldwin recalled.

“I have been heartsick over the frenzy that is sweeping over the country, have been speaking and working on it,” Darrow told Mary.

Darrow represented
Theron Cooper, a pacifist in Chicago, and
Schulim Melamed, an anarchist who was slated for deportation. He advised former senator
Richard Pettigrew, who was charged with making antiwar comments in the press. When hundreds of Wobblies were carted off to jail, Darrow helped raise funds for Bill Haywood’s bail and eventually took the case of
Vincent St. John, one of the arrested leaders. He testified for the defense at the trial of once and future congressman
Victor Berger and four other Socialist Party officials accused under the Espionage Act, and contributed to a Supreme Court brief on behalf of
Emma Goldman, who had been convicted of opposing the military draft.
²

In August 1917, Darrow met in Washington with President Wilson and his aides, who saw the value of having radicals who would endorse the war. If carefully handled and brought on board, Darrow could be an “agency for good,” his advisers told the president. Wilson and Darrow had a “philosophical” discussion about the wartime limits on expression, in which Darrow sought guidelines for dissenters and the press. There was just no way to draw a definite line, Wilson told him, but he promised to be fair and to work on a “good sense” solution.