Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (6 page)

“Try to bear up and be reconciled,” Amirus wrote. “She does not suffer so much as she did.”

As the tumor grew, blocking her small intestine, Emily was confined to bed. “I feel so ready to go,” she told Mary. “Death is nothing for sure
but rest, and if I might get well now it would only be a few years longer that I could live, for life is so short.”

“It is just a dream, and you will all find it so when your time comes,” she told her frightened children.

Emily’s death came during hard times for the family, when Amirus had been forced to take a second job teaching school. The days of Clarence’s childhood were over, as he picked up the slack in the furniture shop. “Clarence is almost a man and does a man’s work,” Mary reported to Everett, and she postponed her own plans to attend the University of Michigan. Clarence described the “blank despair” that settled over the house, and Mary told Everett how “everything that made it bright and pleasant is gone.”

Clarence was fifteen when his mother died. But he described himself in memoirs as a “little child” and “very young” and “quite little” when he lost her. Her death fed his hunger for affection. He was the fifth of eight children in that Puritan home, and had “no feeling of a time when either my father or my mother took me, or any other member of our family, in their arms,” he wrote. “I cannot recall that my mother ever gave me a kiss or a caress.” Years later, Darrow would joke that he never could master the verb
love
. He would rush into an early marriage, cheat, divorce, marry again, and never stop reaching for women’s hands, or waists, for comfort. “That verb has never grown easier,” he wrote.

Emily’s rites were agony for Clarence. She was laid out in the parlor of their home. As was customary in small towns, Amirus’s line of hardwood furniture also included coffins, which led him to double as the local undertaker. Between funerals, the Darrow chickens roosted on the hearse, which now needed to be cleaned and its black flowers attached, and Black Hawk, the mare, hitched to take it to the graveyard. Clarence was overwhelmed by “shudder and horror” and an “endless regret that I did not tell her that I loved her.” In the years after, he visited her grave but once.
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Amirus did no draining or embalming; in those years the relatives would simply wash and clothe a corpse for burial. But there were recurring funerals, and the coffins stored in a corner of the shop that Clarence refused to visit after dark. Intellectually, he confronted the questions of existence, always declining the easy solace of religion. Emotionally, he
was scared. Friends knew not to raise the subject with him. He visited seers and mediums, and at one point near the end of life Darrow asked his wife to kill herself on his deathbed, because he could not face the crossing alone. As with many other essential matters—politics, money, and his relationships with women, to cite just a few—Darrow’s feelings toward death were rife with contradiction. As a lawyer, his greatest fear was to lose a client to the gallows. And yet he did not shy away. Darrow repeatedly took on capital cases, many seemingly hopeless, where his private terrors inspired some of his greatest performances.
¹⁷

T
HE LAW GAVE
Darrow his ticket out of Kinsman. He was a student in secondary school when Emily died, studying at the local public “academy.” A year later, his family scraped together enough money to send him to a preparatory course at Allegheny College. He did not last long. The “Panic of 1873” plunged the nation into depression, and ended Darrow’s college days. Like Everett and Mary and Amirus before him, Clarence took a job as a schoolteacher, in his case at the District No. 3 school, a few miles away in the town of Vernon. He received $100 for the three-month autumn term. He was a colorful sight in those days of the “Long Depression,” wearing a bowler and driving through town in a shabby contraption: an old sleigh that his father had converted into a buggy. He was a lax instructor who refused to employ corporal discipline and let the boys stretch their hour of recess. The choicest part of the job, he’d say, was the good meals and pie he got when invited to supper by the families of his students.

Oratory was part of the curriculum, and as a student Clarence had excelled at memorizing his “pieces” and presenting them with dramatic flourish. His own classmates would long remember his recitation of “Darius Green and His Flying Machine” (“Darius was clearly of the opinion / That the air is also man’s dominion / And that, with paddle or fin or pinion / We soon or late / Shall navigate”). The Darrows had a custom of reading aloud for one another at the dining room table or while gathered in the sitting room on winter nights. He attended, and soon was entering, the speaking contests held at town picnics and the evening declamation series in the local schoolhouse. He liked to sit in, as well, on the arguments held before “Justice” Fitch. “Every time there was a lawsuit I used
to go to the tinsmith’s law shop and listen to those country pettifoggers abuse each other,” he recalled. “They talked so much and abused each other and the witnesses so violently that I thought I would rather be a lawyer than anything else in the world.” The blacksmith,
Lorenzo Roberts, let Darrow read his law books.

He taught for three years, but the legal profession seemed a better way to make money, and he nurtured a conceit that “I was made for better things.” His father had studied law and so, Darrow decided, should he.
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T
HE
D
ARROWS PLACED
great faith in education. As each child graduated from college, he or she devoted a share of their earnings to help the next pay tuition. As times got better, it was Clarence’s turn for higher learning. Amirus, Mary, and Everett contributed, and he set off for the University of Michigan school of law in the fall of 1877, at the age of twenty. He made no significant impression in his year in Ann Arbor, did not graduate, and never acquired a law degree. His only notoriety was not the best kind. He got in a spat with his landlady. Darrow “could not or would not pay for his rooms, and accordingly left them one day last week, telling Mrs. Foley that he had left his trunk and its contents and those he said would pay his indebtedness to her. She was, of course, glad to get even this from him. But on opening the trunk it was found to be filled with “wood, burnt boots and other things of equal value,” the local paper reported. “This should warn all others from trusting him.”

Darrow replied with a letter to the editor, calling Mrs. Foley’s account “nearly all an entire fabrication.” He had paid his rent, and was moving out, when they bickered over alleged damage to his room. She had seized his trunk, said Darrow, and half of the wood heating fuel he left behind. “Although poor, I value my reputation too highly to dispose of it for the small sum in controversy,” Darrow said. “I will prove by witnesses the above facts, as stated by me, to be true, to any one who will call at my present boarding place.”
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The costs of law school were not terribly high—$50 covered tuition and fees—but still an obstacle for Darrow. And for American lawyers in that era, a law degree was an exception. Most took jobs as clerks in a local attorney’s office and “read law” to prepare for the bar exam. So
Darrow found work in a Youngstown, Ohio, firm and studied there. He remembered sitting through one libel case with his mentor, and being puzzled when that learned man pronounced the newspaper’s action as “libeelious.”

“Libelous, correctly pronounced, has a dry technical, colorless sound, but when pronounced libeelious it sounds frightfully evil,” the attorney told him. “I know the men on the jury. I have grown up with some of them. I know how they feel about evil wicked things and I knew just what response that evil-sounding word would evoke.” In later years, Darrow told fanciful stories about the bar examination (most of them involving alcohol), which took place at a room in the Tod House, a local tavern. The general theme of his tales, that his examination was a casual ceremony given by genial members of the local legal fraternity, is credible. “They were all good fellows and wanted to help us through,” he recalled.

Darrow returned to Kinsman, which had, in the blacksmith, all the lawyers it needed. So he heeded Greeley’s famous advice. The twenty-one-year-old lawyer had gone west, the local press reported, to make a start in “the territories.” Custer had but recently died at Little Big Horn, and the cattle drives and wagon trains were still toting cowboys, sodbusters, and gunslingers to the Wild West when Darrow passed through a scenic part of central Kansas, along the Chisholm Trail. In the town of McPherson a group of two dozen Ohio families had founded a settlement called the “Ashtabula Colony.” Darrow visited, liked what he saw, and rented an office, intent on making his fortune on the rolling Kansas plains. But something changed his mind, and he moved on. Maybe the risk and the isolation were daunting. Or maybe the something was a woman.

In the spring of 1880, Darrow married Jessie Ohl. She was a little younger than he, a rural lass he had known in Kinsman and courted for years. He made her laugh and took her to dances in the town hall, and she went to see him lecture and debate. She came from a prosperous farming family that owned land in Ohio and Minnesota. Her money helped pay for Darrow’s law books, and they settled in Andover, a tiny community a dozen miles from Kinsman.

Andover was a hick burg, with a square of buildings, wood sidewalks, and hitching racks surrounded by fields. Darrow and Jessie roomed above a store, in a second-floor apartment that doubled as an office and a home.
He took, as a helper,
James Roberts, the son of Lorenzo the blacksmith. Roberts read law with Darrow and went on to become a judge. In time the town acquired a pool hall and a tavern, where the blind barmaid ascertained what mugs were full by sticking her thumb in the beer. Darrow found a kindred spirit in
Wat Morley, the freethinking owner of a clothing store, whose feud with the barmaid and her husband—Morley had suggested that they lacked a marriage license—bloomed into a slander suit that provided the town with invaluable diversion.

A lawsuit, in those days, was like a medieval tournament, Darrow recalled. “Every one, for miles around, had heard of the case and taken sides … Neighborhoods, churches, lodges and entire communities were divided as if in war … Audiences assembled from far and near.” It was Morley who, in one of Darrow’s first showdowns, gave him some memorable advice. Get to the justice of the peace’s home early on the morning of the trial, Morley said, and introduce yourself with a jug of whiskey. Darrow did so, only to find that the opposing attorney had gotten there the evening before, and caroused with the jurist all night.
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The law gave Darrow a glimpse at the sins of his neighbors, which they labored so hard to hide. The experience confirmed what his father had taught him about “the right sort” of people. “The only way I got any money was defending farmers who sold hard cider, because we had a prohibition law in those days in northern Ohio,” said Darrow. “Then I used to defend deacons for watering the milk before they sent it to the factory.”

“Membership in a church in no way affected these cases of dilution,” he noted.

Darrow’s talents as an orator made him a popular guest at patriotic events and other celebrations, and the speech-making was good advertising for his law practice. In 1881, the farmers in Wayne celebrated the end-of-summer harvest with a September picnic. Rigs stirred the dust on the county roads and families gathered for backslaps and hugs, home-cooked suppers, music from a brass band, songs, and Darrow’s speech. He gave them what they wanted to hear, with an ode to Manifest Destiny.

“Friends and Neighbors … Your presence and appearance here today, on this occasion, means that you are all contented with your lot,” he said. “It means happiness, prosperity and peace; it means that you exist under the protecting arm of a Government which guarantees to you the legitimate product of your industry and your toil.

“One hundred years ago, nay, eighty years ago, naught but the giant oak and other forest trees stood where the bright and yellow grain in golden wreath was harvested but yesterday; the untutored savage of the wood had pitched his tent upon the spot where you are living now; the tomahawk and scalping knife did their barbarous deeds of cruelty and blood.

“But destiny, whose laws we all obey, had decreed that another and a better race should find these treasures … And so today we meet to celebrate this golden harvest time.”

In 1883, Darrow became a father when Jessie gave birth to a son, whom they named Paul. Darrow felt that he was ready for a bigger stage and was urged to seek one by an admiring judge who had heard him try cases. They moved to Ashtabula.
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I
T WAS DURING
his stay in Ashtabula that Darrow launched a career in politics, which he would pursue for the next twenty years. He fell in with the Democrats, who were glad to have him, for he was a handsome, well-spoken young man. He served as secretary of the county party and was a delegate to the state convention. He worked on the victorious presidential campaign of
Grover Cleveland in 1884, then ran for the state senate and lost. He entered the race for Ashtabula County prosecutor and lost. He finally found a race he could win when, with the help of a friendly judge, Darrow was elected Ashtabula’s city solicitor, with a salary of $75 a month.