Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (7 page)

Darrow now added a partisan edge to his rhetoric. After an 1884 trip to Washington, D.C., he filed a report in the local Democratic newspaper in which, with mock consternation, he told how in “the sacred marble halls” of Congress he had found “a real, living, terrible saloon.”

“I sat down at one of the tables and wept in silence,” Darrow wrote. “To make sure of the character of the place, I ordered drinks.” The Republicans, he told audiences, were a “party that talks temperance in Ohio and runs a gin mill in Washington.”

A Memorial Day address in 1886 contained the expected patriotic flourishes—and a radical proposal, as well. “Once more we bring the tender tokens of our love, the Spring’s bright flowers and garlands green, and strew them o’er our soldiers’ graves,” he began. “We hear the fife’s shrill
notes, the drum’s loud beat and the bugle’s clarion call, we hear the roar and din of strife, the cannon’s deadly peal, the war horse neigh and see the wounded and the slain. Once more we watch the daily tidings from the South and with quickly beating hearts we scan the list to know whose loved one has fallen in the fray. We see the pall; the bier; the hearse and view again the brave boys, cold in death.”

But the dreams of the Founding Fathers, and the sacrifice of those who died in the Civil War, would not be fulfilled until women could vote, Darrow said. In denying women the ballot, “we defame the principles for which our fathers fought,” he told the crowd. “Strange that men … without a blush of shame … take from woman, the class who needs it most, and as a class the most fitted for its use, the only weapon which a self-governing people have the right to use—the ballot box.”

Darrow shared cases with a lawyer named
Charles Lawyer and worked as a public defender. And throughout his years in Ashtabula, Darrow kept up a running fight on behalf of
James Brockway. In March 1885, Brockway had cared for a wealthy but sick “inebriate” and, in return for his help, been promised a gilt-trimmed horse harness. But then the drunkard was assigned a guardian,
Cornelius Jewell, who refused to honor the deal. Darrow tried the case—
Brockway v. Jewell
—before a justice of the peace and lost. Unwilling to give up, he fought the case through retrials and appeals until finally he prevailed, nine years after it was first contested, in the Ohio Supreme Court. It was a battle over principle, not money. The harness was worth $30.

Ohio was beginning to take notice. In August 1886 he went to the state Democratic convention in Toledo. One newspaper called Darrow “a young man of brilliant attainments” who “already enjoys an enviable reputation as a lawyer and an orator.” Another noted how Darrow “brought his candidate before the convention in a masterful manner. He has a scholarly look, a perfectly beardless face and a deep rich voice.”

But life was tame in what Darrow took to calling “benighted Ashtabula.” There was little chance as a Democrat to win higher office. The poker games with pals were fun, but it was still a place where life and commerce came to a halt and everyone gathered to see the spectacle when the movers hoisted a safe through an upstairs window. He had lots of time to read, and to the books he had discovered in his father’s library, he added a small volume on crime, recommended by a local judge:
Our
Penal Machinery and Its Victims
, written and self-published by a Chicagoan named John Peter Altgeld. It argued that biological and social conditions, and not willful deviltry, were the source of criminal behavior. Darrow became an acolyte, as well, of
Robert Ingersoll, an elegant orator and famous agnostic, whose willingness to champion freethinking philosophy in the face of popular disapproval made him, in Darrow’s eyes, a “soul of matchless courage.”

And Darrow was moved by
Progress and Poverty
, a bestselling political tract written by
Henry George. An Ashtabula banker brought it to his attention, and it made a marked impression. “In factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work … Amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation … Everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the fear of want,” George wrote. He advocated a heavy “single tax” on property, to ensure equality.
²²

Darrow’s radical soul was stirring. Jessie might be comfortable in Ohio, but he desired more. “I had accumulated $500 in cash and wanted to buy a home. Of course, I don’t suppose I did, but the family wanted it,” Darrow recalled. “Wives always want homes, something to bring a man to at night … it stabilizes things. Wives are great stabilizers.”

“I made a bargain with a fellow for that home, which I was to pay $3,500 for—$500 down and the rest as long as I lived,” said Darrow. “He came up the next morning to bring the deed, and he said he could not bring it because his wife would not sign it.” In some versions of the tale Darrow, provoked, tells the seller, “I don’t want your fool house anyhow, I am moving to Chicago.” In others, he tells off the wife. What really matters is, he told it to himself. Great men were doing great things, and he wanted to be among them.

The March 5, 1887, edition of the
Ashtabula Standard
carried the news. “City Solicitor CS Darrow has decided to locate in Chicago,” it said, “and early next month will shake the dust of Ashtabula from his feet and take up his abode in the wickedest city in the United States.”
²³

Chapter 2

CHICAGO

Chicago was a mining camp, five stories high
.

C
larence Darrow arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887, knowing no one of any consequence, lost in the flocks of other young pilgrims seeking their fortunes in the great boomtown in the middle of the continent. Chicago’s unbridled growth, corsair creed, and mesmerizing license gave the city its magnetic pull. The Great Lakes port had ninety thousand inhabitants in the year Darrow was born. By the time he arrived at the age of thirty, there were a million people living there, and it had become the nation’s second-largest city. Everyone came from somewhere else; most were foreign born. “First in violence, deepest in dirt,” wrote journalist
Lincoln Steffens. “Loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.”
¹

The Chicagoans were a truly intrepid lot. When their effluence despoiled Lake Michigan and threatened to slay them all with cholera, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River and sent the sewage down the Mississippi. When the lake sand gave way beneath their buildings, they lifted the city, block by block. In 1871 the famous Chicago fire razed the downtown, destroying eighteen thousand buildings. From tent cities out on the prairie, emissaries were dispatched to assure Wall Street and Capitol Hill that Chicago would rebuild; that wall and shingle could be consumed, but not the great kinetic spirit of the town.

The fields and pastures of the Republic shipped grain and hogs and cattle to Chicago to be butchered, processed, and sent east. In return came
fine goods and imports, and a tide of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Scandinavia, and Italy. The city was known as the “Rome of Railroads,” for its immense depots and switchyards. The McCormick Reaper Works and the Pullman Palace Car Company topped the manufacturing sector. Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour built mighty packinghouses, feeding on the herds of livestock slaughtered at the Union Stockyards. The docks were crowded with stevedores, unloading lumber and iron ore from the Great Lakes fleet. Towering grain elevators competed with that new architectural phenomenon, the skyscraper, to define the city skyline.

With splendor came sin and corruption. The bucket-shop bars, faro games, and bordellos ran all night. “City Hall … is filled with brothel-keepers, saloon-keepers and prize-fighters, ready to barter the rights of citizens for a song,” wrote
John Burns, a visiting British socialist.
²
From 1875 to 1890, the homicide rate soared by 413 percent, driven by brawls in the saloons and gunfire in the alleys. The legal domain that Darrow entered was worthy of the town. “Chicago was a mining camp, five stories high,” the journalist
George Ade recalled. “It was owned by the gamblers” and “the minor courts were controlled by agents of crime.” Attorneys worked in rundown buildings, with the invariable leather chair, rolltop desk, and bust of Lincoln. A few hundred dollars was, for a few years yet, a significant fee. Fistfights broke out in court. Verdicts could be purchased. “I could cite many cases of organized attempts to bilk my companies on absolutely fictitious testimony,” the streetcar baron
Charles Yerkes recalled. And so, said Yerkes, “I bribed juries.”

Darrow rented a desk in an office downtown on LaSalle Street. Among the first to engage his services was Dr.
Charles Arnold, who had been sued for slander by
Richard McDonough, a rival for an office in the “Grand Lodge of the Knights and Ladies of Honor.” Darrow presented witnesses who testified that, as Arnold had claimed, McDonough did indeed run “a bawdy house” on Madison Street. A clerk who manned the front desk told how the male guests, to disguise their identities, signed the register as Grover Cleveland. Arnold described the hotel as a den of sin where “Negroes with white women, white men with Negro women, young girls with old men and old women with young men” came and went, staying but an hour, with no luggage, “in a manner that demonstrated their abandoned purpose.”

“What kind of women go there?” Darrow asked a German barber who worked nearby. “Shippies.”

“How do you know they’re chippies?”

“Vell, they got their hair cut, and I know ’em.”

Darrow earned little that first year. He was homesick and awed, but not alone: the whole Darrow clan was moving to the city. Darrow’s older brother Everett and sister Mary worked as public school teachers and lived on the West Side at 907 Sawyer Avenue, where Amirus and Darrow’s youngest sister, Jennie, another teacher, soon joined them. After renting a house in Englewood, Darrow and Jessie moved to 905 Sawyer Avenue. Within months, his brothers Hubert, a musician, and Herman, a teacher and a printer, had arrived.

And Darrow had an uncle in Chicago—his mother’s brother,
William “Horse” Eddy, a trader and breeder who ran a stable and carriage shop on Dearborn Street. Profane, loquacious, and opinionated, Eddy was “quite a character,” the
Tribune
noted, a “man of shrewd discernment and radical politics.” He had arrived in Chicago from Ohio in the 1840s and made his fortune in livestock and real estate. He was an abolitionist who, during the Civil War, had gained fame for horsewhipping
Wilbur Storey, the Lincoln-hating editor of the
Chicago Times
. Eddy became wealthy, civic-minded, and almost respectable, and helped found the city’s Republican Party. But he lost almost everything in the great fire, and took to drinking, brawling, and waging hopeless campaigns for office. In the face of various religious revivals, he remained an infidel. “Tain’t natural to think a man is going to be roasted after death because some people say so,” he explained.

Darrow took to Eddy and agreed to represent him in a seemingly hopeless lawsuit he had filed to recover a disputed thirty-acre tract of land near Auburn Park. It took six years, and Darrow had to carry the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, but he won his uncle title to the now-valuable property.
W. H. EDDY RECOVERS HALF A MILLION
, read the front-page headline in the
Tribune
. It was Darrow’s
first big legal triumph.
³

V
ICTORIAN
A
MERICA LOVED
its clubs, and Darrow became a stalwart at the Land and Labor Club, the Andrew Jackson League, the Secular
Union, the Equal Suffrage Club, the Women’s Physiological Institute, the Personal Rights League, and other organizations. Getting known was good for business. So were letters to the editor. Just days after arriving in Chicago, Darrow wrote the
Inter Ocean
, decrying the widespread practice by which wealthy landowners lied about the assessed value of their properties. “About the only class … that pays taxes on the full value of their personal property are those of widows, orphans and imbeciles.”