Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (74 page)

Robert Toms did not suffer. The prosecutor waited for months before dropping his cases against the other Sweet defendants but ultimately did so, as he had promised. When he first ran for election to the bench, Toms
asked Darrow to return to Detroit and campaign with him in black precincts. Darrow did, and Toms won. He capped his career at Nuremberg, Germany, where he was one of the judges who presided at the postwar trials of Nazi war criminals.

Years after the Sweet trials, Toms told an interviewer that “I can put myself in that house on Garland Ave. that night, and I can imagine the terror that must have crept through every occupant … I can’t say that it was an unjust verdict at all.”

Nor would he challenge the witnesses for the defense who had testified that there were four or five hundred people outside 2905 Garland Avenue on that warm summer night. The Sweets and their friends “panicked, that’s what happened,” Toms said, warming to his tale. “They spread themselves around the house and when the stones began to fall … Bang! Bang! It didn’t take much to start the shooting.”

The Sweet trials had a salutary effect on the city of Detroit, he said. “I think it taught the fringe of the white people who were in foment. I think it taught them that they couldn’t have the support of the law in blocking the Negro from living where he wanted.”

“Sociologically, I mean, leaving all legal aspects aside, I think it was probably a fortunate thing,” Toms said. “Of course, this doesn’t say much for Mr. Breiner, who was shot. But, after all, what’s one soldier in a war?”
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The Sweets paid for their victories. First Ossian and Gladys lost their baby girl to tuberculosis. Then Gladys died of the disease. Henry earned a law degree at Howard University and practiced briefly before he too succumbed to tuberculosis before the age of forty. Their family believed that Henry and Gladys contracted the disease while awaiting trial in the county jail, and gave it to her baby.

Before Gladys died, Ossian moved her into the house on Garland Avenue, and afterward he lived there many years. But his personal and professional life was erratic. Burdened by debt, Sweet sold the property in 1958. And in 1960, ill and disturbed,
Ossian Sweet took his own life. One soldier in a war.
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Chapter 20

CRASHING

Here is the kind of damn fool I have been.

D
arrow did not pause long to celebrate his victory in the Sweet case. In two weeks he was off to Tennessee, to argue the Scopes appeal before the state supreme court. It was a stressful exercise, with foes before and behind him. His critics had been horrified by the carnival in Dayton, and schemed to remove him from the legal team.

“It will not be our cause on trial,” George Rappelyea wrote his co-conspirator
Forrest Bailey at the ACLU. “It will be a case of the State of Tennessee vs. Clarence Darrow, the man who spiritually and literally crucified Bryan.”
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But Bailey had a hard time finding someone to bell the cat; Darrow was a public hero. “We are constantly receiving criticisms and protests concerning the Darrow personality and the harm it may do us,” Bailey told one ACLU supporter, “but feel inhibited from passing these on directly to Mr. Darrow.”

Inevitably, word got back to Darrow, and he acceded to the suggestion that a distinguished Tennessee lawyer be added to the appeals team. But now Hays had his back up. “I don’t think you can accept the services of Darrow and Malone in the trial of the case and then suggest ousting them,” Hays told ACLU counsel
Walter Nelles. “I am not willing to have conservative lawyers … reap the benefit of work done by liberals or radicals.…

“I never yet have found any conservative lawyer who, at the beginning, wanted to undertake a case which
might
reflect discredit upon him. When it turns out differently and there seem to be some publicity or honor to
be had, then offers of assistance come,” Hays said. Nelles and the others surrendered, but only as far as the Tennessee appeal. The ACLU insisted that Darrow withdraw before the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the end, it was Tennessee’s lawyers who disgraced themselves before their state’s high court, ranting against scientists and intellectuals and jabbering about the specter of communism. Darrow was nothing but dignified. “The schools of this state were not established to teach religion, they were established to teach science,” he told the justices.

“We must learn, and we will learn, and what we have today is the result of knowledge, of investigation, of science,” he said. “It will be a sad day, both for education and religion, when the sword is tied to the cross.”
²

Darrow returned to Chicago to pack for a vacation in Colorado. The victories of the last three years had been as draining as they were glorious, and he needed a rest. In June he headed for Greeley. It was there that he suffered a coronary episode—a
heart attack, it seems, brought on by an arterial blockage—and was hospitalized in Denver. Darrow and Ruby lingered in Colorado as he regained strength. “I had rather a serious breakdown … and am very slowly recovering,” he wrote Whitlock. “I must not work or indulge in any feverish activity. Of course it is time that I had a permanent breakdown for I will be 70 next April and have led a very strenuous life.”

Ruby tried, with little success, to get him to stop smoking. His doctors told him to postpone a planned European vacation and to spend the winter in the South. The Darrows settled on Fairhope, Alabama, a liberal colony on Mobile Bay. Mary saw him in New York before he left. “Darrow looks very old and even more tired. Sags like an old bag out of which almost everything is taken. Jokes as usual, simple rustic jokes. Criticizes none. Asks nothing. People come to strut before him and puff their breast bones and ruffle their feathers. He sits humbly, with head bowed, silent,” she told her diary. She saw him off at the station and, as she watched him board the train, was struck by a premonition of death.

In January, word came from Tennessee. The court had given Scopes the victory, but on a technicality: the defendant was freed because Judge Raulston, and not the jury, had fixed the amount of the $100 fine. The justices upheld the anti-evolution law, but instructed the prosecutors to drop the “bizarre” case that had proved so embarrassing. Though never
enforced, the law stayed on the books. It would take another forty years before the
U.S. Supreme Court overturned an anti-evolution statute.

But the law, Darrow knew, follows folkways. And the showdown on the courthouse lawn was not forgotten. Darrow did not give fundamentalism its death blow in Dayton—it is, after all, in the nature of religious fanatics to ignore objective truth—but he had exposed it to ridicule. The timorous politicians of the South continued to sanction intolerance, and commercial textbook publishers ducked the issue. But away from the clout of the Bible Belt churches, Americans had no problem honoring the poetry of Genesis in Sunday school, and the findings of Darwin in science class. Darrow never made but a modest claim about the outcome, which was inarguable. “Somebody had to make a fuss about it,” he wrote Mencken. “I was interested in waking up the country as to what they had to meet and think we succeeded. I do not know how much farther [the fundamentalists] can get, but they will never pull off anything else without a fight.”

Darrow despised fanatics, not faith. Nor would he deny to lost mankind what solace it might find in religion. In the weeks after Dayton, Darrow declined an invitation from Manhattan’s liberals to speak on the topic “Is Science the Enemy of the Church?” It was the “dense ignorance” of the fundamentalists, and “their persistent endeavor to destroy all freedom of thought,” that had led him to the Monkey Trial, he said.

“I would hate to put myself openly in the way of declaring that the church is the enemy of science,” he wrote
Oswald Villard. “Life is so hard that I am satisfied for some time to come, perhaps forever, the great mass of men will turn to some kind of faith to make it easier. I am not at all certain that humanity at large could live without it.”
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F
OR A MOMENT
in 1926 it seemed Darrow might enter another famous case. He had offered advice to
Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists sentenced to die in Massachusetts for murdering guards in a payroll holdup. It seemed a trumped-up charge to liberals, who rallied behind the men. Darrow “is an anarchist, and has for the ruling beast our feelings,” Vanzetti told his defense committee. “There is the probability that the dogs, knowing to have to face a fearless and merciless man of genius, may yield.” But Vanzetti’s legal team was cool to the idea and
persuaded him to drop it because, he told a friend, of the “resentment and hostility that [Darrow’s] personality and his coming from Chicago would arise in the black-gowned hangers.”

Darrow did scheme, with
Fremont Older and
Lincoln Steffens, to win Jim McNamara his freedom. He offered to go to California himself, though, he told Older, “I am not well and my heart is not good.” Steffens was dispatched instead. “I don’t expect to die in the near future,” Darrow reassured Older, “still I know that it won’t be very long and I know of nothing I would rather accomplish than this.”
⁴

Darrow kept an office, and loaned his name to a law firm—Darrow, Smith, Cronson & Smith—organized by several former Chicago prosecutors. He went downtown when he could but bemoaned the “stream of poor crippled useless people on the way to their graves” who crowded the waiting room for help he could no longer give them. “Hell, Mary,” he wrote her, “I am sorry not to be cheerful. I really am cheerful. I am eternally saying things witty and clever and laughing at fate. Still I don’t seem to be in that mood today.”

In August 1927 Darrow returned to court, responding to an alarm raised by Chicago social workers over the impending execution of two black men—Stonewall Clark and
Ernest Holt—who had been sentenced to death for murdering a white grocer during a $4 robbery. The
Defender
praised his “love of humanity,” but the most Darrow could do, in a questionable case, was broker a deal to preserve the duo’s lives. He persuaded Judge
Emanuel Eller to grant them a new trial on the condition that they would plead guilty and accept a sentence of life imprisonment.

A few days later, Darrow and Ruby left for Europe aboard the White Star liner
Majestic
, where he spent the trip reading and playing cards and shuffleboard. In England, he had a pleasant visit with
A. E. Housman. But after Darrow left, the poet sniffed a bit at this American who had brought him pamphlets of his closing arguments. “Sure enough,” Housman told
W. H. Auden, “there were two of my poems—both misquoted.”
⁵
From Britain, the Darrows went to Paris and Geneva. He was chased by bad news from home. California had rejected Jim McNamara’s appeal. Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed. And his brother Everett had died. Everett’s wife, Helen, was bitter that Darrow had not taken the opportunity, when passing through New York, to visit them one last time. “Clarence did not come out,” Helen told Jennie. “Everett was much disappointed, he
had written him telling him he wanted to see him. Too bad he could not have spared an hour from his lawyers and friends.”
⁶

In Belgium, his old pal Whitlock returned home from golf one day and found the Darrows waiting. “He is now 70 and retired after a long life spent in fighting for all the most hopeless causes and standing by the underdogs,” Whitlock told his diary. “I was very much touched by his coming this long way, with much difficulty, to see me.” Darrow still liked to read aloud, and that night chose the work of a black poet, most likely
Langston Hughes, whom Darrow had met at James Johnson’s salon in Harlem. Ruby had the irritating habit of repeating, out loud, the last line of each poem after Darrow finished, “as in a litany,” Whitlock wrote. It nettled Whitlock, though he concluded that she was a “nice, admirable little woman” who looks after Darrow, “with all his whims … devoutly.”
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