Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (75 page)

The Darrows returned to America in October. He went promptly to Cincinnati to testify as a character witness for
George Remus, the “King of the Bootleggers,” who was on trial for killing his wife. Remus had practiced law in Chicago for years before cheating Prohibition had made him a millionaire. He claimed he shot his wife after he had been cuckolded by a federal agent and sobbed when a witness told the jurors that the late Mrs. Remus had a murder contract on her husband’s life. The jury took nineteen minutes to find him not guilty, by reason of temporary insanity. “American justice! I thank you!” he shouted.

Back in Chicago, Darrow stirred a ruckus when he told a largely Jewish audience that the concept of a chosen people, and the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine, was bunk. “There are no such thing as races,” Darrow said. “There is a difference caused by climate [or] long living in particular localities, but [humans] are all made alike.”
Zionism was an “absurd enterprise,” said Darrow. The Middle East was a dry and barren land. “No sane person would ever think of going to Palestine, except for religion. It has been the home of myth … and fable and sleight-of-hand ever since we knew it.…

“I love idealism,” said Darrow. “I am something of a dreamer myself, but there are some things that are not worth dreaming about.” He described his own visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where he saw a young man “with the idealism that people like myself always recognize—the far-off look of the dreamer who is thinking of something beyond the world and of some justice somewhere, sometime.

“I saw him beating his fist and his head against a wailing wall,” said Darrow, “wailing for the lost Jerusalem, wailing for lost Zion, wailing for the glory and grandeur that once was there, wailing for the past, like everyone else, for the past to come back out of the dark and the dawn, and it never comes, and it never can.”
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Darrow saw Mary twice that fall. On one visit she welcomed Darrow, Steffens, and others to dinner, and resented her role as housekeeper and cook, waiting on the gentlemen. “Lions are hard to entertain,” she told her diary. “They get used to homage.” A second visit, a week later, went better. She had Darrow to herself at dinner and accompanied him to a speaking engagement in Brooklyn, holding his hand in the backseat of the car.
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D
ARROW RETURNED TO
New York in December, but not to hold hands. The fascist
Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy, and his success roiled the Italian American community. After a series of confrontations in the spring of 1927, two American fascists from the Bronx were assassinated. Mussolini himself sent flowers to their funeral, and the bodies were brought to Italy, placed in silver caskets, and given a state burial. In July, the police in New York charged two men—Donato Carillo and
Calogero Greco—with the murders.

The Left rallied behind the defendants, and Darrow and Hays led the defense.
Alexander Rocco, a comrade of the victims, claimed to have seen Carillo and Greco join in the killing. But Darrow got Rocco to admit that the description of the killer he originally gave police did not fit either of the defendants.
Luigi Alfano, a witness who was not affiliated with either side, declined—despite furious efforts by the prosecutors—to identify the defendants. He didn’t want the conviction of innocent men on his conscience, he told the court. And a third man, under Darrow’s questioning, admitted that he had been working as a fascist spy.

“Darrow rendered each of them useless in a few hours of cross-examination,” one newsman wrote. Darrow’s own chief witness was a Mussolini sympathizer who had split from the dead men’s organization, the Fascist League of North America. He had seen the attack up close and emphatically denied that Carillo and Greco were the killers. The defendants testified on their own behalf, and had alibi witnesses placing them at their homes in Brooklyn.

The New York press was delighted to have Darrow working a sensational murder case. “Deep furrows have been cut by time in Darrow’s majestic face,” one feature writer wrote. “His hair looks as if he had it cut twice a year, and then with a scythe. His pants are never pressed.…

“But Darrow would be a majestic figure no matter how he dressed. He towers over six feet. His head sticks forward, always in sort of an onward rush at his adversary. His broad, square shoulders know how to shrug with finest sarcasm.…

“Everything is natural, unaffected and perfectly timed … The only waste motion in Darrow’s technique is an occasional habit of scratching himself behind the ear,” the story said. “Now and then he has been known to scratch his head. But this is a Will Rogers head scratch, which has its definite effect upon the judge, jury and audience. He scratches his head in such a way as to bring out more clearly, more sarcastically, a certain bit of cross-examination. The scratch behind the ear, however, apparently has no purpose whatsoever.”

In his closing address, Darrow attacked Mussolini’s rule. “Fascism was born in bloodshed,” Darrow said. “Of course these defendants hate the regime in Italy, as all men do, and they had the courage to say so.”

The jury deliberated eight hours and found Carillo and Greco innocent. The judge praised the verdict. After the holidays, Darrow was the guest at a “victory luncheon.” He had two reasons for taking the case, he said. “The first reason is that I detest Mussolini and everything he stands for,” said Darrow. “The second was the example of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, where I felt that prejudice, passion and feeling were largely responsible for the verdict. I didn’t want to see it happen again.” He had been promised $10,000, but agreed to accept $1,000 from the defense committee. “He received their love, if not their fee,” said Mary, who was his escort.
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Darrow then left for Vermont to pay off a twenty-year-old debt. When Paul was a student at Dartmouth College he had lost control of a horse, which ran down and killed a five-year-old boy. Paul had written to the distraught mother, at the time, pledging to do anything to ease her sorrow. In 1927, after her nephew
John Winters was condemned to death for murder, she approached Darrow, who was giving a lecture at Dartmouth, and told him of Paul’s promise.

“One of the boys came to me and told me the lady wanted to see me
and told me what it was all about. I told the boy that she must be crazy, that no such thing could have happened,” Darrow wrote his son. “She came in and showed me your letter (it was a very nice letter) and said that you were in no way to blame. I am sorry that this has bothered you all these years.…

“It is very doubtful if anything can be done,” Darrow told Paul, but he scheduled an appearance before the
Vermont Supreme Court. The courtroom and the hallways outside were crowded with lawyers and local residents hoping to see him. Darrow asked why a key witness had taken several days to identify Winters as the killer. He challenged rulings of the trial judge, who had allowed the jury to see a staged rearrangement of furniture at the crime scene but excluded evidence that the blood found on the defendant’s clothing may have been his own. “Blood is an important factor in a murder case,” said Darrow. “I don’t know what the jury would have done with the evidence. But it had a right to it.” The justices agreed, spared the defendant’s life, and granted him a new trial. Winters then pled guilty to second-degree murder and went to prison for twenty years.
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Darrow spent most of 1928 on a ten-month speaking tour. He mixed his usual debates and lectures with appearances to benefit the NAACP and, in the fall, the Democratic presidential candidate,
Al Smith.
¹²
In May, he mixed business with sentiment and returned to Ohio to represent a notorious local bootlegger,
James Munsene, who was on trial for attempting to bribe the Trumbull County sheriff. Munsene was an Italian immigrant who had settled in Warren and made his way as a grocer and nightclub owner. He tracked Darrow down when Darrow was visiting Kinsman and persuaded him to take the case. It was Munsene’s third trial on the charge: the first two had ended in convictions but were overturned on appeal.

The trial was conducted in the Ashtabula County seat, in Jefferson, where Darrow had practiced law as a young man. It was the first time, he told the local papers, he had tried a case with women on the jury. One potential juror, a member in good standing of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, chastised the great infidel as he questioned her. She was excused.

Darrow quizzed witnesses and raised many questions about the sheriff’s warm relationship with the
Ku Klux Klan, which was active in northeast

Ohio and didn’t much like Italian immigrants. After a weeklong trial the jury was deadlocked. Darrow returned in 1929 and defended Munsene at his fourth trial. That jury was deadlocked as well, and another mistrial declared. Finally, in 1930, Darrow persuaded Munsene to plead guilty and pay a fine. Munsene went on to fame as a racketeer and nightclub owner and was shot to death by gunmen in 1941.
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D
ARROW WAS FEELING
better than he had for months. That summer he roamed New England and the Dakotas, seeing sights and making speeches. “Clarence retires somewhat after the fashion of a fly that can’t really stay away from the fly-paper long,” Ruby wrote Dr. Gerson. “I have caught the knack of care-taker and general proxy for many a step and stretch and strain that saves taxing his none-too-fit heart—alas.”

Ruby “watches over Clarence, day and night, like a baby, and Clarence delights in it,” the critic
George Nathan wrote. “She answers all his telephone calls, makes or breaks all his appointments, writes and answers three-fourths of his letters, lifts him out of taxicabs (when the occasion demands), tells him when his socks are falling down, pours his and his friends’ drinks for him, answers any possibly embarrassing questions that interviewers may put to him, tells him what he should eat and if it tastes good to him.…

“Without Ruby, he would be completely lost—and he knows it,” Nathan wrote. “She tells him several times a day that he is the greatest and finest and most adorable man she has ever known and that she loves him to death.”

Hoover whipped Smith in the November election, which Darrow blamed, in part, on women voters who had gone against the “wet” candidate. “To any woman he is the best, the most helpful, the most understanding friend. But the collective woman! Here he lets emotion color his views,” said Mary, after listening to one of Darrow’s tirades. “Against the collective woman he rages as he would like to against the little piss ant wife whose pettiness and jealousies have galled him.”

Yet when feminist
Margaret Sanger was persecuted for her advocacy of sex education and birth control, Darrow spoke at a rally on her behalf in Boston in 1929. She arrived with a gag around her mouth and Harvard
historian
Arthur Schlesinger read her speech. The next day Darrow was in court, as a witness, speaking in defense of
Theodore Dreiser, who had been charged with violating obscenity laws when writing
An American Tragedy
. The jury found Dreiser guilty.

“The powers of reaction and despotism never sleep,” Darrow told
Roger Baldwin. “We have to be very watchful.”
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I
N
J
UNE
1929
the Darrows were off to Europe once again. They went to Paris and to Germany, where Darrow was examined by heart specialists. They took a motor tour of Wales and Scotland and the English countryside. From Montreux, in Switzerland, Darrow wrote his grandchildren in the nonsense style he liked to use.

“Eye have bin thinking how lucky it waz that Eye got U to kum to Chicago so I woodent be so far away from U when U kum. Eye dident think about kumming to Europe but now I am 4 thosand miles aweigh but if U haddent kame to Chicago eye would now bee 5 thousand miles awa and what wood we have dun then. You kan sea yourself.” He signed it “Ur Grand Dad.”

Darrow seemed set in retirement. His investment in the Colorado gas company, with Paul’s sweat equity, left them with small fortunes when they sold the business in 1928. Paul moved back to Chicago. Darrow loaned $8,000 to Mary and Lem (without telling Ruby); helped fund treatments for two friends suffering from cancer; and wrote to the ACLU and the NAACP to announce that he was adding them as beneficiaries in his will. “Do you need any money?” he asked
W. C. Curtis, after hearing the news that the zoologist’s son had contracted polio.

Darrow had always liked to speculate—railroads, copper companies, banks, gold mines, and Latin American stocks were among his favorites—even though he often took big losses. “Here is the kind of damn fool I have been,” he had written Paul after a previous catastrophe. He had invested $10,000 on a tip “from a friend of mine who knows,” who “had word direct from Guggenheim who is a relative about the supposed copper merger.” The copper stocks “went up a minute, then went down fast” and Darrow was stuck scurrying for cash to cover margin calls.

“We are not very good speculators, and had better go slow in the stock
business,” Darrow told Paul. Now “I am going to quit forever,” he vowed. “I think we both should and this time I will stay sworn off.”

Of course, he did not. But he was wise enough in the bull market of 1929 to see what was going to happen. “Things can’t keep going up forever,” he warned Paul in August. “I don’t like the look of things. All stocks are far too high,” he told his son in September, and “if there are big drops you might get caught very badly.” In early October he wrote Paul again: “Everybody is crazy and most of them will lose their money.”

Paul assured his father that he was acting responsibly. And even after the stock market took its first great plunge, Darrow and Ruby remained in Europe. In their absence, Paul tried to recoup his losses by buying what he reckoned were bargains, only to keep losing as the economy cratered. Darrow’s savings slipped from $300,000 before the crash to $125,000 afterward—and that he had to give to Paul, who was deep in debt and struggling to meet his margin calls and interest payments. “Use all I have,” he told his son.