Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (76 page)

“I am in a predicament right now,” Darrow told
Walter White. “Really it is not so much that I am but Paul is and you know that I think more of him than myself. Anyhow I am obliged if possible to get in some money to save what is left.” Ruby was furious at Darrow and at Paul. Her aged husband had to go out on the road, giving lectures and debating and after picking up a check for the night’s work immediately sending it to his son. She scolded Paul for not realizing “how almost sacred his life savings have been to us two, and how impossible to replace.” Darrow had told her that “he begged you to be careful,” she wrote Paul, “and had been worried and fearful all along and firmly prophesized the disaster … but couldn’t get you to see his attitude.”
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W
HITLOCK WAS IN
Cannes working on a book, and somewhat surprised when the Darrows arrived and announced they would be staying weeks, not days. He liked his walks along the sea with Darrow at first, but railed in his diary about Ruby’s “utter provincial ignorance” and the way she fluttered about her husband, even fixing his food on his plate. Before long, Whitlock tired of Darrow as well. Sick and fretting over money, Darrow was not good company. “I didn’t invite them here or encourage
him to come; they came on their own, but for some odd reason seem to expect me to entertain and amuse them,” Whitlock wrote. “Mrs. D is wholly uninteresting, crude … with no redeeming wit … D. is brilliant, but impossible, and intellectually vain and with all his radicalism, nihilism, atheism and all the rest, the most intolerant … There is something sinister and diabolic about him, something baffling, frustrating and unwholesome.

“He … sneers at everything and has an insatiable appetite for approval and flattery. His manners are those of his rural middle west of his youth. He goes slouching along slovenly and unkempt, his hands in his pockets, spitting now and then and demolishing everything that is, in that soft and rather musical voice of his. He has a taste in literature, though limited to the literature of revolt and pessimism and a sympathy with the poor and outcast, which I like in him, but he has no genuine culture.”

Whitlock was relieved when the Darrows took off for visits to see
H. G. Wells (a free love advocate who was living with a mistress, Whitlock noted disapprovingly) and
Somerset Maugham, and in time Whitlock regretted his ill will. But he couldn’t hide his relief on March 8, 1930, when he saw the Darrows off on their ship home. “The
Saturnia
lay off Cannes all afternoon,” he wrote. “I, from our window, watched her sail away, with relief, because the Darrows were aboard. Darrow has many virtues and is clever but he is
dificil
and trying and it has been a
corvee
to have to see so much of him this winter.”
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D
ARROW WAS CONFRONTED
,
upon arriving home, with his shattered finances. “It has been twenty years at least since I have had to ask anyone for any help and had no idea that I ever should again,” he told White. Darrow went on speaking tours and, in debate, took on some younger opponents—like
G. K. Chesterton—whose wit he could no longer match. He swallowed hard, and wrote Mary and Lem about the loan he had given them. He had secured it with stock in the Southern Pacific Railroad, and wondered “just how much is owed the bank and the rate at which it is being paid and whether you have any difficulty keeping it up,” since he needed to sell some shares for cash. “The truth is I got pretty badly hurt with all the rest in last year’s failure and the disappointments since.”

He reminded them to answer via his next-door neighbor, who had agreed to take mail that Darrow didn’t want Ruby to see. “Poor great Darrow, unafraid of God, of public opinion, of custom of prejudice—brave enough to stand alone—yet cowed before a little insect of a woman,” Mary wrote in her diary.
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Darrow announced, as well, that he would return to the courtroom at the age of seventy-three to defend gangsters
George “Red” Barker and
William “Three-fingered Jack” White. They had been rounded up in Chicago in Judge
John Lyle’s campaign to use the city vagrancy statutes to arrest “public enemies.” Darrow’s partners had taken on several infamous underworld clients in recent years, including
Myles and Klondike O’Donnell,
John “Dingbat” Oberta, and
George “Bugs” Moran. Now he would join them on the gangster payroll.

“I can’t somehow reconcile your representation of these men with your excellent record and their atrocious records,” Lyle scolded Darrow in court.

“If the authorities wish to harass the lawless they should do it legally,” Darrow told him. “There is no such charge in law as a ‘public enemy.’ ”

Darrow also joined the appeals team for the reprehensible
David Stephenson, the grand dragon of the Indiana
Ku Klux Klan. Stephenson had doubled as the state’s political boss in the mid-1920s and was one of Indiana’s most powerful individuals when he was convicted of murdering
Madge Oberholtzer, a twenty-eight-year-old social worker. In her dying declaration, Oberholtzer said she had been drugged, kidnapped, and repeatedly violated, and had taken poison to escape her captivity and disgrace.

“While I have not believed in the Klan, I think that the conviction was absolutely wrong,” Darrow wrote Stephenson. “The ideas that you have apparently stood for are as far away from my views as one can possibly imagine, but I believe in fair play and I have a very strong feeling that you have not had it.” Despite Darrow’s aid, Stephenson’s appeal failed.
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In the spring of 1931, Darrow was invited to participate in his last great civil rights case. On March 25 an Alabama posse chasing a group of black men who had brawled with some white hoboes pulled nine black youths and two white girls, dressed as boys, from a freight train near Scottsboro. It would have been scandalous for
Ruby Bates, seventeen, and
Victoria Price, twenty-one, to admit to riding the rails with black men. They claimed, falsely, that they had been raped. So began the nightmare of the Scottsboro Boys. It would last for almost twenty years.

The black men escaped lynching but were rushed to trial, with incompetent counsel, in less than two weeks. Eight of the nine, all of whom were under the age of twenty, were convicted by all-white juries and condemned to death. There was a mistrial in the case of the final defendant, a thirteen-year-old boy: though the prosecutors had asked only for life imprisonment, seven jurors insisted that he be executed.

At the NAACP, White made the worst call of his career. Despite requests for help from local black leaders, he held back, worried by reports that the defendants might be guilty. His inaction allowed the legal arm of the American Communist Party—the International Labor Defense—to get to Scottsboro first. They signed up the unschooled and desperate African Americans as clients and promised to appeal the verdicts. The ILD called Darrow and asked if he would take the case. He notified White, who was finally moved to act and offered Darrow $5,000 to represent the boys for the NAACP.
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The rivalry between the groups was intense. In December, Darrow and Hays traveled to Birmingham to see if they could forge a common front. In the course of a long night of negotiating that ventured on “bedlam,” the two men agreed to disassociate themselves from the NAACP and work with the ILD as private attorneys, under no organization’s flag. But the communists would not bend. Darrow and Hays were welcome to join the communist team, and take communist direction, or go home. They went home.

The ILD would score some successes away from Alabama, but its communist ideology alienated the state and helped doom the defendants to years in prison. “The trouble with these fellows is that they think only of the cause,” Darrow told Erskine Wood in a letter. “They may be right, but no lawyer can accept this doctrine. The client, of course, comes first.”
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It was a dismal experience for Darrow. Until he could explain what happened in Birmingham, good friends accused him of deserting the defendants. He then faced the humiliating task of writing to his friends at the NAACP and begging them for time to pay back $1,000 that he owed them from his unearned retainer.

“The truth is that before these terrible times I had about $300,000, in
what seemed perfectly good securities. They are not now worth more than ten and are not paying dividends,” Darrow told White, in what the latter called a “most pathetic” plea. “Paul had about the same but he owed quite a large amount and for a year I have been giving him every cent I could to save what he had. The debt is now reduced to about $10,000 but the value of his stock has been reduced much more.…

“I had intended returning $1,000, but it looks from here as if I was broke entirely,” Darrow wrote White. It took him until the summer of 1933 to refund all the money.
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Chapter 21

CLOSING

The old ghosts creep out of the dimming past.

J
ust before one a.m. on September 13, 1931, on the island of Oahu in the territory of Hawaii, a car full of late-night partygoers were startled to see an intoxicated young woman step out into the glare of their headlights on a desolate stretch of Ala Moana Road. She waved them to a stop. “Are you white people? Thank God,” said
Thalia Massie. “Please take me back to my husband.”

Thalia’s face was badly swollen, as if she had been beaten. She told the Good Samaritans that she had left a party at a Waikiki inn and, as she walked along the sidewalk toward the beach, was grabbed by a group of Hawaiian men, struck in the face when she struggled, and dumped in a clearing on the side of the road. A lady in the car asked the obvious question, but tactfully. Had the abductors hurt Thalia in any other way? “No,” she said.

It was after Thalia Massie got home and was reunited with her husband that she declared she was raped. He was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and the news moved quickly through the great base at Pearl Harbor. The rumors were lurid, and untrue. “They had violated her in every respect and … orifice,” one sailor recalled. “They kicked her and broke her pelvis and they bit the nipple practically off one of her breasts … They broke her nose. Blackened both of her eyes, of course. On her face was a perfect imprint of a rubber heel, where they stomped on her.”
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The navy and the Hawaiians had an uneasy relationship, dating back to America’s seizure of the islands in the 1890s. And then there was this: Thalia was white, and her alleged ravagers were brown. Admiral
Yates Stirling, the southern-born commandant in Hawaii, was informed that the wife of one of his officers had been gang-raped by “dark-skinned … half-breed hoodlums.” He resisted his initial impulse, which was “to seize the brutes and string them up on trees.”

Thalia was twenty years old. Her parents were
Granville Roland Fortescue, a cousin of Teddy Roosevelt, and
Grace Bell Fortescue, a doyenne of Washington, D.C., society. Thalia had been but sixteen when she married
Tommie Massie, a Kentucky-born Naval Academy graduate about to join the fleet. Her wedding photograph showed a doll-like innocent with large eyes and dark blond hair. When five Hawaiians were arrested and charged with Thalia’s rape, the news sent navy officials, members of Congress, and many of their constituents into an ugly fury. The islands were portrayed as a steamy hell where brown savages preyed upon the wives and daughters of American servicemen. Naval officials threatened to pull the fleet from Pearl Harbor, a move that would devastate the local economy. In Washington, Admiral
William Pratt, the chief of naval operations, declared that indolent Hawaiian officials had sanctioned a plague of sexual assaults on white women—forty was the fanciful number that he cited.
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