Clarence Darrow

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As an American labor lawyer and as a criminal lawyer, Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938) helped sharpen debate about the path of American industrialism and about the treatment of individuals in conflict with the law.

Clarence Darrow was born on April 18, 1857, in Farmdale, Ohio, to Amirus and Emily Darrow. He was introduced early to the life of the dissenter, for his father, after completing studies at a Unitarian seminary, had lost his faith and had become an agnostic living within a community of religious believers. Furthermore, the Darrows were Democrats in a Republican locale.

After completing his secondary schooling near Farmdale, Darrow spent a year at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and another year at the University of Michigan Law School. Like almost all lawyers of the time, he delayed his admission to the bar until after he had read law with a local lawyer; he became a member of the Ohio bar in 1878. For the next 9 years he was a typical small-town lawyer, practicing in Kinsman, Andover, and Ashtabula, Ohio.

Seeking more interesting paths, however, Darrow moved to Chicago in 1887. In Ohio he had been impressed with the book Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims by Judge John Peter Altgeld. Darrow became a close friend of Altgeld, who was elected governor of Illinois in 1892. Altgeld not only raised questions about the process of criminal justice but, when he pardoned several men who had been convicted in the aftermath of the Haymarket riot of 1886, also questioned the treatment of those who were trying to organize workers into unions. Both of these themes played great roles in Darrow's life.

Labor Lawyer

Darrow had begun as a conventional civil lawyer. Even in Chicago his first jobs included appointment as the city's corporation counsel in 1890 and then as general attorney to the Chicago and North Western Railway. In 1894, however, he began what would be his primary career for the next 20 years - labor law. During that year he defended the Socialist Eugene V. Debs against an injunction trying to break the workers' strike Debs was leading against the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. Darrow was unsuccessful, though; the injunction against Debs was finally upheld by the Supreme Court.

In 1906-1907 Darrow successfully defended William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, the leader of the newly formed Industrial Workers of the World, against a charge of conspiring to murder former governor Steunenberg of Idaho. But in 1911 disaster struck as Darrow, defending the McNamara brothers against a charge of blowing up the Los Angeles Times Building, was suddenly faced with his clients' reversing their previous plea of innocence to one of guilt. In turn, Darrow was indicted for misconduct but was not convicted. With this his career as a labor lawyer came to an end.

Criminal Lawyer

Darrow had always been interested in criminal law, in part because of his acceptance of new, psychological theories stressing the role of determinism in human behavior. He viewed criminals as people led by circumstance into committing antisocial acts rather than as free-willing monsters. For this reason he was a bitter opponent of capital punishment, viewing it as a barbaric practice. Now he embarked on a new major career as a criminal lawyer.

Without a doubt Darrow's most famous criminal trial was the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, in which two Chicago boys had wantonly murdered a youngster. For the only time in his career Darrow insisted that his clients plead guilty, then turned his attention to saving them from the death penalty. He was successful in this, partly because he was able to introduce a great deal of psychiatric testimony supporting his theories of the determining influences upon individual acts.

Scopes Trial

During this period Darrow also participated in another great American case, the Scopes trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tenn. The issue was the right of a state legislature to prohibit the teaching of Darwinian theories of evolution in the public schools. Darrow, as an agnostic and as an evolutionist, was doubly contemptuous of the motives behind the fundamentalist law that had been passed, and he sought to defend the young schoolteacher who had raised the issue of evolution in his class. Technically, he was unsuccessful, for Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for his crime. But Darrow's defense, and particularly his cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan (the three-time Democratic candidate for president who spoke for the biblical, antiscientific, fundamentalist side) served to discredit religious fundamentalism and won national attention.

Two books among Darrow's many writings typify his concerns toward the end of his life. In 1922 he wrote Crime: Its Cause and Treatment; in 1929 appeared Infidels and Heretics, coedited with Wallace Rice, in which he presented the case for freethinking. To these two issue-oriented books he added in 1932 his autobiography, The Story of My Life.

Darrow's last important public service was as chairman of a commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to analyze the operation of the National Recovery Administration. He died on March 13, 1938.

Further Reading

The standard popular biography of Darrow is Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941). A more recent work is Miriam Gurko, Clarence Darrow (1965). A specialized, scholarly study is Abe C. Ravitz, Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition (1962), which takes note of Darrow's participation in some of the literary controversies of his time.

(1857-1938), labor and criminal lawyer, reformer, and social critic. Notable for his courtroom skills and his wide-ranging concern over the maladjustments in society, Darrow acted as attorney for the defense in nearly two thousand courtroom battles. He was successful at persuading juries in the years before World War I to consider sympathetically the social context of the bitter struggle then going on between capital and labor. In 1911, however, when he felt compelled to advise two labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, to plead guilty to the bombing of the antiunion Los Angeles Times, the labor movement repudiated him and he had to rebuild his practice.

Darrow then entered into a second career in the field of criminal law. Victories in a series of spectacular trials, many of them desperate cases, made him a national figure, especially his defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in Chicago in 1924. The teenaged defendants had kidnapped and killed a young boy for thrills. By introducing psychiatric evidence, a novelty at the time, and invoking a sense of pity for the inscrutable human predicament, Darrow cast a spell over the courtroom. His plea for mercy, which took over two days to deliver, resulted in a verdict of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Today Darrow is best remembered for his role in the so-called monkey trial held at Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925 in which he defended a schoolteacher, John T. Scopes, who was charged with violating a law banning the teaching of evolution in the public schools. His relentless grilling of his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, on his literal interpretation of the Bible, drew international attention.

Darrow also wrote extensively--short stories and novels, essays on literary themes, and works on crime and penology. He wrote an engaging and pastoral account of his rural birth and early youth at Kinsman in northeast Ohio. The liberal and free-thinking outlook of his poor but intellectually active parents, he wrote, colored his later life.

After a somewhat sketchy education, which included a year at Allegheny College and a year at the University of Michigan Law School, Darrow was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. After a few years of practice in small Ohio towns, he moved to Chicago in 1888, his home for the rest of his life. There he developed associations important to his career and thought with John Peter Altgeld, the governor of Illinois, Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty, and Henry Demarest Lloyd, publicist and pioneer muckraker.

In his later years Darrow became widely known on the lecture platform where he advanced with wit and passionate advocacy his views on such troublesome issues as capital punishment, Prohibition, prison reform, evolution, the relationship of science to society, and the philosophic problem of free will versus determinism. As a convinced materialist, Darrow's outlook on religion was in the skeptical tradition of Robert G. Ingersoll, although he preferred a conversational, colloquial style to the florid rhetoric of the orator. Darrow was a man of brilliant talents and many paradoxes in whom cynicism and compassion, pessimism and a zest for life, were mingled. During his long and colorful career, he served both the poor and the powerful, but never the strong at the expense of the weak.

Bibliography:

Kevin Tierney, Darrow (1979); Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg, Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (1980).

Author:

Gerald Carson

See also Scopes Trial.

A staunch opponent of capital punishment, Darrow exerted his tremendous courtroom skill in behalf of those charged with murder; none of his more than 100 murder trial clients was sentenced to death, although he failed to win a reprieve (1894) for Robert Prendergast, who had already been convicted of murdering Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison before Darrow took his case. Darrow procured, in 1906, the acquittal of William D. Haywood and his associates on the charge of murdering former Governor Steunenberg of Idaho. He offended many socialists (with whom he had been popularly identified) by introducing a plea of guilty in his defense of the McNamara brothers in the Los Angeles Times dynamiting case (1911). Darrow was himself tried for allegedly bribing a juror in the trial, but he was acquitted. In the Chicago "thrill" kidnapping and murder trial (1924) of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb (see Leopold and Loeb) he saved the defendants from execution.

Long an agnostic, Darrow fought fundamentalist religious tenets in the Scopes evolution case (1925; see Scopes trial). Pitted against William Jennings Bryan, he defended without success a schoolteacher charged with violating a Tennessee statute prohibiting teaching that humans are descended from other forms of life. Many felt, nevertheless, that Darrow's examination of Bryan on the witness stand did much to discredit fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Among Darrow's books are an autobiographical novel, Farmington (1904); Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922); and Attorney for the Damned (1957), a collection of his defense summations, ed. by A. Weinberg.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1932); The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow (2007), ed. by E. J. Larson; biographies by I. Stone (1941, repr. 1971), M. Gurko (1965), J. E. Driemen (1992), R. J. Jensen (1992), J. A. Farrell (2011), and A. E. Kersten (2011); D. McRae, The Great Trials of Clarence Darrow (2010).

A lawyer and author of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was known for his defense of unpopular causes and persons, including Eugene V. Debs. Darrow was defense attorney in the Scopes trial.

Lawyer and social reformer Clarence Darrow was the most famous and controversial defense attorney of the early twentieth century. He won unprecedented fame in momentous courtroom battles where he championed the causes of labor, liberal social thought, and the use of scientific criminology. His aggressive legal tactics as well as his outspoken denunciations of industrial capitalism, political corruption, and popular religion aroused animosities throughout his life. But in the end, his compassion for oppressed persons as well as his winsome personality compelled friends and foes alike to honor his unparalleled legal career as attorney for the damned.

Darrow was the master of the courtroom drama. One striking and effective aspect of his legal style was his physical appearance in the courtroom. He wore rumpled suits—often bared to shirtsleeves and suspenders—and let his tousled hair hang into his face. He had a halting walk and slouching stance, and his habits of smoking long cigars slowly during the proceedings and even reading and writing during the prosecution's presentation were endlessly arresting for juries and distracting for opponents.

Darrow was born poor, on April 18, 1857, near Kinsman, Ohio. His mother died when he was fourteen, and his father, an embittered seminary student-turned-undertaker, bore the stigma of the village atheist in an intensely religious rural community. As a child, Darrow hated formal schooling, but with his father's encouragement, he read widely from the extensive family library to educate himself. As his father's intellectual companion, Darrow grew to love reading, to hate being poor, and to willingly embrace unpopular causes. Once, Darrow's father went to observe a public hanging to see what it was like, but left before the moment of execution and reported to Darrow how he felt a terrible shame and guilt for being any part of such a "barbaric practice." This report was not lost on Darrow, who would become a fierce public opponent of the popular practice of capital punishment, defending fifty murderers in his legal career and losing only one such case.

Darrow's entrance into the practice of law was strained by poverty. He left his studies at Allegheny College after one year for lack of money. After three years teaching in a rural one-room schoolhouse and one year at the Michigan University law school, where he again withdrew for lack of tuition, Darrow gained an apprenticeship with a law firm in Youngstown, Ohio. There, he read the law and passed the bar exam in 1878 at the age of twenty-one. Returning home, he married his childhood sweetheart, Jessie Ohl, began his own practice in the rural Ohio towns of Andover and Ashtabula, and fathered his only child, a son. In search of a better income for his family and eager for opportunity, Darrow accepted an invitation from his brother Everett Darrow to move to Chicago—then the commercial and cultural center of the Midwest—in 1887.

Darrow's path from the country to the city was well-worn by millions of others at the end of the nineteenth century. The lure of jobs and opportunities following the Civil War combined with mass migrations from Europe added 31 million residents to U.S. cities between 1860 and 1930. Chicago, which barely existed in 1830, had by 1900 grown to 3 million inhabitants. Along with other large U.S. cities such as New York and Boston, Chicago was unprepared for this overwhelming influx of urban immigrants. The result was poverty, crime, and corruption spawning human misery on a grand scale.

When Darrow moved his hopes and his family to Chicago, the city was in the midst of both a population and an industrial boom. With its being the railroad center of the nation, the meatpacking, lumber, steel, and agricultural industries were rapidly expanding. A devastating fire in 1871 had leveled much of the city and helped inspire new building programs and fresh commercial initiatives. The city had also become a magnet for social reformers, artists, and intellectuals, including Jane Addams, Lincoln Steffens, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, and Theodore Dreiser, who viewed the human suffering of the great city with outrage.

Darrow found Chicago both fascinating and troubling. While he saw opportunity for himself to advance, he was moved by the evident suffering of laboring families, poor people, and those who were imprisoned. His passion for the lower class only increased as he witnessed the economic contrasts of industry and labor. Throughout the city, industrial tycoons were striking it rich off the backs of laborers—often uneducated and poor—who earned poverty wages under hazardous conditions. Similarly, the prisons were filled with poor and broken people who had little means of defending themselves.

Having read the prison reform writings of Judge John P. Altgeld of Illinois, Darrow shortly introduced himself to this social reformer who would one day become governor. He began a mentorship in the law and politics of reform under Altgeld that would last until Altgeld's death. When Darrow became outraged by the heavy sentences laid upon four anarchist defendants in the Haymarket Square bombing of 1887, Altgeld urged him to join the alliance for their amnesty. In turn, Darrow later successfully implored Altgeld as governor to commute their sentences.

In 1888, after being impressed by Darrow's public speaking ability, Mayor DeWitt Cregier, of Chicago, offered him an appointment as a special assessment attorney. Within a year, Darrow rose to chief corporation counsel—becoming the head of the legal department for the entire city of Chicago at age thirty-three. From this vantage, he observed firsthand the plight of the city's working class in industries where labor had little power to organize and government had little power to regulate.

After four years, with his city appointment about to be terminated, Darrow accepted an offer to become chief counsel for the Chicago and Northwestern Railway (CNR), which he had recently defeated in court. He imposed one condition: that he be allowed to continue his outside legal assistance work as long as it did not conflict with his loyalty to the company. Within two years, a decisive conflict was staring Darrow in the face: the Pullman strike of 1894. This bitter dispute pitted the workers of the newly formed American Railway Union (ARU) against the powerful Pullman Company and its railroad industry allies. The conflict was so violent that President Grover Cleveland sent in Army troops to protect the trains.

Darrow resigned his corporate position with CNR despite enticing offers of higher pay. Instead, he took the case of the ARU's national leader Eugene V. Debs, who was charged with violating a strike injunction. Darrow's defense strategy was not to quibble about the violation of an injunction order but to expose the working conditions imposed upon railroad workers by the industry—in this case, the enormously wealthy and ruthless Pullman Company. To do this, Darrow boldly subpoenaed company president George M. Pullman to testify, but the tycoon went into hiding rather than appear. So, after describing the abysmal working conditions of Pullman's railroad workers and their families, he argued fervently that people had a right to strike for just causes, and that inadequate wages and unsafe working conditions were such causes.

Darrow defended Debs in two trials—taking an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court before finally losing and seeing his client sentenced to six months in prison. In this defense of the underdog against the powerful, Darrow had found his calling. In just six years, Darrow had moved from positions of political power and financial security to that of gladiator in the nation's emerging class struggle.

In 1894 Darrow handled his first criminal case in Chicago, defending Eugene Prendergast. Prendergast was a mentally deranged drifter who had murdered Mayor Carter H. Harrison, Sr., of Chicago, then walked to a police station and confessed to the crime. Darrow attempted an insanity defense and failed, and Prendergast was executed. Of the fifty murder defendants Darrow represented in his lifetime, this was the first and last one he lost to execution.

In 1897 Darrow divorced his wife of seventeen years. In 1903 he married Ruby Hamerstrom, a Chicago newspaper journalist. This second marriage for Darrow lasted his lifetime, but produced no children.

In 1907 the former governor of Idaho Frank Stuenenberg was killed by a booby trap bomb on his front gate. Stuenenberg had been a powerful supporter of the mining industry. William ("Big Bill") Haywood, leader of the Western Federation of Miners union, and several others were abducted by Pinkerton agents from other states and brought to Boise, where they were charged with conspiracy to murder. The miners' union hired Darrow for the defense, and he traveled with Ruby to Idaho and assembled a defense team.

The prominence of the individuals involved and the violent nature of the crime drew national attention to the trial. Darrow was able to crack the government's case with painstaking cross-examination of its star witness, the self-confessed perpetrator of the crime, Harry Orchard. Darrow exposed Orchard to be a man bent on personal revenge who had implicated the labor leaders only after being prompted to do so by the prosecutors. Darrow's moving summation in defense of the labor movement—"for the poor, for the weak, for the weary—who, in darkness and despair, have borne the labors of the human race"—drew tears in the courtroom, and Haywood and the others were acquitted.

Thanks to Darrow, labor was again vindicated over opponents in government and industry. But the cost to Darrow was considerable. After the trial, he was broke and in poor health. His legal fees from the union had already been spent, and he suffered from an acute ear infection. When he returned to Chicago, the financial crash of 1907 had wiped out all his savings, and he started back into his law practice.

Darrow reluctantly entered the limelight again in 1911 when he agreed to defend the accused in what newspapers called the crime of the century. At one o'clock in the morning on October 10, 1910, Los Angeles was rocked by two explosions that blew apart the Los Angeles Times Building with over one hundred people inside. Twenty-one people were killed and forty injured in the concussion and the fire that followed. The Times's prominent and antiunion editor, Harrison Gray Otis, managed to get out an edition with the headline "Unionist Bombs Wreck Times."

Under pressure from Otis, the mayor of Los Angeles hired a private detective agency to investigate and abduct labor movement suspects living in Indiana and Michigan and return them to Los Angeles to stand trial. Labor movement members appealed to Darrow, but he resisted, still drained and wary from the Haywood defense. Renowned labor leader Samuel Gompers, then president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), visited Darrow in Chicago and appealed to him to defend labor, the innocent, and due process. Gompers promised in return that a nationwide AFL union war chest would generously compensate his services. Darrow agreed.

By the time Darrow arrived in Los Angeles, the three defendants had already confessed to the crime. Darrow pleaded them guilty in a plea bargain to at least save them from execution. The shock and outrage from labor supporters were devastating. Darrow was jeered by a waiting crowd and shunned by Gompers and other labor leaders. The promised fees evaporated.

Within days, Darrow was charged with attempting to bribe the jury and was brought to trial. Away from home, without funds or allies to make a strong defense, Darrow fell into a depression that lasted through most of the proceedings. But in the closing arguments, he arose to defend himself to the jury with such force and poignancy that he again brought the jury, the audience, the press, and even the judge to tears. When the verdict came, and Darrow was acquitted, the courtroom burst into sustained cheers and embraces. Darrow never again took a major labor case.

Darrow continued to take the unpopular route in his court cases. When the United States entered World War I despite a strong pacifist movement, Darrow managed to offend people on both sides of the war issue by personally supporting the war while professionally defending pacifists who refused to serve.

Darrow's choice of defense in a notorious murder case further outraged popular sentiments. In 1924 two Chicago adolescents from millionaire families—Richard Loeb, age eighteen, and Nathan Leopold, Jr., age nineteen— decided to commit a murder for the thrill of it. Loeb had graduated with honors from the University of Michigan and was on his way to Harvard Law School. Leopold was a Phi Beta Kappa already attending law school. They thought they were clever enough that they would not get caught. Luring a fourteen-year-old friend named Bobby Franks into their car, Loeb killed Franks with a chisel. The two then stuffed his body into the trunk before sending ransom notes to the boy's millionaire family. Two days after the boys had been caught, had been charged, and had confessed, three members of the Loeb family came to Darrow's home in the early morning before he had yet awakened and insisted on making their way to his bedside to beg him to take the case. As a friend of the family, and because of their desperation, Darrow accepted.

Hoping to save the boys from execution, Darrow had his clients plead guilty and then presented expert scientific testimony from fourteen psychiatrists and psychologists. These witnesses contended that the boys suffered from a mental illness that caused them to commit the crime. Loeb and Leopold received life sentences. This verdict was extremely unpopular with the public, for many had called for the death penalty for this unusually grisly murder. Darrow was attacked in the press and threatened in the mail, and the millionaire families who had begged him to save their children balked at paying the agreed-upon legal fees. Darrow, now age sixty-seven, spoke of retiring from legal work unless he could really "have some fun" doing it. The next year, he got his chance.

Intent on stemming the influence of Modernist thinking in the schools, in 1925, the Tennessee legislature passed a law making it illegal to teach anything that contradicted the account of the Creation portrayed in the Bible's book of Genesis. With the help of local citizens and the support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a twenty-four-year-old biology teacher in rural Dayton, a Tennessee native named John T. Scopes, challenged the law by teaching the evolutionary theories of Charles R. Darwin in his high school classroom. When Scopes was arrested and charged with violating the law, William Jennings Bryan, a well-known former representative from Nebraska and presidential candidate, offered his services for the prosecution. At Scopes's insistence, the ACLU recruited the most controversial defense attorney and atheist in the country, Darrow.

For nearly a century, European scholars in linguistics and geology, as well as in Darwin's biology, had contested certain beliefs about the Bible, which left many of the faithful anxious. The Fundamentalists in the Tennessee legislature had attempted one solution to this problem: forbid the teaching of anything in conflict with creationism in the public schools. Since Darrow passionately opposed this in principle and was no friend of religion, he happily took the case.

The trial drew enormous media attention in the form of international newspaper coverage and live nationwide radio broadcast. The popular Henry L. Mencken covered the story and joined other major newspaper reporters in calling it the Monkey Trial. Since the weather was hot and muggy, and the trial had drawn more than two thousand visitors, the judge moved the proceedings outside the courthouse onto a platform built for the occasion. Here, the two masters of law and rhetoric sparred before a stirred crowd and an international audience. The trial was ostensibly to determine whether Scopes had violated the law, which he clearly had purposely done. But the exchanges between Bryan and Darrow quickly revealed deeper issues, such as the constitutional guarantee of free speech and the struggle between Fundamentalist and Modernist interpretations of the Bible.

This time, Darrow's favorite strategies of elevating the crime to a context of higher issues and presenting expert scientific evidence did not work. The presiding judge repeatedly upheld objections to these defense tactics. So, knowing that the local folk were overwhelmingly Fundamentalist and saw Bryan as their champion, Darrow took a masterful gamble and put Bryan himself on the stand as a Bible expert for the defense. In a series of deft and probing questions about the Bible, Darrow managed to so befuddle the champion of Fundamentalism that the crowds were finally laughing with Darrow and at Bryan. To many observers, Bryan and his cause were humiliated.

Although the jury voted to convict, the judge imposed only a nominal fine of $100 on Scopes, who was immediately rehired by the school board. Five days later, after eating a characteristically heavy meal, Bryan died in his sleep. Many believed that the devastating cross-examination by Darrow and Bryan's failure to win a larger judgment against Scopes were the cause of Bryan's death. Darrow responded tersely, "No such thing—he died of a broken belly."

After the Scopes trial, Darrow became a public celebrity once again. He received many invitations to speak and to debate the issue of religion. As he had in the Pullman case, Darrow lost in the courts but seemingly won before a wider audience.

A year later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked Darrow to defend eleven blacks in Detroit who were being charged in the death of a single white during an ugly racial incident. Darrow again, at age sixty-nine, called upon his powerful defense skills to prove that none of the accused had fired the fatal bullet but that all were instead the target of racial prejudice. All charges were dismissed.

In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Darrow, at age seventy-seven, to head a commission to adjust inequities in the law for the National Industrial Recovery Act, a program intended to relieve the Depression. Darrow's work proved successful when the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, and the necessary revisions were made. The same year, Darrow was asked to chair the opening session of the American Inquiry Commission, a citizens' committee to study the darkening events in Germany. He emerged to tell Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, of New York, at lunch that "Herr Hitler is a very dangerous man and should be destroyed."

Darrow died in Chicago in 1938, at the age of eighty-one. He had asked his friend Judge William H. Holly to deliver his eulogy because, as Darrow put it, "he knows everything about me, and has the sense not to tell it." As Darrow's body lay in state in Chicago for two days, thousands from every sector of humanity lined up in a driving rain to say good-bye. The tributes to Darrow were bountiful. He was commended for his courage and compassion; his public service and his private practice; his support for labor, minority groups, poor people, and criminals; and, always, his defense of freedom. Although his popularity rose and fell during his lifetime, Darrow's memory has received the highest accolades. Popular and scholarly biographies as well as theater, cinema, and television dramatizations of his impassioned career and complex life have won for Darrow a legendary stature in U.S. law and history.

Despite wavering public opinion, fickle allies, and powerful opponents, he was an uncommonly skillful and courageous warrior for justice in the courts and in public life. The secret of his courage was revealed in a memorial comment by the eminent attorney Joseph N. Welch: Darrow was "so brave and fearless that he never seemed to realize he was either."

Quotes:

"At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't."

"Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt."

"You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can be free only if I am free."

"You can only be free if I am free."

"He's the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth, Vermont. [On Calvin Coolidge]"

"History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history."

See more famous quotes by Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow ca. 1922
Born	April 18, 1857(1857-04-18) Kinsman Township, Trumbull County, Ohio
Died	March 13, 1938(1938-03-13) (aged 80) Chicago, Illinois
Cause of death	Pulmonary heart disease[1]
Alma mater	Allegheny College, University of Michigan Law School
Occupation	Lawyer

Clarence Seward Darrow (April 18, 1857 – March 13, 1938) was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924) and defending John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925), in which he opposed William Jennings Bryan (statesman, noted orator, and 3-time presidential candidate). Called a "sophisticated country lawyer",^[2] he remains notable for his wit and agnosticism, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians.^[3]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Upbringing 1.2 From corporate lawyer to labor lawyer 1.3 From labor lawyer to criminal lawyer 1.4 Leopold and Loeb 1.5 The Scopes Trial 1.6 Ossian Sweet 1.7 Massie Trial 1.8 Mecca Temple Debate 2 Books by Darrow 2.1 List of books 3 Legacy 3.1 Onscreen 3.2 Onstage 3.3 In publications 3.4 Other 4 References and further reading 5 Notes 6 See also 7 External links

Biography

Upbringing

Clarence Darrow was born in rural northeastern Ohio on April 18, 1857.^[4] He was the son of Amirus Darrow and Emily (Eddy) Darrow. Both the Darrow and the Eddy farms had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution. Clarence's father was an ardent abolitionist and a proud iconoclast and religious freethinker, known in town as the "village infidel." Emily Darrow was an early supporter of female suffrage and a women's rights advocate. Clarence attended Allegheny College and the University of Michigan Law School but did not graduate from either institution. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. The Clarence Darrow Octagon House, which was his childhood home in the small town of Kinsman, Ohio, contains a memorial to him.

From corporate lawyer to labor lawyer

Darrow began his career reading law in Youngstown, Ohio, where he was first admitted to the profession by Judge Alfred W. Mackey. He opened his first practice in Andover, Ohio, and then moved to Ashtabula, where he became involved in Democratic Party politics and served as the town counsel. In 1880 he married Jessie Ohl, and seven years later he moved to Chicago with his wife and young son, Paul. There, he worked for the city government as a lawyer and made a mark for himself speaking at Democratic rallies and other speaking engagements. He was a close friend and protege of Illinois Gov. John Altgeld and helped secure a pardon from the governor for the anarchists who were imprisoned for the Haymarket Square bombing. With Altgeld's help, Darrow became a corporate lawyer for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company, a major Midwestern railroad.^[5] In 1894 Darrow represented Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who was prosecuted by the federal government for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894. Darrow severed his ties with the railroad to represent Debs, making a financial sacrifice. He saved Debs in one trial but could not keep the union leader from being jailed in another.

Also in 1894, Darrow took on the first murder case of his career, defending Patrick Eugene Prendergast, the "mentally deranged drifter" who had confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter H. Harrison, Sr.^[6] Darrow's "insanity defense" failed and Prendergast was executed that same year. Among fifty defenses in murder cases throughout the whole of Darrow's career, the Prendergast case would prove to be the only one resulting in an execution.^[6]

Darrow became one of America's leading labor attorneys. He helped organize the Populist Party in Illinois and then ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1896 but lost to Hugh R. Belknap. In 1897 his marriage ended in divorce. He represented the woodworkers of Wisconsin in a notable case in Oshkosh in 1898 and the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in the great anthracite coal strike of 1902. He flirted with the idea of running for mayor of Chicago in 1903 but ultimately decided against it. That year he married Ruby Hammerstrom, a young Chicago journalist.

From 1906 to 1908, Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone when they were arrested and charged with the 1905 murder of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg. After a series of trials, Haywood and Pettibone were found not guilty and the charges were dropped against Moyer.

The American Federation of Labor then called on Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers, John and James, who were charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building during the bitter struggle over the open shop in Southern California (21 employees had died as a result of the explosion). Darrow came to realize that the McNamara brothers were guilty but worked hard to have them acquitted. With his help, they were portrayed by the AFL as heroes to American workers, who contributed their hard-earned money to a McNamara defense fund. In November 1911, an orchestrated plot was launched by the defense to bribe jurors in the McNamara case.^{[according to whom?]} Darrow was at the scene of one attempted bribery, as one of his investigators was arrested handing money to one of the prospective jurors.^{[according to whom?]} With the case collapsing around him, Darrow convinced the brothers to change their plea to guilty. The plea bargain he helped arrange got them lengthy prison sentences instead of the death penalty, but he was accused by many in organized labor of selling the movement out.

Two months later, Darrow was charged with two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in both cases. He faced two lengthy trials. In the first, defended by Earl Rogers, he was acquitted. Early during the second trial Rogers resigned after a disagreement with Darrow over defense strategy; Darrow served as his own attorney for the remainder of the trial, which ended with a hung jury. A deal was struck in which the D.A. agreed not to retry Darrow if he promised not to practice law again in California.^[7] Darrow's early biographers—Irving Stone and Arthur & Lila Weinberg—asserted that he was not involved in the bribery conspiracy; but more recently Geoffrey Cowan and John A. Farrell, with the help of new evidence, concluded that he almost certainly was.^[8]

From labor lawyer to criminal lawyer

Darrow in 1913

As a consequence of the bribery charges, most labor unions dropped Darrow from their list of preferred attorneys. This effectively put Darrow out of business as a labor lawyer, and he switched to civil and, most notably, criminal cases. "He began taking criminal cases, because he had become convinced that what we are used to describing as 'the criminal-justice system' was a gigantic fraud that ruined real people's lives because they had no representation capable of defending them properly against it."^[4]

Throughout his career, Darrow devoted himself to opposing the death penalty, which he felt to be in conflict with humanitarian progress. In more than 100 cases, Darrow only lost one murder case in Chicago. He became renowned for moving juries and even judges to tears with his eloquence. Darrow had a keen intellect often hidden by his rumpled, unassuming appearance.

A July 23, 1915, article in the Chicago Tribune describes Darrow's effort on behalf of J.H. Fox, an Evanston, Illinois, landlord, to have Mary S. Brazelton committed to an insane asylum against the wishes of her family. Fox alleged that Brazelton owed him rent money, although other residents of Fox's boarding house testified to her sanity.

Leopold and Loeb

In the summer of 1924, Darrow took on the case of Leopold and Loeb, the teenage sons of two wealthy Chicago families who were accused of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy from their stylish Kenwood neighborhood. Nathan Leopold was 19 and Richard Loeb was 18 when they were arrested. Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago about to transfer to Harvard Law School. Loeb was the youngest graduate ever from the University of Michigan. When asked why they committed the crime, Leopold told his captors: "The thing that prompted Dick to want to do this thing and prompted me to want to do this thing was a sort of pure love of excitement... the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different... the satisfaction and the ego of putting something over."

The Chicago newspapers labeled the case the "Trial of the Century"^[9] and Americans around the country wondered what could drive the two young men, blessed with everything their society could offer, to commit such a depraved act.

The killers were arrested after a passing workman spotted the victim's body in an isolated nature preserve near the Indiana border just half a day after it was hidden, before they could collect a $10,000 ransom. Nearby were Leopold's eyeglasses with their distinctive, traceable frames, which he had dropped at the scene.

Leopold and Loeb made full confessions and took police on a grim hunt around Chicago to collect the evidence that would be used against them. The state's attorney told the press that he had a "hanging case" for sure. Darrow stunned the prosecution when he had the killers plead guilty in order to avoid a vengeance-minded jury and place the case before a judge. The trial, then, was actually a long sentencing hearing in which Darrow contended, with the help of expert testimony, that Leopold and Loeb were mentally diseased.

Darrow's closing argument lasted 12 hours. He repeatedly stressed the ages of the "boys" (before the Vietnam War, the age of majority was 21) and noted that "never had there been a case in Chicago where on a plea of guilty a boy under 21 had been sentenced to death." His famous plea was designed to soften the heart of Judge John Caverly, but also to mold public opinion, so that Caverly could follow precedent without too huge an uproar. Darrow succeeded. Caverly sentenced the killers to life plus 99 years. Darrow's closing argument "was something of a popular bestseller, in various editions, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was reissued at the time of Darrow's death."^[4]

The Leopold and Loeb case raised, in a well-publicized trial, Darrow's lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior. The public got an education in psychology and medicine and, because Leopold was an admirer, the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

During the Leopold-Loeb trial, the newspapers claimed that Darrow was presenting a "million dollar defense" for the two wealthy families. Many ordinary Americans were angered at his apparent greed. He had the families issue a statement insisting that there would be no large legal fees and that his fees would be determined by a committee composed of officers from the Chicago Bar Association. After trial, Darrow suggested $200,000 would be reasonable. After lengthy negotiations with the defendants' families, he ended up getting some $70,000 in gross fees, which, after expenses and taxes, netted Darrow $30,000.^[10]

The Scopes Trial

In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial. It has often been called the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a title popularized by author and journalist H.L. Mencken. The trial pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in an American court case that tested the Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925. The act forbade the teaching of "the Evolution Theory" in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee. More broadly, the Butler Act outlawed in state-funded schools (including universities) the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." (The theory of evolution is a scientific explanation for the origin of all living organisms, including humans; it therefore conforms to the latter description.)

During the trial, Darrow requested that Bryan be called to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Over the other prosecutor's objection, Bryan agreed. Popular media at the time portrayed the following exchange as the deciding factor that turned public opinion against Bryan in the trial:

Darrow: "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?"

Bryan: "Yes, sir; I have tried to.... But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy."

Darrow: "Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?"

Bryan: "I believe that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people."

After about two hours, Judge John T. Raulston cut the questioning short and on the following morning ordered that the whole session (which in any case the jury had not witnessed) be expunged from the record, ruling that the testimony had no bearing on whether Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution. Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay the minimum fine of $100.

A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Dayton court on a technicality—not on constitutional grounds, as Darrow had hoped. According to the court, the fine should have been set by the jury, not Raulston. Rather than send the case back for further action, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case. The court commented, "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case."

This event led to a change in public sentiment, and an increased discourse on the subject of faith versus science that still exists in America. It also became popularized in a play based loosely on the trial, Inherit the Wind, which later became a film.

Ossian Sweet

A white mob in Detroit attempted to drive a black family out of the home they had purchased in a white neighborhood. In the struggle, a white man was killed and the eleven blacks in the house were arrested and charged with murder. Dr. Ossian Sweet and three members of his family were brought to trial, and after an initial deadlock, Darrow argued to the all-white jury: "I insist that there is nothing but prejudice in this case; that if it was reversed and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted. They would have been given medals instead...." Following the mistrial of the 11, it was agreed that each of them would be tried individually. Darrow, alongside Thomas Chawke, would first defend Ossian's brother Henry, who had confessed to firing the shot on Garland Street. Henry was found not guilty on grounds of self defense, and the prosecution determined to drop the charges on the remaining 10. The trials were presided over by the Honorable Frank Murphy, who went on to become Governor of Michigan and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.^[11] Darrow's closing statement, which lasted over seven hours, is seen as a landmark in the Civil Rights movement and was included in the book 'Speeches that Changed the World' (given the name 'I Believe in the Law of Love'). Uniquely, the two closing arguments of Clarence Darrow, from the first and second trials, are available and these show how he learned from the first trial and reshaped his remarks.^[12]

Massie Trial

Aged 68, Darrow had already announced his retirement before he volunteered to take part in the Scopes Trial, apart from the Sweet trial later that same year. After those final trials, Darrow retired from full-time practice, emerging only occasionally to undertake cases such as the 1932 Massie Trial in Hawaii.

In his last headline-making case, the Massie Trial, Darrow—devastated by the Great Depression—was hired to come to the defense of Grace Hubbard Fortescue, Edward J. Lord, Deacon Jones, and Thomas Massie, Fortescue's son-in-law, who were accused of murdering Joseph Kahahawai. Kahahawai had been accused, along with four other men, of raping and beating Thalia Massie, Thomas's wife and Fortescue's daughter; the resulting 1931 case ended in a hung jury (though the charges were later dropped and repeated investigation has shown them to be innocent). Enraged, Fortescue and Massie then orchestrated the murder of Kahahawai in order to extract a confession and were caught by police officers while transporting his dead body.

Darrow entered the racially charged atmosphere as the lawyer for the defendants. Darrow reconstructed the case as a justified honor killing. Considered by the New York Times to be one of Darrow's three most compelling trials (along with the Scopes Trial and the Leopold and Loeb case), the case captivated the nation and most of white America strongly supported the honor killing defense. In fact, the final defense arguments were transmitted to the mainland through a special radio hookup. In the end, the jury came back with a unanimous verdict of guilty, but on the lesser crime of manslaughter.^[13] As to Darrow's closing, one juror commented, "[h]e talked to us like a bunch of farmers. That stuff may go over big in the Middle West, but not here."^[14]

Mecca Temple Debate

In January 1931 Darrow had a debate with English writer G. K. Chesterton during the latter's second trip to America. This was held at New York City's Mecca Temple. The topic was "Will the World Return to Religion?". At the end of the debate those in the hall were asked to vote for the man they thought had won the debate. Darrow received 1,022 votes while Chesterton received 2,359 votes. There is no known transcript of what was said except for third party accounts published later on. The earliest of these was that of February 4, 1931, issue of The Nation with an article written by Henry Hazlitt.

Books by Darrow

A volume of Darrow's boyhood reminiscences, entitled "Farmington," was published in Chicago in 1903 by McClurg and Company.

Darrow shared offices with Edgar Lee Masters, who achieved more fame for his poetry, in particular the Spoon River Anthology, than for his advocacy.

The papers of Clarence Darrow are located at the Library of Congress. The Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center of the University of Minnesota Law School has the largest collection of Clarence Darrow material including personal letters to and from Darrow. Many of these letters and other material are available on the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection website.

List of books

• Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
• Persian Pearl
• The Story of My Life
• Farmington
• Resist Not Evil
• Marx vs Tolstoy

Legacy

Today, Clarence Darrow is remembered for his reputation as a fierce litigator who, in many cases, championed the cause of the underdog; because of this, he is generally regarded, for better or worse, as one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers in American history.

Henry Drummond (left), a greatly fictionalized version of Clarence Darrow, as portrayed by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.

Onscreen

• Darrow, a film starring Kevin Spacey and released by American Playhouse in 1991.
• "ALLEGED", starring Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson.

Onstage

• Darrow, a full-length one-man play created after his death, featuring Darrow's reminiscences about his career. Originated by Henry Fonda, many actors, including Leslie Nielsen and David Canary, have since taken on the role of Darrow in this play.
• Inherit the Wind, a play (later adapted to the screen) which is a broadly fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial. Though the authors note that the 1925 trial was "clearly the genesis" of their play, they insist that the characters had "life and language of their own." They also mention that the issues raised in the play "have acquired new dimension and meaning", a possible reference to the political controversies of the 1950s. Still, they finish their foreword by inviting a more universal reading of the play: "It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow."^[15]
• Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials is a play written by Arthur Beer, based on the trials of Ossian and Henry Sweet, and derived from Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice.^[16]
• My Name is Ossian Sweet is a Docu-drama written by Gordon C. Bennett, based on the Sweet trials in which the black family was defended by Darrow against a charge of murder in Detroit 1925. Published (2011) at www.HeartlandPlays.com.

In publications

• Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell was published by Doubleday in June, 2011, and includes a wealth of new material opened to the public in June 2010 by the University of Minnesota Law Library through the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection.
• The Angel of Darkness, Darrow is a main character in the fictional Caleb Carr novel.
• Arc of Justice (Owl Books, 2004), Kevin Boyle's book looks in-depth at the Ossian Sweet trial.
• Clarence Darrow for the Defense, a biography by historical novelist Irving Stone.
• Compulsion (1956), Darrow was the inspiration for the character of Jonathan Wilk in the novel, a thinly fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb case. In 1959, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Orson Welles as Wilk. Welles, whose closing monologue was the longest ever committed to film at that time, shared the Best Actor award with co-stars Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell at that year's Cannes Film Festival.
• The People v. Clarence Darrow (ISBN 978-0-8129-2179-3), Geoffrey Cowan's book is a penetrating analysis of Darrow, both as a lawyer and as a person.

Other

• The Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge is located in Chicago, just south of the Museum of Science & Industry.

References and further reading

• Baatz, Simon. For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (New York: HarperCollins, 2008)
• Blum, Howard, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century, 2008, Crown.^[17]
• Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt & Company, New York: 2004). (National Book Award Winner) ISBN 978-0-8050-7933-3.
• Darrow, Clarence, The Story of My Life, "The Negro in the North" (1932).^[18]
• Farrell, John Aloysius, "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned". Doubleday, New York: 2011. ISBN 0-385-52258-4.
• Hakim, Joy (1995). War, Peace, and All That Jazz. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 44–45. ISBN 0-19-509514-6. 
• Mackey, Judge Alfred W. Clarence Darrow biography
• Montefiore, Simon. Speeches That Changed the World: The Stories and Transcripts of the Moments That Made History (Englewood Cliffs: Quercus, 2007.) (Smith-Davies Publishing in Books, 2006), 224 pages – ISBN 978-1-84724-606-6; ISBN 1-84724-087-9; ISBN 978-1-84724-219-8).
• Morton, Richard Allen, "A Victorian Tragedy: The Strange Deaths of Mayor Carter H. Harrison and Patrick Eugene Pendergast," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, spring 2003. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3945/is_200304/ai_n9171948
• Ossian Sweet Murder Trial Scrapbook, 1925. Scrapbook and photocopy of the Nov. 1925 murder trial of Ossian Sweet. Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University.^[19]
• St. Johns, Adela Rogers: Final Verdict (Doubleday, 1962; biography of Earl Rogers, relating the events of Darrow's trials for jury bribery)
• Stone, Irving, Clarence Darrow For The Defense (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1941).
• Toms, Robert, Speech on the Sweet murder trials upon retirement of the prosecuting attorney in 1960, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University.^[20]
• Vine, Phyllis. One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream. (New York: Amistad, 2005). ISBN 978-0-06-621415-3.
• Weinberg, Arthur, Editor, Attorney for the Damned, "You Can't Live There!" (1957) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). ISBN 978-0-226-13649-3.

Notes

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2009)

1. ^ James Edward Sayer, "Clarence Darrow: Public Advocate", Wright State Univ. (1978), p 2.
2. ^ Linder, Douglas O. (1997). "Who Is Clarence Darrow?", The Clarence Darrow Home Page
3. ^ Hakim, Joy (1995). War, Peace, and All That Jazz. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 44–45. ISBN 0-19-509514-6. 
4. ^ ^{a b c} Riggenbach, Jeff (2011-03-25) Clarence Darrow on Freedom, Justice, and War, Mises Institute
5. ^ Crow, L (June 18, 2006). "Show focuses on Darrow, infamous Mahoning native". The Vindicator: p. D-1. 
6. ^ ^{a b} Clarence Darrow: Biography and Much More from Answers.com at www.answers.com
7. ^ see in Adela Rogers St. Johns: Final Verdict, (Doubleday, 1962) and "Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel" by Arthur and Lila Weinberg.
8. ^ Farrell, John A: "Darrow in the Dock". Smithsonian Magazine, December 2011, Volume 42, Number 8, pp. pp. 98-111.
9. ^ JURIST – The Trial of Leopold and Loeb, Prof. Douglas Linder. Retrieved November 2, 2010.
10. ^ See, A. Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned, pp. 17–18, n. 1 (Simon & Schuster, 1957)); Hulbert papers, Northwestern University.
11. ^ *Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt & Company, New York: 2004) (National Book Award Winner) ISBN 978-0-8050-7933-3.
12. ^ Darrow closing arguments, People vs. Sweet, Famous American Trials, University of Missouri, Kansas City.]
13. ^ David Stannard."The Massie case: Injustice and courage". The Honolulu Advertiser, October 14, 2001.
14. ^ Stannard, David E. (2006) [First published 2005]. Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow's Spectacular Last Case. Penguin Group. p. 382. ISBN 978-0-14-303663-0. 
15. ^ Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind. Bantam, 1955.
16. ^ The Sweet Trials: University of Detroit Mercy
17. ^ NPR: Books We Like by Maureen Corrigan.
18. ^ Project Guttenberg The Story of My Life.
19. ^ Clarke Historical Library manuscript, Scrapbook of Sweet Murder Trial.
20. ^ Clarke Historical Library manuscript, Robert Toms speeches.

See also

• Mildred Seydell

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Clarence Darrow

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Clarence Darrow

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Clarence Darrow

• An excerpt on the McNamara case from "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned."
• leopoldandloeb.com
• Attorney for the Damned – or just Another Damned Attorney?
• The Trial of Bill Haywood – detailed account of the Bill Haywood murder trial.
• Leopold and Loeb trial, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch
• Ossian Haven Sweet American National Biography.
• Scopes trial, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch.
• The Sweet Trials home page, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch.
• Works by Clarence Darrow at Project Gutenberg
• FBI file on Clarence Darrow
• Darrow Family scrapbooks at the Newberry Library
• Mary Field Parton-Clarence Darrow Papers at the Newberry Library

Persondata
Name	Darrow, Clarence
Alternative names
Short description	an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union
Date of birth	April 18, 1857(1857-04-18)
Place of birth	Kinsman Township, Trumbull County, Ohio
Date of death	March 13, 1938(1938-03-13) (aged 80)
Place of death	Chicago, Illinois

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