Clarence Darrow

Darrow spent the first half of his working life on the payroll of the interests he spent the second half fighting. He was born in Farmdale, Ohio, in 1857 and raised a few miles away in Kinsman, the son of a cabinetmaker and coffin-maker whom the town called its village infidel. He managed one year at Allegheny College and one at Michigan law school, graduated from neither, read law in an office instead, and passed the Ohio bar in 1878. Chicago came next, then the city law department, then in 1891 a salaried post as counsel to the Chicago and North Western Railway. In 1894 he quit it to defend Eugene Debs over the Pullman strike. The move was deliberate.

This roster is full of judges and justices, men who decide. Darrow argued. For 40 years he took the cases nobody else would, and argued in nearly all of them that the state should not kill his client. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had confessed to murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924. Darrow pleaded them guilty to keep the case away from a jury, then spent 12 hours before Judge John Caverly arguing that their acts followed from inheritance and circumstance. They got life. It is among the most consequential death-penalty arguments ever made in an American courtroom.

The part that has never been cleanly resolved began in November 1911. Defending the McNamara brothers for the bombing of the Los Angeles Times, Darrow watched his own investigator arrested for handing 4,000 dollars to a prospective juror on a street corner near his office. California tried him twice for jury bribery. The first jury acquitted him, the second hung, and the district attorney dropped the matter in exchange for a promise that Darrow would never practice law in the state again. His early biographers insisted he was innocent. Geoffrey Cowan and John Farrell, working from evidence found later, concluded he almost certainly was not. Organized labor dropped him either way, which is how the labor lawyer became a criminal one. He was chronically short of money and openly agnostic, and both facts followed him into court.

What most people know about Darrow is a play. Inherit the Wind alters the Scopes trial substantially. The real one he lost: John Scopes was convicted and fined 100 dollars, and the Tennessee Supreme Court voided the verdict in 1927 on a technicality, not the constitutional ground Darrow wanted. His least-known case has risen fastest. In Detroit in 1925 and 1926 he defended Ossian Sweet and his family for firing on a white mob outside their house, and won. Kevin Boyle's account of it took the National Book Award in 2004. In 2017 Dayton, Tennessee, put a statue of Darrow on the courthouse lawn, a few feet from the Bryan statue that had stood there alone since 2005.

Clarence Darrow's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Defense of Eugene V. Debs case
  He resigned as railroad counsel to take it 1894
• Defense of Big Bill Haywood case
  Acquitted in Boise of conspiring to murder a former Idaho governor 1907
• Crime: Its Cause and Treatment book
  The determinist case against punishment, set out in full 1922
• Illinois v. Leopold and Loeb case
  A 12-hour plea against hanging, delivered to a judge rather than a jury 1924
• State of Tennessee v. Scopes case
  Lost at trial, voided on appeal in 1927 on a technicality 1925
• The Sweet trials case
  An acquittal for the Sweet household from an all-white Detroit jury 1926

• April 18, 1857 aged 0 Born in Farmdale, Ohio The family moved to Kinsman when he was seven, into an octagonal house now on the National Register.
• 1891 aged ~34 Takes a salaried post as counsel to the Chicago and North Western Railway He had come up through Chicago politics and the city law department.
• 1894 aged ~37 Resigns the railroad job to defend Eugene V. Debs after the Pullman strike He saved Debs in one prosecution and could not keep him out of jail in the other.
• 1907 aged ~50 Wins an acquittal for Big Bill Haywood in Boise Haywood was charged with conspiring to murder former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg.
• December 1, 1911 aged 54 The McNamara brothers plead guilty in Los Angeles Days earlier his own investigator had been caught paying a prospective juror. Darrow was tried twice for jury bribery in 1912 — acquitted once, hung jury once, charges then dropped.
• August 22, 1924 aged 67 Begins a 12-hour plea for the lives of Leopold and Loeb Delivered over three days to Judge John Caverly, who sentenced them to life plus 99 years.
• July 20, 1925 aged 68 Questions William Jennings Bryan on the Bible at Dayton The judge struck the testimony the next morning. Scopes was convicted and fined 100 dollars.
• April 19, 1926 aged 69 The second Sweet trial opens in Detroit Henry Sweet was acquitted and the prosecutor dropped the charges against the remaining defendants.
• March 13, 1938 aged 80 Dies at his Chicago home of pulmonary heart disease

• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. defended
• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. cross-examined
• H.L. Mencken 1880–1956
  Satirist and cultural critic whose biting prose defined American journalism in the early 20th century. covered by
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. allied with