Chicago—young women in scandalous short-skirted costumes or even “Turkish trousers”—singing out the “Marseillaise” and heckling actors portraying Uncle Sam, the czar, and his executioners. Darrow traveled to Washington and submitted a long brief to the State Department. On January 26, as one of the Roosevelt administration’s final actions, Secretary of State Elihu Root announced that Rudowitz would be freed.9
IT WAS AROUND this time—in the latter part of 1908 or early 1909—that the fifty-one-year-old Darrow met the thirty-year-old Mary Field. They were introduced at a protest rally. It may have been a Rudowitz meeting; in later years, she could not remember. (“Somebody was jailed, or somebody was striking or somebody wanted higher wages.”) After Darrow finished his speech, his old Desplaines Street neighbor Helen Todd brought them together.
Todd was working with the Elm Street settlement house, trying to save young David Anderson from the gallows. She prevailed on Darrow to take the case, and he argued that the state should not be executing a nineteen-year-old who, even if guilty of shooting a policeman, had been represented by a disbarred lawyer. Days before the hanging, the governor and the parole board heard Darrow’s plea, and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Mary was a veteran of the settlement world, a social worker with literary ambitions and socialistic leanings. She was spirited, clever, idealistic, and pretty—just the kind of independent “new woman” to whom Darrow was drawn. Darrow cheated on his “silly little” wife, and had “many affairs,” Mary’s sister Sara recalled. “But always his … love affairs were with intellectual women.”
In a letter to a friend, Columbia University professor Randolph Bourne described the “new woman” of the era as if he were writing about Mary. “They are all social workers, or magazine writers in a small way. They are decidedly emancipated and advanced, and … thoroughly healthy and zestful,” he said. “They shock you constantly … They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, and innocence and self-reliance, which absolutely belies everything you will read in the story-books or any other description of womankind … They enjoy the adventure of life; the full, reliant audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new woman isn’t to be a very splendid sort of person.”
Mary was one of three daughters of a rigid Baptist father and a devout Quaker mother. The girls inherited their mother’s gentle idealism and their father’s will. Mary defied his order that she attend a small religious college, borrowed money, and enrolled at the University of Michigan—a stunning act of independence for a young woman in the 1890s. He banished her from their home.10
Like Darrow, Mary worked as a teacher for a time, in a one-room school in rural Michigan. After hearing Debs speak one night, she applied to Hull House, where Addams passed her name to Graham Taylor at the Chicago Commons. There, she gave English classes, and taught parenting to immigrant mothers and helped deliver babies. “I came to the Commons in a glow of enthusiasm for service among the plain people,” she recalled. “I was so happy.” She thought Addams was “very wise,” but Saint Jane did not return her regard—she viewed Mary as saucy and irreverent.
Mary had several suitors in Chicago, including a Russian diplomat, a police inspector who presented her with the comb of a notorious murderess, and a wealthy young man who gave her a set of pearl-handled golf clubs and an engagement ring. She called off the marriage when, in an argument at a party, he slapped a cocktail from her hands; it reminded her of her father’s cruelty. Another affair ended ruinously when her lover—a black-haired Irish newspaperman who lived at the Commons and took her to anarchist lectures—disclosed he was betrothed to another woman. Mary had “peaks of ecstasy and elation” that could be followed by “descents into the valley of despondency,” her sister Sara said.
Mary’s breakup with the journalist helped feed a disillusionment with settlement life. “I grew to doubt everything,” she wrote Taylor. Charity work seemed but a palliative, insufficient without greater social change. She feared that the “good is the enemy of the best.” Taylor hoped a move would do Mary good, and she was named co-director of the Maxwell Street Settlement House, in a neighborhood of impoverished Jewish immigrants known as “Little Russia.” There, in the spring of 1908, she gained some notoriety when Lazarus Averbuch, a student in her English class, was shot five times on the doorstep