Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,11

coffins, and cupboards, and installed his wife and children in a strange, octagonal home that sang of nonconformity.11

KINSMAN WAS ONE of the thousands of such midwestern towns: a homogeneous community of several hundred souls, a dusty village square, and some tall shade trees on the banks of a shallow river—the Pymatuning, in this case—that supplied its boys with the requisite fishing holes and a sandy bend for swimming. It had woods and fields to roam and hills to coast, a graveyard with an iron gate, and a Presbyterian church with a tall white steeple that commanded the skyline like the spires of New England.

“It would be hard to make a town better fitted for boys,” Darrow remembered. He and his brothers and their friends ran barefoot in all but the coldest months, playing games like fox and geese, or skin the cat. They clapped gunpowder between the blacksmith’s anvils for the required salutes on Independence Day, went skating when the ponds and creeks froze, and plucked tiny gifts from Christmas trees lit by wax candles at church. They walked to the local schoolhouse with dinner pails of lunch and pie, and were generally tardy because, as Darrow recalled, “there were always birds in the trees and stones in the road and no child ever knew any pain except his own.”

Clarence had a sloppy demeanor, with a lock of lanky hair that invariably fell upon his forehead, and a lazy, easygoing personality. One prissy classmate remembered turning in her seat and gasping at his arithmetic: barely legible and blotted with ink. “I never seemed able to finish any work that I began; some more alluring prospect ever beckoned me,” Darrow would confess. He was a dedicated whittler, aimlessly shaving sticks until “it became as mechanical as breathing.” A favorite book was The Story of a Bad Boy, a tale of mischievous youth. As he grew older, he became devoted to the adventure novels of Thomas Mayne Reid and Frederick Marryat. One of Kinsman’s most “alluring prospects” was baseball, a sport that acquired its modern rules and format at midcentury, caught the popular imagination, and swept across the land. “I once thought that when the time should come that I could no longer play ball there would be nothing left in life,” Darrow said. Skills and equipment were rudimentary; scores of forty runs were not uncommon. Darrow was sturdy and broad-shouldered as he reached adolescence: a good-enough first baseman, and good-enough-looking, his sister Jennie recalled, to acquire the attention of Kinsman’s girls.

The Darrows’ eight-sided home, a relic of an eighteenth-century architectural fad, was made of chestnut beams and concrete, with large rooms and closets and a wraparound veranda. Clarence and three brothers shared two beds in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Downstairs was a kitchen, a parlor, and his father’s study, lit at night by kerosene lamps. The yard was sheltered by a towering elm, and across the street was a tin shop whose proprietor, Cliff Fitch, doubled as a justice of the peace. Nearby was Lorenzo Roberts, the blacksmith who knew some law, and Collin’s grocery, where, as a boy, Darrow took a nickel he’d received for Christmas, mumbled a request for almonds—a treat he’d heard of but never tasted—and was sold a small bag of alum. He went home with puckered lips and told his mother that he could not understand why people liked the stuff.12

Its Puritan roots made Kinsman a “narrow and smug community,” Darrow remembered. Material success was seen as proof of character and not—as was often the case—of avarice, or luck, or intrigue. Conformity was a smothering virtue. Clarence preferred the approach of some Darrow relatives who never amounted to much of anything, but seemed to have a good time doing so. “I had an uncle or two—not very prominent,” he would recall. “They were engaged largely in fiddling and drinking whiskey, which is not a bad way to kill time while we are here.” To their children, Amirus and Emily were distant and demanding. “They were New England people, raised in the Puritan school of life … demonstrations of affection were signs of weakness rather than of love,” Darrow remembered.13

THE YEARS OF Darrow’s upbringing were a volatile era in American government, and Amirus’s interests ensured that the household was immersed in the turmoil. Jefferson and other members of the Revolutionary generation were still living when Amirus was born, but the nation had already begun its transformation from Arcadian domain to commercial giant. The pace of change,