is one thing worth defending.”
The commissioners wanted to like Darrow and were troubled by his general hopelessness. “There is no moral purpose in the universe that we can see,” Darrow told them. “The righteous man suffers the same as the unrighteous. The good is crucified as often as the evil, and evil triumphs as often as the good.”
“Is it not better to look at the doughnut than the hole?” one asked of him.
“We differ in our temperaments,” Darrow admitted. “My emotions are quickly reached and my sympathy is quickly touched, and I have a lot of imagination—which has caused me a lot of trouble.”12
HIS ORDEAL IN California had left deep furrows. Privately, Darrow was struggling. Life was just a weary journey to “death and annihilation,” he wrote Mary, and the wiser human beings found their own brand of “dope—intellectual, spiritual or physical”—with which to endure. “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right, the dope fiends of all kinds are right,” he wrote. “For some of us the dope must be good and strong and shot into the arm.”
He had been reading the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose theories he stirred into his Spencer and Jefferson, the fading influence of Tolstoy, and what he was learning about genetics, sociology, and human behavior from a group of scientists, mostly from the University of Chicago, whose gatherings he dubbed “Biology Class.” They met to discuss books and papers, listen to speakers, and keep abreast of new discoveries. “Nietzsche is … influencing me against the rabble with its cruelty, its littleness, its prejudices, its hatred, its stupidity,” he wrote Mary.
In June 1914 the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by a Bosnian gunman in Sarajevo, triggering events that brought Europe to war. Before it was over, the Great War would claim the lives of 14 million people—a human catastrophe beyond conception for those who lived though it. It put an end to the Good Years, as they were called, when the general glow of prosperity and good feelings was interrupted only by spectacular disasters like the San Francisco earthquake, or the sinking of the Titanic. Now people grew glum as the stock market crashed and the economy fell into recession. Darrow was ahead of his countrymen in exhibiting feelings of dread and despair.
In October 1914, Darrow delivered a lecture on war to the Society of Rationalism at the Germania Theatre in Chicago and conveyed his grim perspective. The dreamers who had brought such optimism to the era before the war had been revealed as frauds, Darrow said. The German socialist who had called his French counterpart “comrade” would “run a dagger into him” now, he said. “All the theories have fallen down—religion, socialism, trade-unionism, capitalism, education—every theory has been swept away.”
The “small feelings” of life are “swallowed up in a strong emotion,” Darrow said. “Men are not kept alive by intellect—they are kept alive by the will to live, the will to power, the deep instincts and emotions.…
“We feel sorry for the poor peasant that dies on the field of battle in Europe … seized by strong emotion, goes into a battle, fighting like a demon, and dies,” said Darrow. But “if he had not gone to war, he would have lived fifty years in cold, in rags, in hunger, in toil and suffering, and brought forth a dozen others to live the same kind of life that he had lived.
“Did he win, or did he lose, by having that one great emotion which meant his death?”
Darrow had come a long way from Resist Not Evil, in which he had argued that man “with his higher intellect and better developed moral being is … susceptible to kindness and love.” The Otises and McNamaras of the world could do that to a man.13
It was embryonic philosophy; Darrow was a synthesizer, who tended to think things out as he went along. He was writing and lecturing about Voltaire and was influenced by Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe novels, a saga of a musician who must balance the call of genius with the uninspiring demands of a dull, materialistic world, and by Folkways, a study of how natural instincts and social customs become law, by the American sociologist William Sumner. “I wonder what I really do believe, anyhow,” he told Mary.
Death continued to dominate his days. Many in Chicago knew Darrow as a friend, but