he wrote, “and I want to see it destroyed.”
Darrow’s old flame Katherine Leckie, Addams, and other pacifists took advantage of Henry Ford’s offer to finance the journey of a “peace ship” that would tour European ports. Darrow was asked to join them but turned down the invitation. “I can make a damned fool of myself without leaving Chicago,” he said.16
“Can’t help being glad U.S. is getting into the war,” Darrow wrote Paul when President Wilson brought America into the conflict. “It is time Germany was licked.”17
Darrow enlisted with Gompers in a campaign to rally labor behind the war. He joined groups like Labor’s Loyal Legion, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, and the National Security League. He toured as a speaker, wrote essays, and contributed to a pamphlet called “The War for Peace,” published by the government’s new Committee on Public Information. Teddy Roosevelt praised his patriotism, and wealthy industrialists served beside him. He was “right in it with the fellows who have always been against me,” he told Paul, but if they needed to raise money for the gas business, he noted, that might be helpful.
A special target was Chicago’s Republican mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson, who was pro-German and antiwar. Darrow compared him to “a biting adder … that lies lurking in the grass,” and said that Thompson and other opponents of the war were being used by German agents “in a conspiracy of treason.” In October, Darrow spoke on “Loyalty Day,” when 150,000 people gathered in Grant Park for fireworks, anthems, and martial rhetoric. “I believe in liberty; I believe in the greatest possible freedom of speech and of the press, but I know this: the rules for war and the rules for peace … cannot be the same,” Darrow said. “This country is at war and this country will win and you are playing with fire when you fight us in the rear.”
In a New York speech to the National Security League, Darrow sounded Prussian himself: “Be it said to the honor and glory and idealism of America, that she accepted the gage of battle from the German empire and prepared to fight! …
“It ill becomes any American to criticize the President in this great crisis,” he said. “The United States never had a greater, wiser, more patriotic President than Woodrow Wilson, and it is for the people of the United States, not to condemn or criticize, but to support and uphold him in this, the greatest crisis of our nation’s life!”18
Darrow’s friends were thunderstruck. They saw his stand as a betrayal, and some believed that Darrow, along with Gompers, had joined in the patriotic fever to bleach the stains of the McNamara debacle. Gene Debs was chagrined. Darrow “is war mad,” Johannsen reported. Dr. Gerson wrote Darrow a letter of protest. Austin Wright called Darrow “the prostitute.” Few felt so betrayed as Mary.
“Darrow is following the flag. Too bad. Too bad that old General Otis is dead, not to sit on the platform with Darrow!” she wrote Sara. “Oh, but now is Darrow thrice forgiven his sins! Though his sins be scarlet they shall be white as wool … once he bathes in the muddy waters of patriotism.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1918, Darrow took advantage of a British offer to speak in England and tour the battlefields of France. The trenches seemed a foolish destination for a sixty-one-year-old man. But he promised Paul he would “try to keep away from the submarines and bullets” and sent Jessie a letter with reassuring instructions about money, “in case anything happens.”
“I can’t miss it,” Darrow told Mary. “The lure is too strong.” As their ship skirted the German U-boats, he spent pleasant hours on board playing bridge with the young sculptress Nancy Cox-McCormack, who delighted in his “droll” humor. Darrow gave speeches to labor crowds in England, met with H. G. Wells, visited the fleet, and praised the quiet determination shown by the British. “They fought and died and held the invaders back,” he wrote, in one of a series of dispatches for the Chicago Journal. It is difficult to tell how much his writing was restrained by censors, or by self-censorship, but he labored dutifully as a propagandist. “It is true that our Allied airplanes are now dropping bombs on German cities,” he wrote. “But let it never be forgotten that the bombardment of open towns, the destruction of non-combatants, the violation of all the rules of the game was begun by Germany.”
Darrow did not mention