Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,16

presence and appearance here today, on this occasion, means that you are all contented with your lot,” he said. “It means happiness, prosperity and peace; it means that you exist under the protecting arm of a Government which guarantees to you the legitimate product of your industry and your toil.

“One hundred years ago, nay, eighty years ago, naught but the giant oak and other forest trees stood where the bright and yellow grain in golden wreath was harvested but yesterday; the untutored savage of the wood had pitched his tent upon the spot where you are living now; the tomahawk and scalping knife did their barbarous deeds of cruelty and blood.

“But destiny, whose laws we all obey, had decreed that another and a better race should find these treasures … And so today we meet to celebrate this golden harvest time.”

In 1883, Darrow became a father when Jessie gave birth to a son, whom they named Paul. Darrow felt that he was ready for a bigger stage and was urged to seek one by an admiring judge who had heard him try cases. They moved to Ashtabula.21

IT WAS DURING his stay in Ashtabula that Darrow launched a career in politics, which he would pursue for the next twenty years. He fell in with the Democrats, who were glad to have him, for he was a handsome, well-spoken young man. He served as secretary of the county party and was a delegate to the state convention. He worked on the victorious presidential campaign of Grover Cleveland in 1884, then ran for the state senate and lost. He entered the race for Ashtabula County prosecutor and lost. He finally found a race he could win when, with the help of a friendly judge, Darrow was elected Ashtabula’s city solicitor, with a salary of $75 a month.

Darrow now added a partisan edge to his rhetoric. After an 1884 trip to Washington, D.C., he filed a report in the local Democratic newspaper in which, with mock consternation, he told how in “the sacred marble halls” of Congress he had found “a real, living, terrible saloon.”

“I sat down at one of the tables and wept in silence,” Darrow wrote. “To make sure of the character of the place, I ordered drinks.” The Republicans, he told audiences, were a “party that talks temperance in Ohio and runs a gin mill in Washington.”

A Memorial Day address in 1886 contained the expected patriotic flourishes—and a radical proposal, as well. “Once more we bring the tender tokens of our love, the Spring’s bright flowers and garlands green, and strew them o’er our soldiers’ graves,” he began. “We hear the fife’s shrill notes, the drum’s loud beat and the bugle’s clarion call, we hear the roar and din of strife, the cannon’s deadly peal, the war horse neigh and see the wounded and the slain. Once more we watch the daily tidings from the South and with quickly beating hearts we scan the list to know whose loved one has fallen in the fray. We see the pall; the bier; the hearse and view again the brave boys, cold in death.”

But the dreams of the Founding Fathers, and the sacrifice of those who died in the Civil War, would not be fulfilled until women could vote, Darrow said. In denying women the ballot, “we defame the principles for which our fathers fought,” he told the crowd. “Strange that men … without a blush of shame … take from woman, the class who needs it most, and as a class the most fitted for its use, the only weapon which a self-governing people have the right to use—the ballot box.”

Darrow shared cases with a lawyer named Charles Lawyer and worked as a public defender. And throughout his years in Ashtabula, Darrow kept up a running fight on behalf of James Brockway. In March 1885, Brockway had cared for a wealthy but sick “inebriate” and, in return for his help, been promised a gilt-trimmed horse harness. But then the drunkard was assigned a guardian, Cornelius Jewell, who refused to honor the deal. Darrow tried the case—Brockway v. Jewell—before a justice of the peace and lost. Unwilling to give up, he fought the case through retrials and appeals until finally he prevailed, nine years after it was first contested, in the Ohio Supreme Court. It was a battle over principle, not money. The harness was worth $30.

Ohio was beginning to take notice. In August 1886 he went to the state Democratic convention in