Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,17

Toledo. One newspaper called Darrow “a young man of brilliant attainments” who “already enjoys an enviable reputation as a lawyer and an orator.” Another noted how Darrow “brought his candidate before the convention in a masterful manner. He has a scholarly look, a perfectly beardless face and a deep rich voice.”

But life was tame in what Darrow took to calling “benighted Ashtabula.” There was little chance as a Democrat to win higher office. The poker games with pals were fun, but it was still a place where life and commerce came to a halt and everyone gathered to see the spectacle when the movers hoisted a safe through an upstairs window. He had lots of time to read, and to the books he had discovered in his father’s library, he added a small volume on crime, recommended by a local judge: Our Penal Machinery and Its Victims, written and self-published by a Chicagoan named John Peter Altgeld. It argued that biological and social conditions, and not willful deviltry, were the source of criminal behavior. Darrow became an acolyte, as well, of Robert Ingersoll, an elegant orator and famous agnostic, whose willingness to champion freethinking philosophy in the face of popular disapproval made him, in Darrow’s eyes, a “soul of matchless courage.”

And Darrow was moved by Progress and Poverty, a bestselling political tract written by Henry George. An Ashtabula banker brought it to his attention, and it made a marked impression. “In factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work … Amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation … Everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the fear of want,” George wrote. He advocated a heavy “single tax” on property, to ensure equality.22

Darrow’s radical soul was stirring. Jessie might be comfortable in Ohio, but he desired more. “I had accumulated $500 in cash and wanted to buy a home. Of course, I don’t suppose I did, but the family wanted it,” Darrow recalled. “Wives always want homes, something to bring a man to at night … it stabilizes things. Wives are great stabilizers.”

“I made a bargain with a fellow for that home, which I was to pay $3,500 for—$500 down and the rest as long as I lived,” said Darrow. “He came up the next morning to bring the deed, and he said he could not bring it because his wife would not sign it.” In some versions of the tale Darrow, provoked, tells the seller, “I don’t want your fool house anyhow, I am moving to Chicago.” In others, he tells off the wife. What really matters is, he told it to himself. Great men were doing great things, and he wanted to be among them.

The March 5, 1887, edition of the Ashtabula Standard carried the news. “City Solicitor CS Darrow has decided to locate in Chicago,” it said, “and early next month will shake the dust of Ashtabula from his feet and take up his abode in the wickedest city in the United States.”23

Chapter 2

CHICAGO

Chicago was a mining camp, five stories high.

Clarence Darrow arrived in Chicago in the spring of 1887, knowing no one of any consequence, lost in the flocks of other young pilgrims seeking their fortunes in the great boomtown in the middle of the continent. Chicago’s unbridled growth, corsair creed, and mesmerizing license gave the city its magnetic pull. The Great Lakes port had ninety thousand inhabitants in the year Darrow was born. By the time he arrived at the age of thirty, there were a million people living there, and it had become the nation’s second-largest city. Everyone came from somewhere else; most were foreign born. “First in violence, deepest in dirt,” wrote journalist Lincoln Steffens. “Loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the ‘tough’ among cities, a spectacle for the nations.”1

The Chicagoans were a truly intrepid lot. When their effluence despoiled Lake Michigan and threatened to slay them all with cholera, they reversed the flow of the Chicago River and sent the sewage down the Mississippi. When the lake sand gave way beneath their buildings, they lifted the city, block by block. In 1871 the famous Chicago fire razed the downtown, destroying eighteen thousand buildings. From tent cities out on the prairie, emissaries were dispatched to assure Wall Street and Capitol Hill that Chicago would rebuild; that wall and shingle could be consumed, but not the great kinetic spirit of the town.

The fields and pastures of