MILLION, read the front-page headline in the Tribune. It was Darrow’s first big legal triumph.3
VICTORIAN AMERICA LOVED its clubs, and Darrow became a stalwart at the Land and Labor Club, the Andrew Jackson League, the Secular Union, the Equal Suffrage Club, the Women’s Physiological Institute, the Personal Rights League, and other organizations. Getting known was good for business. So were letters to the editor. Just days after arriving in Chicago, Darrow wrote the Inter Ocean, decrying the widespread practice by which wealthy landowners lied about the assessed value of their properties. “About the only class … that pays taxes on the full value of their personal property are those of widows, orphans and imbeciles.”
Many in the community were struck by Darrow’s speaking skills, his wry sense of humor, and his restless, inquiring mind. George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”
Though Darrow admired Christ’s teachings, he doubted his divinity, and was a regular with Schilling at the Secular Union. It had been organized to oppose the “infliction” of religion on secular society, and met, appropriately, in an abandoned church. “The religion for which we are struggling and which must prevail in the future is not based upon … a Supreme Being,” Darrow told a standing-room-only crowd of nonbelievers at Easter in 1888. “But … a foundation deep in human reason.”
Here, Darrow expressed the deterministic philosophy that would guide him all his life. “The worst of all cruel creeds and of all the bloody wrongs inflicted by the past can be found in the barbarous belief that man is a free moral agent,” he said.
“The political and religious rulers of the world have ever taught that each individual possessed the power to choose the right or wrong … and if he chose the bad it was because he … preferred the sin,” said Darrow. That was ignorance, and folly. Man was but a leaf, tossed and bashed in the “great moving restless universe of which he forms so small a part.”
Darrow enlisted in the local Democracy, as the party was called, and was dispatched to Rock Island, Warren, Dixon, and other small towns on behalf of President Cleveland in the 1888 election. After an appearance at a YMCA hall in Moline, he was described as a “Chicago orator and reformer” and hailed for his “brilliant and forcible exposition.” He was not so well received when debating in Belvidere. “Poor Darrow,” the Tribune reported, was “completely demolished.” So, in that Republican year, was Cleveland.
Darrow sought out influential men in the community to cultivate their friendship. To the wealthy reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, Darrow sent an ingratiating note asking to “allow me to thank you for your brave and able letter in yesterday’s Herald. It will do much good. The cause of organized labor is fortunate in having such a champion.” Lloyd was a scholar and a journalist related through marriage to an owner of the conservative Tribune. With long white hair and a drooping mustache, he looked a bit like Mark Twain. As early as 1881, he had started writing about the pernicious influence of trusts and monopolies, and his 1894 book Wealth Against Commonwealth was a model for muckrakers to come. His home in Winnetka became a salon for radicals. It wasn’t long before Darrow was attending. “He is one of our best young lawyers,” Lloyd told a friend, “and a zealous friend of the working men.”4
LLOYD AND DARROW would join many crusades in the coming years, but none so eruptive as that which brought them together during Darrow’s first months in Chicago—the execution of the Haymarket defendants. It was “not the first unholy verdict rendered by a jury and sustained by a court, but it is perhaps the most unrighteous,” Darrow declared.
In the fall of 1897, as three hundred policemen armed with rifles and shotguns guarded the approaches to the Cook County jail, four men cloaked in spectral shrouds dropped through the gallows and, kicking and writhing, slowly strangled to death. The hangman had erred, their necks did not break, and it took them time to die. Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were anarchists, a word which came to evoke