Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,228

was reluctant. “I had so long and decidedly been for the Negro” and this was a case “at variance with what I felt and had stood for,” he told a friend. Darrow ultimately agreed to go, he told himself, because he might bring healing to the troubled islands. And because he had always wanted to see Hawaii. But most of all he took the case because he needed money.

His decision triggered a debate in the civil rights community over whether Darrow “is at heart loyal to the cause he espouses,” wrote the African American editors of the Chicago Bee, “or whether his interest in them wanes at the sight of sufficient monetary consideration.”

Darrow was troubled by such commentary. “I have occasionally in the past represented people of wealth, and there has always been criticism,” he wrote a friend who objected to his decision. “I don’t know what I should have done if now and then a fairly well to do client had not come my way; the ravens have never called on me.” He set his price at $30,000. “Please do not tell anyone what you are to receive,” Ruby wrote her husband, who was traveling when the $5,000 retainer arrived in Chicago, “or again you’ll be eaten alive by those who will think they may as well get some of it.”

DARROW AND RUBY sailed from San Francisco. It was his first trip back to California since the bribery trial. He took a young New York lawyer, George Leisure, who had tried a case in Honolulu and volunteered to assist him without pay. They arrived in Hawaii on March 24 and Darrow, bedecked in leis, immediately sought to cool passions in the islands. The territorial legislature was considering a bill that would add rape to the list of crimes punishable by death in Hawaii. It was an awful idea, said Darrow, for it would only encourage rapists to murder their victims, since the penalty would be the same, and dead girls tell no tales.

Ruby glowed for years over the way that island society—the good people—welcomed them with lunches and receptions. And it was important, as things turned out, for Darrow to meet Governor Judd and Thalia’s physician, and the Chamber of Commerce types like Walter Dillingham, a leader of the haole elite. Darrow also spent evenings with the out-of-town reporters; he jawed with Charles Banks, an old Chicago newspaperman he found in Honolulu, and spoke to George Wright, a former Allegheny College professor who edited the Hawaii Hochi and had, from the start, defended Kahahawai and the other suspects.

Darrow visited the beach and let Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer, and a crew of Waikiki beach boys give him a ride through the cresting surf on an outrigger canoe. But he turned seventy-five that spring. On several occasions, the sun and the work and the okolehao, the local moonshine, took their toll.6 Darrow was disarmingly frank about his motives. “He has told us candidly and with a smile that he wanted to take the trip to Hawaii and was offered an attractive fee,” Wright wrote in the Hochi. “The present case … in no sense detracts from his record as an idealist … it is the bow that a great actor makes when he has been called before the curtain, after the play is over.”

Darrow found obstacles in Hawaii. The first was a new prosecutor, John C. Kelley, “rugged, powerful, afraid of nothing … a shrewd, keen lawyer,” as the mainland papers reported. Another was the Hawaiian character. If he hoped to get a jury of sympathetic whites, Darrow was disappointed. Racial mixing was tolerated, even prized, away from the navy base, and huge crowds had attended Kahahawai’s funeral. Leisure warned Darrow that they must, by all means, avoid being seen as “coming to the rescue of The White Race.”7

“I kept every white man I could,” Darrow said later, and the final roster of jurors looked promising, with seven whites, three Chinese, and no pure Hawaiians. Yet Darrow was troubled, and told Leisure they had little hope for success. He began to direct his remarks, via his friends in the press, at the population back home in hopes of obtaining pardons. “He … frankly confesses that he has difficulty in trying to understand the mentality of these oddly mixed island jurors,” Russell Owen wrote in the Times. For a lawyer whose strength was his ability to manipulate a jury’s emotions, not knowing “the mentality” was indeed a problem.

Prosecutor Kelley, nattily dressed