sides. The Civic Federation, a good government group, sued to stop the deal, claiming the aldermen were “corruptly influenced,” and Darrow and Mayer teamed up to beat the reformers in court.
“I have no doubt that many good citizens believe money was used to secure the passage of these ordinances, as during the last few years nearly everything they own has been given away,” Darrow told the judge. But the separation of powers precluded judicial interference, he said. “When the City Council performs its duties carelessly or corruptly—but within its own rights—it is not the province of a court … The court cannot ask an alderman, ‘Why did you vote for that measure?’ That is for his conscience, whether he has one or not.”
The court ruled for Darrow. He and Lanehart secured the operating permits for Ogden Gas and Cosmopolitan Electric. As was predicted, after several years both firms were bought out by the trusts that furnished power and light to the city, and the boodlers reaped their profits. When bought, Darrow stayed bought. He was there at the finish in 1900, leading a legal and political crusade—bankrolled by Sullivan—to put pressure on the gas trust during the final negotiations.2
Darrow may have received a cut, or merely earned an unsavory legal fee when saving the deal in court. He was candid enough not to make the distinction. “I undertook to serve this company … believing they had an ordinance procured by the aid of boodle,” he admitted. “I am satisfied that judged by the higher law … I am practically a thief.
“I am taking money that I did not earn, which comes to me from men who did not earn it, but who get it because they have the chance to get it. I take it without performing any useful service to the world, and I take a thousand times as much as my services are worth even assuming they were useful and honest.”
Darrow made this confession to Ellen Gates Starr, one of the founders of Hull House, who had scolded him in a scathing note, which he answered with a long, revealing letter. “I believe now that society is organized injustice,” Darrow told Starr. In such circumstances, how does a just man live his life? There were those who believed that Morrison Swift, a mutual friend who renounced a family fortune and joined the Commonweal protests, had taken the moral path. Swift “has perhaps done some good in his way by refusing to compromise with evil,” Darrow said. But in the end Swift’s ways were impractical and he and other absolutists were “shunned.” Darrow had chosen a different course. “I came to Chicago. I determined to take my chances with the rest, to get what I could out of the system and use it to destroy the system,” he said.
He was not a child of a well-off family, like Swift and Starr. And “society provides no fund out of which … people can live while preaching heresy,” said Darrow. So “I have … sold my professional services to every corporation or individual who cared to buy,” said Darrow. “I have taken their ill-gotten gains and have tried to use it to prevent suffering.
“I have defended the poor and weak, have done it without pay, will do it again,” he said. “I cannot defend them without bread, I cannot get this except from those who have it.”3
NOW DARROW HAD the money to flee his unhappy home. He left Jessie and Paul in Chicago, and roamed Europe for two months. He toured the English countryside, saw Shakespeare’s grave, and wandered among the tombs in Westminster Abbey. The collapse of his marriage and his political defeats weighed on him, and he was in a gloomy mood when composing a dispatch for the Chicago Chronicle. “The man who believes in the cause and has the courage of his convictions finds … the way very lonely,” he wrote. “The tide of progress … leaves the long coast strewn with shattered hopes, ruined plans, defeated purposes and despondent men.”
Darrow was happier in France. He delighted in the whitewashed houses, the medieval nooks, and the broad boulevards of Paris. He took a boat ride on the Seine, saw Notre Dame, and visited the grave of a favorite author, Victor Hugo, at the Pantheon. Above all stood Eiffel’s tower, rising “so light and graceful,” like “a cobweb fastened to the earth and spun from a star.” In the streets and cafés, Darrow fell hard for the French. “They