successful campaign for the Illinois legislature, using the West Side ghetto as his base and the women at the Langdon as his campaign organizers. “He expects to be governor of Illinois and even aspires to the Presidency,” Perdue told Ely. She described how Johnson, “his private secretary,” had run Darrow’s campaign, helping him with “most inflammatory” speeches and gathering the “lowest men and boys” from the district’s saloons to parade down the streets and light bonfires in his honor. It was “a miniature French Revolution,” the elated Johnson told her. Perdue concluded that Darrow was “a dangerous man.”
Barnum, who arrived at the Langdon after breaking off an engagement, thought Darrow was a bit frightening, with “his Free Love theories; his radicalism.” But “unlike most men, even in passionate relations with women, Darrow always made those contacts human—not just ‘sexy,’ ” she said. “He respected each individual soul.” It was a rare attitude, she concluded, among the men of her day.9
Barnum “was deeply in love with Darrow, and … it was a great disappointment that she did not win him to herself. But that is true of … a considerable number among Miss Barnum’s intimates,” Ruby Hamerstrom recalled. Darrow was “smothered” with female attention, she said. “He was continuously finding himself much more strongly entwined with them than ever intended by himself. He would have a hell of a time to extricate himself.”
Hamerstrom met Darrow in 1899 at a meeting of the White City Club, an artsy group, where he gave a talk on Omar Khayyám. He was forty-two and she was twenty-six. He was taken by this girlish writer with doe eyes and a pink and white complexion, and asked her out. She was engaged to a stockbroker and declined, but he clung to her hand, refusing to let go. She agreed to join him for dinner some nights later at an Italian restaurant favored by the literary set. Afterward, as they crossed the Rush Street bridge in the rain, Darrow paused, took one of her gloves from her hand, entwined his fingers with hers, and slid their hands into his overcoat pocket.
He told her he was smitten—but warned her he would never marry again. That was all right, she replied, as she was preparing to marry someone else. “Well,” he said, “we’ll have to devise ways to break your engagement.” Soon, she was seeing him regularly.10
THE FREE LOVE movement bloomed in the years after the Civil War, when utopian dreamers and some of the early feminists pushed society to relax laws governing marriage, divorce, and contraception. By the turn of the century, libertarians of both sexes were enlisting. “All that is good in marriage, home or child-rearing rests on free love,” wrote one of Darrow’s friends, the poet and lawyer C. E. S. Wood. “When it rests on a forced appearance of love, on a forced relationship, it rests on falsity, vice and hypocrisy and no apparent social quiet can justify that … torture of the soul.”
In 1899, Darrow served as a legal adviser to Dr. Denslow Lewis, the president of the medical staff at the Cook County Hospital, who had proposed to the American Medical Association that it publish his paper on the physiology of sex. His description of sexual practices in the Victorian era explains the appeal of the movement. A bride “too often comes to the marriage bed with inexact ideas of all that pertains to sexual intercourse,” he wrote. Young women needed to be taught how pregnancy occurs and to be instructed that, in marital relations, “it is right and proper for her to experience pleasure.”
“Her husband is not usually so ignorant,” said Lewis, but not because anyone had instructed him. “His experience in sexual matters is due to intercourse with prostitutes. His knowledge is imperfect and often dangerous. His relations with his bride are sometime brutal.” Too often, “he will come home from the club at midnight and find his wife in bed … Erection is speedily followed by intromission, and often before the wife is really awake, the orgasm has occurred,” Lewis wrote.
“Some one should tell him the difference between a virtuous girl and a street walker,” the gynecologist said. “He should know regarding the anatomic conditions. He should know that intromission is painful until dilation of the parts has occurred. He should understand that reciprocity in the mechanism of the act is not to be expected until his wife is accustomed to the marital relationship.”
It was basic stuff, carefully phrased, based on