twentieth-century realists in stories like that of John Swanson, a worker in a mill whose owner does not believe in unions, government regulation, or safety equipment. As a result, Swanson loses a hand in an industrial accident. “The board caught as the saw passed through, his foot slipped, he threw out his right hand to save himself,” Darrow wrote. “His hand fell on the side where the waste pieces of timber were wont to drop, and the blood trickled down in the saw dust below.”
Pat Connor, an Irish railway man blacklisted for his role in the Debs strike, takes dangerous work on a night train, where he is decapitated by a low bridge. “The heavy oak beam struck him just above his nose and the upper third of his skull came off almost as clean as if cut by a surgeon’s saw,” Darrow wrote. “He really felt no pain whatsoever.”
And James Clark, an ironworker, dies in a fall from a towering skyscraper. “When the workmen went to him they found a limp, shapeless bundle of flesh and blood and bones and rags,” Darrow wrote. Even the emperor Trajan insisted that nets be strung beneath the acrobats in the Roman circus. But “this was before Christianity and commercialism,” Darrow noted. In court, Clark’s widow receives nothing, and the judge goes on to speak at a Commercial Club banquet. “There he met some of the members of the beef trust, the railway combine and the associated banks. He spoke long and feelingly about the tyranny of labor organizations and his words were loudly cheered.”
In a summary essay, “The Influences That Make the Law,” Darrow told readers that these tales were drawn from real cases he had witnessed, and he warned of the pernicious interests of the era. “This is the age of iron and steel,” he wrote. “Legal principles and decisions and individual rights and privileges have been as much changed, contorted and destroyed as have the old business methods that have been supplanted by electricity and steam.”
The “independent artisan has been destroyed” and the legislatures were now manned by “lawyers … saloon-keepers and professional politicians” whose function “has sunk to the business of giving public property and privileges to the few, and executing such orders as the industrial captains see fit to give.”
The legal profession, Darrow told his readers, must share the blame. “The judges are chosen from the ranks of lawyers, and by natural selection the brightest of these have been placed upon the bench,” he wrote. “These have been the ones who were formerly employed by corporations and great aggregations of wealth. There is no other clientage that can yield the money and influence which the ambitious lawyer craves.”16
LIKE MANY OF his fellow radicals at the turn of the century—when the liberal impulse was strong but the structures for promoting it were weak—Darrow rambled around the Left. He would describe himself, variously, as a reformer, a Democrat, a philosophical anarchist, a socialist, a Populist, or a progressive. He was skeptical of human creeds, and had the lawyer’s knack for seeing all sides of an issue. Darrow was a “gathering point for all the ‘radical notions’ of the time … a dreamer, practical man, lawyer, politician, friend of labor, friend of women, friend of literature and of experiment,” wrote Hapgood.
And if Darrow claimed no one cause, neither did any claim him. He was “regarded as ‘dangerous’ by the ultra-conservative, and as ‘crooked’ by the pure idealists, and as ‘immoral’ by the … ladies of blue stocking tendency,” said Hapgood. “He is radical, idealistic and practical at once … with a marvelous inconsistency of mind.”
“As we grow older we feel more and more the hunger for applause instead of sneers,” Darrow said, as he entered his fifth decade. But for meager pay, and sneers, he continued to defend radical causes in court. In the fall of 1898, he traveled to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to represent an old Populist ally, the union leader Thomas Kidd, who had been jailed during a woodworkers’ strike. It was the Debs case, writ small. There was no attorney general claiming that the sanctity of the mails called for intervention: just local prosecutors, aping Ogden’s legal tactics. But things would be bad, indeed, for American workers if any local prosecutor in a company town could use the conspiracy statutes to toss union men in jail.
Conditions were wretched in Oshkosh, a town of twenty-eight thousand dominated by seven big manufacturers specializing in the production of doors, windows, and custom