he agreed to defend three Irish American lawyers charged in the scandal. It was a Chicago sensation. Extra bailiffs were required to control a courtroom crowded with rowdy Celts. Fistfights broke out when a guilty verdict was announced, and the angry Irish spectators rushed the prosecutor, shouting “Dog!” and “Scoundrel!”
Darrow persevered, and two of the convictions were reversed on appeal. He then gave a job to a lawyer named Cy Simon, who was the Union Traction bagman in the case. Some months later, Masters discovered that their firm was receiving $150 a month from Union Traction to buy Simon’s continued silence. And whenever Darrow represented a client in an injury case against Union Traction, Masters said, the company would invariably agree to a generous settlement. The word spread and boosted their business. “It was bribery all around,” said Masters.
“Darrow has no principles,” Wright told a mutual friend. “He professes to hold feelings of utmost contempt for millionaires, while his acts emphasize a greed for money.”
“I once had a fondness approaching affection for Darrow,” Wright concluded, “but the withering blight of his moral bankruptcy fell upon every feeling of that kind.”
The journalist Hutchins Hapgood was a bit more forgiving. Darrow could best be described, he wrote, as a philosophical anarchist who, in the name of liberty, refused to be ruled by nettlesome rules or creeds. There were advantages to such a pose. “It allows a man to be an opportunist,” Hapgood said, “while having a high ideal.”17
Darrow’s involvement in another scandal made the front pages across the country when the Bank of America, a Chicago thrift, went bust in early 1906. The bank had been looted by its president, former judge Abner Smith. Darrow was a cofounder and a major stockholder.
The idea for the bank was laudatory. It was to have been run for the benefit of working folks, whose pennies it would solicit by accepting deposits at neighborhood drugstores. Some five hundred families opened savings accounts. Darrow borrowed $7,000 to invest in the bank and deposited another $6,000. Masters invested $4,000. Even John Azzop, the elevator operator in their building, was persuaded to move his savings there.
But Smith never had the capital reserves required by Illinois law. And he then okayed $250,000 in ill-secured loans for himself, associates, and members of his family. Darrow and the other stockholders were fortunate in but one regard: the bank failed quickly, allowing them to save the depositors’ money, if not their own. Darrow contained the scandal by alerting the authorities and announcing that he would personally guarantee the $25,000 in workingmen’s deposits that were at risk. They were paid out to folks like Azzop when they showed up with their bankbooks.
“Darrow prevailed upon me to stop playing the races … and put my money in the bank,” said Azzop, after getting his money back. “I’m going to put this on a horse,” he told the press.
Masters lost his $4,000. For years he hounded and pursued Smith, who was convicted and sent to prison. The episode also added to the friction between the law partners. When Darrow used the borrowed $7,000 to embellish the bank’s reserves, he had acted—though on a far smaller scale—just like Smith, said Masters. But by serving as the whistle-blower and prevailing on his friends in the press, Darrow emerged as a hero. “He participated in the fraudulent incorporation,” Masters marveled, “and then prosecuted his confederate in the fraud, and escaped unexposed.”
One cheerful cynic found his friend Darrow’s behavior irresistible. In the fall of 1906 Elbert Hubbard wrote a satirical ode for the Philistine, his literary magazine.
“I love Darrow because he is such a blessed crook. He affects to be a brave man, but admits that he’s an arrant coward; he poses as an altruist, but is really a pin-headed pilferer,” Hubbard wrote. “People think he is bounteously unselfish and kind, whereas he dispenses and supplicates solely for Darrow & Co. He eloquently addresses the bar, bench and jury in public in the name of justice, and then privately admits the whole thing is a fraud.”18
Others were concerned. Their knight seemed to have lost his way. In January 1907, Garland and his wife invited the Darrows to dinner. After they left, he described the evening in his diary. “I found him as grave and even more bitter than his writing indicates,” said Garland. “He weakens his cause by extreme expression. His uncompromising honesty of purpose and his aggressive cynicism make him repellent to many.”
“As a lawyer he was always ready