Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,100

within the shadow of the monument raised to the great Liberator’s name, defenseless Negroes are murdered, families are driven from their homes … and the ruthless hand of vengeance and destruction is raised against every man, woman and child whose face is black,” Darrow wrote in the American. It would be easy to blame the riot on “hoodlums” and “drunkards,” Darrow wrote, but to do so would be a mistake. The Springfield riot was a sign that a “dark stain” of racism gripped all American society. “North and South—men of place and influence—have freely parroted words of venom and hate against a poor and helpless race, until in churches, clubs, factories, shops and on the streets the word is passed from mouth to mouth that life is not safe unless the black is hanged or burned by the righteous mob.

“Time was when these lynchings in the South awoke the righteous indignation of the North. But those days have passed. The friends of the Negro have gone to their last long sleep and on this question of color the North and South are one.”

Two weeks later, William E. Walling, a wealthy socialist who had rushed to Springfield for a firsthand look at the scene, published an appeal for a “large and powerful body of citizens” to come to the aid of American blacks. He asked Darrow for his help, and liberals like Jane Addams, John Dewey, Florence Kelley, Lincoln Steffens, William Dean Howells, and Oswald Villard enlisted in the cause. Darrow was on the program when, at a conference in New York in May 1910, the NAACP was founded. He spoke in the evening at Cooper Union—the site of Lincoln’s landmark speech against slavery. The abolitionist Theodore Parker had said, in the years before the Civil War, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr. would like the image; so did Amirus Darrow’s son. “God’s and nature’s laws are working, and working toward equality, and broadly and slowly and imperceptibly, perhaps, toward justice,” Darrow said.7

AS DARROW WORKED his way out of debt, his client list was the usual assortment—a rich glimpse of the social, legal, and economic disputes at the century’s turn.

On behalf of his friend William O. Thompson—who was married to one of the young ladies—Darrow conducted shuttle diplomacy among the three comely daughters of a local King Lear, a wealthy capitalist whose fortune needed dividing. One brother-in-law took to loitering near the mansion with a revolver. When he was banished by the family, his wife rushed to join him, crying, “I still love him” and—to the delight of the gossips of tony Hinsdale—“suffered a heart shock and fell in a swoon” on the lawn. The affair seemed destined for a scandalous legal confrontation until Darrow helped them reach a settlement.

Sex and money were the culprits again when Darrow went to the aid of the wealthy Anna Boysen, who had been arrested in a rooming house with her young skating instructor, Rudolph Hough, and charged with illegal cohabitation. The warrants for the arrest had been procured by Boysen’s mother, Helen Leet, who insisted that Anna was a floozy given to drink, drugs, and carousing and could not be trusted to administer her finances. But Darrow told reporters that Anna had been deserted by her husband, and that Leet was taking advantage of her daughter’s predicament to steal her money. Anna and Rudolph were just good friends, Darrow insisted. Once again, he got the warring sides to settle.

Darrow took the case of lawyer Charles F. Davies, who was charged with blackmail after accepting a $3,200 payment from Charles Foster, a prominent Cadillac car executive who had four wives. And then there was the juicy divorce of Sidney Love, a broker whose spectacular financial collapse was accompanied by accusations that he married an English heiress for her money, and whose story delighted headline writers (“Love Will Try Again”). Darrow represented William Henley, a former judge and railroad president accused of embezzlement, and John Ericson, the city engineer, who allegedly distributed public funds to his friends. He defended distillery operators charged in federal court with tax evasion. He took a $500 fee from local theatrical interests that wanted to have underage actors exempted from child labor rules. And he unsuccessfully represented the crooked directors of a Kankakee, Illinois, manufacturing firm that was sued for defrauding investors. Some clients were seriously unsavory. Darrow represented Willis Rayburn, one of three men—including Nicholas Martin, the private