Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,12

wrought by wondrous inventions, cheap labor, and new sources of energy, accelerated after the Civil War. The status of the individual was diminished in this increasingly mechanistic world, as Americans struggled to apply the principles of liberty in the industrial age.

The Republicans of the Gilded Age had a concise theory: government was a guarantor of property rights. If but one man in a thousand took the liberty conferred by the Constitution, clawed his way up from the factory floor, and built a business empire, the others did not have a right to deprive him of his gains. If the Morgan family were better bankers, or the Vanderbilts more adept at running railroads, so be it. And if a mill worker or a railway switchman didn’t like the wages offered, well, they had the right to quit.

Liberals like Amirus thought it preposterous that an Ohio farm boy or a seamstress from eastern Europe could negotiate with a corporation. Workers penned up in company towns, by industries whose ownership was clustered in trusts, had no leverage. Nor did farmers, who were forced to ship crops on monopolistic railroads. The American economy was producing huge extremes of poverty and wealth, and quaked with recurring “panics” and depressions. But the government’s power to regulate and tax, and the workers’ right to take collective action, were curbed by the courts.

Amirus subscribed to the New York Weekly Tribune, whose exuberant editor, Horace Greeley, championed westward expansion, abolitionism, and the interests of the workingman. The paper, with its eclectic mix of correspondents and coverage of political fads, became the Darrow household’s “political and social Bible,” Clarence recalled. Amirus was a supporter—one of the few in Trumbull County—when Greeley made his unsuccessful run for president as a Republican liberal aligned with the Democrats in 1872. The household’s hopes were doused again in 1876 when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote for the presidency, but lost the White House to skullduggery.

Amirus was an admirer, as well, of Peter Cooper, a Unitarian philosopher who ran for president as the candidate of the Greenback Party. It was just the sort of hopeless cause to attract Amirus, and he joined the movement, an insurrection of farmers and laborers united in their opposition to Republican tight-money policies. “He had moved his soiled and tattered tent to a new battlefield and was fighting the same stubborn sullen threatening public opinion for a new and yet more doubtful cause,” Clarence recalled. The “determined band of agitators” that visited during the abolitionist days now returned to the Darrow home. “They were always poor, often ragged, and a far-off look seemed to haunt their eyes, as if gazing into space at something beyond the stars,” he recalled. “They would sit with my father for hours in his little study, where they told each other of their vision and their hopes.”

In 1883, Amirus ran for the state senate. He finished fourth in a field of five candidates, with 146 votes.14

CLARENCE DARROW LOVED his father, and admired the courage and the wit that Amirus displayed when besting his neighbors in arguments about politics or religion. “My father had directed my thought and reading. He had taught me to question rather than accept,” he remembered. “I had little respect for the opinion of the crowd. My instinct was to doubt the majority.”

Darrow had, as well, a particularly keen sense of compassion. As a boy, he was known for sticking up for the weaker children of the town, his sister Mary recalled, and her family was astonished when, after their mother slaughtered and cooked a chicken that Clarence had favored, he fled the house and refused to eat fowl ever again. He had nursed the frail thing as a chick, carried it around on his shoulder, and named it “David.” Later in life, he would add veal and lamb to his list of forsaken foods. Not surprisingly, this empathetic soul was moved by his father’s talk about injustice. “I listened so rapturously and believed so strongly,” he recalled, and “looked with the same unflagging hope for the promised star … the brilliant rainbow.”

Yet it was not easy, in that small town, to be the son of the local apostate. The good people in the Kinsman congregations shunned the Darrow furniture shop, and their children eyed the family warily. For their father’s strange ways, Darrow and his siblings faced “the social boycott that the Godly … enforced” against the “children of darkness,” he recalled. As Darrow made his way through adolescence,