Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,150

he was deft at masking his real feelings. Outwardly he would charm, while “every other emotion or estimate was most completely concealed,” Ruby said. Among the exceptions were his closest intellectual companions: his brother-in-law, the gentle naturalist John H. Moore, with whom he discussed the mysteries of eternity, and George Burman Foster, a tall and elegant philosophy professor at the University of Chicago with whom Darrow debated and caroused.

In the summer of 1916, the gentle Moore saw his wife Jennie off on a shopping trip and went to the Wooded Island, in Jackson Park. There, where he had liked to go to watch the birds and wildlife, he shot himself. “The long struggle is ended,” he wrote in a suicide note. “Oh, men are so cold and hard and half-conscious toward their suffering fellows … Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever.”

Darrow gave the eulogy. Moore “was my brother and my friend,” Darrow said. “His was a tender heart, a noble brain, and a nature so sensitive and fine that in his imagination he lived the lives of every thing that breathes—and men like him cannot die old.”

Darrow’s letters to his friends were now dabbled with notations that he was “blue” or “in the dumps” or “longing.” He spoke of life’s “dark maze” and muttered “we are so long dead.” He told Mary that “every thing is such a dull gray to me” and “I fear it grows grayer as the time comes for it to turn black” and that “nothing is important but death.” A winter snowstorm made him feel “that the warmth of the crematory would be welcome.”

Darrow’s friendship with Foster was a relief and an exception. They were a year apart in age, had been raised in strict midwestern towns, and now, in their late fifties, did “the things they should have gotten out of their system when they were 18,” as Foster’s wife put it. They would stagger in at midnight from a tour of the Fifty-seventh Street art colony or a masquerade ball and eat cold baked beans as they rehashed the night’s events. “They were as young as the youngest,” an acolyte, Natalie Schretter, recalled. “Girls never thought of them as old men.” After Sunday evening debates, Darrow and Foster would retreat to a nook at the Kunz-Remmlers restaurant with a small circle of pals, to continue the discussion. One night, after Darrow had lectured on a certain radical pamphleteer of the American Revolution, a rich and pretty widow was invited to join them. She made both men’s wives nervous until she asked, “Is Tom Paine a Chicago man?” and was instantly dismissed.

Two years after Moore’s death, Foster was struck down by illness at the age of sixty. Darrow gave that memorial address as well. His friend “had the head of a god and the heart of a child,” Darrow said. He loved him “as I seldom loved any other man.…

“At a time like this, the mortality of things is brought home to all, and there is no chance to close our eyes,” he said, and quoted verse from “A Shropshire Lad.”

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodland I will go

To see the cherry hung in snow.

“All that is left for us is to go out and see the cherries hung with snow,” Darrow told the mourners. “Get what you can—get it kindly—because that is the best—but get it while the day is here, for the night comes apace.”

His friend was gone. “The winter will be longer and colder, and the summer shorter now that he is dead,” said Darrow. “The stars in heaven will never shine so bright again. The day will lose its old time glory. The sun will fade faster, the twilight fall quicker and the night close deeper since he is dead.”

Darrow “was at his best,” Margaret Johannsen told Sara. “I sat, unconscious of having a body until I felt the tears rolling quietly down my cheeks.” 14

DEATH WAS DARROW’S near-constant companion at work, as well. The 2,500 men and women and children who went aboard the steamship Eastland early on the morning of July 24, 1915, didn’t mind a bit of drizzle. They were factory workers and their families, eager to be ferried on the grand lake steamer to a Western Electric company outing in Michigan City, Indiana.

They did not know that the Eastland had a