and beaten by police. The houses of prostitution never closed in Little Cheyenne and the Levee, nor the predatory gambling and drinking dens. The city was divided along class lines and still seething that spring from the 1886 bombing that killed seven policemen at a workers’ rally in the Haymarket, and the subsequent public delirium that sent four guiltless anarchists to the gallows. The city’s smokestacks cast a famous pall, to rival that of London, across the prairie sky, and the polluted water spurred outbreaks of cholera. A visitor from England, well versed in the miseries of the industrial age, was stunned. “Chicago is a pocket edition of hell,” he wrote, “and if it is not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.”10
Darrow had delved into politics, joining the movement to assist the Haymarket defendants and employing his talents and political connections to persuade the Illinois legislature to pass a bill regulating sweatshops and child labor. More than a year before, he had written to Lloyd, confessing his shame at working for the railroad and praising a protest that his friend had led after a police raid on a union meeting. “You dare to say what is true,” Darrow told him. “Your speech … made me feel that I am a hypocrite and a slave, and added to my resolution to make my term of servitude short.” But he could not summon the will to act. The months passed, and his time of “servitude” dragged on.11
DARROW’S CONSCIENCE WAS still struggling with his comfort on the morning of Thursday, April 27, when, shortly after eleven a.m., Goudy finished dictating a letter, dismissed his secretary, and summoned his first visitor—a retired Civil War hero, General John McArthur—into his office. Darrow prepared to join them.
“Good morning, Judge,” McArthur said, greeting his friend Goudy. Then: “You don’t look very well … are you ill?”
Goudy seemed stricken, and gasped. McArthur cried out in alarm, and Darrow rushed in, as Goudy collapsed at his desk.
Darrow and McArthur carried the lawyer to a couch. Goudy stared up at Darrow with pleading eyes, said nothing, and died.
The great man’s heart attack was front-page news in Chicago. “He lived only a few minutes,” Darrow told the reporters. “It all happened so suddenly that we can scarcely appreciate that Mr. Goudy is really dead.” Darrow was a pallbearer at the funeral. He had lost his patron, and his paradigm.
Goudy’s death changed Darrow’s life. That weekend, the newspapers carried the story: C. S. Darrow was leaving his position as lawyer for the railroad to go to work for Mayor Carter Harrison. No one then perceived that this was the birth of the grandest legal career in American history. In 1893, of Darrow’s future clients, Eugene Debs was still an obscure labor leader with dreams of forming a national railway union. Patrick Prendergast was a mumbling paperboy, lost in delusions. Bill Haywood was a frontier ruffian. Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, Ossian Sweet, and John Scopes were not yet born.
And yet, in little more than a year, Darrow would be battling to keep Debs and the other ringleaders of a turbulent workers’ uprising out of prison, and to save the demented Prendergast, by then an infamous assassin, from the hangman. He would be on his way to becoming an American icon, his name synonymous with a passionate, eloquent, and miraculous defense of the underdog. Journalist Lincoln Steffens would cite Darrow’s departure from the railroad as the “turning point” in his friend’s life. “Darrow counted the cost; he seems always to have counted the cost,” Steffens wrote, but “he found himself off-side, and had to cross over to where he belonged.”
And so was born, said Steffens, “the attorney for the damned.”12
HE HAD MAGNIFICENT presence. He would walk into a courtroom, the conversation would stop, and people would murmur, “There’s Darrow.” He was over six feet tall, and handsome in a roughcast way, with eyes set deep and the bold cheekbones that evoked, as George Bernard Shaw once said, a Mohican brave. His hair was brown, and straight and fine, with a famously unruly lock that was apt to drift down to his forehead. His face, in middle age, was deeply lined; his skin charitably described as leatherlike, or bronzed. His ears lacked lobes, a puckish touch; his chin was cleft. His voice was a melodious grumble of a baritone, flowing from a deep chest. “He had what the French call in a woman—the beauty of the Devil; the charm of the imperfect,” one