Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,209

admitted.

Afterward, Toms conceded that his witnesses were inferior—in terms of education, intellect, aplomb, and appearance—to the Negro defendants. Steadily, the estimates of the size of the crowd given by the prosecution witnesses inched upward—toward and beyond one hundred. Two youngsters admitted that they heard glass breaking as boys threw stones at the Sweet residence.

“I heard some noise … it may have been stones, or mud … hard dirt, you know, striking something … maybe it was against this house,” one witness conceded.

“You knew sounds of something striking a building came from that direction …,” Darrow said.

“Well, it seemed like it, yes,” said the witness.

“And you knew the sounds of breaking glass came from that direction?”

“Yes.”

“And they came about the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And after that—the shooting?”

“Yes.”

It was grueling, and at times depressing, work exposing the prejudices of human beings. One night, in a discussion about the defendants, a tired Darrow asked Hays, “What difference does it make whether or not these people go to jail?”

Hays was surprised. If Darrow felt like that, Hays asked him, why was he defending them? “I dunno,” said Darrow. “I suppose I’d be uncomfortable if I didn’t.”

From the prosecution witnesses Darrow drew the story of the Waterworks Park Improvement Association, an all-white group that lured hundreds of people to a protest meeting at the elementary school across the street from the Sweet house a few weeks before the shooting, at which speakers urged them to drive the black residents out. “I don’t believe in mixing people together that way, colored and white,” one neighbor explained.13

Darrow and Hays meshed well, White said: “Hays the logician, relentless, keen, incontrovertible; Darrow the great humanist, pleading with fervor for decency and justice and tolerance, breathing into the law romance and beauty and drama.” One of Hays’s central missions was to keep them from being snagged by a legal trick or an obscure precedent. One day Toms asked Darrow if he wasn’t going to join them in the judge’s chambers, where Hays was arguing a point of law. “Nooo, I guess not,” Darrow said. “I can’t be bothered with the books. Let Arthur take care of that.”14

DARROW HAD NO trouble filling his time in Detroit. Watching Darrow had become an event for the smart set. He would meet Hays and White and others to wind down and plot strategy at his quarters in the Book Cadillac Hotel, and then join journalists, vivacious young actresses, and other celebrities at a large round table. The girls were “young, attractive, on their toes with the gait of the world,” Ruby wrote. Darrow held court, “beaming with his own happiness.”15

On one evening he made the trip to Ann Arbor, where, after dining at a fraternity house on campus, he addressed more then four thousand students at his alma mater. He spoke to some 1,500 black people who gathered at a YMCA in Detroit and addressed the Detroit Federation of Labor. A young theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, was in the audience, and came away impressed. Darrow made the crowd “writhe as he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial system,” Niebuhr wrote, though “the tremendous effect of his powerful address was partially offset by the bitterness … I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have the eyes to see and the heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”16

Darrow also joined Hays and White at gatherings of the city’s Penguin Club, a hangout for silk-stocking liberals. It was there he spotted Josephine Gomon. The thirty-three-year-old “Jo” was the daughter of a college professor. By the time she met Darrow she had worked her way through the University of Michigan as a switchboard operator, graduated with a degree in engineering, taken a job teaching physics at City College in Detroit, married, and had five children. After seeing two friends die in childbirth, Gomon became a champion of family planning and got into politics. She was an adviser to progressive leaders like Harriet McGraw and Judge Murphy and attended the Sweet trial as often as she could.

Darrow nurtured the relationship by chatting with Gomon during breaks in the trial and by walking her to her car after court ended for the day. Her diary offers a glimpse of Darrow’s seductive advances. “Women fall into two classes for him—those he is interested in and those he isn’t,” she wrote. “He treats all the former with the same flattering attention as if they were the only woman—each of them—that he had ever