Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,221

the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine, was bunk. “There are no such thing as races,” Darrow said. “There is a difference caused by climate [or] long living in particular localities, but [humans] are all made alike.” Zionism was an “absurd enterprise,” said Darrow. The Middle East was a dry and barren land. “No sane person would ever think of going to Palestine, except for religion. It has been the home of myth … and fable and sleight-of-hand ever since we knew it.…

“I love idealism,” said Darrow. “I am something of a dreamer myself, but there are some things that are not worth dreaming about.” He described his own visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where he saw a young man “with the idealism that people like myself always recognize—the far-off look of the dreamer who is thinking of something beyond the world and of some justice somewhere, sometime.

“I saw him beating his fist and his head against a wailing wall,” said Darrow, “wailing for the lost Jerusalem, wailing for lost Zion, wailing for the glory and grandeur that once was there, wailing for the past, like everyone else, for the past to come back out of the dark and the dawn, and it never comes, and it never can.”8

Darrow saw Mary twice that fall. On one visit she welcomed Darrow, Steffens, and others to dinner, and resented her role as housekeeper and cook, waiting on the gentlemen. “Lions are hard to entertain,” she told her diary. “They get used to homage.” A second visit, a week later, went better. She had Darrow to herself at dinner and accompanied him to a speaking engagement in Brooklyn, holding his hand in the backseat of the car.9

DARROW RETURNED TO New York in December, but not to hold hands. The fascist Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy, and his success roiled the Italian American community. After a series of confrontations in the spring of 1927, two American fascists from the Bronx were assassinated. Mussolini himself sent flowers to their funeral, and the bodies were brought to Italy, placed in silver caskets, and given a state burial. In July, the police in New York charged two men—Donato Carillo and Calogero Greco—with the murders.

The Left rallied behind the defendants, and Darrow and Hays led the defense. Alexander Rocco, a comrade of the victims, claimed to have seen Carillo and Greco join in the killing. But Darrow got Rocco to admit that the description of the killer he originally gave police did not fit either of the defendants. Luigi Alfano, a witness who was not affiliated with either side, declined—despite furious efforts by the prosecutors—to identify the defendants. He didn’t want the conviction of innocent men on his conscience, he told the court. And a third man, under Darrow’s questioning, admitted that he had been working as a fascist spy.

“Darrow rendered each of them useless in a few hours of cross-examination,” one newsman wrote. Darrow’s own chief witness was a Mussolini sympathizer who had split from the dead men’s organization, the Fascist League of North America. He had seen the attack up close and emphatically denied that Carillo and Greco were the killers. The defendants testified on their own behalf, and had alibi witnesses placing them at their homes in Brooklyn.

The New York press was delighted to have Darrow working a sensational murder case. “Deep furrows have been cut by time in Darrow’s majestic face,” one feature writer wrote. “His hair looks as if he had it cut twice a year, and then with a scythe. His pants are never pressed.…

“But Darrow would be a majestic figure no matter how he dressed. He towers over six feet. His head sticks forward, always in sort of an onward rush at his adversary. His broad, square shoulders know how to shrug with finest sarcasm.…

“Everything is natural, unaffected and perfectly timed … The only waste motion in Darrow’s technique is an occasional habit of scratching himself behind the ear,” the story said. “Now and then he has been known to scratch his head. But this is a Will Rogers head scratch, which has its definite effect upon the judge, jury and audience. He scratches his head in such a way as to bring out more clearly, more sarcastically, a certain bit of cross-examination. The scratch behind the ear, however, apparently has no purpose whatsoever.”

In his closing address, Darrow attacked Mussolini’s rule. “Fascism was born in bloodshed,” Darrow said. “Of course these defendants hate the regime