Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,3

female admirer recalled. His eyes roamed restlessly until those times when, with intent fury, they bore into a witness or a foe.13

What most impressed those who witnessed Darrow in court were his big, evocative shoulders, which he hunched or tossed this way and that, like a bull in the corrida. His wife Ruby ordered special shirts and had his hats custom made, wider at the brim and higher in the crown, to offset the bulk of that upper body. “The powerful orator hulking his way slowly, thoughtfully, extemporizing,” wrote Steffens. “Hands in pocket, head down and eyes up, wondering what it is all about, to the inevitable conclusion, which he throws off with a toss of his shrugging shoulders.”14

“His clothes were a mess, wrinkled, untidy,” noted jounalist William Allen White. “He slouched when he walked and he walked like a cat. I always thought of him as Kipling’s cat, who walked alone.”15 He would slouch, as well, in his seat at the defense table, sinking indolently toward the horizontal, a signal to the jurors that nothing they were hearing from the prosecutor was important. It was all, of course, performance. “The picture of Darrow drawling in front of a jury box was a notable scene,” wrote the Chicago newsman and author Ben Hecht, whom Darrow defended from the censors. “The great barrister artfully gotten up in baggy pants, frayed linen, and string tie, and ‘playing dumb’ for a jury as if he were no lawyer at all, but a cracker-barrel philosopher groping for a bit of human truth.”16

Darrow crafted an American archetype: advocate for the common folk, hooking his thumbs in his vest or suspenders, regarding the jury from beneath that cascading shock of hair, speaking with plain but emotional conviction of the nobility of man, the frailty of mankind, and the threat to liberty posed by narrow-minded men of wealth—“the good people,” he called them, with no shortage of sarcasm—and their legal guns-for-hire.

“With the land and possessions of America rapidly passing into the hands of a favored few,” he would roar, “with thousands of men and women in idleness and want; with wages constantly tending to a lower level … with the knowledge that the servants of the people elected to correct abuses are bought and sold in legislative halls at the bidding of corporations and individuals: with all these notorious evils sapping the foundations of popular government and destroying personal liberty, some rude awakening must come.

“And if it shall come,” he warned, “when you then look abroad over the ruin and desolation, remember the long years in which the storm was rising, and do not blame the thunderbolt.”17

It was quite a show. In the days before radio and motion pictures, the era’s courthouse clashes and public debates played the role of mass entertainment. It was not unusual for the gallery to be packed with prominent lawyers, off-duty judges, newspapermen, and politicians, and the hallways outside jammed with spectators trying to get in, all to see Darrow close for the defense. At times a mob of thousands would spill through the corridors, down the stairs, and out into the yard, to surround a courthouse and listen at the windows.

Darrow savored the attention. “In corporation law practice he was but an invisible cog in a great machine. And he disliked being invisible,” said the writer Louis Adamic. “His superior powers and wit, of which he was more and more conscious, demanded function and expression. The actor-egoist in him sought opportunities to play great parts. Hero parts.”18 It wasn’t only ego. Darrow employed his celebrity to shape public opinion, knowing that jurors reflect communities. “Cases are not won in the courtroom alone, and no one on earth knows this better than Darrow,” said his friend Erskine Wood. “His first move is to get the outside atmosphere right for his case and he sticks at nothing to do this.”

In lectures and public speaking, Darrow affected a humble awkwardness; in court, simplicity, to endear him to his audience. He might start with his arms folded, tapping his gold spectacles on his shoulder, his brow contracted in thought. Often, he would lean on the rail, as if to take the jurors into his confidence, talking so softly that those in the back row would lean toward him to listen. Then, suddenly, his demeanor would change. His voice would turn harsh; his jaw muscles would tighten. Soaring in a crescendo, he would swing his arms, shake clenched fists at heaven, or point a finger in