Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,7

Rockefeller in oil—and attributed their success to God, hard work, and pluck. They found in the writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer the comforting assurance that the poor deserved their lot; it was nature’s way of furthering the race, by weeding out the weak. They ordered their managers to lower costs and, when workers organized guilds or unions, brought in immigrants to take away jobs. If the union men fought back, then private armies and local militias were summoned to break up the strikes and demonstrations, often with volleys of rifle fire. According to the courts, a worker’s only right was to negotiate, man to man, with an employer, and to take himself elsewhere if the terms were not to his liking. And none married the boss’s daughter. Atop the social order, the robber barons flaunted their aristocratic aspirations by dressing up like eighteenth-century European royalty at spectacular parties, hiring semi-naked chorus girls to jump out of cakes, and hanging diamond collars on their dogs.

The industrial plutocracy squeezed huge subsidies from the federal government (the railroads alone got $350 million and 242,000 square miles of land) and controlled the legal establishment, right up to the Supreme Court, where the justices worked diligently at redefining the Bill of Rights as a guarantee of property, above all else. “From the time in earliest records when Eve took loving possession of even the forbidden apple, the idea of property and sacredness of the right of its possession has never departed from the race,” Justice David Brewer told the graduates at Yale. “The love of acquirement, mingled with the joy of possession, is the real stimulus to human activity.”

The jurists who resisted—Brandeis, Holmes, Darrow—would be honored by history as great dissenters and mediocrities like Brewer forgotten, but that was no consolation to the working men and women of the time. And by the 1890s the great economic relief valve—the frontier—was gone. Its absence heightened “the sharp contrast between the traditional idea of America—as the land of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class distinctions, and from the power of wealth,” wrote historian Frederick Turner, “and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal.”29

With the growth of the state came new, intrusive police powers and prescriptions for social remedy. Though Darrow spent decades in radical and populist politics, he had no illusions about the ability of liberalism, or socialism, or any other man-made “ism” to cure social ills. Well ahead of most of his contemporaries, Darrow foresaw the dangers posed by totalitarian creeds and regimes. He was an early foe of Italian and German fascism. But his commitment to individual freedom left him wary of all government, and ultimately led him into clashes, as well, with the liberal presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

“It is the mediocre, the thimble-riggers, the cheap players to the crowd, the men who take the customs and thoughts of the common people, who weave them into song and oratory and feed them back to the crowd, who get their votes,” he said. “And from them nothing ever did come and I fear nothing can.”

“Many of his most passionate interests were rooted not merely in his moral idealism and his human pity, but … in his distrust of government,” wrote his friend the theologian John Haynes Holmes. “He hated and denounced Prohibition because it was an invasion by the State of the liberties of the individual. He fought capital punishment because it was the State laying its bloody hand upon some poor forlorn individual who it had earlier betrayed by neglect or oppression.”

THE GREAT THEME of Darrow’s life, the long war he fought in his march through courtrooms and cases, was the defense of individual liberty from modernity’s relentless, crushing, impersonal forces. “No era of the world has ever witnessed such a rapid concentration of wealth and power as this one in which we live,” Darrow warned. “History furnishes … abundant lessons of the inevitable result.”

“All the greatness of America, all her marvelous wealth, all the wonders … are a monument to the wisdom of liberty,” Darrow said. But “our liberty produced prosperity, and this prosperity looks with doubting eye upon the mother who gave it breath, and threatens to strangle her to death.”

Americans needed a new sustaining myth. In his defense of the underdog Darrow helped create one. He gave it a narrative voice, kept it supplied with sympathetic characters, and forged his own place in folklore. “If the underdog got on top he would probably