The Life of Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was a man of many talents, but he is most famous for his status as the greatest trial lawyer of the early 20th century. His beliefs and attitudes towards society in America were considered highly progressive at the time, and his stances on labor and civil liberties were shown especially through his cases.
Clarence was born on April 18, 1857, just a few years before one of the greatest conflicts in American history, the Civil War. In his early years, he became a lawyer for Ohio, where he stayed for several years. Almost a decade later, just as the labor movements were picking up across the country, Darrow moved to Chicago and represented rioters from the Haymarket Riot, one of the more controversial labor conflicts of the time. Another one of his clients was none other than Eugene V. Debs, the future candidate for president and leader of the Pullman Strike, and although Darrow lost this case, he had by this time established his presence as a skillful and determined labor and criminal lawyer.
However, Darrow’s true zenith would come later, in the mid-1920s, where he took three of his most famous cases, the Leopold and Loeb trial, the Scopes monkey trial, and the Sweets trial. In the Leopold and Loeb trial, Darrow presented the argument that if the jury sentenced the two defendants, who were clearly insane, to death, it would be the equivalent of the crime the two men committed. In the highly publicized Scopes monkey trial, Darrow went against William Jennings Bryan, with whom he’d had a long-standing and bitter rivalry, over the legitimacy of the law that banned the teaching of Darwinian evolution to students at a school in Tennessee. Darrow argued the atheist, strong scientific position while Bryan argued the fundamentalists, strictly religious position. In the end, Darrow lost the case, but his reputation was solidified. The final case of this period was the Sweets trial, where Darrow defended a group of African-American men who had killed a white man while defending their home in Detroit. In this case, Darrow made an argument that today looks simple, yet back then was quite groundbreaking: that if the American citizen had a right to defend their home then African Americans have that right too. This argument led to the men’s acquittal and the writing in the law of this principle. With his cases, as well as his books, Darrow advocated for certain liberties, such as the ending of Prohibition, unrestricted free speech, and the banning of capital punishment. In addition, he was an early advocate for the suffragette movement, although he would later have less enthusiasm for the movement due to its support of Prohibition. As if this were not enough, Darrow was a founding attorney of the NAACP, and often took cases for free in an attempt to represent the indigent American.
As lauded as he may be, Darrow was not without faults. In his early years, he was very focused on the monetary aspect of being a lawyer, and would often squander his money on poor investments. This changed, however, after he took a case in Los Angeles defending two men who were accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times and killing several people. Before the case was over, Darrow and a colleague were accused of bribing the jury, and after two rulings the jury ended hung 8-4 for convicting him. It was after this case that his reputation was in tatters, and he started a new and began to build the reputation we know today. There was one more thing that Darrow was known for, and that was his widespread philandering. He had married twice and had many mistresses, and this was widely due to his belief in the free love movement of the time.
Clarence Darrow was a staunch believer in civil liberties and labor rights, and his efforts to those ends are reflected across American history into our time when certain liberties are taken for granted that he had argued for. What can we learn from his determination to change the values of America at the time? Can we apply those efforts to today’s struggle over civil liberties and rights for minorities? We will have to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment