Introduction

J EF F ERSON’S H EI R

Some rude awakening must come.

larence Darrow, sitting at his desk in the law offices of the Chicago
C & North Western Railway Company on an April morning in 1893,
had much to be pleased about. In the six years since he arrived in Chicago,
he had carved a fine niche. The mayor and governor asked his advice. The
newspapers covered his speeches. He had taken a real estate dispute to the
Illinois Supreme Court and won his client a $500,000 award that, so large
for its time, got front-page attention. He had a pleasant house, a proper
wife, influential friends, and a son he loved. As first assistant counsel to
a mighty railroad, he had a salary and social standing to be envied by
the city’s glut of aspiring lawyers: dire, sepulchral figures, languishing in
the courts, longing for the stroke of fortune that would land them such a
choice position.1
Darrow had just turned thirty-six. He was a tall man for his time,
with high cheekbones and a formidable brow that could give him the look
of a young Lincoln: no disadvantage in Illinois. His eyes were a soft blue
and his smile, a law partner would recall, was “wreathed in good nature
and irresistible charm.” He had a kind of rough charisma that, he was
discovering, charmed the pretty girls who attended his talks and lectures.2
Small-town Ohio could not hold him and so he had come to Chicago,
to the flickering gaslight, the smoke and cinder, the clamor and hoot and
honk of that most American city. He had applied himself, in the courts
by day and by making the rounds of political clubs and debating societies
in the evenings. And he had sought as mentors rich and famous men, and
had prospered from their interest. If Darrow sought a template for success,

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he needed look no further than his boss and patron, the railroad’s gen-
eral counsel, whose office was next to his in the law department at Fifth
Avenue and Lake Street, in downtown Chicago.
William C. Goudy was a trailblazer in a new specialty of the industrial
age: the “corporation lawyer.” With his bearded chin and stern demeanor,
Goudy looked like an Amish elder, and though friends insisted that he had
a warm heart, he was cold and direct in his professional affairs. He was
said to be a millionaire, and Darrow knew him as “ultra conservative.”3
As a chieftain of the Illinois “silk-stocking” Democrats, Goudy served as
an adviser to President Grover Cleveland, who had just been elected to a
second term, and who shared his corporate sympathies. “No harm shall
come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long
as I am President,” Cleveland boasted. Goudy was a close friend, as well,
of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, a Chicagoan who led the era’s notoriously
conservative Supreme Court, known for decisions shielding monopolies
and trusts, outlawing the income tax, and, in the infamous Plessy v. Fer-
guson, authorizing racial segregation.4
In the Gilded Age, when the interests of politicians and industrialists
ran in tandem—or could be made to do so with a timely payoff— Goudy’s
political ties enhanced his appeal to the clients who secured his services. He
represented the Vanderbilt railroad empire, the great Armour meatpack-
ing firm, and other powerful interests in their wars against government
regulation. It was said that Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act
in part to counteract Goudy, who so ably promoted the rights of corpora-
tions and monopolists to run their affairs as they saw fit, without regard
to the public interest.5
Goudy and the railroad were, this day, engaged in one such battle
with the people of Chicago. That great midway between the crops and
natural resources of the West and the markets and capital of the East was
a wicker of railroad tracks. Five million engines and freight cars passed
through Chicago each year, on 1,400 miles of rails. As the city’s popula-
tion leaped, so did the number of those killed and injured by trains tra-
versing its roads and alleys at the thousands of street-level crossings. It
was Darrow’s duty to represent the railroad in court, fighting to limit the
compensation sought by the victims or their families.
The carnage was ghastly. “A stranger’s first impression of Chicago
is that of the barbarous gridironed streets,” a British visitor wrote, “his

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second is that of the multitude of mutilated people . . . the mangled rem-

nant of the massacre.” In a single month that spring, there were forty-five
deaths. One story suffices, that of the mother driv ing home, who froze at
the roar of an approaching train. A passerby pulled her from the driver’s
bench, but her two young daughters were left behind to be shattered and
tossed in the shards of the carriage as their wounded horse bellowed in
pain.
But the railroads were tough, and abetted by public officials who
collected “lavish bribery . . . year after year,” the Chicago Times reported.
When, finally, the city council voted to compel the railroads to raise their
tracks, the companies went to court. “There is no power on earth which
can compel us to elevate our tracks,” said a confident Marvin Hughitt,
the president of the Chicago & North Western. “The opinions of the best
lawyers in the country have been obtained.” A test case was pending at
the Supreme Court, and earlier that month Goudy had traveled to Wash-
ington to speak to the chief justice and visit with his allies at the White
House. He returned to Chicago cheered about his company’s prospects.6

Here, then, was a blueprint for Darrow’s aspirations. He was no

scion of a wealthy family like his liberal friends, the muckraker Henry
Demarest Lloyd or the philanthropist Jane Addams, who used her inheri-
tance to found the Hull House settlement for immigrants in Chicago’s
West Side ghetto. Darrow’s parents, though educated, were moneyless.
He tasted want and shame as a child, and “I never have been able to get
over the dread of being poor, and the fear of it,” he would confide to a
friend. Nor were there government programs in this laissez-faire era for
a man to fall back on in hard times, illness, or old age. The only social
safety net was the free lunch offered in workingmen’s saloons, and a bit of
floor space on which to sleep in municipal hallways during Chicago’s bit-
ter winters. Darrow had a deep interest in learning, and in literature, “but
he has been under the awful compulsion of the age, to make money,” his
friend Brand Whitlock would tell a confidant. “Have you ever reflected
that we of this time are kept so busy making a living that we never find
time to live?”7
Yet Darrow chafed in corporate harness. There was something miss-
ing in the Goudy model. If Darrow’s cunning was a defining attribute,

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more so was his empathy. He was “sensitiveness and egotism all twisted
as the strands of a rope . . . a great character of wonderful sweetness, of
profound intelligence, of Godlike patience and tenderness—shot through
with queer pettiness—about money, about criticism,” one of his lovers,
Mary Field Parton, would confide to her diary. What saved him was his
“extraordinarily” acute compassion, she concluded, “the edges of his emo-
tions sensitive as the antennae of insects.”
Darrow felt guilty working for a corporation, where his legal skills
and his boss’s clout were employed at union busting, or to limit the relief
sought by the pitiful victims of the railway crossings. He longed for peace
of mind. “It seems to me, and for me, that I have no right to save myself
when the injustice is so great,” he would tell Addams.8
Around him was injustice in abundance. The slaughter at Chicago’s
railway crossings was emblematic of conditions in the Gilded Age, when
the United States grappled with economic and social transformations that
many Americans feared, with some justification, might trigger revolu-
tion. Immigrants packed the tenements of the cities, where women took
piecework in squalid, ill-lit flats, while men and children labored in the
factories, mills, mines, and collieries for twelve hours a day, six or seven
days a week, for cents. Unions were assailed; a political and corporate
aristocracy employed the police, the state militia, and private armies of
detectives to disperse—or gun down—striking workers. Blacks were con-
demned to lynch law. Congress, the judiciary, and the state legislatures
were corrupted, and the criminal justice system was no such thing. “The
rich and powerful are seldom indicted and never tried,” one of the city’s
leading lawyers, W. S. Forrest, told an audience in 1892. “Manslaughter
is committed by corporations with impunity. Men are convicted who are
innocent. Even in ordinary trials, the forms of law are frequently set aside
and the rules of evidence ignored.”9
Chicago witnessed all the era’s ills. Drenched in blood, bone-weary
workers slaughtered the illimitable herds of hogs and cattle that clanked by
them on the assembly lines of the stockyards. At McCormick Reaper and
other storied industrial works, union organizers fighting for higher wages
or an eight-hour day were locked out, harassed, and beaten by police. The
houses of prostitution never closed in Little Cheyenne and the Levee,
nor the predatory gambling and drinking dens. The city was divided
along class lines and still seething that spring from the 1886 bombing

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that killed seven policemen at a workers’ rally in the Haymarket, and the
subsequent public delirium that sent four guiltless anarchists to the gal-
lows. The city’s smokestacks cast a famous pall, to rival that of London,
across the prairie sky, and the polluted water spurred outbreaks of cholera.
A visitor from England, well versed in the miseries of the industrial age,
was stunned. “Chicago is a pocket edition of hell,” he wrote, “and if it is
not, then hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.”10
Darrow had delved into politics, joining the movement to assist the
Haymarket defendants and employing his talents and political connec-
tions to persuade the Illinois legislature to pass a bill regulating sweat-
shops and child labor. More than a year before, he had written to Lloyd,
confessing his shame at working for the railroad and praising a protest
that his friend had led after a police raid on a union meeting. “You dare to
say what is true,” Darrow told him. “Your speech . . . made me feel that I
am a hypocrite and a slave, and added to my resolution to make my term
of servitude short.” But he could not summon the will to act. The months
passed, and his time of “servitude” dragged on.11

Darrow’s conscience was still struggling with his comfort on the

morning of Thursday, April 27, when, shortly after eleven a.m., Goudy
finished dictating a letter, dismissed his secretary, and summoned his
first visitor—a retired Civil War hero, General John McArthur—into his
office. Darrow prepared to join them.
“Good morning, Judge,” McArthur said, greeting his friend Goudy.
Then: “You don’t look very well . . . are you ill?”
Goudy seemed stricken, and gasped. McArthur cried out in alarm,
and Darrow rushed in, as Goudy collapsed at his desk.
Darrow and McArthur carried the lawyer to a couch. Goudy stared
up at Darrow with pleading eyes, said nothing, and died.
The great man’s heart attack was front-page news in Chicago. “He
lived only a few minutes,” Darrow told the reporters. “It all happened so
suddenly that we can scarcely appreciate that Mr. Goudy is really dead.”
Darrow was a pallbearer at the funeral. He had lost his patron, and his
paradigm.
Goudy’s death changed Darrow’s life. That weekend, the newspapers
carried the story: C. S. Darrow was leaving his position as lawyer for the

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railroad to go to work for Mayor Carter Harrison. No one then perceived

that this was the birth of the grandest legal career in American history. In
1893, of Darrow’s future clients, Eugene Debs was still an obscure labor
leader with dreams of forming a national railway union. Patrick Prend-
ergast was a mumbling paperboy, lost in delusions. Bill Haywood was a
frontier ruffian. Nathan Leopold, Richard Loeb, Ossian Sweet, and John
Scopes were not yet born.
And yet, in little more than a year, Darrow would be battling to
keep Debs and the other ringleaders of a turbulent workers’ uprising out
of prison, and to save the demented Prendergast, by then an infamous
assassin, from the hangman. He would be on his way to becoming an
American icon, his name synonymous with a passionate, eloquent, and
miraculous defense of the underdog. Journalist Lincoln Steffens would
cite Darrow’s departure from the railroad as the “turning point” in his
friend’s life. “Darrow counted the cost; he seems always to have counted
the cost,” Steffens wrote, but “he found himself off-side, and had to cross
over to where he belonged.”
And so was born, said Steffens, “the attorney for the damned.”12

He had magnificent presence. He would walk into a courtroom,

the conversation would stop, and people would murmur, “There’s Dar-
row.” He was over six feet tall, and handsome in a roughcast way, with eyes
set deep and the bold cheekbones that evoked, as George Bernard Shaw
once said, a Mohican brave. His hair was brown, and straight and fine,
with a famously unruly lock that was apt to drift down to his forehead.
His face, in middle age, was deeply lined; his skin charitably described as
leatherlike, or bronzed. His ears lacked lobes, a puckish touch; his chin
was cleft. His voice was a melodious grumble of a baritone, flowing from
a deep chest. “He had what the French call in a woman—the beauty of
the Devil; the charm of the imperfect,” one 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 off-

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set 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 Wil-
liam 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 hear-
ing 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 Dar-
row 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 enter-
tainment. It was not unusual for the gallery to be packed with prominent
lawyers, off-duty judges, newspapermen, and politicians, and the hallways

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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 cor-
ridors, 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 court-
room 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 awk-
wardness; 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 the face of his opponent. And then the storm
would pass, the sun would return, the jurors would relax, and Darrow
would be genial and engaging, lightening the mood with a wisecrack. He
never addressed juries, he said. He talked to them.
He often used laughter as a weapon. “We will never get a conviction
unless we can make this case more serious,” one frustrated prosecutor told
his associates, as he watched Darrow captivate the courtroom. His gal-
luses were a favorite prop, and he wore them long after belts became the
fashion. “The old man used to crack his suspenders like the explosion of
a .45,” a Chicago newspaperman recalled. “I used to think he’d break a
rib.”19

Darrow’s appeals to juries were all about context. The haughty

judges and the lean and hungry prosecutors of Victorian America knew

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their duty; they were there to exact vengeance, and to safeguard property
and propriety. But Darrow believed that jurors, if given the opportunity
and a skillful enough invitation, could be persuaded to look past the legal
particulars, to judge a defendant in the context of the times, and consider
the situational factors that prompt behavior. He sought to make even the
most hideous of crimes comprehensible.
A juror “begins by assuming that a man charged with a crime is guilty.
He sees before him, not an ordinary human being like himself, but a crea-
ture of whom he thinks as a criminal,” Darrow said. “The first task of a
lawyer . . . is to put forward the human side of his client, to show that jury
that the defendant is merely a man like themselves.”20
Darrow would “stand up, slouch his shoulders, talk quietly and . . . hardly
mention the facts,” said Arthur Garfield Hays, his co-counsel in several cel-
ebrated cases. “In homely language and with a great wealth of illustrations
he would talk about human beings, the difficulties of life, the futility of
human plans, the misfortunes of the defendant, the strange workings of fate
and chance that had landed him in his trouble. Darrow would try to make
the jury understand, not so much the case, as the defendant.”
It was not unusual, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, for lawyers to take many hours—spread over two or three days—to
give a closing argument in a significant case. Darrow did so without
notes, in marvelous displays of intellect and concentration. Taking his
time, Darrow worked like a weaver, ranging back and forth across the
crime, laying down threads, reviving assertions in different form, show-
ing the facts from different angles. To a modern ear, his rhetoric seems to
sprawl. But when he was done he had reshaped the case. “He will travel
far beyond the immediate issue of guilt or innocence,” said Hays. “The
whole background of the case takes on a different coloring.”21
It was more than a tactic. It was his creed. Darrow was a determinist.
He did not believe in free will, nor good and evil, nor choice. There were
no moral absolutes, no truth, and no justice. There was only mercy. “We
are all poor, blind creatures bound hand and foot by the invisible chains
of heredity and environment, doing pretty much what we have to do in a
barbarous and cruel world. That’s about all there is to any court case,” he
said.
He had no faith in God or churches, and won notoriety in the Jazz
Age as the country’s most prominent and outspoken atheist. He built his

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moral code upon life’s very pointlessness, and the comfort and tolerance
that human beings can offer to their doomed fellow travelers on what he
called this “graveyard planet.” His infidel status gave Darrow the distinc-
tive fortune of being among the most beloved and the most hated men in
America.
“Mr. Darrow is the greatest criminal lawyer in America today. His
courtesy is noticeable, his ability is known,” said one prosecutor who was
pitted against him. “Great God! The good that a man of his ability could
have done if he had aligned himself with the forces of right, instead of
aligning himself with that which strikes its poisonous fangs at the bosom
of Christianity.”22
Which of his clients won Darrow the public’s greatest disapprobation?
Was it Prendergast? The homosexual thrill killers Nathan Leopold and
Richard Loeb, who murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks? Or James
McNamara and his brother John, responsible for the bombing of the Los
Angeles Times and the fiery death of twenty employees? Big Bill Haywood,
the leftist union rabble-rouser accused of deploying union executioners
and assassins? The socialist Debs? The anarchists arrested for the Hay-
market bombing? The American communists in the days of the Red Scare
after World War I? Or perhaps, in that era of prejudice and bigotry, it
was the black men whom Darrow volunteered to defend—Isaac Bond; the
Scottsboro boys; Ossian and Henry Sweet and others—charged with the
rape of white women, or the murder of white men.
These were only the more notable misfits. He was a practicing defense
lawyer, and in his time he represented gangsters, psychopaths, gamblers,
bank robbers, drunk drivers, rum runners, yellow journalists, union
goons, crooked politicians and greedy corporations, bunko men, and
many a scorned woman like Emma Simpson, the socialite who smuggled
a handgun into court and shot her philandering husband in the midst of
their divorce proceeding. “You’ve killed him!” said a shocked clerk. “I
hope so,” said Emma. Meeting the classic definition of chutzpah, Darrow
convinced the jury to have mercy on the widow.
“His instantaneous reaction toward people—especially people in
trouble—was the welling forth of that tremendous, instinctive kindliness
and sympathy,” Nathan Leopold recalled. “It was so genuine, so immedi-
ate, so unforced. And it embraced the whole world. Or, at least, nearly the

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whole world. The only things Mr. Darrow hated were what he consid-
ered cruelty, narrow-mindedness, or obstinate stupidity. Against these he
fought with every weapon he could lay a hand to.”23

In his personal life, Darrow was a notorious rake—a professed

sensualist who took much pleasure from the chase, seduction, and act of
love. He relied on “physical nearness” to escape the “emptiness” and the
“spiritual isolation” of his life, said Mary Field Parton, for he was often
lonely, haunted by death, and prey to melancholy. “Sex,” he told her, was
“the only feeling in the world that can make you forget for a little while.”24
Work was an anodyne as well. “Even as I have fought for freedom,”
he said, “I have always had a consciousness that I was doing it to keep
myself occupied so I might forget myself.” Every man had his “dope,” said
Darrow, whether it was “religions, philosophies, creeds, whisky, cocaine,
morphine . . . anything to take away the reality.”
Darrow’s practice was nondiscriminatory, and the rich were as wel-
come as the poor, if not more so. As with many things in Darrow’s life,
his attitude toward money was marked by contradictions. “He is a strange
mixture of craft and courage, generosity and penuriousness, consider-
ation and despotism, honesty and deviousness,” one longtime friend told
another. “And yet he has a big brain and a kind heart.” Darrow was a
foolish and impulsive investor, ever scheming to recover, who could be
alternately tight and free with the balled-up wads of bills and the silver in
his pockets.
But the fat fees from monopolists and elegant divorcées helped offset
the costs of defending folks like poor Tommy Crosby, a thirteen-year-old
charged with shooting a sheriff who had been sent to evict the boy and his
widowed mother from their home three days before Christmas. Darrow
told the whole sad story to the jury and dared them to send Tommy to the
hangman. Of course they did not. And when no one else would defend a
crazed killer like Russell Pethick, the grocery boy who slashed Ella Cop-
persmith to death with a butcher knife, cut the throat of her two-year-old
son, and sexually abused her corpse, Chicagoans were not surprised to
learn that Darrow had taken the case. He saved Pethick—and Crosby
and Simpson and two or three score like them—from the noose and the

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electric chair. “I have known him a lifetime,” Wood wrote. “His almost
insane desire is to save life.”
“Well what can a fellow do,” Darrow asked, “when some poor devil
comes to him, without a cent or a friend in the world, trembling in his
shoes and begging for a chance before the law?”25

He was a Byronic hero—intelligent, captivating, jaded, moody; a

renegade, with small regard for rank or privilege. He scorned society and
its norms, and this seeped into his practice of the law. He would employ
any trick to save a client. “To him the world was equally unmoral above as
well as below,” said the Progressive Era reformer Frederic Howe. “So why
be squeamish about it in criminal cases?”
“Do not the rich and powerful bribe juries, intimidate and coerce judges
as well as juries?” Darrow asked. “Do they shrink from any weapon?”
“A great many people in this world believe the end justifies the means.
I don’t know but I do myself,” he told the court in his closing argument in
the Leopold and Loeb trial.
The first time that Steffens called on him, Darrow laughed the muck-
raker out of his office. “Oh, I know,” Darrow said scornfully. “You are the
man that believes in honesty!”
“I never knew,” said Howe, “whether I admired or disliked him most.
His realism hurt my illusions when it encountered them, and I hated hav-
ing my illusions hurt.”
And yet. Darrow had ineffable compassion for those who faced loss or
despair or persecution. His “strongly emotional nature” was nourished by
his upbringing. His father was the book-loving owner of a rural furniture
shop, an abolitionist who steeped his family in the values of liberty and
equality and taught his son to suspect and challenge authority. “He was
always in rebellion against religious and political creeds of the narrow and
smug community in which he dwelt,” Darrow recalled. His parents were
“friends of all oppressed people, and every new and humane and despised
cause.”26
With such a childhood, and a “vivid imagination,” Darrow recalled,
“not only could I put myself in the other person’s place, but I could not
avoid doing so.”
Compassion was the unifying theory in Darrow’s chaotic universe.

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The bench in Darrow’s outer office was invariably fi lled by “men in over-
alls, their arms in slings; by women huddled in shawls and threadbare
clothes, wan-faced, waiting for Darrow,” a friend recalled. A less chari-
table pal described them as “the types one would expect in a fortune
teller’s parlor . . . including half wits, whom even God could not teach
anything.”
Darrow would emerge at the end of the day, see the long line, sigh,
and offer an understanding smile. Sunday dinners would grow cold as he
sat with a supplicant for an hour or more, patiently hearing the facts of the
case and offering advice. Depending on how he was fi xed at the time, a
third or more of Darrow’s cases earned him nothing.
“The Gilded Age go-getter . . . was strong in Darrow,” wrote
Adamic. “Had he remained a corporation lawyer, he would probably be
a multi-millionaire . . . But he did not. And is not. He could not. Always
it seemed there was a confl ict in Darrow. The idealist in him, with his
inbred sensitive imagination which made him see and understand the
plight of unfortunates, was never suppressed. That phase of him rebelled
against the ambitious go-getter and politician.”
“Everything about Darrow suggests a cynic,” said the publisher
E. W. Scripps, in as perceptive an analysis as was ever made about the man.
“Everything but one thing, and that is—an entire lack of real cynicism.”27

He was Jefferson’s heir—his time’s foremost champion of personal

liberty. When he was a boy, Darrow liked to say, the hired man had dig-
nity; he dined with the family of his employer, shared their pew on Sun-
day, and could court the boss’s daughter. “There were no . . . banks, no big
stores, very little money and nobody had a monopoly of either riches or
poverty,” Darrow recalled. “The community was truly democratic.”
But the nation’s founding principles were stretched beyond recognition
in the roar of the industrial age. At Darrow’s birth, in 1857, America had
one hundred public high schools and thirty thousand miles of railroads,
and produced ten thousand tons of steel a year. By the time he turned forty
the United States was a commercial titan, with six thousand high schools
and 200,000 miles of railroad, and had surpassed Great Britain as the
world’s leading steel producer, with 6 million tons a year. The population
doubled as millions of immigrants poured through the Atlantic seaports,

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 14 ? JEFFERSON’S HEIR

filling the mining towns of Appalachia, the tenements of New York, and
the factories, docks, and stockyards of Chicago with cheap manpower and
desperately poor families.
The Constitution, with its fierce defense of individual rights, had
been written in times when each man was his own agent, free to claim
land on the endless frontier and trade labor or goods on fair terms. But
the coming of steam power, railroads, oil, and factory production lines
yielded huge economies of scale. The fierce new economy demanded, not
a yeoman’s sense of inquiry and initiative, but rote labor at minimal cost.
By the turn of the century there were no more “harness shops, wagon
shops, blacksmith shops or furniture shops,” he noted. “All these things
are made in the centers of industry and made by machines. The workman
merely feeds them.”28
A shrewd and lucky few made great fortunes— Carnegie in steel, Mor-
gan in finance, 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 col-
lars 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

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 15 ? JEFFERSON’S HEIR

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 for-
gotten, 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 ear-
lier 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 totali-
tarian 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 peo-
ple, 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 govern-
ment,” 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 lib-
erty from modernity’s relentless, crushing, impersonal forces. “No era

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 16 ? JEFFERSON’S HEIR

of the world has ever witnessed such a rapid concentration of wealth

and power as this one in which we live,” Darrow warned. “History fur-
nishes . . . abundant lessons of the inevitable result.”
“All the greatness of America, all her marvelous wealth, all the won-
ders . . . 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 folk-
lore. “If the underdog got on top he would probably be just as rotten as the
upper dog, but in the meantime I am for him,” Darrow said. “He needs
friends a damn sight more than the other fellow.”30
Americans drew strength watching Darrow rage against the machine.
They can again today. There is something grand and epic in his fierce
resistance to those inexorable oppressive forces that, in varying guises,
inspired the rebels in his ancestry and the abolitionists of his boyhood,
imperiled freedom in his lifetime, and pose a threat to liberty today.
“The marks of battle are all over his face,” wrote the journalist
H. L. Mencken. “He has been through more wars than a whole regiment
of Pershings. And most of them have been struggles to the death, without
codes or quarter.
“Has he always won?” Mencken asked. “Actually, no. His cause seems
lost among us.”
“Imbecilities, you say, live on? They do,” wrote Mencken. “But they
are not as safe as they used to be.”31

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