NOTES

PREFACE

1. Ruby Darrow to T. Perceval Gerson, 17 December 1934, TLS, CLU-SC, Gerson Papers.

2. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 15 July 1927. (Letters cited without a source—like this one—are published in this book.)

3. Darrow to Benjamin B. Lindsey, 17 December 1929.

4. Clarence Darrow, Farmington (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), vii.

5. Ruby Darrow to Ella Winter, 26 October 1936, TLS, NNC, Steffens Collection.

6. Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, n.d. (“Dear Partner:— | Mrs. McKay telephoned . . .”), DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

7. See also Margaret Parton to Paul Heffron, 8 April 1974, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers (“I’m disappointed but not surprised at the scarcity of personal correspondence [in the Darrow Papers at the Library of Congress]; my mother [Mary Field Parton] told me once that Darrow almost always threw letters away once he had read and answered them”).

8. See, e.g., Leo Cherne to Arthur Garfield Hays, 25 March 1948, TLc, MBU, Cherne Papers, Box 1, Folder 3 (explaining, perhaps mistakenly, in response to Ruby Darrow’s concern that the collection had been destroyed, that he had donated the whole collection to the Library of Congress except for a few photographs, a cartoon sketch, and some books).

9. See http://darrow.law.umn.edu, accessed 16 July 2011.

10. Story, 323.

11. Darrow to T. Perceval Gerson, 17 December 1934, TLS, CLU-SC, Gerson Papers (“This is written by Mrs. Darrow, as I am dictating to her at the machine; she has learned to take care of my large mail, and whatever else needs to be moved aside, as I no longer go to any office”).

12. Darrow to John Cowper Powys, 9 August 1935, TLS, TxU-Hu, Powys Collection.

13. See, e.g., Darrow to Frank Murphy, 9 October 1935.

14. See Darrow to Gertrude Barnum, circa April 1930; Darrow to Charles Mantinband, 23 August 1932; Darrow to John H. Dietrich, 20 September 1932.

15. See Darrow to Chicago Tribune, 27 January 1903.

16. See Darrow to J. Howard Moore, 28 December 1912.

17. See David M. Rabban, Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 8 (noting that many of the progressives who founded the American Civil Liberties Union and who became civil libertarians after the war “had little interest in the subject of free speech before the war”).

INTRODUCTION

1. H.L. Mencken, “Stewards of Nonsense,” American Mercury, January 1928, 35–37 (reprinted in H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, ed. Terry Teachout [New York: Knopf, 1995], 85–88).

2. Great American Lawyers, ed. William Draper Lewis (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1907), 1:iv–v.

3. Story, 45.

4. See, e.g., Darrow to William Essling, 15 January 1934.

5. Mencken, “Stewards of Nonsense,” 36.

6. E.B. White to Corona Machemer, 11 June 1975, in Letters of E.B. White, ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 655.

7. Darrow to Fremont Older, 22 February 1925.

8. Clarence Darrow, Pessimism: A Lecture (Chicago: J.F. Higgins, 1920), 19 (reprinted in Clarence Darrow: Verdicts out of Court, ed. Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg [Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963; repr., Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989], 293).

9. Darrow to Brand Whitlock, 17 December 1910.

10. Darrow to Charles Erskine Scott Wood, 6 October 1916.

11. Darrow to Charles Erskine Scott Wood, 15 February 1918.

12. Darrow to Fremont Older, 25 December 1920.

13. Darrow to Mary Field, 29 November 1912.

14. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 31 March [1914?], ALS, ICN, Parton-Darrow Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.

15. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 4 March 1915.

16. Darrow to Anna Scherff Tzitlonok, 23 September 1921.

17. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 16 October 1919.

18. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 25 November 1920.

19. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 27 April 1916.

20. Darrow to Sara Bard Field, 16 November 1918.

21. Victor S. Yarros, My 11 Years with Clarence Darrow (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1950), 9.

22. Ibid.

23. Hamlin Garland’s Diaries, ed. Donald Pizer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1968), 121–22.

24. David Karsner, Talks with Debs in Terre Haute (New York: The New York Call, 1922), 102.

25. Darrow, Pessimism, 14.

26. Ben Hecht, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (Chicago: Covici-McGee, 1922), 161.

27. Darrow to Ashtabula (Ohio) Democratic Standard, 24 August 1887.

28. Darrow to Chicago Daily News, 26 February 1900.

29. The Plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22, 23, and 25, 1924, in Defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on Trial for Murder (Chicago: R.F. Seymour, 1924), 83.

30. Darrow to Fred Bicknell, March 1929 or later.

31. Darrow to Vivian Pierce, 8 February 1931.

32. Darrow to “Miss S,” March 1895.

33. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 1 February 1923; see also, e.g., Darrow to Harry Elmer Barnes, 12 March 1932 (“I don’t know what I should have done if now and then a fairly well-to-do client had not come my way; the ravens have never called on me”).

34. Undated, unidentified newspaper clipping, “Darrow Makes Reply to Attack in Letter,” ICN, Darrow Family Scrapbooks, Box 3 (quoting text of a letter to Darrow from Hugh M’Gee, William F. Dunn, Edward Quinn, W.E. Kern, H.D. Lighthall, James Curran, John Maloy, N.B. Travis on 4 April 1903).

35. Ibid.

36. “Clarence Darrow,” New York World, 27 July 1907.

37. Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, 18 September 1940, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

38. Darrow to George P. Costigan Jr., 10 January 1917. See also Transcript, The People of the State of California v. Clarence Darrow, Sup. Ct. Calif., vol. 71 (29 July 1912), 5889, CLL (Darrow testifying: “I suppose nine-tenths of my practice has been civil practice and perhaps one-tenth of it criminal and about one-third of it charity for the last twenty years”).

39. See, e.g., Darrow to Horace Traubel, 28 January 1903 (“All my life I have been harrassed over money matters, although I make a good income. I have so many people to look after & obligations of all sorts that I am always in debt & unable to do what I would like.”); Darrow to Edgar Lee Masters, 29 November 1907 (explaining that he [Darrow] could probably earn one hundred dollars a day in Chicago practicing law and otherwise providing some financial information about the law firm); Darrow to Paul Darrow, 14 May 1911 (revealing that a fee received of twenty-five thousand dollars plus income of three thousand dollars from the gas company would approximately cover his debts, but saying nothing of his assets); Darrow to Charles Erskine Scott Wood, 6 October 1916 (“I am working hard & doing fairly well financially, but there are always so many worthy & unworthy looking for help that it keeps me poor”).

40. See, e.g., Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 21 March 1903 (“Besides all of this I hardly believe I have more friends than any one in Chicago, . . . & there are many who love me as devotedly as any one I ever knew”).

41. See Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

42. Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of Labor (New York: Duffield, 1907; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 141.

43. Ibid.

44. See, e.g., J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 331–33 (discussing rumors that Darrow, in the Idaho trials, had been involved in payments to Steve Adams’s uncle to convince Adams to recant a confession; no charges were ever brought or even discussed publicly).

45. John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 278 (concluding that Darrow “most assuredly” “participate[d] in the bribery scheme”); Andrew E. Kersten, Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011), 146 (“It seems hard to believe that [Darrow] didn’t [know about the bribery]”); Geoffrey Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow (New York: Times Books, 1993), 434 (“it is fair to conclude that Darrow bribed both Lockwood and Bain”); Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg, Clarence Darrow: A Sentimental Rebel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), 262–64 (providing reasons for believing in Darrow’s innocence); Kevin Tierney, Darrow: A Biography (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979), 274 (stating that a review of facts did not show guilt beyond reasonable doubt, “but neither does it give confidence that he was innocent”); Miriam Gurko, Clarence Darrow (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965), 168–80 (implying that Darrow was innocent); Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1941), 307–42 (written as though Darrow were innocent); Charles Yale Harrison, Clarence Darrow (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931), 198–99 (never suggesting that Darrow was guilty and stating that his “acquittal was a popular one”).

46. Transcript, The People of the State of California v. Clarence Darrow, Sup. Ct. Calif., vol. 5 (28 May 1912), 363–65, CLL.

47. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 11 November 1911.

48. See also, e.g., “Darrow Passes Buck to Davis,” Los Angeles Times, 14 February 1913 (during his own opening statement in his second trial, “Darrow said his recollection of Bain was slight. He declared that Franklin urged [LeCompte] Davis to retain Bain on the panel.”).

49. Sidney Fine, “Without Blare of Trumpets”: Walter Drew, the National Erectors’ Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903–57 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 97–98 (explaining why the San Francisco unionist might have been behind the dynamiting).

50. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 279–80 (giving a short analysis of the theory that Tveitmoe—who handled some of the money raised for the defense of the McNamaras—was the architect, without Darrow at “the center of the plot”); Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow, 435 (summarily dismissing the theory that labor leaders were responsible for the bribery because “no evidence points to [other labor leaders]”).

51. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 5 December 1911.

52. Kersten, Clarence Darrow, 148 (citing “Too Much Biased against M’Namara,” New York Times, 17 October 1911).

53. See, e.g., “McNamara Attorneys Win Point,” San Francisco Call, 17 October 1911 (quoting Darrow asking Bain a question other than the one the New York Times reported); “M’Namara Wins Point in Court,” Chicago Tribune, 17 October 1911 (suggesting several of the questions that were asked); “M’Namara Jurymen,” The (Ogden City) Evening Standard, 17 October 1911 (reporting that the questioning of Bain continued the next day, 17 October); “Rapid Progress Is Expected in M’Namara Case,” Los Angeles Tribune, 17 October 1911 (quoting some of the questions Darrow asked Bain and implying that others were asked); “Two Near-Jurors Found in the M’Namara Case,” Los Angeles Examiner, 17 October 1911 (quoting or implying questions asked by Darrow of Bain).

54. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 238 (quoting Darrow to J. Howard Moore, 6 February 1912); see also http://darrow.law.umn.edu/letters.php?pid=37&skey=Moore, Howard J., accessed 16 July 2011 (facsimile of the handwritten letter together with a transcript that includes a similar misreading).

55. See also Darrow to Frederick Hamerstrom, 6 February 1912 (using similar phrasing, about how “the interests are strong” against him).

56. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 248 (quoting Darrow to Paul Darrow, 4 July 1911 [mistaken as 1912 by Farrell]); see also http://darrow.law.umn.edu, accessed 16 July 2011 (facsimile of the handwritten letter together with a transcript, listed under letters to Paul and dated 4 July [1912] on the website).

57. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 278.

58. Darrow to Frederick Hamerstrom, 6 February 1912 (emphasis added); see also, e.g., Darrow to Paul Darrow, 29 December 1911 (“There is no right to get me in trouble . . .”); Darrow to Paul Darrow, 1 January 1912 (“There is really nothing to it except some suspicious circumstances”); Darrow to J. Howard Moore, 6 February 1912 (“They had no right to do this to me & I don’t believe it will stick”).

59. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 244.

60. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 16 December 1927; see John A. Farrell, “Darrow in the Dock,” Smithsonian (December 2011): 98–111 (referring to this letter as “another incriminating detail” against Darrow).

61. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 17 December [1927], ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Papers (“I wrote you yesterday about the Draft to Golding. I forgot to tell you what the reason I asked you to do it is that I am here [in New York City] and can not get the money that he needs as easily as you can. Am really glad the plant is sold.”).

62. Darrow to E.W. Scripps, 19 May 1915.

63. George Schilling to Darrow, 12 February 1913, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

64. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 272.

65. Stone, Clarence Darrow, 82 (describing Jessie as “lethargic and slow-thinking,” lacking “an exciting intellect,” etc.); Tierney, Darrow, 136–37 (“Clarence for his part was uncomfortable with Jessie’s lack of sophistication and distinction. It hurt his pride to be married to a woman who was a living reminder of his past.”).

66. Kersten, Clarence Darrow, 87–88.

67. William H. Holly, review of Clarence Darrow for the Defense, by Irving Stone, American Bar Association Journal 28 (1 February 1942): 140–42 (Darrow’s friend and former law partner, then a federal judge, reviewing Stone’s biography and noting that Stone had “said some things about Darrow’s first and his second wife that are unkind and untrue”).

68. Story, 33; see also Darrow to Victor Yarros, 28 May 1930.

69. Darrow to Jessie Darrow, 8 January 1896.

70. Bill (for divorce), Clarence S. Darrow vs. Jessie O. Darrow, Circuit Court of Cook County, February Term 1897 (copy in ICN, Arthur and Lila Weinberg Papers, Box 12).

71. Darrow to Jessie Darrow, 14 July 1903.

72. See, e.g., Tierney, Darrow, 164 (maintaining that “[n]either father nor son ever fathomed the complexities of their loving but difficult relationship”; and that Paul was embarrassed by Darrow’s stand for unpopular causes and Darrow, for his part, was “hurt and mystified to the end” that “Paul wanted neither to follow in his . . . footsteps nor to live in his shadow”), 434 (“In almost every way, father and son contrasted . . .”).

73. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 12 March 1924; Darrow to Paul Darrow, 19 March 1924.

74. Darrow to Paul Darrow, 19 March 1924.

75. See, e.g., “Paul Darrow Dies Thursday of Heart Attack,” Greeley Tribune, 21 December 1956 (“Because of [Paul’s] interest in Rotary, the father addressed the club on his frequent visits to Greeley . . .”).

76. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 29 May 1915.

77. Paul Darrow to Jessie Darrow, 25 August 1892, ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Papers; Diary of Paul Darrow (photocopy in editor’s files); see also Stone, Clarence Darrow, 117.

78. Stone, Clarence Darrow, 118; see also Handwritten Notes of Irving Stone (apparently from an interview with Paul Darrow), undated, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers, Box 12 (showing the same statement from Paul Darrow).

79. But see Margaret Parton, Journey through a Lighted Room (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 24–25 (the daughter of Darrow’s friend, Mary Field Parton, who, as a child, viewed Darrow as someone who “didn’t care for children very much”).

80. Photocopy in editor’s files.

81. Darrow to Jessie Darrow, 8 January 1896.

82. See, e.g., Darrow to Ruby, 9 November 1911 (Darrow apologizing to Ruby for something he did or said and reassuring her of his love and respect for her); Darrow to Ruby, 7 December 1914 (apologizing for something that he said to Ruby).

83. Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 4 June 1902.

84. See, e.g., Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 20 June 1902; Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, n.d. (“Monday”), ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Papers (“There has only been the obstacle of which I told you, the same that is in your life—I shall try to make this right so I can come to you—I want you & can never be happy without you & can make no-one else happy. I must work this out the best I can to cause the least misery possible but I feel that it must be done & can be—and how anxious I am that it shall be soon”).

85. Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 20 November 1902; see also, e.g., Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, n.d. (“Friday”), ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Papers (“Really the loveliest picture I can conceive is to have a home & you there. I feel that I would be content.”); Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, 25 January 1941, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers (“I was afraid for a long time to let him take another chance, for he had so wanted his freedom [in his first marriage], and had so reveled in it, and fully intended never to—again!”).

86. “Their Marriage a Surprise to Friends,” Chicago Tribune, 17 July 1903.

87. Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 28 January 1903.

88. Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 7 April 1903.

89. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 440; see also, e.g., ibid., 124 (“The near-universal opinion of Darrow’s pals [was] . . . that his new wife was his intellectual inferior”; they “talk[ed] of her henpecking, of her ‘twittering,’ and of her insecurity and possessiveness”).

90. Frederick and Frances Hamerstrom to Dr. A.H. Wolff, 18 February 1955, TLc, private collection of Elva Paulson (copy in editor’s files).

91. Margaret Parton, “Mary Field” (unnumbered pages of a typewritten manuscript of a partial draft, unpublished biography of Parton) [1974], OrU, Margaret Parton Papers, Box 38, Folder 7.

92. Ibid.

93. Darrow to Mary Field, 15 March 1910.

94. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 4 July 1913, ALS, ICN, Darrow-Parton Papers.

95. See, e.g., Margaret Parton, “Mary Field” (in the draft of Margaret’s book about her mother): “According to Irving Stone, Darrow’s biographer, the famous lawyer had many affairs at this period when Free Love had become a cult among radicals; for years I wondered whether my mother had been one of them. It was not exactly a question which any daughter with a sense of delicacy could ask directly, but once during the tape-recording sessions I edged up to it. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you went to all those meetings with Darrow and you shared a hundred dinners and sometimes he would walk home with you to your flat. Tell me, didn’t you ever talk about anything except politics and suffering humanity? Didn’t you ever . . . well, hold hands?’ She understood what I was asking, but she was not to be trapped. ‘I think if I had been born a Catholic, I would have been a nun,’ she answered. This remark left me speechless, which I guess is what she intended. . . . Ruby evidently had reason to be jealous, but whether she had reason to be jealous of Mary I’m not entirely sure, for there are some mysteries in every life which I suppose even the most diligent sleuthing cannot penetrate, and probably should not.” See also Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 226, 242, quoting letters from Charles Erskine Scott Wood to Sara Bard Field from which details of a sexual affair between Darrow and Parton are inferred; and Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow, 204 (same).

96. See, e.g., Donald McRae, The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow (New York: William Morrow, 2009), 15 (maintaining that Darrow and Parton briefly resumed a sexual relationship in 1924).

97. See, e.g., Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, undated, TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers (“Dear Irving Stone:— | You see I did send you . . .”) (describing Parton as having “no fine sides”); Weinberg and Weinberg, Clarence Darrow, 156–57 (“Against the collective woman Darrow rages as he would like to against the little piss ant wife whose pettiness and jealousies have galled him for years”) (quoting Parton’s diary entries as quoted by Parton’s daughter in her unfinished biography of her mother).

98. Ruby Darrow to Frederick Hamerstrom Jr. and Frances Hamerstrom, undated, TLS, private collection of Elva Paulson (copy in editor’s files).

99. Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 281, 296.

100. See, e.g., Cowan, People v. Clarence Darrow, 174–75; see also Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 225 (noting that “Sara had a way of tweaking her lover’s jealousy with tales about men who sought to bed her and it is possible that she embellished her encounters with Darrow”), 269, 302.

101. Transcript, Sara Bard Field: Poet and Suffragist, Oral History Interview conducted by Amelia R. Fry (Regional Oral History Project, University of California at Berkeley, 1959–63), 273.

102. Farrell, Clarence Darrow, 89.

103. Holly, review of Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense, 140–42.

104. “Woman’s Place in Nature,” (Englewood) Daily Evening Call, 24 January 1891; see also “The Rights of Women,” Rockford (Illinois) Register-Gazette, 8 September 1891 (reporting on a similar speech by Darrow at the Christian Union Church in Rockford).

105. “Woman Lawyer to Defend Pethick,” Chicago Tribune, 25 August 1915 (observing that Darrow’s co-counsel relationship with Alice Thompson was “one of the first where a woman has appeared in a criminal case”).

106. Darrow to Charles Erskine Scott Wood, 19 May 1913.

107. Darrow, “Nietzsche,” The Athena 1 (June–July 1916), 6–16; see also Darrow, “Schopenhauer,” The Liberal Review 2 (March 1917): 9–23.

108. Darrow, “Nietzsche,” 10–11.

109. “Nothing in Law, Darrow Asserts,” Chicago Tribune, 17 December 1916.

110. See also, e.g., Darrow, “Attorney for the Defense,” Esquire 5 (May 1936): 36–37, 211–13 (making harsh statements about women serving on juries); Darrow, “Women and Justice: Are Women Fit to Judge Guilt,” McCall’s (June 1928): 15, 65–66.

111. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 26 September 1914, ALS, ICN, Darrow Papers. See also, e.g., Story, 106.

112. Philadelphia Daily Record, 17 May 1927.

113. Darrow to Mary Field, 27 September 1910.

114. Darrow to Alice Beal Parsons, 13 March 1926.

115. Darrow to H.L. Mencken, 2 May 1924.

116. Darrow to Mary Field Parton, 25 November 1920.

117. Cowan, People v. Clarence Darrow, xiv (quoting a conversation with Irving Stone).

118. Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 56.

BEFORE 1890

1. Everett Darrow was in Europe when his mother, Emily Darrow, died. Fifteen-year-old Clarence—although not out of the country—was also away from home that day: “I never could tell whether I was sorry or relieved that I was not there, but I still remember the blank despair that settled over the home when we realized that her tireless energy and devoted love were lost forever.” Story, 27.

2. Viola (“Jennie”) Darrow.

3. Herman C. Darrow.

4. Lauren A. Perkins (1847–1923), a florist and the postmaster in Kinsman.

5. Probably Juliette Allen (b. 1819), wife of John D. Allen (b. 1814), a farmer from Kinsman.

6. Henry B. Eldred.

7. Mary Darrow Olson.

8. When this letter was written, Everett was still in Europe, attending the University of Berlin.

9. Channing E. Darrow.

10. In his autobiography sixty years later, Darrow remembered his interest in the literary society: “For several years, while I was in my later teens, the Literary Society met in the schoolhouse. My older brother Everett and my sister Mary were members of the organization, and before I was old enough to join I used to go to hear the essays and debates. It was some very pressing interference that caused me ever to miss one of these meetings. Our father always encouraged us to go, and sometimes he went along. As soon as possible I became a member and participated in the scholarly activities.” Story, 376.

11. Ezra Lewis (b. 1807), a farmer in Kinsman, married to Ammirus Darrow’s sister, Mary Darrow Lewis (b. 1816).

12. Here, one or two sentences—approximately eighteen words—are heavily blackened out with a pencil (the letter itself is in ink) and “taint so” is written in pencil above the blackened-out words.

13. “Hermy” is Darrow’s youngest brother, Herman Darrow, but the meaning of the rest of this sentence is unclear. “Steam Nigger” might refer to a steam engine used in hoisting on a ship. See Mitford M. Mathews, ed., A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 2:1117.

14. Darrow was enrolled in the law department of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. This is apparently a reference to Bridget Foley (b. 1835), who rented out part of her house on Huron Street in Ann Arbor.

15. The purpose of Darrow’s trip to Virginia is unknown.

16. Darrow is likely referring to their move to Chicago. Jessie was probably with her sister and brother-in-law, Lizzie (Ohl) and Henry Budd, who lived in northern Minnesota. Interview with Blanche Darrow Chase, Wheaton, Illinois, 29 July 1995.

17. The subject of Darrow’s speeches is unknown. The only newspaper account located states that “C.S. Darrow lectured in Root’s Hall Monday after noon. The meeting was under the auspices of the Liberals, and they report a good lecture.” “Farmdale,” Western Reserve Chronicle, 6 April 1887.

18. Mary Darrow Olson.

19. Everett Darrow.

20. Starr O. Latimer (1845–1918) was the sheriff of Ashtabula County, Ohio.

21. Joshua R. Giddings (1795–1864), lawyer and antislavery congressman from Ohio (first as a Whig, then a Free Soiler, and eventually a Republican), 1838–59.

22. Benjamin Franklin Wade (1800–1878), lawyer and United States senator from Ohio (first as a Whig and then a Republican), 1851–69, famous for his antislavery stands. Giddings and Wade practiced law together in Jefferson, Ohio, for several years in the 1830s.

23. Joseph Benson Foraker (1846–1917), Union soldier, Republican governor of Ohio, and United States senator. In 1887, when President Cleveland ordered the return of captured Civil War battle flags to their respective states, Foraker received national attention when he declared: “No rebel flags will be surrendered while I am governor.”

24. Albert Parsons (1848–87), Confederate soldier, printer, editor of Alarm (a popular radical newspaper in Chicago), and member of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) (a patchwork of revolutionary groups and ideas all with the aim of abolishing the capitalist system). Parsons was hanged on 11 November 1887.

25. Samuel Fielden (1847–1922), English-born laborer, orator, lay minister, and member of the IWPA. Fielden’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Richard Oglesby (1824–99) and he was pardoned by Governor John Altgeld in 1893. He lived out his life on a ranch in Colorado.

26. August Spies (1855–87), German-born editor, writer, orator, manager of Arbeiter-Zeitung (a radical German-language newspaper in Chicago), and member of the IWPA. Spies was hanged on 11 November 1887.

27. Michael Schwab (1853–98), German-born bookbinder, reporter and editor of Arbeiter-Zeitung, and member of the IWPA. Schwab’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Oglesby and he was pardoned by Governor Altgeld in 1893, after which he operated a shoe store and continued to write for Arbeiter-Zeitung.

28. George Engel (1836–87), German-born laborer, owner and operator of a toy store, founder of a short- lived monthly anarchist journal called Der Anarchist, and member of the IWPA. Engel was hanged on 11 November 1887.

29. Adolph Fischer (1858–87), German-born compositor for Arbeiter-Zeitung and member of the IWPA. Fischer was hanged on 11 November 1887.

30. Louis Lingg (1864–87), German-born carpenter and member of the IWPA. The day before he was scheduled to be executed in November 1887, he committed suicide by exploding a dynamite cartridge in his mouth.

31. Oscar Neebe (1850–1916), laborer, tinsmith, and part owner and operator of a small yeast company. Neebe was pardoned by Governor Altgeld in 1893 and operated a saloon in Chicago after his release.

32. In the election of 1876, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden (1814–86), governor of New York, won the popular vote for the presidency over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), governor of Ohio. The electoral college also favored Tilden, but the Republicans claimed that four states rightfully belonged to Hayes (Louisiana was among the four and the integrity of its election returns, in particular, came under a cloud of suspicion). A fifteen-man electoral commission appointed to investigate and resolve the dispute decided the election in favor of Hayes.

33. John Sherman (1823–1900), Republican congressman and senator from Ohio, secretary of treasury under President Hayes, secretary of state under President McKinley, and contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1880, 1884, and 1888. After the presidential election in 1876, Sherman and a group of other Republicans traveled to Louisiana to observe the work of that state’s board of election returns. Democrats sent their own representatives. The board eventually decided the election in favor of Hayes and rumors circulated that members of the board had been bribed or otherwise influenced by the “visiting statesmen.” Sherman’s conduct was especially scrutinized. See Ralph J. Roske, “‘Visiting Statesman’ in Louisiana, 1876,” Mid-America 33 (April 1951): 89–102.

34. Lucius Fairchild (1831–96), Union soldier, Republican governor of Wisconsin, and foreign diplomat. In a speech in 1887, while serving as Wisconsin commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Fairchild famously condemned President Cleveland’s order requiring the states to return all captured Civil War battle flags: “May God palsy the hand that wrote the order! May God palsy the brain that conceived it! May God palsy the tongue that dictated it!” “Gen. Lucius Fairchild Dead,” New York Times, 24 May 1896.

35. On 14 September 1887, the Supreme Court of Illinois issued a unanimous decision affirming the judgment of the trial court in the Haymarket case and setting an execution date of 11 November 1887 for the seven men sentenced to death. See Spies v. People, 122 Ill. 1, 12 N.E. 865 (1887). Schilling and many others began a clemency movement. Meetings protesting the treatment of the defendants were held in several major cities on 20 October 1887. Some four thousand people gathered in Chicago, with Darrow slated among the speakers. See “Appeal to the People,” Chicago Evening Mail, 20 October 1887 (“Mr. Darrow is a lawyer, and will give the legal points in the case”); “Mercy for the Reds, It Is Asked by Their Friends,” Chicago Morning News, 21 October 1887; “Say They Must not Hang,” Chicago Tribune, 21 October 1887.

36. The bottom part of the letter—approximately one-third of the page—is torn off and missing. This might have contained seventy or so words.

37. Here, Darrow is referring to the fact that on 13 October 1887 the club agreed to petition Illinois governor Richard Oglesby to extend executive clemency to the men convicted in the Haymarket bombing. The resolutions of the club—which Darrow prepared—asserted objections to the defendants’ trial process, the sufficiency of the evidence, the state supreme court’s recent decision, and capital punishment. These resolutions were sent to Henry George.

38. At a meeting of the General Assembly of the Knights of Labor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Schilling and others urged the Knights of Labor to adopt a resolution that would support commuting the death sentences of the Haymarket defendants. The resolution was strongly opposed by Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924), grand master of the Knights of Labor, and lost on a vote by a three-to-one margin. See “Anarchism,” Minneapolis Tribune, 11 October 1887.

39. Darrow spoke in Marion, Ohio, and other places against the tariff. In Marion, “the great orator of Chicago” spoke to one hundred fifty Democrats and thirty Republicans for two hours and fifteen minutes: “fifteen minutes preliminary remarks; two hours to show the famous and the poor what a curse the tariff is, and how they had been imposed upon.” “‘C’ Writes from LaRue,” Marion Weekly Star, 29 October 1887.

40. “Elsie” was Elsie (Welty) Darrow (b. 1864), the first wife of Clarence Darrow’s youngest brother, Herman, and “the baby” was Elsie and Herman’s first child, Elmer Darrow (1885–1960).

1890–1894

1. On 7 April 1890, an estimated seven thousand carpenters in Chicago went on strike, seeking an eight-hour day, forty cents an hour in wages, and recognition of their union. Darrow, Lloyd, John Altgeld, William Salter, and others formed a committee to try to bring the carpenters and contractors together to resolve their disputes. By the date of this letter, the strike had developed into a more general strike by many workers in the building trades, which brought to a halt many construction projects in the city. The strike was settled on 6 May 1890 through an arbitration committee, with the carpenters receiving, among other things, an eight-hour day and nearly forty cents an hour. “Dropped Their Tools, Washington Post, 8 April 1890; “Intercepting Arrivals,” Chicago Tribune, 16 April 1890; “Still Another Strike,” Chicago Tribune, 17 April 1890; “Strike Fever in Chicago,” Washington Post, 24 April 1890; “Chicago Carpenters,” Washington Post, 7 May 1890.

2. Franklin Head (1835–1914) was at various times a lawyer, businessman, and banker in Chicago. A wealthy man, Head was active in civic affairs, president of the Civic Federation of Chicago, and a Republican in his politics.

3. The Fountain Hotel—on whose stationery this letter was written—also operated a sanitarium called the New Fountain Bath House.

4. Hubert H. Darrow.

5. “Helen” is probably Helen Kelchner Darrow, Everett Darrow’s wife. Darrow and Jessie were apparently staying at the home of Darrow’s brother and sister-in-law.

6. Lloyd was scheduled to speak on Saturday, 27 December 1891, at a public meeting of organized labor in Chicago. Six weeks before this letter (on 12 November), approximately one hundred police officers had raided a meeting of the Painters’ Union at Greif’s Hall in Chicago. Twenty-three men were arrested on charges of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Five were also charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The mayor and police came under immediate criticism for the warrantless raid, and they defended their actions by claiming that they had thwarted an imminent uprising of “anarchists.” “Anarchy Meets the Law,” Chicago Tribune, 13 November 1891.

7. During a court hearing the day after the raid, one police detective testified—perhaps before a justice of the peace (which might explain the reference to “J.P.”)—that he had heard a man at the meeting say that “they would hang the mayor and that he is a——dude.” “Bombs Were to Follow,” Chicago Daily News, 13 November 1891.

8. Lloyd delivered a speech condemning the raid on Greif’s Hall and urging more active involvement against police lawlessness. The speech was published posthumously in a book of Lloyd’s essays. “Free Speech and Assemblage,” in Henry Demarest Lloyd, Mazzini and Other Essays (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), 125–46.

9. William W. Catlin was a stockbroker in Chicago and a member—together with Darrow, Lloyd, and several others—of what was known as the Labor Committee for the World’s Congress Auxiliary. This body was organized to present a series of meetings at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, covering a wide spectrum of subjects—including medicine, music, literature, engineering, government, religion, labor, education, the press, temperance, “moral and social reform,” and “woman’s progress.” By the end of the fair, the auxiliary had held 1,283 sessions, with 3,817 speakers from around the world delivering a total of 5,978 speeches. The “congress” on religion overshadowed all of the others in the number of speakers and numbers in attendance. Representatives of the world’s religions were invited to speak, but freethinkers and mormons were specifically excluded. See David F. Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 235–85.

10. Charles C. Bonney (1831–1903), lawyer. Bonney was born in New York, educated at what is now Colgate University, and went to Chicago in 1860, where he practiced law and served for a time as president of the Illinois State Bar Association and as vice president of the American Bar Association. The World’s Congress Auxiliary was his inspiration and he organized the efforts behind its establishment. He delivered a speech himself at the opening of each “congress.” In politics, he was a Democrat and in religion he was a Swedenborgian. He was also a prohibitionist.

11. Walter Thomas Mills (1856–1942), labor reformer, author, and political organizer. Mills was born in New York, the son of Quaker farmers. After graduating from the College of Wooster and Oberlin College, he moved to Chicago, where he was an ardent prohibitionist, a founder of the Socialist Party, and a social-gospel crusader. He was chairman of the Labor Committee for the World’s Congress Auxiliary. He wrote prohibitionist handbooks and other books, including The Science of Politics (1887) and The Struggle for Existence (1904). After living in New Zealand for several years, 1911–14, Mills returned to the United States, protesting involvement in the war, writing, promoting socialism, and working to establish cooperative communes, among other activities.

12. Darrow might be referring to the religious and patriotic nature of the inaugural ceremony for the auxiliary, which was held on 21 October 1892. See “Congress Auxiliary Inaugural,” Chicago Tribune, 21 October 1892 (program for the ceremony); “In Oratory and Song,” Chicago Tribune, 22 October 1892 (text of invocation and speeches at the ceremony). The fair itself did not open until the following May.

13. Several weeks after this letter was written, the Women’s Labor Committee of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, which included Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, and many others, also resigned as a body, apparently because of the authoritative role and conservative approach of Bonney and other managers to the subject of labor. The “religious feature” of the Labor Congress was said to be the “real bone of contention.” “Resigns in a Body,” Chicago Tribune, 29 December 1892. In Bonney’s words, the World’s Congress Auxiliary had created no “mixed committees” but, in “appropriate cases,” had created committees of women, “not to have charge of subjects in general, but to look after the interests of women and children . . . and to cooperate with the general committee of men as occasion may require.” Ibid.

14. Lloyd owned a summer house on Sakonnet Point, across the mouth of Narragansett Bay from Newport, Rhode Island. “Vanderbilt’s home” is probably the mansion in Newport known as Marble House, which was built for William K. Vanderbilt (1849–1920), of the prominent Vanderbilt family.

15. Joseph E. Gary, who presided over the trial of the Haymarket anarchists, wrote an article defending the trial process. Joseph E. Gary, “The Chicago Anarchists of 1886: The Crime, the Trial, and the Punishment,” Century Magazine, April 1893, 803–37.

16. The reaction to Darrow’s speech at the Chicago Law Club was mixed, as it was for many of his speeches. A few months after the speech, the Republican Journal, for example, in commenting on the possibility that Darrow would seek Gary’s judicial seat, recalled Darrow as having no “conviction” in his speech: “Only a few months ago, at a meeting of the Chicago Law Club, [Darrow] read a paper purporting to be a review of Judge Gary’s article in the Century. Judge Gary himself was present as well as most of the lawyers who were engaged in the trial of the Anarchists on either side. Mr. Darrow’s paper was merely a reiteration of the time-worn arguments against the justice of the trial. They were presented in good temper, for he is a man of tact, but they failed to carry conviction. Judge Gary was with difficulty prevailed upon to reply, but he did so with a brevity and dignity that elicited tumultuous applause. | That occasion was an epitome of the contest that has been waged for years over the graves of the Anarchists. On one side was a young man of generous feeling, the victim of a dangerous sentimentalism; on the other a tried and venerable Judge, who stood firm as a rock against the enemies of social order.” “Gov. Altgeld’s Judicial Candidate,” Chicago Journal, 13 July 1893.

17. Darrow is probably referring to a Charles Bary, who was chairman of the executive committee of the “Amnesty Association of Illinois,” which was making an organized effort to get pardons for the remaining anarchists convicted for the Haymarket incident. The committee was made up of dozens of people, including Darrow. “Its Charter Board of Directors,” Chicago Tribune, 7 August 1892.

18. Howells was likely coming to Chicago for a weeklong session of lectures and meetings among leading men and women in philology, literature, folklore, history, and libraries, as part of the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Fair. See “For Men of Letters,” Chicago Tribune, 9 July 1893.

19. Darrow is referring to admissions to the World’s Fair, held in Chicago from 1 May to 29 October 1893.

20. James Goggin (1842?–98), lawyer and judge. Goggin was a judge on the superior court in Chicago and responsible for keeping the World’s Fair open on Sundays. The commissioners of the fair had issued an order closing the fair on Sundays. A judge of the superior court (Judge Stein) entered an order enjoining the commissioners from closing the fair. Judge Goggin presided at the hearing on a motion to dissolve the injunction. Before the hearing, Goggin invited two other judges (one of them, Edward Dunne) to sit with him to hear the motion, given the importance of the issue. But before the hearing began, Goggin reportedly learned that the other two judges were in favor of dissolving the injunction. So shortly before the hearing began, Goggin had the clerk enter an order postponing the hearing for sixty days, which effectively left the injunction in place until after the fair was over. See “Quashed the Other Views,” Washington Post, 1 September 1893; Adolf Kraus, Reminiscences and Comments (Chicago: Toby Rubovits, 1925), 86–87.

21. On 27 December 1887, Joseph Gary—the judge who presided over the trial of the Haymarket defendants—gave a speech condemning organized labor at a dinner held in his honor by the Chicago Bar Association. The next week, the Chicago Herald published a letter from Lloyd criticizing the speech and supporting labor. “Labour and Monopoly: A Reply to the Views of Judge Gary,” Chicago Herald, 3 January 1888.

22. On 28 October 1893, Patrick Eugene Prendergast (1868–94) called on Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. at the mayor’s house and shot him dead.

23. Prendergast’s trial began in December 1893. His lawyers pleaded insanity as a defense, but he was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Darrow and Stephen S. Gregory represented Prendergast in his post-trial proceedings and eventually obtained an order postponing his execution under a statute that authorized a judge to appoint a jury to inquire into the sanity of a person convicted of a capital crime if the convicted person allegedly became insane after the trial. A trial on that issue—whether Prendergast became insane after his criminal trial—began in June 1894. The jury returned a verdict finding Prendergast sane (again) and he was hanged on 13 July 1894, after Governor Altgeld refused to commute his sentence.

24. The point of Lloyd’s “suggestion” is not known, but on 19 October, Darrow would deliver a speech for the People’s Party at the auditorium in Chicago. The People’s Party, formed in 1892, followed a political platform that included free coinage of silver, direct election of senators, an eight-hour work day, nationalization of communications and railroads, and municipal ownership of utilities, among other reforms. In his speech, Darrow was critical of the policies and actions of both the Democratic and Republican parties. He told his audience that “those who entertain opinions and views such as I hold should no longer affiliate themselves with either of the two great political parties.” “Crowd the Auditorium,” Chicago Herald, 25 October 1894. See also “Pops out in Force: They Besiege the Auditorium to Secure Admittance,” Chicago Tribune, 20 October 1894.

25. The (Chicago) Times was a Democratic daily newspaper that had been owned by the late Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. and Adolf Kraus (1852–1928). After Harrison was assassinated in 1893, Harrison’s majority interest in the paper passed to his two sons, who had a difficult time operating the paper profitably. Kraus, Reminiscences, 65, 100–101. Darrow—who believed that the “most formidable obstacle” to political reform was the “hostility, indifference and treachery” of the press—was apparently interested in organizing an effort to purchase the paper. Darrow, along with some others, proposed to organize a “People’s Press Association,” the object of which would be to establish “a great national daily newspaper to be owned and controlled by the people.” Darrow et al. to “Dear Sir,” 22 October 1894, TLc, WHi, Lloyd Papers. In the end, the Times was not sold and Darrow did not establish a national daily newspaper. In 1895, Harrison’s sons transferred a majority interest in the Times to Kraus. Kraus, Reminiscences, 100–101.

26. In the spring of 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company—manufacturer of railroad cars in the company-owned town of Pullman, Illinois—went on strike when the company refused to negotiate with the American Railway Union over rents on company-owned housing for employees and cuts in employee wages. The strike soon developed into a general railroad strike throughout the West when the ARU’s members refused to handle any Pullman cars. This general strike led, in turn, to a federal court injunction in July 1894 prohibiting interference with the mail and interstate commerce. Shortly after this injunction, President Cleveland ordered troops into Chicago to quell rioting and free any blocked trains. In September 1894, several leaders of the strike, including Eugene Debs, were tried for contempt of the injunction and, in early 1895, twenty union men, including Debs, would stand trial for conspiracy to obstruct the mail. Darrow was one of the defendants’ lawyers in both matters.

27. Four leaders of the ARU in Los Angeles were convicted on 21 November of conspiracy to interfere with the mail. Lloyd wrote back to Darrow (in a long letter) saying he had been expecting the convictions from the beginning of the strike. Lloyd to Darrow, 23 November 1894, TLc, WHi, Lloyd Papers.

1895–1899

1. The intended recipient might have been Ellen Gates Starr (1859–1940), a settlement worker, social reformer, and cofounder with Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago in 1889. This is suggested by the salutation (“My Dear Miss S.”) and the reference to Hull House, among other indications. But the fact that this document appears to be a typewritten copy of a letter or a draft of a letter (undated and by an unknown typist) leaves some doubt about the identity of the recipient.

2. The letter that Darrow received apparently complained about his representation of the Cosmopolitan Electric Company. In February 1895, the city council for Chicago had passed ordinances granting franchises to the Ogden Gas Company and the Cosmopolitan Electric Company. The ordinances were passed quickly, without any second reading and without being referred to a committee for consideration. One week later, a reported five-thousand-plus people gathered at Central Music Hall to denounce the ordinances and protest against approval by the mayor. On 4 March 1895, despite the protests, the mayor, “amid curses and laughter,” approved the ordinance for the Ogden Gas Company and suggested some amendments (encouraged, apparently, by Darrow) for the Cosmopolitan Electric Company, which were then approved by the council. A few days later, some citizens filed a petition in superior court in Chicago, seeking an injunction that would prohibit the companies from using any of the streets and alleys for their businesses. The judge assigned, although “practically [holding] the ordinances were invalid,” dismissed the petition on the ground urged by Darrow—that it should have been brought by the state attorney general. “History of the Three Measures,” Chicago Tribune, 11 April 1895; “Zeisler Picks Flaws,” Chicago Tribune, 21 March 1895.

3. Morrison Isaac Swift (1856–1946), socialist writer and lecturer. Swift was born in Ravenna, Ohio. He attended Western Reserve University and then Williams College, from which he graduated in 1879. He received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, 1885, concentrating in political economy, and then spent two years studying philosophy at the University of Berlin. Returning to the United States, he performed settlement work in Philadelphia and New York. In 1894, he took a lead role in the march of a Coxey Army of poor and unemployed people from Boston to Washington, D.C. He later moved for a short time to Los Angeles, where he was active in the utopian Alturia Colony. After his return east, he was the chief lecturer and director of the Humanist Forum in Boston, 1907–14, and a frequent contributor of letters to the Boston Transcript. See William O. Reichert, “The Melancoly Political Thought of Morrison I. Swift,” New England Quarterly 49 (December 1976): 542–59. Swift’s many books include The Monarch Billionaire (New York: J.S. Ogilvie, 1903), Human Submission (Philadelphia: Liberty Press, 1905), Can Mankind Survive (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1918), and The Evil Religion Does (Boston: Liberty Press, 1927).

4. Edward W. Bemis (1860–1930), political economist and tenured professor at the University of Chicago, was removed from the faculty in December 1894, probably because of his articles and public statements favoring labor and criticizing utility companies. His removal received a great deal of attention in local newspapers. Lloyd was among Bemis’s strongest supporters. See Harold E. Berquist Jr., “The Edward Bemis Controversy at the University of Chicago,” American Association of University Professors Bulletin 58 (December 1972): 383–93; Chester McArthur Destler, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 355–72.

5. Richard T. Ely.

6. The identity of “Aldrich” is unknown.

7. The Tribune published an editorial sharply critical of a speech that Darrow gave at the Review Club in Chicago, saying that he expressed “an opinion which outrages every instinct of manhood”: “For Mr. Darrow was not content with denouncing the Monroe doctrine, nor with attacking President Cleveland, nor with asserting that if England should acquire the whole of South America it would make no difference to the United States. He went very much further than this, though this was far, and vehemently and with every manifestation of emotion said: ‘Patriotism? A blind inhuman cry for blood—that is patriotism.’ . . . Let Mr. Darrow think again. If he have in his veins a drop of red blood he will make haste to offer apology for the insult he has put upon his own forefathers who ‘cried for blood’ that he today might enjoy life, liberty, and a right to the pursuit of happiness—including the happiness of sneering and playing cynic in public places.” “Patriotism Defined Anew,” Chicago Tribune, 6 January 1896.

8. What Darrow said to Paul is not known. It might have been something about Darrow’s relationship with Jessie. In June 1896, Jessie and Paul would travel to Europe and stay there until the fall of that year. When they returned to the United States, they lived in Sharon, Pennsylvania, where Jessie had relatives. In March 1897, Jessie and Paul moved back to Chicago, and Darrow and Jessie were divorced that same month. See Paul Darrow to Irving Stone, 22 February 1940, TLc, MnU-L, Darrow Papers.

9. Edward Bellamy (1850–98), social reformer and author of the popular utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888).

10. William Morris (1834–96), English designer, poet, and socialist. Morris’s popular novel News from Nowhere (1890) described a rural socialist utopia.

11. Darrow is probably referring to Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), which criticized the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company and remains the book for which Lloyd is usually remembered today.

12. The identity of “Abbott” is unknown.

13. Richard Fisher.

14. The identity of “Frank Brown” is unknown.

15. “Mrs. Young” might be reference to a boarding house in London.

16. In 1895, Illinois was one of six states that passed laws requiring school authorities to display the national flag. The law in Illinois required private schools to comply as well. See Albert Gray, “Notes on the State Legislation of America in 1895,” Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 1 (1896–97): 232–38.

17. In 1897, the Kingdom Publishing Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, published a pamphlet titled A Foe to American Schools, written by George Gates (1851–1912), president of Iowa (now Grinnell) College, 1887–1900. The pamphlet charged that the American Book Company (ABC), a publisher of school and college textbooks out of New York, used bribery and other corrupt and monopolistic business practices to sell textbooks to school officials. In May 1897, ABC filed two lawsuits against Kingdom Publishing in state court in Minnesota seeking damages and an injunction prohibiting further publication of the pamphlet. See American Book Co. v. Kingdom Pub. Co., 73 N.W. 1089 (1898). In June 1897, ABC sued Gates for libel in federal court in Iowa. See American Book Co. v. Gates, 85 F. 729 (1898). Also in June 1897, ABC sued Kingdom Publishing for libel in federal court in Minnesota. On the eve of trial in federal court in Minnesota, which started on 9 March 1897, Kingdom Publishing’s lead attorney became sick and Darrow agreed to serve as its counsel.

18. Herbert Gleason (1855–1937), Congregationalist minister, editor, publisher, and photographer. Gleason was born and raised in Massachusetts. He moved to Minnesota in 1883, serving as pastor of a rural church, 1883–85, and then a church in Minneapolis, 1885–88. Later, he became managing editor of The Northwestern Congregationalist, 1888–94, and then its successor, The Kingdom, 1894–99 (the associate editors for which included George Gates and Benjamin Fay Mills). After The Kingdom stopped publication, Gleason returned to Massachusetts and worked the rest of his life as a nature photographer. See Dale R. Schwie, “Herbert W. Gleason: A Photographer’s Journey to Thoreau’s World,” The Concord Saunterer 7 (1999): 150–65. Darrow mentions a letter from Gleason but no letter was found.

19. Tillotson W. Gilson (1849–1914), a partner in Ginn & Company, publisher of school and college textbooks and competitor of the American Book Company. During trial, ABC asserted that Gates’s pamphlet had been written with the support of Ginn & Company.

20. At the end of the trial in federal court in Minnesota, the judge instructed the jury to find the Kingdom Publishing Company liable because the company had introduced no evidence to support one of the bribery charges made against ABC in Gates’s pamphlet, although evidence was introduced to support other similar charges. The jury awarded ABC $7,500. The following year, The Kingdom ceased publication primarily because of the judgment entered against the publishing company. See “Publisher’s Announcement,” The Kingdom 11 (13 April 1899): 1. So Darrow’s plan to have any judgment paid by Gilson, as described in Darrow’s letter to Lloyd, apparently did not succeed.

21. On 17 December 1898, Darrow delivered an address entitled “Workingmen and the Courts” at the annual convention of the American Federation of Labor. The speech was highly critical of the administration of justice in the courts. A motion was passed at the convention to publish the address as a pamphlet, but Darrow asked to revise it before publication because he had “made it without preparation.” AFL, Report of Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor, Held at Kansas City, Missouri, December 12th to 20th Inclusive (1898?), 113. The pamphlet was apparently never published. The Library of Congress has a typewritten version of the address, partially edited in Darrow’s hand. See DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers. Ely probably asked Darrow for a copy of the speech (and for other materials) as part of his research on a history of the labor movement. Ely to Henry Demarest Lloyd, 23 March 1898, TLS, WHi, Lloyd Papers (noting that he would like to have Darrow’s legal briefs).

22. In May 1898, woodworkers in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, began a fourteen-week strike for an increase of wages and recognition of their labor organization, among other demands. During the strike, Thomas I. Kidd (1860–1941), general secretary of the Amalgamated Wood-Workers’ International Union of America, and two members of local unions were charged in state court with conspiracy to injure the business of the Paine Lumber Company, the largest manufacturer involved in the strike. The case was defended by Darrow and two other attorneys. The defendants were acquitted in November 1898, after a three-week trial. A stenographic report of Darrow’s final argument to the jury was published in pamphlet form: Argument of Clarence S. Darrow in the Wood-Workers Conspiracy Case (Chicago: Campbell Printers, 1899).

23. Brief and Argument for Petitioners (Clarence Darrow, Counsel for Petitioners), In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895). Darrow’s brief and the briefs of his co-counsel and the government are reprinted in Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper, eds. Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law (Arlington, VA: University Publications of America, 1975), 11:267–598.

24. Ely replied to this letter a few days later, asking for another copy of Darrow’s pamphlet in the woodworkers’ case and a copy of Darrow’s brief in the case involving the American Book Company against the Kingdom Publishing Company. Ely to Darrow, 4 January 1899, TLc, WHi, Ely Papers.

25. The “federation” that appointed Darrow was the Civic Federation of Chicago, of which Easley was the founder and secretary.

26. Darrow might be referring to a recent short story of Whitlock’s about a state attorney general caught by the governor borrowing money from the state treasury. Brand Whitlock, “A Secret of State,” Ainslee’s Magazine, November 1899, 447–57.

27. The first page of the letter ends here; what followed is missing.

1900–1904

1. In June 1899, Denslow delivered an address titled “The Gynecologic Consideration of the Sexual Act” at the fiftieth annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Columbus, Ohio. In this address, Denslow urged, among other things, that young people receive some education about sex; that the wife, in particular, “should be told that it is right and proper for her to experience pleasure in its performance”; and that the young husband should be made to understand that “he is not the master but the companion of his wife.” Denslow also described sexual acts in detail and described his treatment (including clitoral circumcision) of various sexual maladies. See Denslow Lewis, The Gynecologic Consideration of the Sexual Act (Chicago: Henry O. Shepard, 1900; Weston, MA: M&S Press, 1970) (the M&S Press edition includes an essay on Lewis by Marc H. Hollender). Lewis was criticized after his address by physicians in the audience. Later, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association refused to publish Lewis’s address (which would have been customary) on the ground that the Journal did not publish that “class” of literature. Lewis appealed the editor’s decision to the publication committee of the AMA’s board of trustees, which refused (by a divided vote) to overrule the editor, with one member suggesting that if they did agree to publish it, the trustees might be convicted of distributing obscene material through the mail. This suggestion prompted Lewis to obtain this legal opinion from Darrow as well as opinions from several other prominent lawyers in Illinois, all of whom agreed that no prosecution was likely. Ibid., 19–40 (citation is to the original Shepard edition).

2. Darrow is likely referring to United States Revised Statutes, Section 3893, which provided that “[e]very obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character, . . . and every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use, . . . are hereby declared to be nonmailable matter.” Violation of the statute could result, “for each and every offence,” in a fine of not more than five thousand dollars or imprisonment “at hard labor not more than five years, or both.”

3. Lewis’s efforts to appeal to the board of trustees failed, despite the legal opinions he had obtained, so Lewis tried to convince the AMA’s membership, in general session at the annual meeting in June 1900, to vote on the matter. At the annual meeting, the president of the AMA referred Lewis’s proposal to the general executive committee, which declined to put the matter to a vote in the general meeting. Lewis, Gynecologic Consideration, 12–14 (citation is to the M&S Press edition). In 1983, the Journal finally published Lewis’s address: Denslow Lewis, “The Gynecologic Consideration of the Sexual Act,” JAMA 250 (8 July 1983): 222–27.

4. The day before this letter, Darrow gave a speech at a meeting of the Chicago Single Tax Club entitled “Government by Injunction,” in which he was critical of judges. “Darrow Attacks Judges,” (Chicago) Inter-Ocean, 26 February 1900. What morning newspaper quoted him is unknown.

5. In May 1900, Jones began writing a series of open, didactic letters to the men who worked in his machine shops. The letters were delivered to the employees with their wages and carried such titles as “Equality,” “Service Brings Its Own Reward,” “A Word on Vacations,” and “Harmony, the Lesson of Life.” Jones continued to write the letters through December 1901. At the end of each year, he collected the letters written that year and had them privately printed. Samuel M. Jones, Letters of Love and Labor, 2 vols. (Toledo: Franklin Printing & Engraving, 1900–1901). After Jones’s death, these two volumes were published as a single volume with an introduction by Brand Whitlock. Samuel M. Jones, Letters of Labor and Love (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1905).

6. Jones had described a lecture trip in a recent letter to Darrow. Jones to Darrow, 28 April 1900, TLc, OT, Jones Papers.

7. Nelson Olsen Nelson.

8. Howells had written to Darrow after Darrow sent him one of Whitlock’s short stories asking if “that Toledo friend of yours . . . has a novel of actual American life in MS” that Harper’s might consider publishing. Howells to Darrow, 4 November 1900, in The Letters of Brand Whitlock, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 31. Whitlock was at work on a political novel that became The Thirteenth District (Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill Co., 1902), but the manuscript was not ready yet. As a substitute for a novel, Darrow likely sent Howells a copy of Whitlock’s short story titled “Malachi Nolan,” which was going to be published in Ainslee’s Magazine. See Letters of Brand Whitlock, 32–33 (Whitlock to Darrow, 7 November 1900). Howells also wrote to Darrow praising his book of essays, A Persian Pearl. Howells to Darrow, 3 June 1900, ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

9. Darrow probably sent Howells a letter from Whitlock to Darrow in which Whitlock described Howells as his “literary divinity”: “For years and years, as you are aware, Mr. Howells has been my literary divinity. I have followed him timorously from afar, I have shivered in the realization that much of my stuff has been a weak imitation of his work, and I have despaired of ever doing anything original. And now I catch my breath to think that I am actually near to attracting his attention, and am fearful that I fail to reward his generous interest by proving worthy.” Letters of Brand Whitlock, 32 (Whitlock to Darrow, 7 November 1900). On receipt of Whitlock’s story and letter, Howells—who later developed a close acquaintance with Whitlock—wrote to Whitlock saying that his letter was “better than the story, . . . though the story is good, too.” George Arms, “‘Ever Devotedly Yours’: The Whitlock-Howells Correspondence,” Journal of the Rutgers University Library 10 (December 1946): 3.

10. Ralph Keeler (1840–73), journalist and friend of Howells. Keeler died (he might have been murdered) on a steamer en route to Havana, Cuba, where he had been working as a correspondent for the New York Tribune. Darrow is referring here to a recent article by Howells in which Howells said of Keeler: “I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men commonly do.” Howells, “Some Literary Memories of Cambridge,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, November 1890, 834.

11. Elinor Mead Howells (1837–1910), artist and wife of William Dean Howells.

12. Mildred Howells (1872–1966), daughter of Elinor Mead Howells and William Dean Howells.

13. Jones probably sent Darrow the first volume of his Letters of Love and Labor. See Darrow to Jones, 7 June 1900, n.5.

14. Darrow is probably referring to Percy Jones (1878–1941).

15. Jones and his son, Percy, apparently had some problem with a contract involving a farm and they considered filing a lawsuit in the matter. Jones to Darrow, TLc, 5 December 1900, OT, Jones Papers.

16. The identity of “Dr. Holmes” is unclear, but Darrow might have been referring to Bayard Holmes (1852–1924), a prominent physician and surgeon in Chicago who ran for mayor as the candidate of the People’s Party in 1895 (Darrow supported his candidacy).

17. Caroline Stallbohm (1855–1914), longtime secretary and literary aid to Lloyd.

18. Nelson Olsen Nelson.

19. Ernest Howard Crosby.

20. Darrow is referring to the first volume of Jones’s Letters of Love and Labor. See Darrow to Jones, 7 June 1900, n.5.

21. Whitlock sent Howells the manuscript for what eventually became Whitlock’s first novel, The Thirteenth District. Howells praised the novel as “a great, honest, powerful story”—“easily the best political story I know”—and he told Whitlock that he would “gladly do anything” he could to help Whitlock find a publisher for it. See Howells to Whitlock, 19 June 1901, in Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 2:145.

22. Joseph H. Sears (1865–1946), an editor at Harper & Brothers (Howells’s publisher) wrote to Whitlock saying that “he found the novel depressing” and he asked Whitlock to “add a chapter of love interest to make the novel salable to young girls.” Whitlock revised the novel accordingly but Harper rejected it in the end, leaving the exhausted Whitlock “quite ill, and for two months he was all but unable to function.” Robert M. Crunden, A Hero in Spite of Himself (New York: Knopf, 1969), 107 (citing letters from Sears to Whitlock, 27 June and 30 September 1901, DLC-MSS, Whitlock Papers).

23. Ella Brainerd Whitlock.

24. Jessie Dowd (Stafford) (1873–1958). Dowd was born in Ohio, educated in the public schools of Toledo, and graduated from the University of Toronto (with a degree in Teutonic Romance languages) and Ohio State University, where she received an M.A. She taught school in Toledo before marrying Frederick Allen Stafford (1856–1918) in 1902 and moving to Arizona to operate a tuberculosis sanitorium. After her husband’s death, she returned to Toledo and taught in public and private schools before becoming a professor of English at the University of Toledo, 1926–43.

25. The program to which Darrow is referring is unknown.

26. This is probably a reference to a short story that Whitlock wrote about the fate of a politician who refused to accept the favors of a political boss: “Reform in the First,” Ainslee’s Magazine, July 1910, 545–53.

27. The identity of the “fellow” with whom Darrow was going to start a publishing business is unknown. And why Darrow put “fellow” in quotations marks is also unknown. Darrow’s book of essays, A Persian Pearl: And Other Essays (East Aurora, NY: Roycroft Shop, 1899), contained five essays: four on literary subjects—including Omar Khayyám’s “Rubaiyat,” Walt Whitman, realism, and Robert Burns—and one on shame and regret entitled “The Skeleton in the Closet.” The book was republished in May 1902 by C.L. Ricketts (1859–1941), a Chicago bookseller, calligrapher, and illuminator.

28. On 6 September 1901, President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, by Leon Czolgosz (1873–1901), an avowed anarchist. He died eight days later. Several anarchists—a few of whom had a slight acquaintance with Czolgosz—were arrested in Chicago after the shooting and charged with conspiracy to assassinate the president. They were held in jail and refused any vistors, including any attorneys. Among those arrested were Abraham Isaak (1856–1937), his wife, Maria (1861–1934), their sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary (1885–1974), their teenage son, Abe Jr. (1883–1953), and several of their friends, including Julia Mechanic (b. 1870), a Russian immigrant and seamstress. Abraham and Mary Isaak were both pacifist Mennonites who immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1889. They settled in Portland, Oregon, where they started The Firebrand, an anarchist newspaper, and moved to San Francisco in 1897 after being arrested for publishing a poem by Walt Whitman. In San Francisco, they changed the name of their newspaper to Free Society. Three years later, in early 1901, they moved to Chicago, where they were publishing and editing the newspaper at the time of their arrest. See Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 23–28; Steven Kent Smith, “Abraham Isaak: The History of a Mennonite Radical,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 65 (October 1991): 449–55; and Steven Kent Smith, “Research Note: Further Notes on Abraham Isaak, Mennonite Anarchist,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (January 2006): 83–94. Jane Addams convinced the mayor of Chicago (Carter H. Harrison Jr.) to allow her to visit the prisoners. Addams described her efforts to help the Isaaks in her autobiography. See Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 230–35.

29. Emma Goldman (1869–1940), anarchist and feminist editor, writer, and lecturer. Czolgosz told police that he had heard a speech by Goldman the year before he shot McKinley. From this, police decided that Goldman held some responsibility for the crime and they arrested her in Chicago. Goldman had not conspired with Czolgosz, but she publicly defended him after his arrest. Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 33. Thirty years later, in her autobiography, Goldman said that Darrow had sent a lawyer from his office to visit her in jail. According to Goldman, this lawyer warned her that she was hurting her case by her defense of Czolgosz and that she should admit Czolgosz was crazy. Goldman attributed the advice to Darrow and said that she found the lawyer’s talk “repugnant.” Emma Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1931), 303–4.

30. Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), Russian geographer, revolutionist, and anarchist philosopher. Kropotkin visited Chicago in April 1901, during a tour of America, and gave five lectures. The most well attended lecture was on 21 April at Central Music Hall. Darrow was chairman for the event.

31. Probably Amanda Johnson (b. 1871). Johnson obtained an A.B. from the University of Wisconsin, 1893, attended law school at Northwestern University, and was a resident of Hull House for a time. Together with Jane Addams, she served as a garbage inspector for the nineteenth ward in Chicago, 1894–98. Later, she and Darrow were both tenants of a twenty-four-unit tenement house on the South Side known as the Langdon Building. Architect Dwight Heald Perkins (1867–1941) designed the building, which was completed around the turn of the century, and Johnson served as an agent for the developer. Ethel M. Colson, “A Home in the Tenements,” The Junior Munsey 10 (April 1901): 28–30.

32. John P. Altgeld died on 12 March 1902. He was Darrow’s law partner when he died.

33. William O. Thompson.

34. Ella Brainerd Whitlock.

35. Pettigrew had written a letter to Darrow expressing his fondness and admiration for Altgeld and proposing that Darrow approach the Chicago American about taking charge of raising funds for a monument in Altgeld’s honor. Pettigrew to Darrow, 19 March 1902, TLc, SdSifSHM, Pettigrew Papers.

36. Altgeld’s wife, Emma Ford Altgeld (1847–1915), according to one biographer, was “almost always an invalid after the death of her husband.” Altgeld’s friends eventually raised a fund for her and the Illinois General Assembly, in 1903, voted to give her five thousand dollars to help lift the mortgage on her house. Harry Barnard, Eagle Forgotten: The Life of John Peter Altgeld (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1938), 470.

37. Public meetings in Altgeld’s honor were held in several cities. Darrow was the principal speaker at Cooper Union in New York City. “John P. Altgeld,” New York Times, 4 April 1902.

38. Probably Joseph S. Martin (1853–1916), who made a lot of money operating a private gambling club in Chicago. Martin had been on Altgeld’s staff when Altgeld was governor. Martin was very active in efforts to memorialize Altgeld.

39. Darrow was involved in the selection of a jury (which took nine days) for a trial of seven men (including Cyrus Simon) who were charged with bribing a jury on behalf of the Union Traction company in a lawsuit with the City of Chicago in April 1902. The trial of the seven men started on 12 June and continued until 29 June, when all of the defendants were found guilty. “Jury Bribers Found Guilty: Row in Court,” Chicago Tribune, 29 June 1902.

40. One of the seven defendants convicted in the jury-bribery case received a prison sentence, but the other defendants, including Darrow’s three clients, received only fines. On appeal, the convictions of two of Darrow’s clients were reversed and their matters remanded for a new trial; the conviction of his other client was affirmed on appeal. See O’Donnell v. Illinois, 110 Ill. App. 250 (1903) (reversing conviction of Darrow’s clients; affirming conviction of two other defendants), affirmed, Gallagher v. People, 211 Ill. 158, 71 N.E. 842 (1904).

41. The identity of “Gretchen” is unknown.

42. In May 1902, anthracite miners in Pennsylvania went on strike, demanding higher wages, shorter hours, and recognition of their union (the United Mine Workers, headed by John Mitchell). In October 1902, as winter approached and anthracite coal became scarce (and prices increased), President Roosevelt obtained an agreement from the striking miners and mine operators to arbitrate their dispute, and he appointed an arbitration commission to hold hearings and decide the matter. The striking miners agreed to return to work while the commission resolved all of the issues between the miners and operators. Darrow and Henry Demarest Lloyd, among others, represented the striking miners in the arbitration.

43. The rest of the letter was cut off.

44. What Darrow was alluding to here, as keeping him from marrying Ruby, is unknown.

45. Brandeis agreed to help and he consulted with the lawyers for the miners and toured the coal mines, but he did not make an appearance before the commission. See Lewis J. Paper, Brandeis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 65; Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, eds., Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1971), 210–23.

46. The next mayoral election in Chicago would be held April 1903, and there was some talk that Darrow should be a candidate for the office. This letter was published closer to the election (after Cruice had a falling out with Darrow), when Darrow threw his support in the race to Carter Harrison Jr. rather than Cruice.

47. Mitchell left the arbitration hearing on 17 January 1903 to attend the national convention of the United Mine Workers in Indianapolis. Before leaving, he told the commission that the miners were not responsible for a shortage in the supply of anthracite coal and that three thousand miners were standing idle and ready to go to work. The mine operators, for their part, blamed the shortage of coal on a refusal of the miners to work longer hours. The “lively tilt in court” that Darrow mentions happened when the mine operators challenged the truth of Mitchell’s statements during the hearing, through witnesses who maintained that the miners were not making an extra effort to produce more coal. Darrow challenged one of the witnesses for the operators (a superintendent of one of the companies) to provide the name of even one miner who refused to make an extra effort. The witness refused on the ground that men he named might then be persecuted by their union. A heated exchange between Darrow and lawyers for the mine operators followed, with Darrow concluding: “I am tired to death hearing the stories of the operators that their poor human slaves drowned out the mines and are responsible for the restrictions upon the output of coal. If I don’t prove by their own reports and figures presented to this commission that the operators who are parties to these proceedings have restricted the output of coal, and that their unwarranted attempts to put the blame on the miners’ union are for the purpose of throwing dust into the eyes of the American public, then I shall go back to Chicago and request this commission to render a verdict against us.” “Lawyers in Hot Dispute,” The (Frederick, Maryland) News, 23 January 1903.

48. Everett Warren was a lawyer representing the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Company.

49. James H. Torrey was a lawyer representing the Delaware and Hudson Company.

50. Six thousand people attended a celebration at the auditorium in Chicago on 16 February 1903. Mitchell, Lloyd, and Darrow all gave speeches. “Labor Honors Mitchell,” New York Times, 17 February 1903.

51. John Maynard Harlan (1864–1934), lawyer and Republican politician. Harlan was the son of John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911), an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and father of John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971), who was also an associate justice of the Supreme Court. He graduated with an A.B. from Princeton University, 1884, and earned an LL.B. at George Washington University, 1888. He practiced law in Chicago for many years before moving his practice to New York City in 1925. He was active in Republican politics in Chicago, serving as an alderman, 1896–98, running twice as a nominee for mayor, 1897, 1905, and once as a candidate for governor, 1920.

52. In reply to this letter, Mitchell said that he hoped the mine operators would be open to settlement negotiations after finishing with their evidence to the commission. He also said that he would do what he could to help Darrow if he decided to run for mayor. Mitchell to Darrow, TLc, 27 January 1903, DCU, Mitchell Papers.

53. The publication of this telegram was followed in the Tribune by an article reporting that Darrow’s attitude had not weakened the belief of his supporters that Darrow would enter the race when he returned to Chicago. The article quoted encouraging statements to that effect from Francis Wilson, who had recently been to visit Darrow in Philadelphia, and it noted that a committee formed to support Darrow’s candidacy had placed an order for fifty thousand campaign buttons with Darrow’s picture on them and the words “Darrow for Mayor.” “Darrow States Mayoral Stand,” Chicago Tribune, 28 January 1903.

54. A few days before this letter, Robert Lindblom formally announced that Darrow was, indeed, a candidate in the mayoral race. Lindblom claimed that he had received a letter from Darrow authorizing him to make the announcement whenever Lindblom believed it was proper. “Says Darrow Is in the Race,” Chicago Tribune, 31 January 1903.

55. The Daily News reported Darrow as saying that he would wait to make a decision on his candidacy until he returned to Chicago: “I have decided to withhold any formal announcement in regard to the matter until I return to Chicago and have had time to look into the situation. . . . I want to assure myself that things are as I am told by those who are urging me to become a candidate. I have not been to Chicago for nearly three months except for short visits. I am told that there is widespread dissatisfaction with Mayor Harrison; that I can have the democratic nomination by saying the word and that election would surely follow my nomination. I do not know these things of my own knowledge and for this reason I shall not say anything until I have an opportunity to personally examine the situation.” “Darrow Delays Entering the Race,” (Chicago) Daily News, 2 February 1903.

56. Possibly Robert J. Gunning (1856–1932), an outdoor display advertiser who also had real-estate holdings in Chicago.

57. The remainder of the letter is missing.

58. Carter Harrison Jr.

59. Robert Lindblom.

60. George F. Baer (1842–14), lawyer and railroad executive. Baer was born in Pennsylvania and served with the Union army in the Civil War. After the war, he became a lawyer, practiced law, and made a great deal of money rehabilitating businesses that failed in the panic of 1873. This led him to be an adviser to J.P. Morgan (1837–1913), who made him president of the Philadelphia & Reading Railway, which combined railway lines and coal corporations. During the strike and arbitration of the anthracite miners, Baer served as the leader of the mine operators.

61. Something apparently led Ruby to believe that someone in St. Louis was investigating her or her relationship with Darrow. A person might have shown up at her front door. Whether her concerns were founded is unknown.

62. Here, Darrow might have written “Mrs. O” rather than “Mr. O,” in which case he might have been referring to his first wife (whose maiden name was Ohl)—somebody Ruby might have feared was behind this incident.

63. This is a reference to Graeme Stewart (1853–1905), the Republican candidate in the upcoming mayoral race in Chicago, and Carter Harrison Jr., the Democratic candidate.

64. Two of Ruby’s brothers, Frederick and George Hamerstrom.

65. Darrow’s handwriting is particularly difficult here, and the name might not be “Smith.” In any event, the identity of the person is unknown, although Darrow might be referring to someone with whom Ruby was residing.

66. Lloyd had asked Darrow to consider introducing some bills in the state legislature and to help get a bill affecting his hometown of Winnetka, Illinois, out of committee: “Is there any chance of getting the matter of the nationalization of the coal mines before the Illinois Legislature as it has been brought before the legislatures of Maine and Massachusetts? | If you care to interest yourself in this, I will send you a copy of the Maine and Massachusetts bill. I, myself, think it will be a mighty good stroke of public policy, and personal policy, to do this. | Another popular measure might be to propose a bill authorizing municipalities to establish municipal fuel yards. | We, here in Winnetka, are very much interested in a bill before the legislature, authorizing municipalities in Illinois to own and operate light, heat and power plants. This bill is now buried in committee. Couldn’t you help get it out on to the floor of the House? | Let me hear from you.” Lloyd to Darrow, 31 March 1903, TLc, WHi, Lloyd Papers.

67. Darrow is referring to the report of the commission appointed by President Roosevelt to arbitrate the dispute between anthracite miners and operators in Pennsylvania. Report to the President on the Anthracite Coal Strike of May–October 1902, by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903). The commission’s award included a ten-percent increase in wages and a reduction in hours but did not result in recognition of the United Mine Workers of America (the commission concluded that the union was not a party to the proceedings and that the commission did not have jurisdiction over the question of union recognition). Ibid., 56, 60–61. Instead, the commission appointed a board of conciliation to resolve future disputes between the operators and miners. Ibid., 67–68. The commission also denounced any efforts by unions to interfere with non-union laborers. Ibid., 75–76.

68. Darrow is probably referring to the funeral for John P. Altgeld. Cruice and Darrow were both pallbearers for Altgeld.

69. Carter Harrison Jr.

70. The central issue in the mayoral campaign involved several private streetcar franchises that had operated in Chicago for many years. Many people believed that municipal ownership of the franchises—a goal that Darrow supported—might be possible if the legislature passed an enabling act authorizing it, which would give the city leverage in negotiating with the private franchise operators. At the outset of the legislative session in 1903, “the prospects for any legislation opposed by the street railway companies were far from bright.” But shortly after the mayoral election, the state senate passed what was known as the Müller bill, which authorized any city in Illinois to own and operate local street railways under certain conditions. The bill was signed by the governor near the end of the session after a dramatic showdown between supporters and opponents of the bill in the legislative house. John A. Fairlie, “The Street Railway Question in Chicago,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 21 (May 1907): 385–87.

71. Graeme Stewart, the Republican candidate for mayor, became a supporter of the Müller bill. Ibid., 385.

72. Cruice, who ran for mayor himself as an Independent Labor Party candidate, was unwilling to accept Darrow’s explanation for supporting Harrison. Cruice was the principal speaker at a meeting of “Altgeld followers” on 2 April 1903, where he apparently made this letter available to newspapers and, at the same time, publicly denounced Darrow: “Darrow has broken faith with me, and if he has done it with me he will do it with you. I want to say, and in as certain tones as may be, that Clarence S. Darrow in taking the stump for Harrison is guilty of a breach of trust to the independent labor party and to myself, who counted him as my friend.” “Darrow Branded a Labor Traitor,” Chicago Tribune, 3 April 1903.

73. On 7 April 1903, Carter Harrison Jr. won his fourth consecutive election as mayor, receiving 143,323 votes to Graeme Stewart’s 138,485 votes. The Socialist candidate received 11,207 votes and Daniel Cruice, as the Independent Labor candidate, received 9,989 votes. “Mayor Harrison Re-Elected,” Chicago Tribune, 8 April 1903.

74. While Darrow and Ruby were on their honeymoon in Europe, Darrow wrote a series of twelve travel essays, mostly on labor and politics in Europe, that were published weekly in the Chicago Daily News (and other newspapers): “English Trade Unions in Politics,” 22 August 1903; “Labor Politics in England,” 29 August 1903; “Present Day Socialism in England,” 5 September 1903; “Tariff Agitation in England,” 12 September 1903; “England’s Rich and Poor,” 19 September 1903; “Where the British Earnings Go,” 26 September 1903; “Success of the German Socialists,” 3 October 1903; “Wilhelm Liebknecht and His Work,” 10 October 1903; “Results of Bismarckian Socialism,” 17 October 1903; “Among the Toilers of Switzerland,” 24 October 1903; “Switzerland and Its Reformers,” 31 October 1903; and “Switzerland’s Political Life,” 7 November 1903.

75. Darrow and Ruby Hamerstrom were married on 16 July 1903 by Edward F. Dunne (then a judge), in the home of John R. Gregg (1867–1948), publisher and inventor of the Gregg shorthand system. Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, TL, n.d. (“We were married on . . .”), DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

76. The White City Club was an intellectual club of artists, writers, and musicians. Darrow lectured on Omar Khayyam the night that he met Ruby Hamerstrom. Ibid.

77. Francis S. Wilson.

78. The identity of “Baker” is unknown but he was probably a stockbroker for Darrow.

79. Henry Demarest Lloyd died of pneumonia on 28 September 1903 while working on a campaign to secure municipal ownership of Chicago’s street railways.

80. The identity of Whitlock’s friend is not known.

81. Darrow is likely referring to his novel Farmington (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1904), which was based on his childhood in Ohio. Darrow worked on the novel while in Europe on his honeymoon.

82. Darrow’s will—written in his own hand and witnessed by his law partner, Edgar Lee Masters, and by Harlan K. Saunders Jr. (b. 1878), a clerk in their law office—provided for a rather simple division of his estate, with his books as the first item:

I; Clarence S. Darrow being in my usual condition of mind make this my last will

Item 1st I give and bequeath to my son Paul my library.

Item 2d I give and bequeath to Ruby H. Darrow all house hold & office goods & property.

Item 3rd The balance of my property real & personal I give devise and bequeath to be equally divided between Jessie Ohl Darrow Paul E. Darrow and Ruby H. Darrow, requesting that said Jessie O. and Paul E. shall give any reasonable assistance (such as I might have given) to any of my relatives needing aid at any time.

Item 4th I nominate and appoint Paul E. Darrow as executor of this my last will and testament and request that no bond shall be required and that any property I may leave shall be amicably divided.

Clarence S Darrow

Signed by Clarence S Darrow & acknowledged as his last will and testament in our presence and by us signed in his presence the 20th day of July 1904

Witnesses | Edgar L. Masters. | Harlan K. Saunders Jr

83. Probably Francis S. Wilson.

1905–1909

1. Mills had probably invited Darrow to speak in California at the “Los Angeles Fellowship,” an independent liberal congregation led by Mills after his break with Unitarianism.

2. Darrow is probably referring to common stock in the National Biscuit Company (later to become Nabisco, Inc.), which, since 1899, had paid a regular quarterly dividend on its stock at a rate of four percent.

3. Paul Darrow did not go to Oxford.

4. Darrow had been appointed “special traction counsel” for Chicago by Dunne on 12 April 1905, shortly after Dunne was inaugurated as mayor. As a candidate for mayor, Dunne had pledged to seek municipal ownership of the city railways, and Darrow’s role as special counsel was to help Dunne achieve that goal. Later, according to Ray Ginger, Darrow became “fed up” with Dunne’s indecisiveness on how to achieve municipal ownership and believed that Dunne had underestimated the obstacles involved. Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958), 296–97. Many Democrats had expected Dunne to accomplish some significant municipal reforms—including public ownership of the streetcar lines—and they were disappointed with his results. See Richard Allen Morton, Justice and Humanity: Edward F. Dunne, Illinois Progressive (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 16–49. Darrow wrote an earlier letter of resignation for Dunne, in June, but whether that letter was ever delivered is unknown. See Darrow to Dunne, 19 June 1905, TL, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

5. Leo Vincent and his brothers (Cuthbert Vincent and Henry Vincent) were populist reformers who helped found the People’s Party and who published a radical newspaper in Winfield, Kansas, 1886–91, called The American Non-Conformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator. Henry Vincent later published another populist newspaper in Chicago called The Searchlight. William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1918), 2:1159; Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 132–34, 190; Walter T.K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 49–50.

6. Darrow is referring to a demonstration and meeting of the People’s Party on 3 November 1894, at Tattersall’s Hall in Chicago. Lloyd, Darrow, and many others were speakers. “Pops Wild with Joy, Great Enthusiasm Is Manifested at Tattersall’s,” Chicago Tribune, 4 November 1894.

7. Lyman Trumbull (1813–96), lawyer, judge, and politician. Trumbull practiced law in Belleville, Illinois, and served in the state legislature, 1840–41, as secretary of state for Illinois, 1841–43, and as justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois, 1848–53, before serving in the United States Senate, 1855–73. At various times, Trumbull was a Democrat and a Republican. After his third term in the Senate, he resumed the practice of law in Chicago. In his final years, he was involved with the Populists in Illinois.

8. Darrow is referring to a meeting on 6 October 1894 at the Central Music Hall in Chicago, on the opening of the People’s Party’s campaign in the city. Trumbull was billed for this meeting as a recent convert to the party. “To His New Allies, Lyman Trumbull Signalizes His Political Conversion,” Chicago Tribune, 7 October 1894.

9. Carroll D. Wright (1840–1909), Union officer, lawyer, statistician, and social economist. Wright served as chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1873–88, and as the first commissioner of the United States Bureau of Labor, 1885–1905. He chaired the federal commission to investigate the nature and causes of the Pullman strike in 1894, and he was commissioner and recorder of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1902.

10. In late December 1905, Frank Steunenberg, former governor of Idaho, was killed by the explosion of a bomb rigged to the gate of the fence around his house in Caldwell, Idaho. State authorities and mine owners believed that the murder had been commissioned by officials of the Western Federation of Miners in retaliation for Steunenberg calling in federal troops several years earlier to quell a violent strike by mine workers in northern Idaho. Their investigation focused in particular on three men associated with the WFM: William “Big Bill” Haywood, Charles H. Moyer, and George Pettibone. In February 1906, state authorities and their private detectives kidnapped these three men in Denver, Colorado, and took them to Idaho to stand trial. The WFM hired Darrow to represent them.

11. This might be a reference to the strike by coal miners in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. The strike started in early March 1906, lasted for nine months, and was sometimes violent. The United Mine Workers of America represented the strikers. Mitchell responded to Darrow with a long letter saying that he had “no doubt” that labor would support the three men and describing efforts already made to raise money. Mitchell to Darrow, 14 March 1906, Tc, DCU, Mitchell Papers.

12. Hall had written Darrow a short note offering to help in the case against Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone: “If there is anything I can do about the Idaho outrage on the Colo. miners I would be glad to do it. I feel strongly about that matter. | If there is not, this needs no answer.” Hall to Darrow, 3 May 1906, ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

13. Edmund F. Richardson.

14. Darrow and other defense attorneys had sought writs of habeas corpus on behalf of Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone from state and federal courts in Idaho. The petitions were denied by the lower courts, and the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in the matter on 10 and 11 October 1906. Darrow and Edmund Richardson argued in favor of the petitions. On 3 December 1906, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts. Pettibone v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 192 (1906); Moyer v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 221 (1906).

15. Darrow and Edmund Richardson had a contentious relationship and bitter disagreements as co-counsel. On this occasion, they were having a disagreement about whether an investigator (George Dickson) should remain on the case or be let go. See Richardson to Darrow, 1 November 1906, TLS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection; Darrow to Richardson, 5 November 1906, TLc, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

16. Haywood’s trial did not begin until 9 May 1907.

17. This is probably a reference to the fact that around this time Darrow was purchasing a gas plant in Greeley, Colorado. Paul eventually moved to Greeley and operated that business until 1928.

18. Frederick Hamerstrom.

19. George Hamerstrom.

20. A few days later, Darrow thought he was out of the case. See Darrow to Ruby Darrow, 13 November 1906 (mistakenly labeled “Wednesday”), ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection (“Dearest Ruben | It looks as if I was out of the case & you can come back Saturday or Sunday bringing everything with you, if you are ready. Wire me the train. I am dying to see you—almost— | Ever with love | Clarence.”).

21. Darrow is likely referring to Whitlock’s The Turn of the Balance (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1907), a novel published in March 1907.

22. Darrow might be referring to a letter from Whitlock when he says, “I note what you say about Dunne,” but no letter was found. Edward F. Dunne was defeated on 2 April 1907 in the Chicago mayoral election by Republican Fred Busse (1866–1914) after serving one two-year term.

23. Darrow had recently returned to Chicago from Wallace, Idaho, where he defended Stephen W. Adams (b. 1867), an itinerant miner and union member, on the charge of murdering a property claim jumper. The trial of Adams ended with a hung jury. Idaho authorities had hoped to use a conviction of Adams to persuade him to reaffirm his earlier confession that he had been hired by Haywood and others to kill Steunenberg. Adams’s confession would have provided corroboration for the confession of Harry Orchard (1866–1954), the central witness for the prosecution. Orchard—who had been arrested shortly after the murder of Steunenberg—signed a confession stating that Haywood and others had hired him to kill Steunenberg. Darrow was returning to Idaho “to begin the fight of [his] life” in defending Haywood, whose trial was scheduled to begin on 9 May 1907.

24. Thomas Patterson (1839–1916), United States senator from Colorado, 1901–6, and owner of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Times. During the trial of Haywood, a sealed federal indictment was brought against Borah and many others by a grand jury in Boise, Idaho, charging Borah and the others with conspiracy to defraud the federal government in connection with the sale of land to timber companies. The indictment might have been politically motivated (he was acquitted of the charges following a trial in the fall of 1907). Borah had been elected to the United States Senate by the Idaho legislature in January 1907 and he was to take his seat in December. The indictment threatened his political future and Borah, according to a biographer, “made an effort to rally support from every quarter possible.” Marian C. McKenna, Borah (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 71. Darrow was likely trying to contact Patterson as part of this effort.

25. Darrow is referring to Edmund Richardson.

26. Münsterberg had recently traveled to Idaho for the trial of Haywood at the request of S.S. McClure (1857–1949), editor and publisher of the popular McClure’s Magazine. McClure—who later said that he was acting on the suggestion of Darrow himself—wanted an eminent psychologist to conduct an examination of Harry Orchard. Münsterberg observed Orchard on the witness stand and met Orchard in his jail cell, where he subjected Orchard to a battery of tests to determine if his confession was truthful, including word-association tests and observations about Orchard’s physical appearance (Münsterberg later stated that Orchard had “the profile of a murderer”). Back in Boston, Münsterberg—who had originally intended to keep his “scientific” conclusions to himself until after the trial—allowed two interviews with newspapers that later reported Münsterberg’s firm conclusion that Orchard had been telling the truth in his confession. These newspaper stories spread across the country and Münsterberg immediately came in for a barrage of criticism; Darrow issued a statement saying that Münsterberg’s opinion was no more than a testimonial bought by a magazine publisher. Darrow maintained, among other things, that Münsterberg had had no opportunity to hear Orchard testify and that Münsterberg had been paid for his efforts by McClure. See J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 594–601. Münsterberg wrote Darrow complaining that Darrow had treated him unfairly in the press by misrepresenting the facts relating to his work. See Münsterberg to Darrow, 14 July 1907, AL, MB, Münsterberg Papers.

27. Orchard, who confessed to a total of some eighteen murders—including Steunenberg’s—had a sensational story to tell. As early as April 1907, McClure became interested in publishing an autobiographical essay that Orchard had written, and he assigned one of his reporters, George Kibbe Turner (1869–1952), to polish and edit the work. Lukas, Big Trouble, 591–92. The “autobiography” was eventually published in five parts in McClure’s Magazine: “The Confession and Autobiography of Harry Orchard,” McClure’s Magazine, July 1907, 296–306; August 1907, 367–79; September 1907, 507–23; October 1907, 658–72; November 1907, 113–29.

28. On 29 July 1907, following a nearly two-month trial, the jury found Haywood not guilty. After Haywood was acquitted, prosecutors were going to try a second time to convict Steve Adams on the charge of murdering a property claim jumper in northern Idaho. Their object, as with the first trial, was to force Adams to corroborate Harry Orchard’s testimony in the cases now remaining against Moyer and Pettibone. Darrow planned to defend Adams again, but when he returned to Boise from Chicago he suffered the flu and developed a severe infection in his left ear.

29. Darrow was not able to delay Adams’s trial and he did not have an operation. Instead, as he describes it in some detail in his autobiography, he traveled to Rathdrum, Idaho, to defend Adams. Story, 157–63. (Prosecutors, according to Darrow, changed the venue of Adams’s second trial to Rathdrum—where there were “few miners or laboring men”—because “[t]hey did not want to risk another trial [of Adams] in Wallace.” Ibid., 157.) In Rathdrum, where there was no hospital or nurse, Ruby took responsibility for regularly irrigating Darrow’s ear in the evening, after trial, and injecting Darrow with codeine when the pain became too severe (“When my memory roams over the West I try to skip Rathdrum. It was one continuous orgy of pain.”). Ibid., 160. In his autobiography, Darrow says that he traveled to San Francisco after the Adams trial for consultation with Dr. Kaspar Pischel (1862–1953), who “sent [him] to the St. Francis Hotel and put [him] under his observation and treatment for a week.” Ibid., 163. The stationery of this and the next letter suggest that Darrow might have remembered the order of events and other details incorrectly; his consultation with Dr. Pischel and stay at the St. Francis Hotel probably preceded Adams’s trial.

30. The second trial of Steve Adams, like the first one, ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors gave up trying to convict Adams, and Adams never testified for the state against Pettibone.

31. Debs was part of the editorial staff of the Appeal to Reason, and Darrow might have been considering republishing some of his books and pamphlets.

32. The trial against Pettibone started almost immediately after the second trial of Adams, and ended with an acquittal in January 1908. After the trial, the charges against Moyer were dropped. Darrow was only able to stay in the trial of Pettibone until the prosecutors had finished presenting their evidence. The pain from his ear infection had become unbearable and he could no longer stand in the courtroom. On the advice of doctors, he went to Los Angeles to see some specialists, including the well-known John Randolph Haynes (1853–1937), who became a friend of Darrow’s and who took Darrow into his home while Darrow was in Los Angeles. Eventually Darrow was operated on for mastoiditis, which left him deaf or near deaf in his left ear for the rest of his life. Story, 168–71.

33. Francis S. Wilson and Cyrus Simon.

34. Darrow was in Montana on business.

35. Later in the year, Whitlock ran for reelection as mayor of Toledo.

36. Tom L. Johnson (1854–1911), inventor, businessman, congressman, and mayor of Cleveland, Ohio. As mayor of Cleveland, 1901–9, Johnson, a Democrat, was well known for his municipal reforms and fights with street-railway interests, but he never accomplished his goal of municipal ownership of the street railways. He served eight consecutive terms as mayor, losing the election in November 1908 to a Republican, in part because of voter dissatisfaction with some of his reforms and continuing disputes with street-railway interests.

37. On 10 June 1909, Paul Darrow married Lillian Anderson in Denver, Colorado. Lillian had worked as a telephone receptionist in Darrow’s law office. Their marriage was written up in at least one Chicago newspaper, with pictures of Lillian and Paul. See Plate 20 of the illustrations.

38. Darrow often told Lillian Anderson that she looked like Lillian Russell (1861–1922), the American singer and actress. Lillian Anderson did not attend Vassar. Interview with Mary Darrow Simonson, Wheaton, Illinois, 29 July 1995.

39. The identity of the “damn preacher” is unknown. It might have been Winfield Gaylord (1870–1943), a Congregational and Methodist minister who served as a socialist in the Wisconsin Senate, 1909–1913, and ran unsuccessfully for Congress several times. It also might have been Carl D. Thompson (1870–1949), a Congregational minister who served as a socialist in the Wisconsin Assembly, 1907–1909. Both were acquainted with Berger. See Victor Berger to Meta Berger, 30 June 1912, in The Family Letters of Victor and Meta Berger, ed. Michael E. Stevens (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1995), 140–42. Michael E. Stevens, personal communication, Madison, Wisconsin, June 1996.

40. Whitlock had just won the third of four consecutive terms as mayor of Toledo.

41. Darrow’s friend was Levi Moore Powers.

42. In Whitlock’s reply to Darrow’s letter, Whitlock, among other things, encouraged Darrow to come to Toledo and give a speech: “I want you to come down here soon and I shall take up the question of having a speech from you. I should like to hear you and so would several thousand other persons in this town. But speech or not, I want you here.” Whitlock to Darrow, 3 January 1910, in The Letters of Brand Whitlock, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 123–24.

1910–1914

1. Probably Helen Todd.

2. Probably Isaac Kahn Friedman (1870–1931), who was born in Chicago of wealthy parents, obtained a degree from the University of Michigan, 1893, became a socialist and interested in settlement house work, and operated a florist business in Chicago for several years. He later traveled extensively, worked as a journalist for the (Chicago) Daily News, and wrote radical novels, including By Bread Alone (1901).

3. William J. Calhoun (1848–1916), lawyer and diplomat. Calhoun practiced law in Danville, Illinois, and later Chicago. He held a variety of foreign affairs positions for Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. He also served as a commissioner of the Interstate Commerce Commission, 1898–99, appointed by President McKinley.

4. In late 1908 and early 1909, Darrow represented a Russian refugee named Christian Rudovitz. Rudovitz’s extradition was sought by the Russian government on the charge that he had murdered three people in a Russian village in 1906. The Department of State’s commissioner in Illinois granted the application for extradition, but Secretary of State Elihu Root reversed the decision and Rudovitz remained in the United States. Jane Addams and other residents of Hull House and prominent citizens of Chicago such as Edward F. Dunne actively supported Rudovitz. In their brief to the Department of State, Rudovitz’s lawyers argued that even if Rudovitz had been involved in the murders (the Russian government presented some evidence that he was), he should not be extradited because the victims had been spies for the government and their murders were political crimes. See William J. Calhoun [Of Counsel], Clarence S. Darrow, Peter Sissman, and Charles Cheney Hyde [Counsel for the Accused], “Before the Department of State in the Matter of the Demand of the Imperial Russian Government for the Extradition of Christian Rudovitz,” Statement and Argument in Behalf of the Accused [(1909)].

5. Prohibition advocates in Chicago had filed a petition to place the question of whether Chicago should be a dry city on the local election ballot on 5 April 1910. Darrow and former mayor Carter H. Harrison Jr. were scheduled to speak against the measure at the Chicago Auditorium on 26 March 1910 (Darrow might have had the date wrong in his letter, or maybe the date was moved up). The day before the meeting, local election commissioners ruled that the issue would not be on the ballot because the petition had an inadequate number of signatures. Darrow showed up for the meeting at the auditorium but the mootness of the issue and the resulting poor turnout led to the cancelation of the meeting. “Ballot to Omit Saloon Question,” Chicago Tribune, 26 March 1910; “Societies Pass on Ward Candidates,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1910.

6. Eden Phillpotts, The Thief of Virtue (New York: John Lane Co., 1910). This was one of Phillpotts’s many novels, plays, and short stories set in the wild upland area of Dartmoor, in southwest England.

7. Louis J. Wilde was facing the possibility of being indicted by a grand jury in Portland for embezzlement in connection with the sale of some bonds to the failed Oregon Trust and Savings Bank in Portland. Darrow and Wood represented Wilde, who was eventually indicted in June 1911. “Wilde to Face Heavy Charge,” Los Angeles Times, 15 April 1910; “Property of Alleged Embezzler at Portland Attached in Suit,” Los Angeles Times, 2 July 1911.

8. Kathryn (Kitty) Seaman Beck (1884–1924), stenographer and secretary. Beck was born in Sacramento. She married a man named John Beck at a young age, but the marriage soon ended in divorce, after which she became a stenographer and secretary for Wood. She held radical ideas, like Wood (who may have influenced her in that regard). She married twice more, in 1911 and 1920. The last marriage was to George W. Vanderveer (1875–1942), a prominent radical lawyer. She died by committing suicide.

9. Walling had probably asked Darrow to make a contribution to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was formed at the second annual National Negro Conference in New York City in May 1910. Darrow was one of the speakers at the Conference. His speech was a wide-ranging criticism of the state of race relations in the country. See Transcript of Darrow’s Speech at the National Negro Conference, Cooper Union, New York City, 12 May 1910, NAACP Papers, Part I, Reel 8, Frames 54–66. He argued, for example, that whites in the South were slowly reconquering the North and driving blacks into ever lower positions of standing and servitude, and that no one was raising a voice against this: “Deprived of the ballot, deprived of any influence in the councils of the state, not permitted in good society, which is white society—lynched and burned—and no one to raise their voice against it—while the optimist stands like a jack ass in a grave yard and says ‘I am not a pessimist. God is in heaven and all is well.’” Ibid. He told the audience to put no faith in the notion that the races could be separate yet equal: “I think it is a false philosophy to teach that humanity are like the fingers on the hand—the various races and nations separate but joining together for a complete hand. If they are separate, I know where you come in—way down at the bottom, just where you have always been.” Ibid.

10. In his speech, Darrow told his black audience that their progress toward equality would be slow and imperceptible and that eventually race problems would be “worked out by race amalgamation, as the difference between the Irish and the German and the American and all the others who used to build up a barbed wire fence to keep the sheep from the goats.” Ibid. Darrow’s speech resulted in an Associated Press account that interpreted Darrow as advocating the marriage of blacks and whites. See “Advises Negroes to Marry Whites,” Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910. Darrow later denied this and said that he was simply pointing out that race amalgamation seemed inevitable and that laws against it would have no effect. He also stated that he did not personally believe in or advocate the marriage of blacks and whites. “Darrow Says He Never Said Blacks Should Wed Whites,” Chicago Tribune, 20 May 1910. Darrow’s speech was apparently never published.

11. Anna Strunsky Walling (1877–1964), author and lecturer. Anna Strunsky Walling was active in the socialist movement in the United States in the early 1900s. She was known for her collaboration with Jack London (1876–1916) on The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903), an epistolary novel on the subject of love.

12. Willoughby George Walling.

13. Older supported Hiram Johnson as a candidate for governor of California. In mid-August 1910, Johnson handily defeated his Republican competitors in the primary election.

14. In August and September 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, trying to resolve the split between the conservative and progressive elements in the Republican party, made a series of speeches and statements that one day showed support for the party regulars and the next day showed support for the progressives. In the end, he was lampooned in the press as a “man on two horsebacks.” George E. Mowry, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Election of 1910,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 (March 1939): 532.

15. The “social diseases law” is the Inferior Criminal Courts Act of the City of New York (also known as the Page Act), which became law in June 1910. See 1910 N.Y. Laws Ch. 659. The act required that every woman convicted of prostitution had to be examined by a physician and, if the physician determined that she was afflicted with a venereal disease, the judge was required to commit her to a public hospital for treatment, for a period not to exceed one year. If she was eventually certified as “free of any venereal disease,” she was to be released, provided that a minimum-detention period had expired. If her minimum-detention period had not been served, she was to be transferred to the workhouse. Many reform groups were strongly opposed to this law, on a variety of grounds. See Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books: 1987), 169–70.

16. Ida Rauh (1877–1970), actress, artist, and poet. Rauh came from a wealthy family and graduated with a law degree from New York University in 1905, but she never practiced law. She was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players, the American theatrical organization that first introduced the plays of Eugene O’Neill, and she acted in many of the plays put on by that organization between 1915 and 1920. After this period, she concentrated on painting, sculpture, and poetry (publishing one volume in 1959). She was a strong advocate of equal rights for women and active in the birth control campaigns. She was arrested in 1916 for distributing birth control pamphlets and received a suspended sentence.

17. Darrow is probably referring to Frances Blascoer (b. 1873), an organizer and executive secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1910–11. Blascoer had been a social worker in Chicago and active in the women’s movement. Later, as a special investigator for a committee on schoolchildren’s hygiene for the Public Education Association of the City of New York, she was author of a study on African American schoolchildren titled Colored School Children in New York (New York: Public Education Association of the City of New York, 1915).

18. William English Walling was being sued in state court in New York by Anna Berthe Grunspan, a Jewish Russian immigrant whom Walling had met in France in 1905, before he married Anna Strunsky. Grunspan claimed that Walling had breached a promise to marry her. Her lawsuit received a great deal of attention from newspapers, but the jury rejected her claim in March 1911. See James Boylan, Revolutionary Lives: Anna Strunsky and William English Walling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 72–74, 165–80.

19. William S. Taylor (1853–1928), lawyer, judge, state attorney general, and Republican governor of Kentucky, was elected governor in 1899 by a narrow margin over Democrat William Goebel (1856–1900). The Democratic majority in the state legislature appointed a committee to investigate the election, but before its work was complete, Goebel was shot by an unknown assassin. A short while later—after several judicial rulings on the election—Taylor was removed from office. Facing possible arrest for conspiracy to assassination Goebel, Taylor fled to Indianapolis, where he worked as a lawyer and vice president of an insurance company. In 1907, after Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer were kidnapped in Colorado and taken to Idaho to stand trial, The Appeal to Reason, the socialist newspaper edited by Fred D. Warren, offered a reward for the kidnap and return of Taylor to Kentucky. Warren apparently did this to draw attention to himself and the Appeal and to draw a contrast between the treatment of the kidnapped union men and Taylor. See Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890–1912 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 175–81.

20. Louis C. Boyle (1866–1925), lawyer. Born in Canada, Boyle graduated from the law department of the University of Michigan, 1889. He practiced law for several years in Fort Scott, Kansas, and served as county attorney there for four years. He was elected as a Populist candidate to one term as attorney general of Kansas, 1897–99, and then continued his law practice in Kansas City, Missouri, until his death.

21. See Warren v. United States, 183 F. 718 (8th Cir. 1910).

22. Warren’s conviction resulted in a $1,500 fine and a sentence of six months in prison. He refused to pay the fine or surrender himself. On 1 February 1911, President Taft—not wanting to make a martyr out of Warren—reduced his fine to one hundred dollars and canceled the prison term. Shore, Talkin’ Socialism, 181.

23. See Pettibone v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 192 (1906); Moyer v. Nichols, 203 U.S. 221 (1906).

24. Justice Joseph McKenna (1843–1926), an appointment of President McKinley, believed that the conduct of the government officials who abducted Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer was indefensible: “Kidnapping is a crime, pure and simple. It is difficult to accomplish; hazardous at every step. All of the officers of the law are supposed to be on guard against it. All of the officers of the law may be invoked against it. But how is it when the law becomes the kidnapper? When the officers of the law, using its forms, and exerting its power, become abductors?” Pettibone, 203 U.S. at 218.

25. The “case in Pennsylvania” is the arbitration of the strike by anthracite coal miners in 1902. See Darrow to Ruby Hamerstrom, 29 October 1902, n.42.

26. Lloyd delivered one of the closing arguments for the miners, urging an annual trade agreement between miners and operators and recognition of the miners’ union. His argument was published posthumously in a collection of his speeches and essays. See Henry Demarest Lloyd, Men, the Workers (1909; reprint, with an introduction by Leon Stein and Philip Taft [New York: Arno Press, 1969]), 201–52.

27. Darrow is referring to Whitlock’s The Gold Brick (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1910), a collection of short stories originally published in popular magazines.

28. Whitlock told Darrow in his letter that if he had not read any of the works of Arnold Bennett, he should read Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). Whitlock to Darrow, 12 December 1910, DLC-MSS, Whitlock Papers.

29. In his letter to Darrow, Whitlock had ruminated about his job as mayor of Toledo and his future in general: “I am very busy; the street car fight is approaching a crisis, one which I hope will dispose of it so that I can get out of this office. What I am to do then I don’t know, whether to give up the law and devote myself entirely to literature or to try to carry water on both shoulders and do both. At any rate I shall not give up writing. This is one of the things I want to talk to you about when I see you.” Ibid.

30. Ella Brainerd Whitlock.

31. Darrow was helping William English Walling defend himself against a lawsuit from Anna Berthe Grunspan. See Darrow to Field, 27 September 1910, n.18.

32. On 23 April 1911, newspapers reported that John and James McNamara and Ortie McManigal had been taken by train from the Midwest to California (without the use of any extradition process), under arrest for dynamiting the Los Angeles Times Building on 1 October 1910, killing twenty-one people in the explosion and fire that followed. Newspapers also soon began to report that Darrow had been retained as chief counsel to represent them. See, e.g., “Retain Darrow in Times Cases,” Chicago Tribune, 25 April 1911. Whitlock, who was then mayor of Toledo, sent a telegram to Darrow after learning that Darrow would be involved in the case, and the telegram ended up in one of the local newspapers: “Clarence S. Darrow, Esq., Indianapolis, Ind.—Glad you have been retained in the McNamara case and that labor has you once more to defend. I wish there was something I could do to help, but I seem to have nothing but sympathy for the cause and indignation at the methods that are used to crush it. Good luck to you. Brand Whitlock.” “Mayor Wires Good Luck to Darrow, Defender of Labor,” Toledo Blade, 25 April 1911.

33. Ella Brainerd Whitlock.

34. Frederick Hamerstrom.

35. Frank S. Black (1853–1913), lawyer, Republican congressman from New York, and governor of New York. Black graduated from Dartmouth College, 1875, worked for newspapers in New York for a few years, and then practiced law, 1879–94, before serving in Congress, 1895–97. He resigned from Congress to become governor, 1897–99, after which he resumed a successful civil and criminal law practice in New York City, from which he retired in 1913. According to one obituary, Black announced in early 1912 “that he had amassed a fortune of $500,000, which was ample to keep him for the remainder of his life,” and that “[j]ust before his retirement [in 1913] he would not take a case unless there was a large fee attached.” “Ex-Gov. Black Dies at His Troy Home,” New York Times, 22 March 1913.

36. Leo M. Rappaport (b. 1879), an attorney in Indianapolis who had long been counsel for the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, the union for which John McNamara was treasurer.

37. The identity of “Christine” is unknown, but she was apparently a domestic helper for the Darrows.

38. LeCompte Davis.

39. Joseph Scott.

40. Frederick Hamerstrom.

41. Ortie McManigal confessed to his involvement in blowing up bridges and buildings for the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers shortly after his arrest in Detroit in April 1911, and he implicated the McNamaras in his confession as well. Many people believed that McManigal had been coerced into making his confession and that the confession was not true. The McNamaras’ defense team worked hard to convince McManigal to repudiate his confession, including using the influence of his wife and uncle, who visited him in jail.

42. John T. Jacobs.

43. Darrow might be referring to P.J. Cooney, a detective from Chicago who was employed by the McNamara defense in July 1911. “Bars Down to New Evidence,” Los Angeles Times, 11 June 1912.

44. Here, Darrow is probably referring to John Harrington.

45. Darrow might be referring to James H. Levering (1859–1942), a civil and hydraulic engineer in California who was hired as an expert by the McNamara defense to reconstruct what happened in the explosion of the Los Angeles Times Building. (He would later complain that he was not fully paid for his work.)

46. Darrow might be referring to the costs associated with bringing McManigal’s wife and uncle to Los Angeles to see if McManigal would repudiate his confession.

47. William J. Burns.

48. Darrow is likely referring to an editorial the day before in Older’s San Francisco Bulletin that explained the Bulletin’s attitude toward Abraham Ruef (1864–1936). Ruef was a political boss who helped maintain corrupt control of San Francisco until he was convicted of bribery in 1908 and sentenced to fourteen years in prison (which he began serving in 1911). Older, through the Bulletin, and William J. Burns helped to convict Ruef. Later, Older sought Ruef’s release from prison. In the editorial to which Darrow refers, Older explained his change of heart and his sympathy for any person suffering in prison conditions. “Concerning the Bulletin’s Attitude toward Abe Ruef,” San Francisco Bulletin, 25 July 1911.

49. The governor was Hiram Johnson.

50. Louis J. Wilde was indicted by a grand jury in Portland, Oregon, in June 1911, on the charge of embezzlement from a failed bank in Portland. The prosecutor sought to have Wilde, who lived in California, extradited to Oregon. A few days before this letter, the prosecutor and Darrow, who represented Wilde, met with Governor Johnson in Sacramento, California, to discuss Wilde’s extradition. Despite an initial opinion from the attorney general for California that Wilde was not guilty and letters and statements of support for Wilde from many people, the governor ordered his extradition, and Wilde went to Portland on 28 July. He stood trial in January 1912 (he was not represented by Darrow then) and, at the end of the trial, the judge ordered the jury to acquit him on the grounds that the prosecution’s evidence failed to support the charge and that the indictment failed to meet the statute of limitations. “Wilde Fighting for His Rights,” Los Angeles Times, 19 July 1911; “Wilde’s Extradition,” Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1911; “Wilde Makes Statement,” 29 July 1911; “A Verdict of not Guilty in Banker Wilde’s Case,” Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1912.

51. Darrow is likely referring to an editorial in Older’s Bulletin that criticized the use of the grand jury by the Los Angeles county attorney to intimidate witnesses and gather evidence for the prosecution of the McNamaras. The county attorney had subpoenaed many witnesses to give grand jury testimony, including a private detective employed by the defense. See “Otis Transforms His Grand Jury into Detective Agency,” San Francisco Bulletin, 16 August 1911.

52. Darrow might be referring to an article by John D. Barry in the same issue of the Bulletin as the editorial referred to above. In this article, Barry lamented the fact that so many people seemed to have lost their capacity for enjoying life. “Ways of the World,” San Francisco Bulletin, 16 August 1911.

53. Possibly LeCompte Davis.

54. William J. Burns.

55. Eugene A. Clancy (b. 1876) was a vice president of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, the union for which John McNamara was treasurer. Clancy lived with his wife and children in San Francisco. He was convicted together with thirty-seven other leaders of the IABSIW in Indianapolis in December 1912. See Darrow to Field, 22 October 1912, n.104 (describing the trial). He served a seven-year sentence in prison. See “San Quentin Gates to Open for Clancy,” Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1918.

56. Abraham Ruef.

57. Darrow is probably referring to the long and difficult process of selecting jurors for the trial of James McNamara, which had been under way for three weeks.

58. E.W. Scripps.

59. Charles Edward Russell.

60. Job Harriman, Darrow’s co-counsel, was also the socialist candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. On 31 October, he won the vote in the primary, with 20,157 votes, well over the 16,790 votes of the incumbent, George Alexander (1839–1923). But Alexander went on to win the general election on 5 December 1911.

61. Lincoln Steffens.

62. The identity of “Mrs. Jacobson” is unknown.

63. What Darrow did is unknown and can only be surmised from this letter.

64. The prosecution decided to try James McNamara first, and his trial started on 11 October 1911. Some fifty days were spent trying to select a jury.

65. The three jurors, selected and sworn for service on 8 November, were Robert D. Bain (b. 1842), a carpenter (the district attorney would later allege that Darrow had bribed Bain); F.D. Green, an orange grower; and Byron Lisk (b. 1850), a retired mill owner.

66. Darrow likely means William A. Baehr.

67. On 1 December 1911, James McNamara confessed to blowing up the Los Angeles Times Building and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder of a machinist who died in the explosion. His brother, John McNamara, pleaded guilty to conspiring to dynamiting the Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles on 25 December 1910 (where a strike had been in progress).

68. The election for mayor of Los Angeles was to be held in four days, on 5 December 1911. This telegram was cited by the Los Angeles Times as confirmation that Harriman, the socialist candidate, had not been part of the plea deliberations. “McNamara Pleads Guilty to Murder,” Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1911.

69. The McNamaras were sentenced on the day of this letter. James McNamara received life in prison. John McNamara received a fifteen-year sentence. Many reports of Darrow’s potential involvement with the bribing of jurors were circulating and one newspaper heard reports (later confirmed to be untrue) that Darrow had been arrested. “Tensest Moment of the Century’s Trial,” Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1911.

70. Stories about Darrow’s potential involvement in bribing jurors continued. “Now Names Darrow in Bribery Tale,” New York Times, 12 December 1911.

71. John T. Jacobs.

72. John T. Jacobs and Charles F. Tew.

73. William Carlin.

74. The identity of “Conley” is unknown.

75. Paul Darrow’s second child, Mary, was born 13 February 1912.

76. Bert H. Franklin (1868–1927), a former deputy United States marshal and longtime resident of Los Angeles, had been working as a private detective for Darrow as part of the team of lawyers and investigators defending the McNamara brothers. During the selection of jurors for the trial of James McNamara, Franklin was arrested for attempting to bribe one of the jurors and one of the veniremen. Within a few days after this letter, newspapers reported that Franklin had confessed and was cooperating with prosecutors. “Darrow’s Detective May Confess All,” New York Times, 31 January 1912. Franklin, who pleaded guilty the following month and received a fine of four thousand dollars (the amount found on him at the time of his arrest), eventually became the prosecution’s principal witness against Darrow. “Darrow Detective Confesses Bribery,” New York Times, 28 February 1912; “Darrow Sleuth Fined $4,000,” Chicago Tribune, 2 March 1912.

77. Probably Willoughby George Walling.

78. This could be a reference to Charles B. Ensign (1860–1942); his brother, Adelbert L. Ensign (b. 1850); or their Chicago firm, C.B. Ensign & Co., which served as an investment bank for Darrow and his son’s gas plant in Colorado.

79. This is a reference to Mungo Brownlee (1843–1925), Jessie Darrow’s second husband. Brownlee was born in Scotland and emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of five. He grew up and lived in Trumbull County, Ohio, and worked as a schoolteacher and justice of the peace in the area of Vernon, Ohio. He lived in Chicago from 1908 (after his first wife died) until 1920, when he moved to Burg Hill, Ohio (where Jessie was born); there he worked as a farmer. He and Jessie were married in Chicago in 1912.

80. William Carlin.

81. The grand jury in Los Angeles County returned two indictments against Darrow on 29 January 1912: one alleging bribery of Robert Bain and the other alleging bribery of George Lockwood.

82. The identity of Darrow’s friend in San Francisco is unknown.

83. All of the ways in which Masters had shown devotion to Darrow by this date may not be known. But several weeks before this letter, Masters had sent a telegram to Darrow acknowledging receipt of Darrow’s letters and sending his love to Darrow and Ruby. Darrow to Masters, 10 January 1912, Tele, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 1. Masters had also publicly shown his support for Darrow by sending a telegram to Fremont Older’s newspaper on the day Darrow was indicted: “Darrow has given his whole life and all his great ability to the cause of liberty and particularly to the emancipation of labor from unjust laws and conditions. He has done this deliberately and with a full understanding of the flattery, the riches and the worldly power that would have been his had he given his talents to the service of capitalism. This supreme self dedication speaks so conclusively for the fundamental trust of the man’s nature and for the largeness of his vision that no one who takes these things into account will countenance any charge which lowers his stature.” “Chicago Judges Telegraph Esteem for Labor Lawyer,” San Francisco Bulletin, 30 January 1912.

84. This is probably a reference to a long letter from Jennie to Ruby in which Jennie had, among other things, expressed her concern in some detail for Darrow’s health and offered to help financially and by coming to Los Angeles. Jennie Darrow Moore to Ruby Darrow, 1 February 1912, ALS, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

85. Darrow is referring to William A. Baehr.

86. Fred had sent a telegram to Darrow one week earlier, seeking more information and offering to drum up publicity for Darrow, but no letter to Darrow was located. Frederick Hamerstrom to Darrow, 30 January 1912, Tele, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

87. Boyce replied one week later, saying that he was “sorry to read of the serious trouble [Darrow had] to face” and that he would write to him in two or three days. Boyce to Darrow, 21 February 1912, ALS, WaSpHiE, Boyce Papers. Several weeks later, Boyce sent Darrow one hundred dollars, saying: “Am sorry I cannot send you the amount you ask; it is unnecessary for me to enter into details as to why I cannot send it: suffice to say if I had the money you could have it.” Boyce to Darrow, 2 April 1912, ALS, WaSpHiE, Boyce Papers.

88. Gompers responded in one letter to these last two letters from Darrow, saying that it would be impossible to raise any money for his defense: “For the life of me I can not see how we can raise any money . . . for you. Believing, aye, almost firmly convinced of the innocence of the McNamaras, we strained every nerve to raise as near as possible the amount of money you suggested would be necessary for their defense. Upon learning that they were guilty, the first intimation of which was conveyed to the rank and file as well as to the officers of the labor movement through their confession, I am free to say to you that in my judgment any general appeal for funds to defend you . . . would fall upon indifferent ears and elicit little, if any, response at this time.” Gompers to Darrow, 16 March 1912, TLc, WHi, AFL Records: Gompers Era. On the subject of whether Darrow ever said that Gompers knew the McNamaras were guilty from the start, Gompers told Darrow that he was “gratified at the receipt of [his] letter.” Ibid.

89. Frank Morrison (1859–1949), secretary of the American Federation of Labor, 1897–1935.

90. Three weeks earlier, after Darrow’s indictment, Wood had written to Darrow, predicting that the prosecution would likely fail, but he sympathized with Darrow and offered to help in any practical way that he could. He also asked whether Larry Sullivan, one of Darrow’s investigators in the McNamara matter and an acquaintance of Wood’s, had been “straight and true.” Wood to Darrow, 29 January 1912, ALS, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 1.

91. Ruby Darrow had written a long letter to Whitlock seeking an explanation for why he had not contacted her husband and pleading for Whitlock to write and show his support: “How can you have remained silent so long!! You men in the east fairly shoved this man out here, and these men in the west came to our house and almost dragged him here—and were horrified when I replied to their whispers of ‘traitor’ that I would rather have him that and alive. . . . Are you all going to sit on the fence and see this man marched past you to prison? . . . Please write to him at once—tell him you have been ill anything—anything but write at once and it will be remembered with gratitude til death by R—D—.” Ruby Darrow to Brand Whitlock, 14 February 1912, ALS, DLC-MSS, Whitlock Papers, Container 25.

92. This might be another reference to Larry Sullivan.

93. “Miss Carlin” is Nellie Carlin. “Jessie” is Jessie (Ohl) Brownlee. But the identity of “Miss Wood” is unknown.

94. “Vaughn” was a prospective sublessee of the Darrows’ furnished apartment in Chicago. He wanted one month free rent.

95. A “dictograph” or “dictofone” (as it was sometimes called) was a relatively recent invention that allowed someone to listen by wire to someone else talking in another room, using an audio amplifier. Dictographs were starting to be used around this time by private detectives and law enforcement officials and, in this case, the National Erectors’ Association (NEA), an anti-union employers’ organization that helped investigate and prosecute Darrow. In February 1912, the NEA and prosecutors lured Darrow to John Harrington’s hotel room in Los Angeles to try to trap Darrow into making some incriminating statements that could be recorded by a stenographer listening next door through a dictograph. The day before this letter, the NEA revealed the use of the dictograph to the New York Times, and the commissioner of the NEA told the newspaper that the evidence obtained through the dictograph would have an “important bearing” on Darrow’s case. “Dictograph Near Darrow,” New York Times, 13 March 1912. But later, during Darrow’s trial, the prosecution never used the stenographic transcript or any other related evidence, and the prosecution refused to provide a copy of the transcript to the defense. “Dictograph Is Nut to Crack,” Los Angeles Times, 5 July 1912.

96. Darrow had insisted that if Paul’s next child was a boy the baby should be named Paul. The baby was a girl, so “Pauline” is apparently how Darrow or Ruby referred to the baby.

97. Probably William Cavenaugh, a stonecutter who became Darrow’s friend in 1907 in Boise, Idaho, during the trial of William Haywood. By the time of the McNamara trial, Cavanaugh was a policeman in the Los Angeles area.

98. The Leo Cherne Papers (Box 2) at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University contain several hundred letters and telegrams of support to Darrow during his time in Los Angeles after his indictment. The Darrow Papers (Box 2) at the Library of Congress also contain many letters and telegrams to Darrow during this same period.

99. Darrow might be referring to a long letter from Debs that was dated nearly one month earlier, relaying several criticisms of Darrow but expressing his personal sympathy and support for him. See J. Robert Constantine, ed., Letters of Eugene V. Debs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 1:460–62 (letter from Debs to Darrow, 19 February 1912). But it seems more likely that if Darrow had just received a letter from Debs on this date, a further exchange of correspondence followed after that earlier letter.

100. On 17 August 1912, the jury, after thirty minutes of deliberation, acquitted Darrow of the charge of participating in the attempted bribery of George Lockwood. The indictment charging him with participating in the bribery of Robert Bain remained to be tried.

101. Gregory had sent a telegram to Darrow three days earlier, congratulating him on his great closing argument and his acquittal. Gregory to Darrow, 19 August 1912, Tele, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 4.

102. Darrow stepped off the steamship from Los Angeles to San Francisco on 31 August 1912. The Bulletin ran a front-page story and picture of Darrow standing at the railing of the steamship, with Ruby on one side and Mary Field on the other, while they were greeted with a brass band and hundreds of well-wishers, including local labor leaders. “Rousing Welcome for Darrow,” (San Francisco) Bulletin, 31 August 1912. Later, he gave a Labor Day speech in San Francisco that was attended by a great throng of people. “‘Labor’s Friend’ Makes Great Speech at Park,” (San Francisco) Bulletin, 3 September 1912.

103. Haley and Daniel Kiefer (1856–1923) and his wife Rosa Kiefer (b. 1863) had sent a telegram from Cincinnati praising Darrow and congratulating him (and Ruby and Lincoln Steffens, who testified extensively on Darrow’s behalf) on the verdict. Haley and Kiefer to Darrow, 17 August 1912, Tele, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 4. Daniel Kiefer was a businessman in Cincinnati who became wealthy in the wholesale clothing business. Later, both in Cincinnati and Chicago, he became a political reformer and very active in the single-tax movement.

104. On 1 October 1912, the federal court in Indianapolis began a trial of forty some members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, including many of its leaders. They were charged with being part of the dynamiting conspiracy involving Ortie McManigal, the McNamaras, and others. Field covered the trial for Bridgemen’s Magazine, a monthly publication of the IABSIW. Field’s “position,” as Darrow referred to it, might have related to money problems that she was having.

105. Olaf A. Tveitmoe.

106. The trial on the remaining indictment against Darrow, which was set for 21 October 1912—after Darrow’s motion to dismiss the indictment was denied—was postponed several times before the trial finally began in January 1913. “Darrow Case Postponed,” Los Angeles Times, 12 October 1912; “Darrow Hearing May Be Delayed,” Los Angeles Times, 13 November 1912; “‘To Be Continued,’” Los Angeles Times, 20 November 1912.

107. Darrow is quoting from “The Garden of Proserpine,” a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), one of Darrow’s favorite English poets.

108. Darrow is referring to William J. Henley (1863–1944), a lawyer and former judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals, 1896–1903. Henley resigned his judgeship to become general counsel for the Chicago Railway Terminal Company. In May 1910, after serving for a time as president of the Chicago & Western Indiana Railroad, Henley, who was then practicing law in Indianapolis, was indicted in Chicago on charges that he had bribed members of the Illinois legislature to secure passage of legislation favorable to the railroad. Darrow represented Henley before leaving for Los Angeles. In December 1912, Henley’s indictment was dismissed because of insufficient evidence. In early 1912, Henley went through a divorce and prompt second marriage that also landed his name in the newspaper. “Henley Defense Gets into Action,” Chicago Tribune, 10 May 1910; “Sues for Divorce from W.J. Henley,” Chicago Tribune, 26 January 1912; “Wayman Explains ‘Nolles,’” Chicago Tribune, 21 December 1912.

109. Darrow spoke on the playwright Henrick Ibsen (1828–1906) at the First Universalist Church in Pasadena, California, at the invitation of the men’s club of the church. “Clarence Darrow Interpreter of Ibsen,” Pasadena Star, 24 October 1912.

110. Darrow might be referring to Irwin E. Rockwell, but what Twain item Darrow wanted Paul to send to Rockwell is unknown.

111. On her typewritten transcript of this letter, Mary’s daughter (Margaret Parton) wrote an explanation for Darrow’s comment: “Note by M.P: Mary had been evicted from Judge Anderson’s courtroom in Indianapolis—I think because of audible remarks of derision—and had been branded an ‘anarchist’ in the newspapers. She was covering the trial for ‘The Bridgeman’s Magazine.’” Darrow to Parton, 29 November 1912, TT, ICN, Parton-Darrow Papers, Box 1, Folder 19.

112. Probably James H. Griffes (1868–1919), single-tax advocate, writer, and magazine publisher. Griffes was born in New York and moved to California from Chicago in 1890, first living in San Francisco and then moving to Los Angeles in approximately 1909. For the last ten years or so of his life, Griffes published and wrote (under the pseudonym Luke North) for a magazine called Everyman, which was devoted to advocating for single-tax ideas. Griffes published pieces by Darrow and Parton (and one by Ruby Darrow) in the magazine.

113. What Darrow was sorry about is unknown, but he might have been sorry for the fact that Ruby would have to endure another trial.

114. Darrow is probably referring to a letter from Henry Salt. Moore and Salt were both strong proponents of vegetarianism and animal rights, and they corresponded with each other often during the last years of Moore’s life. See J. Howard Moore, The Universal Kinship, ed. Charles Magel (Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1992), 333–40 (includes several of Moore’s letters to Salt).

115. Orlando W. Powers.

116. This is a reference to Earl Rogers, who eventually withdrew for health reasons from representing Darrow in his second trial. “Rogers Quits Darrow Case,” Chicago Tribune, 8 February 1913. Two months earlier, Rogers had been in a private sanitorium for a month and was unable, for that reason, to participate in a trial. “Darrow Hearing May Be Delayed,” Los Angeles Times, 13 November 1912. During Darrow’s first trial, Rogers was also absent at times. See, e.g., “Illness Halts Darrow Trial,” Chicago Tribune, 18 June 1912; “Rogers not There,” Los Angeles Times, 6 July 1912.

117. In December 1906, Anna Bradley (d. 1950) shot Arthur Brown (1843–1906) in his hotel room in Washington, D.C. Brown, a former Republican senator from Utah, later died from the wounds. Brown’s mistress, Bradley, had two children with him (although he denied this). She was tried for murder and Powers was her chief defense counsel. She was eventually acquitted of the murder charges by a jury. See “Ex-Senator Brown Shot by a Woman at Capital,” New York Times, 9 December 1906; “Judge Locks up the Bradley Jury,” New York Times, 3 December 1907.

118. Although Moyer’s letter to Darrow was not located, a telegram from Moyer after Darrow’s acquittal in the first bribery trial survives. Moyer to Darrow, 17 August 1912, Tele, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 4 (“Accept my congratulations on your acquittal. Knowing your past record as I do there has never been a doubt in my mind as to your innocence.”).

119. The judge in Darrow’s second trial discharged the jury on this day after forty hours of deliberations. The jury was divided with eight votes to convict Darrow and four votes to acquit him. Several explanations for the divided jury circulated in newspapers, including a common one (reportedly confirmed by an anonymous juror) holding that Darrow had angered some of the jurors by saying that the McNamaras were not murderers but workers in a great cause. “Darrow Remark Lost Him Liberty,” Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1913; “Sting of Conviction Comes Near Darrow,” Los Angeles Times, 9 March 1913.

120. Archived with this letter is a copy of the following recitals and resolution of the Varnishers & Polishers Local Union No. 134, in San Francisco:

WHEREAS:—The acquittal of Clarence S. Darrow, Labor’s foremost champion at Los Angeles has met with the approval of all true Unionists;

WHEREAS:—Clarence S. Darrow has lived a life for man’s betterment with unswerving fidelity, his arms outstretched in succor, his voice in thunderous tones spoke; his pen always wielded with master strokes in behalf of Labor’s rights; liken unto the lowly Nazarene was he.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED:—By Varnishers & Polishers L.U. #134 in meeting assembled Tuesday evening August 27th, 1912. That we extend our most sincere and hearty congratulations to Clarence S. Darrow in his acquittal, hoping that many years be allotted him to continue on in his life’s work and the accomplishment of his high ideals “Equality, Justice & Right” and further that the dark clouds over shadowing his path will disappear as does the melting snow before the sun.

121. The “Times” is the Los Angeles Times and “M & M” is the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, a well-funded, aggressively anti-union organization of employers in Los Angeles formed in 1896 at the suggestion of Harrison Gray Otis (1837–1917), owner and editor of the Los Angeles Times and militant opponent of unions.

122. Darrow’s handwriting is difficult here; he might have intended “champs of fairness” rather than “champions of fairness.”

123. Orlando W. Powers.

124. Albert Ehrgott (1863–1929), Sara Bard Field’s first husband. Ehrgott was a Baptist minister and Sara was seeking a divorce from him, which she would eventually receive in November 1914.

125. On his return from California, the Lawyers’ Association of Illinois organized a celebratory banquet for Darrow at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, with more than two hundred in attendance. “C.S. Darrow Shies from Sympathy,” Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1913.

126. “Camfield” is Daniel A. Camfield, but the “Greeley Recorder deal” to which Darrow refers is unknown.

127. “Gurley” is possibly William W. Gurley (1851–1923), a corporate lawyer and general counsel for traction companies in Chicago, including the Union Traction Company. He was a friend of Darrow’s. “Tew” is Charles F. Tew. The Brown Palace Hotel is in Denver, Colorado. What they were all involved in with Darrow or his son is unknown.

128. The identity of “Mr. Roach” is unknown.

129. Darrow is likely referring to a pamphlet containing his final argument to the jury in his first bribery trial: Plea of Clarence Darrow, in His Own Defense to the Jury That Exonerated Him of the Charge of Bribery at Los Angeles, August–1912 (Los Angeles: Golden Press, 1912). Darrow’s final argument in his second trial was published in a magazine: “Second Plea of Clarence Darrow in His Own Defense,” Everyman (Los Angeles), May 1913, 3–24.

130. Darrow’s final argument in the trial of Haywood was published in toto and in excerpts in a variety of forms, including “Darrow’s Speech in the Haywood Case,” Wayland’s Monthly, October 1907, 4–111.

131. The identity of “Mr. Winter” is unknown.

132. Darrow is probably referring to a recent case in state court in Chicago in which he defended two brothers, both woolen merchants (Edward and Paul Cotiz), and a third man, an insurance adjuster (Joseph Clarke). They were charged with arson and were all found guilty by a jury two days after Darrow wrote this letter. “Three Convicted on Arson Charge,” Chicago Tribune, 30 June 1913.

133. The identity of “Mrs. Hamilton” is unknown.

134. Probably Helen Todd.

135. I. Harris, The Significance of Existence (London: Longmans, Green, 1911).

136. Mary was in Goldfield, Nevada, with her sister, Sara Bard Field. Sara was living there temporarily so she could obtain a divorce from her husband, Albert Ehrgott.

137. The nature of Gerson’s “cooperative scheme” is unknown.

138. Harriet Anna (Thompson) Gerson (d. 1922) was Gerson’s first wife. They were married in 1899.

139. Darrow spoke at the Brownsville Opera House on 30 November 1913. A local newspaper summarized the speech as wide-ranging and sarcastic: “The address was full of radicalism and Mr. Darrow spoke in sarcastic disparagement of lawyers, doctors, preachers and bankers. He made light of the constitution, played dangerously with religion and made organization of laboring men the burden of his message. “Sarcastic Address by C.S. Darrow to Labor Men in Brownsville,” (Union Town) Daily News Standard, 1 December 1913.

140. Gertrude Barnum.

141. Inez Milholland Boissevain.

142. Ellis O. Jones (1874–1967), journalist. Jones was an editor for the original Life magazine and later editor for the Ladies’ Home Journal. A pacifist during World War I, Jones became a fascist during World War II.

143. Leonard Dalton Abbott (1878–1953), English-born socialist editor. Abbott came to the United States in 1897. For twenty years he was an associate editor for Current Literature (later, Current Opinion), 1905–25. He was also president of the Free Speech League, 1910–14, and one of the founders of the Rand School and Intercollegiate Socialist Society (later known as the League for Industrial Democracy).

144. Allan Benson (1871–1940), journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. Benson received a public school education in Michigan and worked as a reporter and editor for various newspapers around the country, until approximately 1907. Later, he wrote for magazines and socialist publications. He was the author of many popular socialist books and booklets, as well as other books. In 1916, Benson was nominated by the Socialist Party as a candidate for president.

145. Darrow is likely referring to a letter that he received from Parton while she was in Goldfield, Nevada. The poems to which Darrow is referring are unknown.

146. Darrow is referring to the second indictment against him in Los Angeles.

147. George West (1884–1943) was a writer or editor for many different newspapers and magazines, including the San Francisco Bulletin and later the San Francisco News. He lived with Darrow and his wife for several weeks while Darrow tried to find employment for him.

148. Darrow delivered an address on Voltaire before the Chicago Society of Rationalism in Chicago on 11 January 1914. The address was later published: “Voltaire,” (Los Angeles) Everyman 9 (January–February 1914): 19–31.

149. In December 1913, Fredericks was considering or planning a candidacy for governor of California and he was apparently concerned that his campaign would have difficulty with labor forces because of the way in which Fredericks had handled the McNamara case and Darrow’s bribery trials. On approximately 15 December, according to Darrow, someone (unidentified) who was a friend of Fredericks and Darrow presented this letter to Darrow in Chicago for his signature. The letter had no date on it, but Darrow was told that if he signed it the still-pending indictment against him for jury bribery would be dismissed. Darrow signed the letter and Fredericks dismissed the indictment on 20 December 1913. The date on the letter (23 December) was apparently added after Darrow signed the letter (Darrow was not in Chicago on that date), so the letter could be dated after the indictment was dismissed. The Los Angeles Tribune, which published this letter, reported that supporters of Fredericks had been “quietly” showing this letter to “various labor leaders.” The Tribune accused Fredericks of abusing his power as district attorney to extort Darrow’s signature, to serve Fredericks’s own political ambitions. “Who Wrote ‘Darrow Whitewash Letter?’” Los Angeles Tribune, 14 October 1914. Before this letter, Darrow and Fredericks had corresponded about the pending indictment, but Fredericks had put off giving any answer to Darrow on the matter because he said that he wanted to talk to Darrow in person in Chicago. See Fredericks to Darrow, 15 September 1913, TLS, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 2, Folder 5. (In May 1914, Fredericks announced that he would be a Republican candidate for governor. He went on to win the primary election in August but lost the general election in November to Hiram Johnson.)

150. S.G. Tallentyre [Evelyn Beatrice Hall], The Life of Voltaire, 3rd ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910).

151. Possibly Charles C. Chapman (1876–1956), civic leader in Portland, Oregon, and founder and editor for forty years of the Oregon Voter, a weekly political publication.

152. In December 1912, thirty-eight of the defendants in the federal conspiracy trial in Indianapolis, all leaders or members of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, were found guilty. Thirty of the men who were convicted appealed (six of them successfully). Sidney Fine, “Without Blare of Trumpets”: Walter Drew, the National Erectors’ Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903–57 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 125.

153. What Darrow is referring to is unknown and can only be inferred from this letter.

1915–1919

1. Darrow is referring to the arrest of Matthew Schmidt and David Caplan. They had been indicted in 1911 for the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building, but they evaded arrest until February 1915. “Dynamite Conspirator Is Caught in New York,” Los Angeles Times, 14 February 1915; “Last of Indicted Dynamiters Now in Jail in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, 28 February 1915.

2. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was held in San Francisco from 4 February to 4 December 1915, marking the opening of the Panama Canal and celebrating the European discovery of the Pacific Ocean. Some 19 million people attended.

3. Fay Lewis.

4. John H. Francis.

5. Darrow is likely referring to people associated with the Day Book, an advertisement-free newspaper that Scripps started in Chicago in 1911 that was designed for the working-class reader. The editor of the newspaper, which folded in 1917, was Negley Cochran. See Duane C.S. Stoltzfus, Freedom from Advertising: E.W. Scripps’s Chicago Experiment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

6. Parton and her husband, Lem, were expecting a child, Margaret Parton (1915–81), who became a journalist and author. The “Jo” who relayed the news to Darrow was likely Anton Johannsen.

7. Darrow is referring to Walter Lionel George’s novel, The Second Blooming (Boston: Little, Brown, 1915).

8. Darrow is referring to his testimony before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, which was established by an act of Congress in 1912 to inquire into the general condition of labor in principal industries and to determine and report on the underlying causes of labor unrest. Frank Walsh was chair of the commission, which traveled to several cities and heard testimony from over seven hundred witnesses. Darrow testified on 18 May 1915. Senate, Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations Created by the Act of August 23, 1912, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, S. Doc. 415, 11: 10769–815.

9. Inez Haynes (Gilmore) Irwin (1873–1970), suffragist and writer. Irwin earned a two-year degree at Radcliffe College, 1896, and became active in the suffrage movement, cofounding the National College Equal Suffrage League, 1900, and later joining the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. She worked as a war correspondent in Europe for American magazines, 1916–18, and lived in New York City most of her life. Her first marriage, to a man named Gilmore, ended in divorce, and she later married Will Irwin, a writer. She wrote The Story of the Woman’s Party (1921) (a history) and many novels, children’s books, short stories, and murder mysteries. She was the president of the Authors’ League of America, 1931, and the Authors’ Guild, 1925–28.

10. Crystal Eastman (1881–1928), reformer, writer, suffragist. Eastman graduated from Vassar College, 1903; she received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University, 1904, and a law degree from New York University, 1907. She investigated workplace accidents for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1907–08, and served as the only woman on New York’s Employer’s Liability Commission, 1909–10. She cofounded the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage, 1913, the Woman’s Peace Party in New York, 1914, and the Civil Liberties Bureau, 1917, which became the American Civil Liberties Union. She wrote many articles on women’s issues, social reform, and other subjects, and cofounded and edited the Liberator, 1918–22, a socialist magazine, with her brother, Max Eastman (1883–1969). Darrow represented her in her divorce from her first husband.

11. “Maude” is written in pencil (the letter is in ink) with the initials “MP” (Mary Parton) next to the name “Younger.” Maude Younger (1870–1936), trade union activist and suffragist. She was active in trade unionism, in particular, the waitresses’ unions, in New York City and San Francisco before becoming involved in suffrage work. She was a member of the Congressional Union and later the National Woman’s Party, and active in both organizations.

12. Darrow is referring to William Lorimer (1861–1934), politician, banker, and businessman. Lorimer served as a Republican congressman from Illinois for several terms, 1895–1901, 1903–08, and later as United States senator, 1909–12, until the Senate removed him from his seat after an investigation into corrupt methods and practices in his election. In June 1914, after Lorimer was removed from the Senate, a bank that he had started in Chicago failed and Lorimer was charged with criminal conduct in connection with the failure. Darrow represented Lorimer early on in the criminal proceedings, but he did not represent him when the matter when to trial in March 1916. See “Trial for Lorimer and Aids Ordered by Judge O’Connor,” Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1915; Joel Tarr, A Study in Boss Politics: William Lorimer of Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 311–13.

13. In April 1915, Addams made a widely publicized trip to the Netherlands to chair the International Congress of Women at The Hague. During the meeting, several resolutions were passed calling for international peace. Afterward, in May and June, Addams and several other delegates personally delivered those resolutions to the warring countries. Addams was in London in early May 1915 urging peace two days after the British passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by the Germans, killing 1,198 passengers, including 114 Americans. Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 217–24.

14. Probably The Poet in the Desert (Portland, OR, 1915), Wood’s best-known work.

15. The bookstore called “A.C. McClurg” was founded in Chicago in 1844.

16. No review of Wood’s book was published in The Mirror.

17. Émile Zola (1840–1902), French novelist, critic, and founder of naturalism in literature.

18. Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1915).

19. Darrow is referring to the cases of Matthew Schmidt and David Caplan. Schmidt was tried in late 1915 and Caplan was tried in late 1916. Wood considered representing them, but they could not reach an agreement on fees. Robert Hamburger, Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 220–22.

20. LeCompte Davis.

21. Horace Appel (1860–1922), a criminal-defense attorney in Los Angeles who was involved in many prominent cases in his day, including as part of the defense team for Darrow’s first trial in Los Angeles for jury bribery. Appel was defense counsel for David Caplan during his trial in 1916. In 1919, Appel was committed to the Norwalk Asylum for the Insane (in Los Angeles County), and for a time was in the same ward as Earl Rogers, his co-counsel on Darrow’s defense team.

22. Darrow is probably referring to Benjamin Fay Mills and his conversion in 1915 to a more conservative form of Christianity.

23. Probably Edwin M. Williams and his wife, Della.

24. Reynold E. Blight (1879–1951) and his wife, Lydia (Walters) Blight (1879?–1922). Reynold Blight, born in England, emigrated to Canada at an early age and settled in California in 1903. He was partner in an accounting firm in Los Angeles and active in church and civic affairs. He was editor for many years of the New Age Magazine and other publications of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Lydia Blight was born in Racine, Wisconsin. She attended normal school in Long Beach, California, and taught school in Los Angeles. The Blights, along with the Gersons and the Williamses, were members of the Severance Club, a cultural club in Los Angeles. Darrow was an occasional speaker and guest at meetings of the club when he was in Los Angeles.

25. In October 1915, a disgruntled former housekeeper of Wright’s tried to convince federal authorities in Chicago to prosecute Wright for violation of the Mann Act. Wright had been traveling back and forth from Chicago to his home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, with Maude Miriam Noel (1869–1930), who would become his wife many years later. The Mann Act made transportation of women across state lines for an “immoral purpose” a federal crime. Darrow represented Wright during the investigation, which was covered extensively by newspapers. See, e.g., Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1992), 244–46; “Bungalow Life Defended by Frank Wright: Complains His Love Affairs Have Been ‘Flung under Foot,’” Chicago Tribune, 7 November 1915.

26. In September 1915, Parton’s sister, Sara Bard Field, and a few other women began an automobile trip across the country, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. The object of the trip was to garner support for the suffrage movement and deliver a suffrage petition to Congress and President Wilson, symbolizing an offer of political power from women in the West (where several states had granted suffrage to women) to women in the East (where no states had granted suffrage). Half a million signatures were gathered on the petition at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. The automobile trip was the idea of Field’s friend, Alice Paul. All of the major cities along the route (including Chicago) held parades and rallies when the automobile with Field arrived, and the trip received considerable attention in the newspapers. Amelia Fry, “Along the Suffrage Trail: From West to East for FREEDOM NOW!” The American West, January 1969, 16–25.

27. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1906).

28. On 5 December 1915, a “peace ship” sponsored by Henry Ford set sail from New York for Oslo, Norway, carrying Ford, some sixty to eighty other “peace delegates” and opponents of the war and preparedness, and approximately half as many journalists. Many of the people invited on this pacifist mission declined to go, including Darrow. Among the delegates who accepted Ford’s invitation were many writers, editors, feminists, and politicians, including John D. Barry, Benjamin W. Huebsch, Inez Milholland Boissevain, and Benjamin B. Lindsey. The mission received considerable criticism and ridicule in the press. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 26–54.

29. The speech (or written account of a speech) to which Darrow is referring is unknown.

30. Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932), president of Sears, Roebuck in Chicago, 1908–24, and then its chairman, 1924–32, was an active Republican and one of the great philanthropists of the early twentieth century. He donated millions of dollars to museums, schools, YMCAs, and Jewish charities. Influenced by Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), Rosenwald was particularly interested in helping African Americans, and he helped build several thousand schools and libraries in the rural South.

31. This is likely a reference to the case of Isaac Bond, a forty-year-old black man who was convicted of murdering Ida Leegson, a white woman who worked as a nurse, artist, and art teacher. Several witnesses testified that they had seen Bond or someone who resembled him in the company of Leegson in the area of the murder in Chicago on the day that she died. Other witnesses testified that they had seen Bond with Leegson’s watch and a pin attached to it or jewelry that resembled those items shortly after she was murdered. On the other hand, seven witnesses testified that Bond was in Gary, Indiana, on the day of and the day after the murder, which would have made Bond’s guilt impossible. The prosecution attacked the credibility of Bond’s witnesses, all of whom were friends or acquaintances of Bond. Darrow represented Bond in his trial and on appeal, which ended with his conviction and a life sentence affirmed on appeal. People v. Bond, 281 Ill. 490, 118 N.E. 14 (Dec. 19, 1917) (affirming conviction).

32. This is probably a reference to a heated argument about the war that Darrow and Sara Bard Field had in New York City at a New Year’s party. Dona Munker, personal communication, New York City, September 2007.

33. What Charles Erskine Scott Wood said is unknown.

34. Probably Helen Todd.

35. Sara Bard Field was in Chicago in early June 1916 to speak and otherwise participate in a convention of women who were forming the National Woman’s Party.

36. Darrow is quoting a line from A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad: “Oh, ’tis jesting, dancing, and drinking / Spins the heavy world around. / If young hearts were not so clever, / Oh, they would be young for ever: / Think no more; ’tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.”

37. The bomb to which Darrow is referring exploded on 22 July 1916 during the Preparedness-Day parade in San Francisco. Ten people were killed. Two of the people arrested—Tom Mooney and Warren Billings—were convicted in what became one of the most sensational radical-labor prosecutions of the early twentieth century. Two days after the bombing, William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner published a scathing editorial claiming that the bombing had been incited by three “political and journalistic demagogues”—which was meant to include Older. The Examiner urged the city to rid itself of “these mean and loathsome vermin.” Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 88–99. The speech by Elihu Root (1845–1937) to which Darrow refers occurred in 1906, when Hearst ran for governor of New York. Root, who was then Roosevelt’s secretary of state, gave a widely publicized speech denouncing Hearst as a demagogue whose “incendiary abuse” of political leaders had “wrought out its natural consequence—in the murder of President McKinley.” Elihu Root, The United States and the War, the Mission to Russia, Political Addresses, comp. and ed. Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), 222–23.

38. The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, formed in 1913, was made up of militant suffragists who sought an amendment to the federal Constitution that would allow women the right to vote. The Congressional Union merged with the National Woman’s Party in 1916. Here, Darrow might be referring to the Congressional Union’s efforts against Democratic candidates in the fall of 1916 who opposed an amendment.

39. “Marion” is Marion Field Greene, the younger sister of Mary Field Parton and Sara Bard Field. Marion, who had two children, was in some financial straits, and Wood had helped her out. Dona Munker, personal communication, New York City, September 2007.

40. Sara Bard Field and other suffragists supported Republican Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) in the presidential campaign in 1916. Hughes (unlike Woodrow Wilson) endorsed the idea of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution.

41. The identity of “Jim Caslin” is unknown.

42. Costigan was writing a book on legal ethics and a section of it was devoted to the McNamara case. In particular, Costigan focused on the ethical issues raised by Darrow having encouraged labor organizations to raise money for the defense of the McNamaras, while at the same time, according to newspaper reports in December 1911 (after the McNaramas pleaded guilty), Darrow knew of their guilt when he undertook their defense. George P. Costigan Jr., Cases and Other Authorities on Legal Ethics (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1917), 343–52. John Wigmore (1863–1943), dean of the law school at Northwestern University, where Costigan taught, had been highly critical of Darrow in a well-publicized law-journal article written along these same lines, published shortly after the guilty pleas of the McNamaras. Ibid., 348–49. Costigan noted that Darrow, “[i]n view of the contemplated publication” of Costigan’s book, had handed him this “statement” on 10 January 1917. Ibid., 351.

43. Milner delivered a sermon at the Ravenswood Presbyterian Church in Chicago on 3 June 1917 that was designed to reconcile the tenets of Christianity with acts of war. The sermon was published as a pamphlet: Duncan C. Milner, May a Christian Be a Soldier and Fight? (1917).

44. On 16 July 1917, Darrow, Walsh, Morris Hillquit, Seymour Stedman, Roger Baldwin, and others spent the morning in Washington, D.C., with Assistant Attorney General William C. Herron (1864–1922) and the afternoon with Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson (1863–1937), trying to convince them that the government should stop banning Masses and Mother Earth and “[s]ome thirteen or fourteen other publications” from the mail. Frank Walsh to Emma Goldman, 18 July 1917, TLc, NN, Walsh Papers. See J.L. Engdahl, “Press Has Right to Oppose Draft Law, Postmaster General Tells Socialists,” American Socialist, 21 July 1917.

45. Gompers responded with a brief note: “I greatly appreciate and thank you for all that you said and for your offer of services. I may yet call upon you.” Gompers to Darrow, 27 August 1917, TLc, WHi, AFL Records: Gompers Era.

46. William Kent (1864–1928), a businessman and politician, was one of the founders of the Municipal Voters League in Chicago, 1896, and later a three-term congressman from California, 1911–17, as well as a member of the United States Tariff Commission, 1917–20, appointed by President Wilson.

47. William Nathanson (1883–1963) was an author, anarchist, and Yiddish writer who lived in Chicago for approximately fifty years before moving to Los Angeles shortly before his death.

48. Weinberger represented Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), anarchist editor, organizer, and Goldman’s friend and comrade. Goldman and Berkman were convicted by a jury in federal court in New York in July 1917 for conspiring to induce eligible men to resist the draft. Weinberger had written to Darrow after he heard from Nathanson that Darrow might be willing to help with the appeal in the Supreme Court: “Mr. Nathanson of Chicago wire[d] me that you would be willing to be associated in the case of United States vs. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman on the appeal. | They and myself would be glad to have you. If you will help, as soon as the case is printed I will send you a copy and submit my plans for the appeal to you.” Weinberger to Darrow, 8 August 1917, TLc, CtY-BR, Weinberger Papers, Box 28, Folder 4.

49. In a short response, Weinberger assured Darrow that his name would not be used: “Your name will not be used. I will communicate further with you, and certainly will be glad of your advice and help in whatever form it takes.” Weinberger to Darrow, 13 August 1917, TLc, CtY-BR, Weinberger Papers, Box 28, Folder 4. The extent of Darrow’s involvement in the appeal is unknown (his name did not appear on the brief), but the appeal—which, among other points, challenged the constitutionality of the draft—was unsuccessful. See Goldman v. United States, 245 U.S. 474 (1918).

50. Darrow is probably referring to someone who either worked for Henry M. Byllesby or H.M. Byllesby & Co., a large utility holding company owned by Byllesby and located in Chicago. Byllesby or his company was apparently a prospective buyer for Paul and Clarence Darrow’s gas plant in Greeley, Colorado.

51. Noyes & Jackson was a stock brokerage firm in Chicago.

52. This is a reference to the criminal trial of Charles C. Healey (1856–1925), a former police chief in Chicago. Prosecutors alleged that Healey had been a member of a conspiracy to take bribes and extort money from several businesses in the city, including prostitution and gambling operations. Healey and two others (a saloon keeper and a police detective) were indicted and tried together in Chicago starting on 15 October 1917. Darrow and another lawyer represented Healey. Healey’s trial followed after the trial of Oscar DePriest (1871–1951), a Chicago alderman (and later Republican congressman from Illinois) who was indicted, on several counts, for being part of the same conspiracy. Darrow also represented DePriest, who was acquitted in June 1917 after a trial on one of the counts against him.

53. Darrow is probably referring to “raising a fund” for the National Labor Defense Council, which had been formed a few months before this letter. Anton Johannsen was general organizer for the council and Walsh was chairman. The object of the council was to give aid and publicity in labor cases “to all persons prosecuted or discriminated against through the courts and other avenues of the law.” Walsh to Fay Lewis, 13 June 1917, TLc, NN, Walsh Papers. The council had two staffs: a legal staff that included Walsh, Darrow, and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, among others; and an editorial staff that included Lincoln Steffens, Fremont Older, John Reed (1887–1920), George West, and several other journalists.

54. Darrow is referring to the appeal of Isaac Bond to the Supreme Court of Illinois. See Darrow to Parton, 27 April 1916, n.31.

55. The Healey case lasted three months, from 16 October 1917 to 12 January 1918, and ended with an acquittal for all three defendants.

56. Henry M. Byllesby.

57. Henry L. Doherty.

58. The War Address by Clarence Darrow, Noted Labor Lawyer, under the Auspices of the National Security League at Chicago, November 1, 1917 (New York: National Security League, Patriotism through Education Series No. 26, [1918]). The National Security League was a preparedness group organized in 1914 and funded by several powerful industrialists. After the United States declared war in April 1917, the league became increasingly conservative, shifting its “emphasis from military preparedness to the formulation of standards for the achievement of complete national unity of thought and action.” Robert D. Ward, “The Origin and Activities of the National Security League, 1914–1919,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 51, 58.

59. Wood lived to be ninety-two, dying six years after Darrow.

60. Darrow was one of several people selected by the United States government, at the request of the British and French governments, to speak in England and France on the war. “Darrow to Tell of Our War Policies,” New York Times, 20 July 1918.

61. Ruby did not take the trip with Darrow.

62. Darrow’s account of his trip was published as a thirteen-part series in the Chicago Daily Journal, appearing every couple of days from 21 October to 15 November 1918.

63. Richard Fisher and his wife, Mary.

64. On 29 June 1918, Debs was indicted under the federal Espionage Act for his speeches against the war. He was convicted the following September and sentenced to ten years in prison.

65. Approximately fifteen words are scratched out here, probably by the federal board of censorship.

66. In October 1918, the brakes failed on an automobile that Field was driving in the hills of Marin County, California, and the automobile rolled backward over a cliff. Field’s two children—Albert Jr. (Darrow gets his name wrong) and Kay—and Charles Erskine Scott Wood were also in the automobile. Albert Jr., who was seventeen years old, was pinned under the automobile and killed. Margaret Parton, Journey through a Lighted Room (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 32.

67. The identity of “Mrs. Edsen” is unknown.

68. This letter was delivered to the president with a memorandum (also in the Wilson Papers) from the attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer believed that Debs’s sentence was too long and ought to be commuted but that the time for commutation was not right:

OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

July 30, 1919.

MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT.

I promised Clarence Darrow to hand you the attached letter.

Debs’ sentence of ten years is too long and ought to be commuted, but I am firmly of the opinion that the time is not yet ripe for such action. He has been in prison only a couple of months, is absolutely unrepentant, will not personally make any application for clemency, and a pardon now would be bitterly resented by a very large portion of the population who consider him a dangerous leader in the ultra-radical class war movement.

When we release Debs, we shall have to release also two or three other leaders of the same class. Their release now would be used by many opponents of the peace treaty as evidence of too great leniency toward law violators of the radical element in the labor classes, in a way that would prejudice many people against the liberal labor provisions of the treaty.

My own judgment is that we should wait until the peace treaty is ratified and out of the way and conditions in the country have settled down somewhat before we seriously consider executive clemency for these leaders. We have already commuted the sentences of more than a hundred persons convicted under the Espionage Act and my plan is to make recommendations to you with respect to the remainder of the cases (including Debs) at or about the time of the actual going into force of the treaty of peace.

A. Mitchell Palmer | Attorney General.

69. Wood wrote a long letter to Darrow and enclosed a copy of a brief that he had written on behalf of Marie Equi (1872–1952), a physician and suffragist in Portland, Oregon. See Wood to Darrow, 22 August 1919, CSmH, Wood Papers. Equi was an outspoken and controversial figure: she performed abortions as part of her practice; she was active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); and she did not try to hide that she was a lesbian. In 1918, she was convicted of violating the federal Espionage Act of 1917 because she delivered an anti-war speech in an IWW hall in Portland. Wood represented her in her appeal, challenging the constitutionality of the act. The appeal failed and her conviction was affirmed in an opinion written by Frank Rudkin (who was sitting temporarily on the federal appellate court). See Equi v. United States, 261 F. 53 (1919). A portion of Wood’s brief was published as a pamphlet, a short section of which is reprinted in Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood, eds. Edwin Bingham and Tim Barnes (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1997), 256–58. Wood used most of his letter to Darrow to comment and ask for Darrow’s view on a variety of political subjects, including the League of Nations, the Treaty of Versailles, President Wilson, the Democratic Party (Wood said that he was of a mind “to come out and speak in favor of the Socialists”), Great Britain, the federal government’s repression of free speech, “the assault on Russia,” “universal militarism coming in as a preparation to control Labor and invade Mexico,” and human beings in general (“How seriously we do take ourselves, we little two-legged ants”).

70. This is a reference to two issues relating to the Versailles treaty, both mentioned by Wood in his letter to Darrow. Shantung (or Shandong) is a northeast coastal province of China. Germany had a naval base there before the war, which Japan took control of during the war and, through a provision in the treaty, continued to control after the war. President Wilson’s acquiescence in this provision of the treaty angered Chinese nationalists and many Americans, and it became an issue when ratification of the treaty was being considered by the United States Senate. Two days before Darrow wrote this letter, a committee of the Senate, which was considering ratification of the treaty, voted to require that Shantung be returned to China as part of the treaty. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 325–44, 490. The Saar Valley is a region in southwest Germany, on the border with France, that was rich in coal. The Treaty of Versailles made the coal mines there the property of France for fifteen years, as reparations for Germany’s destruction of France’s coal mines during the war.

71. Emma D. Simpson (1875–1929?) shot and killed her husband, Elmer Simpson, in the spring of 1919 in a courtroom in Chicago during an argument over alimony in their divorce proceedings. Emma Simpson was the niece of John M. Roach (1851–1924), a wealthy railway official who had been president of the Chicago Railways Company. She was tried for murder in September 1919. Darrow represented her. The jury found her not guilty due to insanity. The judge sent her to the state asylum at Elgin, Illinois, on 1 October 1919. She was released fifty-one days later, having been determined sane by another judge after hearing expert testimony.

72. “Gussie” is probably Augusta (“Gussie”) Rosenwald (1869–1929), who was married to Julius Rosenwald. She was active in the suffrage movement and involved in many philanthropic activities in Chicago, including at Hull House. The “Johansens” are Anton and Margaret Johannsen.

73. “Joe” might be a misspelling and reference to the sculptor Jo Davidson (1883–1952), who was a friend of Darrow and Parton’s. But in an earlier letter to Parton, Darrow spelled Davidson’s first name correctly. See Darrow to Parton, 14 March 1917, ALS, ICN, Parton-Darrow Papers, Box 1, Folder 7. “Lem” is Parton’s husband, Lemuel Parton.

74. Whether the end of this sentence actually reads “McN” is unclear, given damage to the letter. But “J.J.” and (later in the letter) “J.B.” are referring to John J. and James B. McNamara. “Tom O’Connor” is Thomas H. O’Connor (d. 1920), a prominent criminal-defense attorney in San Francisco and friend of Fremont Older’s.

75. “Young friends” is probably a reference to a book, but the book has not been identified.

76. Part of this sentence is illegible because the letter is damaged.

77. On 9 November 1919, Darrow gave an address at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago describing his philosophical attitude toward the war and criticizing the government’s prosecution and continued punishment of civilians under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the government’s treatment of members of the military who were court-martialed during the war. The address was later published in a pamphlet titled War Prisoners (Chicago: Maclaskey & Maclaskey, 1919).

78. Darrow is probably referring to The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams (1838–1918), which was published in late 1918 by Houghton Mifflin. In another letter later in the year, Darrow asked Field if she had read The Education, apparently forgetting this earlier correspondence. Darrow to Field, 22 December 1919, ALS, ICN, Parton-Darrow Papers, Box 1, Folder 7.

79. Masters had recently left his first wife, Helen Jenkins Masters (1874–1958), and was pursuing a relationship with Lillian Wilson (1887–1950?), a wealthy thirty-two-year-old widow in Marion, Indiana. Masters wrote to Darrow from out East, apparently knowing or believing that Darrow was involved in the matter in some way on behalf of his wife. Masters explained that he hoped Darrow—who himself had gone through a divorce and who Masters said should have “much common understanding” with him—could “prevent the statement of things, particularly things not well founded but also things unnecessary to state.” Masters to Darrow, 8 November 1921, TLc, TxU-Hu, Masters Collection (quoted in Herbert K. Russell, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001], 141). In his autobiography, Masters would later contend that Darrow acted as a lawyer for Helen in the divorce. See Edgar Lee Masters, Across Spoon River (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), 396; see also Russell, Edgar Lee Masters, 140–68. But this letter suggests that Darrow, at least initially, was trying to serve as a mediator of some sort. Whatever role Darrow played, Masters eventually came to bitterly resent Darrow.

80. In September 1917, federal agents conducted a nationwide raid on the offices of the anti-war IWW. Hundreds of members of the IWW were arrested and charged with subversion. In Sacramento, California, the government brought forty-six Wobblies to trial in 1919. Most of the defendants refused to defend themselves and sat mute in the courtroom without lawyers. Rudkin presided at the trial and, although he reportedly conducted the proceedings in a fair manner, the jury returned a conviction. See David C. Frederick, Rugged Justice: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the American West, 1891–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 152.

1920–1924

1. Debs was still in prison for violating the federal Espionage Act.

2. On the bottom of the page is a note in Debs’s hand to his brother, Theodore: “Pls. acknowledge with thanks. Tell him we know he’ll do the best he can and all he can & that’s enough. His fidelity and his unforgetfulness is everything.”

3. The Democratic National Convention would be held in San Francisco in late June and early July 1920, and Wood apparently was seeking press seats for himself and Sara Bard Field. William Jennings Bryan sought the nomination at the convention, but he failed to get the necessary votes.

4. Wilbur W. Marsh (1862–1929), businessman. Marsh was an owner of many different businesses in Waterloo, Iowa, including a cattle ranch, an insurance business, and the manufacturer of a dairy-separator machine. He was also the director of several banks and the organizer of a local hospital. Although he never sought office, he was very active in political campaigns and served as treasurer of the national Democratic Party, 1916–24.

5. A. Mitchell Palmer.

6. Wood wrote an article for William Marion Reedy’s magazine that was highly critical of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign and domestic policies. C.E.S. Wood, “Woodrow Wilson,” Reedy’s Mirror, 25 March 1920, 247–49. Darrow wrote a defense of sorts for Wilson, which Reedy published the next month. Darrow, “Woodrow Wilson,” Reedy’s Mirror, 15 April 1920, 311–13.

7. William Bross Lloyd (1875–1946), wealthy son of Darrow’s late friend Henry Demarest Lloyd, and nineteen other members of the Communist Labor Party were tried together in Chicago for felony conspiracy to violate Illinois’s anarchy and sedition laws, which were enacted in 1919. These statutes were typical of many statutes passed by states in the red-scare aftermath of the war, to suppress and punish speech. See Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), 231–35. Lloyd and the other defendants were all convicted during a trial that lasted from 10 May to 2 August 1920. Darrow represented several of the defendants. With the exception of two of the defendants (one disappeared and the other died before sentencing), all of the defendants received sentences with varying terms of imprisonment. The defendants raised a variety of constitutional and other defenses to the charges, but the Supreme Court of Illinois affirmed their convictions two years later. See People v. Lloyd, 136 N.E. 505 (1922).

8. “Everett” is Everett Darrow. The identity of “Mr. Dawson” is unknown although it might be a reference to Charles W. Dawson of Kankakee, Illinois. See Darrow to Lindsey, 4 May 1922, n.52.

9. By this, Darrow probably means that he took a ride on the same type of airplane that had made a record nonstop flight the day before this letter was written, a “JL-6,” the world’s first all-metal passenger (six-seater) airplane. “Larsen Makes New Nonstop Flight Record,” Chicago Tribune, 28 June 1920.

10. William G. McAdoo.

11. Paul Darrow had friends in Greeley by the names of Gilchrist and Doherty but their identities are unknown. Interview with Mary Darrow Simonson, Honolulu, Hawaii, 15 September 1999.

12. John J. McNamara.

13. Probably Lemuel Parton.

14. Frederick Starr.

15. George Leonard (1872–1956), an attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a good friend of Seham. Telephone interview with David Seham, Brooklyn, New York, 15 October 2000. Darrow had met Seham at Leonard’s house, and during this meeting, Darrow brought up the subject of vaccination. As Seham later recalled, Darrow was then “engaged by the Illinois Anti-Vivisectionist groups to oppose some medical legislation.” Seham told one of Darrow’s biographers that he believed “[t]his letter gives you an idea of a blind-spot in an otherwise brilliant and rational mind.” Seham to Irving Stone, 3 March 1941, TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

16. Darrow is probably referring to Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898), which contains a long chapter titled “Vaccination a Delusion—Its Penal Enforcement a Crime.” Wallace (1823–1913), an English naturalist, was a leading figure in the anti-vaccination crusade in the late nineteenth century. See Giacomo Scarpelli, “‘Nothing in Nature That Is not Useful’: The Anti-Vaccination Crusade and the Idea of Harmonia Naturae in Alfred Russel Wallace,” Nuncius (Italy) 7 (1992): 109–30; Arthur Allen, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 66–68.

17. Darrow is likely referring to the hanging of Nicholas Viana (1901–1920) on 10 December 1920, Viana’s nineteenth birthday. Viana was hanged for participating in the murder of a saloon keeper in Chicago. In the press, he was often referred to as the “choir boy” because he sang for the other prisoners in jail. He sang Rudyard Kipling’s “Mother o’ Mine” for his mother shortly before he was hanged.

18. James Middleton Cox (1870–1957), newspaper publisher, congressman from Ohio, 1909–13, governor of Ohio, 1913–15, 1917–21, and Democratic nominee for president in 1920. He lost to Warren G. Harding.

19. Darrow is referring to Ecclesiastes, or, The Preacher (San Francisco: J.H. Nash, 1920), a limited-edition book sent to him by John Henry Nash (1871–1947), typographer and printer of fine books in San Francisco. Darrow’s letter to Nash survives: “I received your beautiful book Ecclesiastes. I am quite sure that no one will appreciate your work more than I do. I wish I could write something good enough for you to print. I am sure you must have great joy in your work else you could not do it. | It was very kind of you to send it to me and I shall always prize it.” Darrow to Nash, 17 January 1921, ALS, CU-BANC, Nash Collection.

20. Benjamin W. Huebsch was publisher of the third edition of Darrow’s Farmington, and a friend of Sinclair Lewis.

21. Darrow is referring to Lewis's Main Street. No review was located.

22. A handwritten note in the margin, with lines drawn to this sentence and to Darrow’s name on the letterhead, states: “Isn’t this the socialist lawyer | Didn’t you breakfast with him in New York?” A biographer of Lewis suggests that Darrow and Lewis met at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., sometime in the winter or spring of 1919–20, when Lewis was writing Main Street. Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 1961), 261.

23. No enclosure exists.

24. From 15 February to 8 March 1921, Darrow was involved as defense counsel in the federal trial of Michael Heitler, a saloon keeper, and eleven codefendants who were charged with conspiracy to transport and sell two hundred thousand dollars worth of Kentucky whiskey in Chicago. Many other prominent local attorneys were involved in the case, which resulted in guilty verdicts for Heitler and five of his codefendants. “Mr. Heitler Now, not Mike De Pike, Court Decides,” Chicago Tribune, 16 February 1921; “Supreme Court Will Pass on Heitler Case,” Chicago Tribune, 9 March 1921.

25. The apartment building in which the Darrows lived was divided into smaller apartments, but the landlord allowed the Darrows to keep their full apartment and they did not move.

26. Darrow is probably referring to a sermon that Milner delivered on his eightieth birthday. See “Portion of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. Duncan A. Milner on His Eightieth Birthday at a Union Meeting in Mt. Dora, Florida,” IU-HS, Milner Papers, Folder 68.

27. Darrow was defense counsel for three officials of an upholsterers’ union who were charged with conspiring to commit acts of violence—namely, bombings and beatings—during a strike by the union that began in 1919. The jury returned a verdict on 10 May 1921, finding two of the three men guilty. “2 Union Chiefs Found Guilty of Slugging Plot,” Chicago Tribune, 11 May 1921.

28. Darrow spoke at the auditorium in St. Paul, Minnesota, on labor unions and the “closed shop.” “Darrow Tells Aims of Trade Unionism,” Minneapolis Journal, 18 April 1921; “Closed Shops Selfish Institution and not Idealism, Declares Darrow,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 18 April 1921.

29. The trial was in Warsaw, Indiana, from 10 to 19 May. Darrow and two other lawyers (with Darrow in the lead) defended four men in their early twenties who had robbed a bank in Culver, Indiana. (A fifth robber was never caught.) In a shootout during their getaway, a townsman who tried to stop them was shot and killed, which led to the four defendants being charged with first-degree murder. They were found guilty and could have been sentenced to death, but the jury fixed their punishment at life in prison. The courtroom was packed every day of the trial, especially during Darrow’s closing argument. One newspaper reported that Darrow’s presence was “a greater attraction than the features of the murder itself.” “Bandits May Know Fate Tomorrow,” Warsaw Daily Times, 19 May 1921.

30. Joseph Lewis, The Tyranny of God (New York: Freethought Press, 1921).

31. Darrow was spending his summer vacation in Door County, Wisconsin.

32. Seba Eldridge (1885–1953) and his wife, Catherine Eldridge (b. 1890). At the time of this letter, Seba Eldridge was an assistant professor of sociology and economics at Rockford College, 1919–21. Later, he became a professor of sociology at the University of Kansas, 1921–53, and author of several books of political sociology. Catherine Eldridge was a trained nurse and lay social worker.

33. Darrow is referring to what became his book, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1922).

34. Darrow is referring to a five-act allegorical play that was written and published by Tzitlonok’s husband, Schevel Tzitlonok: The Children of the Universe (New York: privately printed, 1921). Schevel Tzitlonok (b. 1880) immigrated to the United States in 1913 after escaping from czarist Russia, where he was imprisoned as a revolutionist. After arriving in the United States, he peddled fruits and vegetables in South Bend, Indiana, before attending Toledo University, where he received a B.A. When he published his play, he and his wife lived in Brooklyn, New York. Later, they lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he continued working as a produce merchant.

35. Walsh was chairman of the American Commission on Irish Independence and he had just returned from a trip to Ireland.

36. “A.P.A.” is probably a reference to the American Protective Association or perhaps the American Protestant Association, both of which were anti-Catholic fraternal organizations formed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Alvin J. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 37–38.

37. The “Cole estate” is a reference to litigation over the estate of Margaret C. Cole (d. 1920), which was reportedly valued at $1 million. Cole was the widow of William Washington Cole (1847–1915), a well-known circus proprietor. When Margaret Cole died, she left the bulk of her estate to her personal physician in New York City. Both Walsh and Darrow were lawyers in the litigation, which involved several parties claiming entitlement to assets of the estate. Darrow represented two nieces of Margaret Cole and a daughter of one of those nieces, all of whom lived in Chicago. Darrow reportedly settled the matter involving his clients for two hundred thousand dollars. “Chicago Women Get $200,000 of Cole Estate,” Chicago Tribune, 20 December 1920. The Walsh Papers contain many items relating to the litigation. See “Margaret C. Cole Estate,” NN, Walsh Papers, Boxes 62–63.

38. Darrow might be referring to Henry L. Doherty (rather than Harry M. Daugherty), who probably had an office in New York at the time.

39. In 1920, the Dearborn (Michigan) Independent, a weekly newspaper owned by Henry Ford, began publishing a long series of anti-Semitic articles. These articles maintained, among other things, that Jews were responsible for the recent war and plotting to destroy Christian civilization. The newspaper found a strong reaction against it in several large cities where it tried to increase its street sales. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 315; see also Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). In Chicago, in July 1921, the chief of police had two newsboys arrested for selling the Independent and he ordered a ban on the sale of the newspaper. In August, the ban was lifted by a court injunction, which the city fought unsuccessfully against. “Chief’s Ban on Ford’s Weekly Lifted by Writ,” Chicago Tribune, 5 August 1921; “Ford’s Weekly Menaces City, Court Is Told,” Chicago Tribune, 6 January 1922.

40. Scott Nearing (1883–1983), socialist economist, writer, and reformer. Nearing received a Ph.D. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, 1909, and taught at many universities. He was fired by Wharton in 1915 for his socialist views and by the University of Toledo in 1917 for his pacifists views. He was prosecuted under the federal Espionage Act in 1919 and acquitted. He wrote fifty some books and many pamphlets and articles.

41. Darrow and Nearing debated the proposition “Permanent Progress for the Human Race Is Impossible” at the Manhattan Opera House on 27 November 1921. Walsh served as chairman for the event.

42. Cochran told Darrow that he would be in Washington soon on newspaper business and that he would probably see Harry Daugherty. Cochran to Darrow, 11 October 1921, TLc, OT, Cochran Papers. Daugherty’s letter to Cochran said that Daugherty would be pleased to see Darrow when he came to Washington. Daugherty to Cochran, 1 October 1921, TLS, OT, Cochran Papers.

43. Vincent St. John (1876–1929), mine worker and labor leader. St. John, who was born in Kentucky, began working in the mines in Colorado and other western states in 1894. He was an active labor organizer and held various offices in the Western Federation of Miners, 1900–6. He was one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World, serving as its general organizer, 1907–08, and later as its general secretary-treasurer, 1909–14. In 1915, he started his own copper-mining venture in New Mexico and became ineligible for membership in the IWW (which was limited to wage workers). In September 1917, the United States Department of Justice conducted a nationwide raid on the offices of the IWW, seizing papers and arresting hundreds of people connected with the organization. St. John was arrested in New Mexico, where he was working in his mine. He was taken to Chicago and stood trial in federal court with William Haywood and some hundred other defendants, charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. Even though he was not a member of the IWW or active in the IWW during the period of time covered by the indictment, St. John was convicted along with the other defendants in August 1918 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Darrow began representing St. John shortly after his trial. In April 1919, he obtained St. John’s release on bail pending appeal. Two years later, the judgment of the trial court was affirmed and St. John returned to prison. In 1922, President Harding commuted St. John’s sentence and he was released.

44. Guy Goff (1866–1933), lawyer and United States senator from West Virginia. Goff held various government positions before serving in the Senate, 1925–31, including United States attorney for the eastern district of Wisconsin and several appointments between 1920 and 1923 as an assistant to the attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty.

45. The Mirrors of Washington (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1921) contains critical and satirical essays about fourteen political and public men in Washington, including Warren G. Harding, Woodrow Wilson, Edward M. House, Herbert Hoover, Elihu Root, and Hiram Johnson. The book, published anonymously, caused a public sensation and became a best seller. The author was Clinton Gilbert (1871–1933), a writer and journalist who worked for the Washington bureau of the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

46. Samuel Blythe (1868–1947), writer and journalist. Blythe was the author of several books and worked for many years as a political writer for the Saturday Evening Post.

47. Isaac R. Sherwood (1835–1925), newspaper editor, Civil War veteran, and congressman from Ohio. Sherwood was a pacifist during World War I and often referred to the Civil War in his congressional speeches. Here, Darrow might be referring to a speech that Sherwood gave in opposition to a bill to make appropriations for a large standing army. See Congressional Record, 66th Cong., 2d sess., 1920, 59, pt. 9:8928–31. But he also might be referring to a speech in April 1917 in opposition to the resolution of war. See Congressional Record, 65th Cong., 1st sess., 1917, 55, pt. 1:335–40.

48. Katherine Brownlee Sherwood (1841–1914), poet and newspaper editor. A native of Ohio, Sherwood helped manage newspapers with her husband, translated French and German poems, and wrote poetry of her own, including Campfire and Memorial Poems (Chicago: Jensen, McClung & Co., 1885). For fifteen years, she was also a contributing editor of the women’s department of the National Tribune in Washington, D.C.

49. “Ruby” is Ruby Darrow but the identities of “Dwight” and “May” are unknown.

50. E.W. Scripps.

51. Lindsey wrote to Darrow about a case that was before him involving a small-time criminal who told Lindsey that his name was John R. Randolph (b. 1895?) (Randolph had sometimes gone by the name David Hill). Randolph had been arrested in Denver, Colorado, along with his wife, for robbing an apartment. His wife was Elizabeth Calhoun Randolph (b. 1892?), a graduate of the University of Chicago and an occasional newspaper and short-story writer. Elizabeth Randolph had asked Lindsey to write to Darrow to explain her and her husband’s plight to him. Lindsey told Darrow that he would do what he could to have the charges against Elizabeth dropped, but he was seeking any suggestions that Darrow might have for Elizabeth. Lindsey to Darrow, 2 May 1922, TLc, DLC-MSS, Lindsey Papers.

52. Elizabeth Randolph’s mother was Catherine Dawson (b. 1869). She lived in Kankakee, Illinois, and was active in prison reform work. Catherine’s husband, Charles W. Dawson (1838–1921), was a wealthy automobile and real estate dealer in Kankakee.

53. Randolph eventually pleaded guilty to burglary and robbery and was sentenced to at least five years in prison. His wife was released without charges. Lindsey to Darrow, 24 May 1922, TLc, DLC, Lindsey Papers.

54. Stone reported in his autobiography that during the days of the famous Haymarket bombing (1886), “[w]hile the anarchists were plotting,” George Schilling “frequently called at [his] office and told [him] of the progress of ‘the impending revolution.’” Melville E. Stone, Fifty Years a Journalist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1921), 174. As editor of the Chicago Daily News, Stone had done much to build up hostility against the anarchists before their trial. Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 338. Schilling, on the other hand, was always an active supporter of the Haymarket defendants, and he would have been bothered by the implication in Stone’s autobiography that he had covertly worked against them.

55. Lyman Gage (1836–1927), Chicago banker and secretary of the treasury under President McKinley. While working as vice president of the First National Bank in Chicago, Gage was an active supporter of the Haymarket defendants.

56. Andrew Adair (1851?–1936), printer. Adair started as an apprentice printer at the age of twelve and worked for the next seventy years as a printer in Chicago, working for several Chicago newspapers.

57. Edward Osgood Brown (1847–1923), lawyer and judge. Brown obtained an A.B. from Brown University, 1867, attended Harvard Law School, and began practicing law in Chicago in 1872. He served as a judge on the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, 1903–15, and then returned to the practice of law. He was active in the single-tax movement and wrote papers and pamphlets on political and historical subjects.

58. William Salter.

59. Schlesinger was trying to garner public support for leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Russia who were on trial by a tribunal of the Soviet government for treasonous crimes. The tribunal refused to allow the defendants to present witnesses and documents in their defense and otherwise conducted the trial in an extremely biased manner. A few days after this letter, on 7 August 1922, the tribunal announced the death penalty for twelve of the defendants. Shortly after this announcement, the defendants’ sentences were stayed on the condition that there be no acts against the Soviet regime by the SRP. Fourteen years later, in 1936, Joseph Stalin ordered the survivors executed and “[t]hey were shot in a routine fashion without public announcement.” David Shub, “The Trial of the SRs,” Russian Review 23 (October 1964): 362–69. Many Western intellectuals and socialists voiced their support for the defendants during the proceedings, including Anatole France, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene Debs, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell. See Marc Jansen, A Show Trial under Lenin: The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries, Moscow 1922 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 166.

60. Darrow is likely referring to Louis Berman’s first book, The Glands Regulating Personality (New York: Macmillan, 1921).

61. The book to which Darrow is referring is unknown. Parton edited The Autobiography of Mother Jones (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Pub. Co., 1925), but her work on that book probably did not begin until 1923 or later. See Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 281.

62. Sara Bard Field.

63. Scripps had complimented Darrow on his recent book, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment. Scripps to Darrow, TLc, 18 October 1922, OAU, Scripps Papers, Box 20, Folder 11.

64. Scripps told Darrow that he had spent a few days in August “with a whole bunch of biologists at Woods Hole,” a marine biological laboratory on the coast of Massachusetts.

65. Darrow is referring to the prominent biologist Edwin Grant Conklin (1863–1952), whose “last book” was probably The Direction of Human Evolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922). Conklin obtained his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, 1891, and taught biology at Ohio Wesleyan University, 1891–94, Northwestern University, 1894–96, the University of Pennsylvania, 1896–1908, and Princeton University, 1908–33, where he was also chairman of the biology department. Conklin spent most of his summers at the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole.

66. Scripps told Darrow that he was “surprised” by Darrow’s “general statement that it was the sub-normal men that first migrated to America, and second, that it was the sub-normal men who were adventurers and pioneers and had settled the West.” Scripps said his own experience had been that “the best men and women of the country are those living farthest west” and that “when one travels east,” including all the way to Russia, “one finds men and women of constantly decreasing stature, constantly decreasing all-around mentality, and constantly decreasing per capita wealth.” Scripps maintained that the wealth of the people in California was three time greater per capita “than that of the people of the states east of the Mississippi” and that more people in California attended colleges and universities than in the eastern states. Scripps to Darrow, 18 October 1922, TT, OAU, Scripps Papers, Box 20, Folder 11.

67. Scripps told Darrow: “I have written a number of disquisition[s] besides formulating several hundred pages of autobiographical notes, the whole purpose of all these being to disabuse the minds of at least many of the several thousands of my employees of the idea that I was in any way better equipped than the general run of them, and that therefore none of them had any poorer chances of making a successful life than I have had. I deem it an outrage for any young man to excuse himself, to himself and others, for lack of accomplishment on the ground that he, as a machine, as you call him, is in anyway inferior to the machine that happens to be his employer.” Ibid.

68. Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), Congregational preacher, renowned colonial figure, and considered the greatest theologian of American Puritanism. Among his many prominent descendants was his grandson Aaron Burr (1756–1836), vice president of United States.

69. Elizabeth Tuttle (1645–1718), paternal grandmother of Jonathan Edwards. Elizabeth married Richard Edwards (1647–1718) in 1667, when she was pregnant with another man’s child. In 1688, Richard tried unsuccessfully to divorce Elizabeth. Two years later he succeeded. The grounds included frequent adultery and Elizabeth’s threat to kill Richard in his sleep. Before the divorce, Elizabeth’s brother, Benjamin, murdered one of his other sisters, Sarah, with an axe, and another sister of Elizabeth, Mercy, killed her own son, also with an axe. Darrow states in this letter that Elizabeth remarried after her divorce, but there is apparently no record of her marrying again. Sybil Smith, “What Is It with Those Tuttles?” Ancestry Magazine, May–June 1995, 4–8.

70. The “elder Jukes” is a reference to “Max Jukes,” a fictitious name for a real person who was the subject—together with seven generations of his supposed descendants in upstate New York—of a famous study of criminality, poverty, and other social problems within a family. The study was done by the social scientist Richard L. Dugdale (1841–83) and published as “The Jukes”: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877). Dugdale’s (now discredited) study showed a high incidence of social problems within the “Jukes” family, which Dugdale attributed to genetic and environmental causes. His study was often cited by eugenicists as evidence that “bad blood” caused these problems, and “Max Jukes” and his descendants were contrasted with Jonathan Edwards and his descendants in eugenics literature.

71. Negley D. Cochran.

72. Scripps wrote to Darrow from Florida explaining that he would probably arrive with his yacht in San Diego by 1 February 1923, that he would leave for the Sandwich Islands on about 1 March, and that he would probably not continue his cruise more than six months after leaving San Diego. Scripps to Darrow, 20 November 1922, TT, OAU, Scripps Papers, Box 20, Folder 11.

73. Scripps told Darrow that he had invited William Emerson Ritter (1856–1944) and two other scientists to join him on the cruise. Ibid. Ritter was a professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, an author of several scientific and philosophical books, and a good friend of Scripps. Together, in 1903, Scripps and Ritter founded what has been known since 1925 as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in La Jolla, California.

74. Frederick Starr.

75. From January 1920 until September 1922, a constitutional convention was assembled in Illinois for the purpose of considering amendments to the state constitution. The convention—which was labeled “a conservative body”—produced a whole new document (instead of select amendments), which united some otherwise diverse groups against the proposed constitution. Among the more controversial features were provisions that would authorize income taxes, consolidate the courts and give the state supreme court authority to make rules of practice and procedure, provide Chicago the power to frame its own charter and obtain powers of municipal home rule, and permanently limit Cook County’s representation in the state senate to one-third of the seats (regardless of the county’s percentage of the state’s population). The proposed constitution was rejected at a special election on 12 December, by a margin of nearly five to one. See Walter F. Dodd, “Illinois Rejects New Constitution,” American Political Science Review 17 (February 1923): 70–72. Darrow gave several speeches against the proposed constitution. See, e.g., “Darrow Debates Basic Law with Colored Framer,” Chicago Tribune, 27 November 1922 (noting that in this debate, Darrow’s opposition “was centered on the provisions granting to judges the right to deny bail to persons charged with crimes”).

76. Benjamin Lindsey.

77. The case that Darrow tried involved William H.H. Miller, a state director of registration and education in Illinois. Miller and three other defendants, represented by Darrow and another lawyer, were charged with conspiracy to sell physicians’ and pharmacists’ licenses to unqualified people. Miller and one other defendant were found guilty. “Miller Guilty of Grafting,” Chicago Tribune, 29 January 1923.

78. By the “school graft cases,” Darrow is referring to the trial of some twenty men, including many city officials, who were indicted and tried together in 1923 for conspiracy to defraud the Chicago school system of about $1 million through bribes, phony contracts and bids, and excessive purchase prices for school supplies, among other acts. The most prominent of the defendants was Fred Lundin (1868–1947), a business man and former Republican congressman from Illinois, 1909–11. Lundin was a confidant of William “Big Bill” Thompson (1867–1944), the mayor of Chicago from 1915 to 1923 and then again from 1927 to 1931. Thompson declined to seek reelection as mayor in 1923 because of the controversies surrounding the indictments.

79. Doris Stevens (1888–1963), suffragist. Stevens graduated from Oberlin College, 1911, worked in a settlement in Cleveland, Ohio, taught high school, and then became an organizer for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. Later, she was also very active in the National Woman’s Party. In 1917, she was arrested for demonstrating for suffrage outside the White House. She was represented by Dudley Field Malone, to whom she was married from 1921 to 1929. After 1920, she devoted more of her time to international feminist activities. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, she was a member of the national executive committee of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, of which Darrow was president. She wrote an account of the final years of the militant struggle for female suffrage in Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920).

80. Alice Paul (1885–1977), suffragist. Paul graduated from Swarthmore College, 1905, earned an M.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, 1912, a J.D. from Washington College of Law, 1922, and a Ph.D. from American University, 1928. She was a founder of the Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage in 1913, which eventually became the National Woman’s Party. She devoted much of her life to campaigning for the rights of women.

81. Darrow is no doubt referring to Gerald O’Donovan (1871–1942), Roman Catholic priest and novelist. O’Donovan was born in Ireland and served as the priest for a parish there for eight years, 1896–1904, until a strained relationship with a conservative bishop made him quit. He left the priesthood, moved to London, married, and became a novelist. His best-known work was the semi-autobiographical Father Ralph (London: Macmillan, 1913), which was highly critical of the Catholic Church and the priesthood in Ireland in the early 1900s.

82. Louis Berman.

83. George Moore (1852–1933), Irish writer and author of many novels, including Esther Waters (London: Walter Scott, 1894), Evelyn Innes (New York: D. Appleton, 1898), and Sister Teresa (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1901).

84. Boyce sent Darrow one hundred dollars shortly before the beginning of Darrow’s first trial for jury bribery in Los Angeles. See Darrow to Boyce, 12 February 1912, n.87.

85. Darrow is referring to the trial of Fred Lundin, who had recently posted a bond for his release pending his trial (which didn’t start until April). “Lundin Free on $10,000 Bond,” Chicago Tribune, 3 February 1923.

86. Darrow is referring to an exchange that apparently started with an editorial by the Tribune that mocked Bryan’s opposition to the sale of alcohol and teaching of evolution in schools. “Bow to Bryan,” Chicago Tribune, 10 June 1923. Bryan replied to the editorial with a long letter, arguing that the Tribune had misrepresented his views and that his actual views “are held by a large majority of the church members of all the Christian churches.” “W.G.N. Put ‘on Carpet’; Gets a Bryan Lashing,” Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1923. This was followed by another editorial reprinted from the Peoria (Illinois) Transcript. “Mr. Bryan’s Definitions,” Chicago Tribune, 29 June 1923.

87. Bryan, who was attending a Christian conference at the Billy Sunday Tabernacle in Winona Lake, Indiana, replied to this letter in an interview the same day that it was published: “I know Mr. Darrow’s attitude towards religion and I can give you an interview before reading his questions as well as after. | Mr. Darrow is one of two atheists with whom I am acquainted. I am not worried about an atheist who admits he is one. The man who denies the existence of God is not likely to have much influence, because evidences of a creator are so plain and innumerable that atheism when avowed is not nearly so dangerous as so-called theistic evolution. | Theistic evolution lulls Christians to sleep. It is an anaesthetic which deadens pain while religion is being removed. The theistic evolutionist assumes the existence of God, but puts him so far away that the influence upon life is weakened when not entirely destroyed. | The evolutionist claims that evolution was God’s method, but the method, when carried to its logical conclusion, eliminates all that is vital in the Bible. Evolution has no place for the miracle and the supernatural. That leaves the Bible merely a man made book, and the Bible, shorn of its divine authority, would be hardly as influential as a book that never claimed to be divine. If it is convicted of being an imposter, it is the greatest of imposters. | My controversy is not with atheists like Mr. Darrow, but with those who claim to be Christians and who substitute the guesses of evolution for the word of God. | I decline to turn aside to enter into controversy with those who reject the Bible as Mr. Darrow does.” “Bryan Brushes Darrow Bible Queries Aside,” Chicago Tribune, 5 July 1923.

88. On 13 July 1923, Fred Lundin and his codefendants were acquitted by the jury after less than four hours of deliberation.

89. Abby Scott Baker (1871–1944) was active in the suffrage movement and a leader in both the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and the National Woman’s Party.

90. Darrow is referring to the members of the IWW who were convicted in Sacramento in January 1919 for subversive activities. See Darrow to Older, 27 December 1919, n.80.

91. Darrow is referring to John H. Francis and his wife, Lou Hott Francis (b. 1870). Darrow and Ruby did drive with them to Paul’s house in Colorado. Interview with Mary Darrow Simonson, Honolulu, Hawaii, 15 September 1999.

92. Francis X. Busch (1879–1975), lawyer, educator, and writer. Busch was educated at the Illinois College of Law and DePaul University. He was admitted to the bar in 1901 and began private practice in Chicago. He was a private attorney in criminal and civil cases except when he was assistant corporation counsel of Chicago and attorney for the Chicago Civil Service Commission, 1904–6, master in chancery of the circuit court of Cook County, Illinois, 1920–23, and corporation counsel of Chicago, 1923–27, 1931. He was an instructor and lecturer in the evening division of the Illinois College of Law, 1901–12, and later dean of the evening law school at DePaul University, 1912–23. He wrote several books, including In and out of Court (Chicago: DePaul University Press, 1942), which contains some reminiscences of cases involving Darrow.

93. The following note in Masters’s hand—which might have been a draft of his response to Darrow’s letter—is written at the end of the letter: “How can I think of such a thing with all on my mind that there is now? I’d have to be two gentlemen at once like Cerberus. What is the future? Shall I live with reference to food at 65 or write now and let the future rip? You ought to have some idea of this yourself. I shall be all right to-day anyway, except for the assaults of Envy, and the Dullness of those who didn’t know, and the Greedy Gnats. E.L.M.” Masters had recently gone through a bitter, very public, and costly divorce (in which Darrow had played some part), and his law business and literary career were in steep decline, all of which might account for the content and tone of this note. See Herbert K. Russell, Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 146–201; Darrow to Masters, 10 November 1919, n.79.

94. G. Stanley Hall, Senescence: The Last Half of Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1922). Older responded that he had enjoyed the book “immensely” and had recommended it to many friends. Older to Darrow, 27 August 1923, Tc, CU-BANC, Older Papers.

95. Starr had been in Japan when the great Kanto earthquake struck Tokyo, Yokohama, and surrounding areas on 1 September 1923. For nearly two weeks, there was no news on whether Starr had survived the earthquake. “Prof. Starr Safe in Japan,” Chicago Tribune, 12 September 1923.

96. Albert Hamerstrom (b. 1884) was Ruby Darrow’s youngest brother. Ruby described Bert as a wanderer. Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, n.d. (“Neither you nor the Los A. attorneys . . .”), TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers. He apparently held a variety of jobs over the course of his life, including, as a young man, working and studying law in Darrow’s office in approximately 1903. Later, he worked for a railroad in San Francisco, as an advertising manager and reporter for newspapers, and as a salesman. According to Ruby, during the trial of William Haywood in 1907, he showed up in Boise, Utah, “unannounced and unexpected” and stayed for much of the trial, and then during the McNamara matter in Los Angeles, he “again quite unexpectedly . . . appeared” and Darrow “had him help with investigating” and “just whatever he could by way of being one more helper.” Ibid.

97. Edward H. Morris (1858–1943), lawyer. Morris was born in Kentucky, the son of a slave. His family moved to Chicago in 1867. He graduated from St. Patrick’s College, studied law, and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1879. He became a prominent and successful lawyer in Chicago. He was elected to the state legislature in 1881, serving a total of eight years. He was very active in the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows. In the election in November 1923, Morris, a Republican, sought a seat on the Superior Court of Cook County. The Chicago Bar Association, through a committee, refused to endorse him. He also did poorly in a “primary” in which members of the bar association voted, and the Chicago Tribune wouldn’t endorse him. “Foell Tops List in Bar Primary on Judge Timber,” Chicago Tribune, 21 October 1923; “Bar Indorsements and Little Ballot Recommendations,” Chicago Tribune, 4 November 1923.

98. In the end, Morris lost the election. “Chicago-Cook County Election,” Chicago Tribune, 7 November 1923.

99. Whitlock wrote to Darrow to explain that he had asked his publishers to send Darrow a copy of his latest novel, J. Hardin and Son (New York: D. Appleton, 1923), and to ask Darrow, among other things, if he had read The Diary of Samuel Pepys or Lothrop Stoddard’s The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922). Stoddard’s book, drawn mainly along racial lines, maintained that civilization is threatened by a biologically unfit, mentally inferior class of people. Whitlock told Darrow that he read it “with deep interest” and “despair” for he “fear[ed] it is all too true.” Whitlock to Darrow, 19 November 1923, TLS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

100. The book that Darrow sent must have been his Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922).

101. W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1915).

102. Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, trans. W.W. Worster (New York: Knopf, 1921).

103. Darrow meant The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1922), by Franz Boas (1858–1942), a professor at Columbia University and one of the founders of modern anthropology. The Mind of Primitive Man was first published in 1911 and revised or reprinted many times. Boas maintained in this classic work that “blacks could progress on an equal level with all other races, if given the opportunity,” and that “people who advanced theories of black inferiority spoke from ignorance.” Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas, Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 97.

104. Ella Brainerd Whitlock.

105. Darrow probably means Edwin (“Ned”) Oakford (1879–1955), from Peoria, Illinois. Interview with Mary Darrow Simonson, Honolulu, Hawaii, 13 September 1999. Oakford graduated from Dartmouth College in 1908, a few years after Paul Darrow. He studied in Europe after graduation. He never worked in a steady job. He was a writer but apparently never published anything. Telephone interview with Richard Oakford, Peoria, Illinois, 13 December 1999.

106. Edwin Oakford’s father was Aaron Oakford (1845–1933), founder in 1868 of the Oakford Company, a large wholesale distributor of groceries in Peoria, Illinois.

107. The identity of “Shoemaker” is unknown, but he might have been someone connected to the possible sale of the gas plant in Greeley.

108. The subject that “obsessed” Darrow’s brother, Everett, was apparently the Teapot Dome scandal, the worst of the many scandals of President Harding’s administration, which continued long after Harding’s death in 1923. Albert Fall (1861–1944), Harding’s secretary of the interior, 1921–23, was accused of accepting bribes in the form of large, interest-free loans from Edward L. Doheney (1856–1935), president of the Pan-American Petroleum Company, and Harry F. Sinclair (1876–1956), president of the Mammoth Oil Company. These loans were allegedly in exchange for leasing government oil reserves to Doheney and Sinclair’s companies. Fall and Doheney were tried on fraud and conspiracy charges in 1926 and Sinclair was tried on the same charges in 1928. Both trials resulted in acquittals, although an earlier civil lawsuit against Pan-American resulted in a finding that the oil reserve leases had been fraudulently obtained. Fall was convicted of bribery in 1929 and Doheney was acquitted on the same charges in 1930.

109. Darrow might have been referring to John T. Adams (1862–1939), who was chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1921–24.

110. Irvine L. Lenroot (1869–1949), lawyer and politician. Lenroot served as a Republican congressman, 1909–18, and senator from Wisconsin, 1918–27, and later as a judge on the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, 1929–44. He was a moderate progressive and one-time close ally of Robert La Follette. But during the Teapot Dome scandal, when he was a member and later chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, he was attacked for being too close to the administration and too slow in finding the corruption behind the scandal, all of which led to his defeat in the Republican primary in 1926.

111. In January 1924, when William McAdoo was a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, he was thought to be implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal after Doheney revealed that McAdoo was on his company’s payroll.

112. In early 1924, several senators and others were increasingly trying to link Attorney General Daugherty to the Teapot Dome scandal. The pressure on Daugherty to resign mounted and on 28 March 1924, at the request of President Coolidge, Daugherty resigned. See James N. Giglio, H.M. Daugherty and the Politics of Expediency (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), 163–73.

113. Andrew Mellon (1855–1937), financier and statesman. Mellon acquired large interests in the oil and steel industries, aluminum manufacturing, and banking. He was a generous contributor to Republican politicians and causes before serving as secretary of the treasury and a powerful figure in the administrations of presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, 1921–32. How Darrow and his son felt about Mellon is not clear, but there were some Democrats, at the time of Daugherty’s resignation, who especially wanted to investigate Mellon. Giglio, H.M. Daugherty, 174.

114. The “radio talk” to which Darrow is referring is unknown.

115. Darrow was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the second district in Illinois. The convention was held in New York City from 24 June to 9 July 1924. John W. Davis was nominated on the 103rd ballot.

116. Darrow is referring to an article he wrote doubting that Prohibition statutes could be repealed and predicting (or hoping) that the laws would fall into disuse instead, like the laws supporting the Inquisition and prosecution of witches and the blue laws prohibiting theaters, dancing, etc. Mencken published the article as “The Ordeal of Prohibition,” American Mercury, August 1924, 419–27.

117. On the Edwardses and Jukeses, and Darrow’s view of those families, see Darrow to E.W. Scripps, 30 October 1922 and nn. 69, 70.

118. Mencken sent a short reply to this letter, saying, among other things, that he had already instinctively avoided what Darrow did not want him to say. Mencken to Darrow, TLS, 15 May 1924, MnU-L, Darrow Collection. The biographical note published on Darrow in the back of the American Mercury stated: “Clarence S. Darrow is the well-known Chicago lawyer and libertarian. He has been counsel in many celebrated cases, mainly involving the constitutional rights of the individual. He is the author of a novel and of several volumes of essays.” American Mercury, August 1924, 511.

119. Mencken had written a letter in reply to Darrow’s earlier letter describing some changes to Darrow’s article and proposing that he and Darrow meet for a drink at the upcoming Democratic National Convention in New York. Mencken to Darrow, 9 May 1924, TLS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

120. On 21 May 1924, Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold kidnapped and murdered fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Within two weeks, they were arrested and confessed to the crime. Their parents hired Darrow to represent them and their case became one of the most sensational murder cases in American history.

121. On 21 July 1924, Darrow announced that his clients were withdrawing their not-guilty pleas and changing their pleas to guilty. Many people had expected the defendants to argue insanity as a defense at their trial. The guilty pleas eliminated a trial and placed responsibility for sentencing the defendants in the hands of the trial judge alone, rather than a jury.

122. Blanche Darrow Chase.

123. Marie Thompson, live-in housekeeper and cook for Clarence and Ruby Darrow for sixteen years, until Clarence Darrow’s death in 1938. Interview with Blanche Darrow Chase and Mary Darrow Simonson, Wheaton, Illinois, 29 July 1995; Ruby Darrow to Irving Stone, n.d. (“The constant reminders of other wars . . .”), TL, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

124. Darrow is referring to the pamphlet containing his plea for Leopold and Loeb: The Plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22, 23, and 25, 1924, in Defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on Trial for Murder (Chicago: R.F. Seymour, 1924).

125. John W. Davis.

126. John (“Jack”) E. Nevin (d. 1933), journalist. Nevin was an organizer of William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service and chief of its Washington Bureau for some time. During Davis’s campaign, Nevin—who was described by the New York Times as “astute and jovial” and as a man who “knew every politician and statesman between Paris and Pocatello”—served as Davis’s press representative.

127. With this letter, Darrow enclosed a brief letter of introduction to Davis, stating simply: “This will introduce my son Paul of whom I told you while you were in Chicago. He lives in Greeley Colorado.”

128. Walsh had sent a letter congratulating Darrow on his effort in the Leopold-and-Loeb case and expressing concern that Darrow might not support Robert La Follette for president: “First, I want this to be a belated note of congratulation upon your magnificent effort just concluded. It vindicated what I have said to unnumbered hundreds with whom I talked that you were the only man in America fitted to conduct that case. | I believe you will win the issue but if you do not your speech will save many human lives, because it carried your philosophy through the nation in an incomparable way. | I notice in the Associated Press dispatches that you had called upon Mr. Davis, Mr. [J.P.] Morgan’s messenger boy. For God’s sake do not break my heart by going back on La Follette. That’s all.” Walsh to Darrow, 5 September 1924, TLc, NN, Walsh Papers.

129. Darrow is referring to Farmington, the autobiographical novel of his childhood, which was first published by A.C. McClurg in Chicago (1904) and later by Benjamin Huebsch in New York (1919). Alfred A. Knopf never published any edition of the book.

130. On 10 September 1924, the judge announced that Loeb and Leopold would each be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and ninety-nine years for kidnapping. Ickes had written to Darrow to congratulate him on the result: “I want to congratulate you on the outcome of the Loeb-Leopold trial. I read every word of your argument as it appeared in the public press and it was great throughout. I may say also that I agree with your point of view on crime, criminals and punishment. It was in every way a crowning achievement and the credit due you is none the less because Judge Caverly bravely withstanding the cry of the mob for blood rendered a just and proper judgment.” Ickes to Darrow, 11 September 1924, TLc, DLC-MSS, Ickes Papers.

131. John R. Caverly (1861–1939), judge who presided over the hearing for Leopold and Loeb. Born in London, Caverly came to the United States as a boy, received a law degree from the Chicago College of Law, 1897, worked in the Chicago city attorney’s office, 1897–1903, and as justice of the peace and police magistrate, 1903–6, before being appointed city attorney, 1907–9. Later, he became a judge of the municipal court, 1909–20, and then was elected judge of the circuit court, 1921–39.

132. Darrow was staying at a summer estate owned by Richard Loeb’s parents.

133. Samuel Untermyer (1858–1940), lawyer and civic leader. Untermyer was a well-known and wealthy lawyer in New York City. He participated in many prominent cases. In 1912, he was appointed as counsel to a congressional subcommittee known as the Pujo Money Trust Investigation, which resulted in the Federal Reserve Act of 1914, among other legislation. He was also counsel to the “Lockwood committee” of the New York legislature, 1921–22, which investigated abuses in the building trades and statewide housing conditions. He advocated regulating the stock market and public utilities and government ownership of railroads, among other reforms. He was a leader against anti-Semitism and an early American opponent of the Nazi government in Germany.

134. The debate between Untermyer and Morris Hillquit, with Darrow presiding, was held at Madison Square Garden on 12 October 1924. It was a political event under the auspices of the National Labor Forum, with Untermyer urging the audience to vote in the upcoming presidential election for Democratic candidate John W. Davis and with Hillquit advocating for independent candidate Robert M. La Follette. Darrow told the audience that he was neutral: he “didn’t care who licked Coolidge.” “10,000 Fill Garden at Political Debate,” New York Times, 13 October 1924.

135. On 26 October 1924, Darrow debated the subject of capital punishment with Alfred J. Talley (1877–1952) at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Talley was judge of the Court of General Sessions in New York, a court of exclusively criminal jurisdiction. Their debate was published later that year as a pamphlet: Resolved: That Capital Punishment Is a Wise Public Policy. Clarence Darrow, Negative; Judge Alfred J. Talley, Affirmative (New York: League for Public Discussion, 1924).

1925–1929

1. Baldwin had written to Darrow asking if he knew anything about the disbarment of John L. Metzen (1880–1940?), a lawyer in Chicago with radical connections and (apparently) a difficult personality: “What do you know about the disbarment of John L. Metzen, presumably for his championship of the I.W.W. and strikers, but I guess in reality for a pugnacious and disagreeable personality? Have you had occasion to hear anything about it, and if you haven’t may we tell you what we know? | He wants to get reinstated and from all I can learn, he deserves. I talked it over with Stedman [probably Seymour Stedman] when I was in Chicago in November and he seems to think that Metzen got a raw deal.” Baldwin to Darrow, TLc, 17 January 1925, NjP, ACLU Archives.

2. In 1922, Isaac Wolfgang—fifty-four years old, unmarried, and living in a rooming house in Los Angeles—was seen stealing two bottles of milk early one morning from a box in front of a building near where he lived. A special watchman, joined by a policeman, chased Wolfgang and a struggle ensued at Wolfgang’s rooming house. Conflicting stories were later told about how severe of a beating (if any) Wolfgang received during this struggle, but the encounter ended with Wolfgang shooting and killing the policeman with a revolver that he pulled from his dresser drawer. Wolfgang was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. See People v. Wolfgang, 221 P. 907 (1923).

3. Ernest B.D. Spagnoli (1885–1972), a lawyer from San Francisco who represented Wolfgang.

4. On 25 January 1926, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the denial of a writ of habeas corpus and on 10 September 1926 Wolfgang was hanged at San Quentin Prison in California.

5. Darrow spoke on the subject of crime and punishment to Jasin’s congregation at Temple Israel in Miami on 15 February 1925. “Crime and Punishment to Israel Temple Congregation,” (Miami) Illustrated Daily Tab, 16 February 1925. This letter followed after a letter from Darrow accepting Jasin’s offer of an honorary membership in Temple Israel. Darrow to Jasin, 23 February 1925, ALS, OCAJA, Jasin Collection.

6. Darrow is referring to one of his father’s older sisters, Sarah Darrow Oatley (1815–96), her husband, Joshua Oatley (1814–62), and their children: William, Edwin, Sophia, Ellen, and Mary. The Oatleys were farmers in Farmington, Ohio. In addition to the two boys mentioned by Darrow, the Oatleys also had two other boys who died, one at the age of two (Plimpton) and the other at six months (Charley).

7. George Washington Hyde (1847–1940), lawyer and businessman. Hyde was born and raised in Farmington, Ohio. He was educated in the district school, attended the Western Reserve Seminary, and then went to the University of Michigan, where he obtained a B.A., 1870, and graduated from the law school, 1872. He practiced law in Warren, Ohio, for more than sixty years and was one of the organizers of a local telephone company, serving as its president and treasurer for many years. He was also president and director of a local rubber company and one of the organizers of a local furniture manufacturing company.

8. John Kinsman (1753–1813), the man after whom Darrow’s hometown of Kinsman was named.

9. This letter was apparently in response to a letter from Pierce requesting help for what became the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. Darrow was part of the organizing committee for the league, which was formed in 1925. The league was later incorporated in New York and called the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. William Randolph Hearst did contribute to the organization; in its first year, he distributed ten thousand copies of an anti-death-penalty article from Cosmopolitan in states that used electrocution. Pierce to League Members, 8 June 1926, TLS, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 32, Folder 27.

10. William A. White (1870–1937), psychiatrist, hospital administrator, and author. White was superintendent of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. (later called St. Elizabeth’s Hospital), 1903–37, and a pioneer in the field of psychiatry and treatment of the insane. He wrote widely on medicine and psychiatry as well as crime and eugenics and many other social issues. He testified for the defense in the hearing for Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924.

11. Bernard Glueck (1884–1972), psychiatric criminologist. Born in Poland, Glueck earned his medical degree from Georgetown University Medical School, 1909, and worked at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital before leading a psychiatric clinic at Sing Sing prison in New York. Later, he worked as director of New York’s Bureau of Child Guidance, served in the Army Medical Corps during World War I, and taught at the New York School of Social Work. In 1927, he was one of the organizers of Stony Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital in Ossining, New York. After his retirement from there in 1946, Glueck started outpatient clinics for the Veterans Administration and served on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1956–64. Glueck, like White, testified for the defense during the hearing for Leopold and Loeb.

12. William Healy (1869–1962), psychiatric criminologist, medical psychologist, and author. Born in England, Healy earned an A.B. from Harvard, 1899, and an M.D. from the University of Chicago, 1900. In 1909, he became the director of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research), which was the first child guidance clinic in America. In 1915, he wrote The Individual Delinquent, an influential book that described social and developmental factors in delinquency. In 1917, he moved to Boston, where he helped found the Judge Baker Foundation (later called the Judge Baker Guidance Center). He was the coauthor of many books on delinquency, mental testing, psychoanalysis, and crime. Healy, like White and Glueck, also testified for the defense in the hearing for Leopold and Loeb.

13. Darrow is referring to his article on eugenics that was published in Mencken’s magazine: “The Edwardses and the Jukeses,” American Mercury, October 1925, 147–57.

14. Mencken was among 225 newspaper reporters who gathered in Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of John T. Scopes. His reports on the trial have been called “some of the most brilliant dispatches in the history of journalism.” The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, ed. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 561; ibid., 562–611 (reprinting Mencken’s dispatches).

15. Mencken may have relayed to Darrow something that Lippmann said to him or he may have made some statement about Lippmann’s editorials in the New York World, which were criticial of the Scopes defense. In one editorial, the World complained that the defense had made a mistake in trying to show through expert testimony “that science can be reconciled with the Bible” rather than challenging the Tennessee law outright as a “breach of the American doctrine of the separation of church and state.” “A Blunder by the Scopes Defense,” New York World, 21 July 1925. In another piece, Lippmann complained that Darrow had turned the trial into a contest about whether one “was for or against the Christian religion” and that it was now “dawning upon the friends of evolution that science was rendered a wretched service” by the trial. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 207 (quoting Lippmann, “Darrow’s Blunder,” New York World, 23 July 1925).

16. John T. Raulston (1868–1956), the judge in Tennessee who presided at the trial of John T. Scopes, gave a speech in Chicago on 10 August 1925 at a conference of Christian fundamentalists, held under the auspices of the Illinois Christian Fundamentals Association. He praised the conduct of William Jennings Bryan during the trial and criticized Darrow. He said, “There was much effort on the part of the defendant’s counsel to make Mr. Bryan and the things for which he stood the real issue,” and Bryan “calmly and serenely” suffered many “gibes, taunts and sneers.” Raulston also told his audience how he had cited Darrow for contempt after Darrow became upset with his ruling that Scopes would be prohibited from putting any experts on the witness stand to testify about the scientific basis for evolution. See “Champions of Bible Push Chicago Drive” and “Opens Campaign for Memorial to Bryan,” Daily News, 10 August 1925. The Daily News might have sent this story to Darrow, who was staying with his son in Colorado. The next day, the newspaper published the full text of this telegram. Raulston was seeking reelection as a judge but he did not win.

17. Schwartz had written to Darrow saying that he had a letter from John Roach Straton proposing a debate on the subject of fundamentalism versus modernism. Schwartz asked if Darrow wanted to debate Straton. See Schwartz to Darrow, 10 August 1925, TLc, ICN, Arthur and Lila Weinberg Papers. Straton had also been publicly challenging Darrow to debate the subject of evolution, “assailing” Darrow in his speeches and saying that “the moral decline of the present day started two generations ago when the ‘dark and sinister shadow of Darwinism fell across the fair field of human life.’” “Straton to Debate Darrow, He Hopes,” New York Times, 4 August 1925.

18. John Thompson (1862–1944), pastor. Thompson was born in England and came to the United States in 1893. He graduated from Northwest University and Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois. He was a well-known figure in Chicago and, for more than twenty years, pastor of First Methodist Church (The Chicago Temple).

19. Will Durant (1885–1981), writer and lecturer. Durant attended seminary, taught at the Modern School in New York, lectured at other Modern Schools and at an adult education project in New York City before obtaining his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University, 1917, after which he taught extension courses at Columbia and became director of the Labor Temple School in New York. Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926), which had been published as a “little blue book” by the radical publisher E. Haldeman-Julius (1889–1951), became a best seller and helped to make Durant a popular lecturer. Over the course of the next almost fifty years, Durant, in collaboration with this wife, Ariel Durant (1898–1981), wrote a popular eleven-volume history of the world entitled The Story of Civilization (1935–75). Durant and Darrow debated on stage several times before and after Durant became famous. See Will Durant and Ariel Durant, A Dual Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 91, 96, 110, 114. In Schwartz’s letter to Darrow, he had suggested Durant as another person whom Darrow might want to debate.

20. Schwartz had written another letter to Darrow, proposing a debate between Darrow and Francis J. McConnell (1871–1953), a Methodist bishop in Pittsburg who became well known for his liberal views and activism in liberal causes. In his letter to Darrow, Schwartz quoted a letter from McConnell in which McConnell seemed to say that he could only debate an evolutionist who refused to conceive of an involvement by God: “The only phase of the debate in which I have ever been interested is that between the scientist who maintains that evolution cannot be conceived in terms of God, and the believer who maintains that it can thus be conceived. I simply would not know how to go about it to debate with a man who did not accept evolution. I think I can say some things to the man who believes in Evolution and yet does not believe that Evolution can be interpreted in terms of Divine procedure. I do not pretend to be a scientist but rather an interpreter of the results of science.” Schwartz to Darrow, 15 August 1925, TLc, ICN, Arthur and Lila Weinberg Papers.

21. Darrow wrote another letter to Walsh (not labeled “personal”) on this same date, saying that he would be willing to publicly debate Straton on a question like “Was the Earth Developed by a Process of Evolution and Is Man the Product of Evolution?” Darrow also proposed a way to divide the debate time, suggesting that the first debate be held in Chicago and any second debate (“if I live through the first one”) in New York. Darrow to Walsh, 29 August 1925, TLS, NN, Walsh Papers.

22. Bailey and others with the American Civil Liberties Union wanted Darrow to take a less prominent role in the appellate proceedings of the Scopes case; they also wanted to replace him with a more conservative lawyer with a national reputation. They were sensitive to criticisms of the defense at trial as too theatrical or disrespectful of religious beliefs, and they saw Darrow as too radical for their cause, all of which was affecting the ACLU’s fund-raising for the case. Ray Ginger, Six Days of Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 193–202. Darrow apparently learned of some of this through Arthur Garfield Hays (who might have learned of it through John R. Neal, lead local defense counsel in the case). In any event, Bailey wrote a letter to Darrow to reassure him that the executive committee of the ACLU had the “highest esteem” for him and that they were “unanimously of the opinion that he should not be invited to withdraw” from the case, but they also believed that he “ought to be made aware that a problem existed,” and they thought the “proper person to do it was Dr. Neal.” Bailey to Darrow, 2 September 1925, TLc, NjP, ALCU Archives.

23. Arthur Garfield Hays.

24. Frank Spurlock (1854–1947), a lawyer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, was well known as a local lawyer who championed civil liberties, including the repeal of Prohibition laws. Although he was always in private practice, he was also general counsel for many years for the Chattanooga Times, the city water company, a local railroad, and other companies.

25. Robert S. Keebler (1889–1976), a lawyer from Memphis, Tennessee, had been a vocal critic of the law under which Scopes was prosecuted. In June 1925, before the trial, he denounced the law in a speech during a meeting of the Tennessee bar association, and his speech was removed from the record of the proceedings by the association. He was a graduate of Washington and Lee University and received a master’s degree and law degree from Harvard University. Keebler eventually joined Scopes’s defense team in the appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court. In 1934, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work as counsel for the National Recovery Review Board, for which Darrow was the chairman, and he later worked as a lawyer for the federal government in other capacities.

26. Darrow is probably referring to the letter referenced above from Forrest Bailey.

27. By “bunch” Darrow is apparently referring to the members of the organizing committee for what became the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, which included Darrow.

28. Alice H. Thompson (1892–1969), lawyer. Thompson was a graduate of the law school at the University of Valparaiso. She had a general practice in Chicago. Darrow had known Thompson for a long time. He was co-counsel with her in 1915, when they defended a man charged with murdering a woman and her baby.

29. Willis J. Abbott (1863–1934), newspaper editor. Abbott received an LL.B. and L.H.D. from the University of Michigan. He was managing editor of the Chicago Times in the early 1890s and an editor or editorial writer for many other newspapers and periodicals, including the New York American, the Chicago American, and Collier’s Weekly. He was editor of the Christian Science Monitor from 1922 to 1927 and later a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. He also wrote a column for the paper.

30. This letter was part of a symposium titled “Where Are the Pre-War Radicals?” The editors of The Survey said that this symposium had been inspired by a similar question in the autobiography of Frederick C. Howe (1867–1940): “Fred Howe asked the question in his Confessions of a Reformer [1925]. We broaden it to include progressives, insurgents, liberals, socialists, single-taxers, ‘muck rakers,’ civic campaigners, and labor leaders who in the early years of the century fought for the common good as they variously saw it, and dramatized it before the people. We have asked: ‘Who succeeds them?’ and put the questions to men and women who were in the thick of the fight then, or who are active now.” “Where Are the Pre-War Radicals,” The Survey 55 (1 February 1926): 556–57.

31. Darrow is probably referring to what became Parsons’s Woman’s Dilemma (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1926), which appeared in April 1926. No review of the book by Darrow was located.

32. Darrow’s “story on Eugenics” was an article mocking the claims of eugenicists that the human race could be improved through better breeding. Mencken published it as “The Eugenics Cult,” American Mercury, June 1926, 129–37.

33. Mencken wrote a column arguing that newspapers in Tennessee helped to sustain the “intellectual darkness” in that state and that an “intelligent and courageous press” could have prevented “the Scopes obscenity,” which put “Tennessee all over the first pages of the world” and made it “a joke state, laughed at even by Haitians and Dominicans.” H.L. Mencken, “The Sad Case of Tennessee,” Chicago Tribune, 14 March 1926.

34. This is the only letter from Darrow to Lewis that survives from an exchange of several letters between the two of them in April and May 1926. Darrow was trying to get Lewis to join him on a trip to the Ozarks and Lewis was begging off because he was working on his “preacher book” (which became Elmer Gantry [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927]). See Lewis to Darrow, 5 April, 7 April, 17 April, 10 May 1926, TLS (all), MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

35. The case to which Darrow is referring is known as the second “Sweet” trial. In 1925, Ossian Sweet (1894–1960), a black physician, bought a house in a white neighborhood of Detroit. Shortly after he moved into the house, a hostile crowd gathered outside. Some people in the crowd began throwing stones and other objects at the house. Several shots were fired from the house, killing one person in the crowd and injuring another. Dr. Sweet and ten other family members and friends who were in the house were all charged with conspiracy to commit murder and assault. They were tried together in late 1925; the trial resulted in a hung jury. Ossian Sweet’s brother, Henry Sweet—who admitted shooting—was tried again, separately, in April and May 1926. His trial ended in an acquittal. Darrow was lead defense attorney in both trials. He was recruited and paid by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

36. This is a reference to Burris Jenkins (1869–1945), a clergyman, educator, and author. Jenkins was pastor of the Christian (Campbellite) Church in Kansas City, Missouri. He wrote many books on religious subjects and he was publisher of a weekly journal on religion. In Lewis’s letter to Darrow, Lewis had said: “And, damn you, you will probably seduce me into going off with your infidel and criminal friends to the Ozarks, at that! This noon I talked it all over with Burris Jenkins and we agreed that the lady who tried to assassinate Mussolini had a good idea but she would have contributed much more to human progress if she had taken a shot at you instead.” Lewis to Darrow, 7 April 1926, TLS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

37. Darrow might have told Murphy about some books during or after the second Sweet trial, which ended with an acquittal of Henry Sweet on 13 May 1926, but what books Darrow sent to Murphy is unknown.

38. The identity of “Frank” is unknown.

39. John Scopes was appealing to the Supreme Court of Tennessee from his conviction the year before in Dayton.

40. On 12 March 1926, E.W. Scripps died on his boat while anchored off Monrovia, Liberia. He was buried at sea. Oliver Knight, ed., I Protest: Selected Disquisitions of E.W. Scripps (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1966), 87.

41. Darrow might be referring to his friend Fay Lewis.

42. Roberta (“Berta”) Hollister Smith Pettigrew (1866?–1952), second wife of Pettigrew and a resident of Chicago when she married him in 1922.

43. The indecipherable word in this sentence might be “with,” mistakenly written a second time by Darrow. The book to which Darrow is referring is Joseph Wheless’s Is It God’s Word? An Exposition of the Fables and Mythology of the Bible and of the Impostures of Theology (New York, Knopf, 1926). Wheless (1868–1950), a lawyer in New York who specialized in Latin American matters, was also active as a lawyer for freethinking causes and organizations. Darrow might have learned of Wheless’s book from Mencken’s recent review of a private, limited printing of the book: H.L. Mencken, “Counter-Offensive,” review of Is It God’s Word? (New York: Wheless Publishers, 1926), American Mercury, May 1926, 123–25.

44. See Clarence Darrow, “Crime and the Alarmists,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1926, 535–44.

45. Earlier in October, Ford had announced in a long interview published in Hearst’s newspapers that he planned to hire five thousand young men between sixteen and twenty years of age as a means of curbing the prevailing “crime wave” in the country. “Henry Ford to Employ 5,000 Boys as a Crime Cure Experiment,” San Francisco Examiner, 3 October 1926.

46. Ford responded to Darrow’s earlier letter saying how gratifying it was to receive Darrow’s endorsement of his statements and asking if he could quote from Darrow’s letter. Ford also said that he would forward reproductions of the first four books from the McGuffey Readers series. Ford to Darrow, 20 October 1926, TLS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

47. Darrow is referring to Farmington, his novel about his childhood.

48. Eugene Debs died on 20 October 1926. Darrow sent a similar letter to Debs’s brother. See Darrow to Theodore Debs, 5 November 1926, ALS, InTI, Debs Papers.

49. Darrow is referring to the case involving Nicola Sacco (1891–1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888–1927), Italian immigrants and anarchists who were convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of a paymaster and guard during the robbery of a shoe factory in Massachusetts. Their case became one of the most famous and controversial of the 1920s. Moro had written to Darrow from Boston asking if Darrow would speak at meetings in Boston and New York on behalf of the convicted men and asking if Darrow thought the meetings were advisable. Moro noted that William G. Thompson (1864–1938), Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyer, was opposed to the meetings but that the defense committee for the two condemned men disagreed with Thompson. See Moro to Darrow, 2 December 1926, TLc, MB, Sacco-Vanzetti Collection.

50. No letter from Older to Darrow on 10 December 1926 was found, but a carbon copy of a letter dated 3 December 1926 exists. In this letter, Older expressed his desire to see James McNamara released from prison. See Older to Darrow, 3 December 1926, TLc, CU-BANC, Older Papers, Box 2.

51. Albert F. Coyle was editor of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Journal and a friend of James McNamara.

52. LeCompte Davis.

53. Joseph Scott.

54. Ortie McManigal.

55. Matthew Schmidt.

56. Harry Chandler (1864–1944), publisher of the Los Angeles Times after Harrison Gray Otis died in 1917 (Chandler was married to Otis’s daughter).

57. The identity of “Brennan” is unknown.

58. Darrow is referring to his review of Older’s autobiography, which was eventually published in the Daily News. See Clarence Darrow, “Crusader’s Progress,” review of My Own Story, by Fremont Older, (Chicago) Daily News, 19 January 1927.

59. This is a reference to the trial of Matthew Schmidt.

60. A dinner in celebration of Darrow’s birthday was held at the Palmer House in Chicago on 18 April 1927, with 1,200 people in attendance. See Carroll Binder, “Darrow’s Friends Meet to Laud Him,” (Chicago) Daily News, 19 April 1927.

61. On 17 January 1927 the Supreme Court of Tennessee, in a split decision, upheld the constitutionality of the “Anti-Evolution Act” under which Scopes had been convicted but reversed the judgment because the trial judge rather than the jury—as required by state constitution—had imposed the fine on Scopes. See Scopes v. State, 289 S.W. 363 (Tenn. 1927).

62. The court recommended in its decision that the state attorney general abandon the suit because Scopes was no longer working for the state. The court saw no reason to continue the prosecution: “We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case. On the contrary, we think the peace and dignity of the state, which all criminal prosecutions are brought to redress, will be better conserved by the entry of a nolle prosequi herein.” Ibid. at 367. The state complied by entering a nolle prosequi and the case came to an end. Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 209.

63. The Lord’s Day Alliance, originally called the American Sabbath Union, was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1888 by representatives of several Protestant denominations. The purpose of the organization was to promote Sunday “Blue Laws” and otherwise encourage strict observance of Sunday as a religious day.

64. The letter that Darrow had just received (“this morning”) was probably one sent by Whitlock from Cannes in early January 1927, recommending Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27). See Whitlock to Darrow, 2 January 1927, TT, DLC-MSS, Whitlock Papers, Container 45. But here, Darrow is describing and quoting an earlier letter sent by Whitlock from Brussels in October 1926, also recommending Proust. See Whitlock to Darrow, 13 October 1926, The Letters and Journal of Brand Whitlock: The Letters, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 390–92.

65. Bruère was director of a study conducted by the National Federation of Settlements on the effects of Prohibition on urban life, which was published in 1927: Does Prohibition Work? (New York: Harper & Bros., 1927). Bruère probably sought Darrow’s help or advice in connection with this work.

66. William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1906).

67. Irving Fisher, Prohibition at Its Worst (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

68. Liveright eventually published Darrow’s book, and Fisher later wrote a sequel in defense of Prohibition. See Clarence Darrow and Victor Yarros, The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927); Irving Fisher, Prohibition Still at Its Worst (New York: Alcohol Information Comm., 1928).

69. Probably Raymond Pearl (1879–1940), professor of biology at Johns Hopkins and member of Mencken’s music-playing, beer-drinking “Saturday Night Club.”

70. Probably Arthur Garfield Hays.

71. H.L. Mencken, “The Great Defender—Clarence Darrow,” Vanity Fair, March 1927, 44.

72. Frank Harris’s notorious autobiography, My Life and Loves, 3 vols. (1923–27), was banned in the United States and England for many years because of its sexual frankness. Harris had asked Gertz to consult with Darrow about defending him in any criminal proceedings if he were to come to the United States. See Elmer Gertz, “Clarence Darrow: An American Legend,” Progressive, May 1957, 13. Earlier, in late 1926 and early 1927, Harris, from France, had exchanged letters directly with Darrow. Harris explained where his autobiography had been written, published, and distributed, and sought advice on whether he could avoid prosecution if he came to the United States. See Harris to Darrow, 14 November 1926, TLc, TxU-Hu, Harris Papers; Harris to Darrow, 8 January 1927, TLc, TxU-Hu, Harris Papers. Darrow’s side of this exchange has not been located.

73. Harris came to the United States secretly and did not have difficulty with the government. See Gertz, “Clarence Darrow,” 13.

74. In 1904, Paul Darrow, then a senior at Dartmouth, was driving a horse-drawn carriage when the horse suddenly ran wild, trampling to death a five-year-old boy. Paul wrote a letter to the boy’s parents saying that if any member of the boy’s family ever needed help, they only needed to ask and Paul’s family would help if they could. Twenty-three years later, on 11 May 1927, the boy’s mother approached Darrow after a lecture at Dartmouth. She showed him the letter that Paul had written in 1904 and explained that her nephew, John Winters (b. 1894), had been convicted of murder in Vermont and sentenced to die. “Darrow to Help Save Winters from Hanging,” Boston Globe, 3 June 1927.

75. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1927).

76. Sinclair’s Oil! (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927), a novel about the scandals of the Harding administration, was banned in Boston, reportedly because it contained a reference to birth control. See Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 186.

77. In April 1927, the district attorney in Boston announced that the sale of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) or Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1927) could be grounds for prosecution because both books contained obscenity. Donald Friede (1901–1965), a partner in Dreiser’s publisher (Boni and Liveright), went to Boston to test the ban by selling Dreiser’s book. Represented by Arthur Garfield Hays, Friede was convicted and fined by a municipal court judge. His appeal to the superior court was not heard until two years later, in April 1929. Darrow participated in the superior court trial and read a chapter of Dreiser’s book to the jury. Boyer, Purity in Print, 185–86, 192–93. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty, and the conviction was upheld on appeal. See Massachusetts v. Friede, 171 N.E. 472 (Mass. 1930).

78. Fay Lewis.

79. Gerson’s first wife, Harriet, died in 1922. Gerson married Vera Madeline Daniels in 1923.

80. Possibly Nellie Carlin.

81. Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960), British novelist, poet, and dramatist. Phillpotts was a friend and admirer of Darrow. He dedicated Minions of the Moon (London: Hutchinson, 1934), one of his many novels, to Darrow.

82. Clarence Darrow and Victor Yarros, The Prohibition Mania: A Reply to Professor Irving Fisher and Others (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927).

83. Darrow submitted an article on the Lord’s Day Alliance to Mencken’s American Mercury, but Mencken declined to publish it. See Darrow to Mencken, 28 November 1927, ALS, NN, Mencken Papers. Two articles by Darrow on the Lord’s Day Alliance were later published separately in Vanity Fair and Plain Talk. See “Our Growing Tyranny, Vanity Fair, February 1928, 39, 104; and “The Lord’s Day Alliance,” Plain Talk, March 1928, 257–70.

84. Darrow is quoting—actually, misquoting—A.E. Housman, who wrote: “Now times are altered: if I care / To buy a thing, I can; / The pence are here and here’s the fair, / But where’s the lost young man?” A.E. Housman, Last Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 69.

85. Charles Beard (1874–1948), teacher and historian. Beard taught at Columbia University and then helped found the New School for Social Research, where he also taught. Beard was one of the leading progressive historians.

86. George Burman Foster.

87. Another letter suggests that Walsh had asked Darrow for a photograph. See Darrow to Walsh, 21 July [1927], NN, Walsh Papers.

88. For a short description of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, see Darrow to Moro, 4 December 1926, n.49. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair on 23 August 1927.

89. The identity of “Frank” is unknown. The address that Murphy sent to Darrow might have been part of a well-publicized radio debate in which Murphy participated shortly before the legislature in Michigan failed to pass a bill to reinstate capital punishment. See Sidney Fine, Frank Murphy: The Detroit Years (Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press, 1975), 137–38.

90. Darrow must have meant James Frazer (1854–1941), British anthropologist and classical scholar.

91. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), English writer identified with social reform and the anti-industrial Arts-and-Crafts Movement.

92. Darrow is probably referring to H. Percy Ward (b. 1875), a member of the Chicago Rationalist Society and other liberal or agnostic organizations. He lived in Chicago and made his living as a public lecturer and debater.

93. Ross agreed that they should not debate: “I agree with you about joint debates. Generally, I observe, the opponents glide past each other on different tracks. There is no real collision of facts or argument. That would be the case if we debated prohibition. You would establish your contention from your point of view and I would do the same for my contention from a different point of view. So I agree that it is just as well for each to advance his ideas in his own way as occasion offers.” Ross to Darrow, 1 November 1927, TLc, WHi, Ross Papers.

94. “Fred” is likely Fred Hamerstom. The “deal” to which Darrow is referring was the potential sale of the gas plant that he owned with Paul (and that Paul managed) in Greeley, Colorado.

95. Darrow participated in the argument for John Winters in the Vermont Supreme Court. See Darrow to Paul Darrow, 5 June 1927, n.74.

96. Arthur Keith (1866–1955), Scottish anthropologist and author.

97. The identity of “Hazeltine” (a prospective buyer for the gas plant) is unknown.

98. Darrow’s former law partner, William Holly, helped with the sale of the gas plant.

99. Two Italian fascists were murdered in the Bronx in May 1927 and two well-known anti-fascists, Cologero Greco and Donato Carillo, were indicted for the murders. Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays defended them, at the urging of Norman Thomas and Italian American anarchist Carlo Tresca (1879–1943). The defendants were acquitted by a jury in late December 1927.

100. This is probably a reference to Darrow’s plan to speak in New York City at a fund-raiser for the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. The speech was postponed until 19 February 1928.

101. “J.B.” was James B. McNamara and “Smithy” was Matthew Schmidt, usually called “Schmidty” or “Smitty.” What Steffens said about them is unknown.

102. W. Joseph Ford (1877–1932), lawyer. Born in Oakland, California, Ford was chief assistant district attorney for Los Angeles County, 1907–1914, when he helped John Fredericks, the district attorney, prosecute the McNamara brothers for the Los Angeles Times bombing and Darrow for jury bribery. Ford participated in both of Darrow’s bribery trials. He entered private practice in 1914 and became well known as a criminal-defense attorney in Los Angeles and occasionally served as a special prosecutor. He was also dean of the law school at Loyola University in Los Angeles, 1925–30.

103. See Clarence Darrow, “Crime and the Alarmists,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1926, 535–44.

104. The book to which Darrow is referring is unknown.

105. Frederick L. Hoffman (1865–1946), German-born statistician, author, and lecturer. Hoffman immigrated to the United States in 1884. He worked as an insurance agent and superintendent of an insurance office, 1887–94, before working as a statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company and (eventually) as a vice president for Prudential, 1895–1922, and later as a part-time consultant for the company, 1922–1934. He was a member of the faculty at Yale University for one year, 1917–18. He served as dean of advanced research at the Babson Institute (now Babson College) in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, 1922–27, specializing in economic and industrial research. Later, he worked as a consultant with the Biochemical Research Foundation of the Franklin Institute in Boston, 1934–38. He was responsible for the founding of the American Society for the Control of Cancer in 1913, which later became the American Cancer Society. Throughout his life, he wrote and lectured extensively on a wide variety of subjects related to public health, insurance, and demographic subjects (including widely read reports on suicide and murder rates), and he published some sixteen books. He was a member of many organizations and societies, including the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, of which Darrow was president.

106. Darrow, Frank Walsh, and Lewis Lawes were all speakers for the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment at Hampden’s Theatre in New York on 19 February 1928. “Would Force Jury to View Execution,” New York Times, 20 February 1928.

107. Clarence Darrow, “The Lord’s Day Alliance,” Plain Talk, March 1928, 257–70. See Darrow to H.L. Mencken, 22 January 1927, n.63.

108. Walsh’s son, Jerome Walsh (1902–71), was a defense lawyer in a celebrated murder trial in Los Angeles, California, in early 1928. His argument to the jury on the appropriate punishment for the defendant—for which he said that he “took great liberties” with Darrow’s ideas—resulted in life imprisonment for his client rather than the death penalty. After the trial, a representative of the Warner Film Company approached Jerome with the idea of producing a movie that “would be a preachment against capital punishment,” and he asked if it could be arranged to have Darrow appear in the movie. Frank Walsh to Darrow, 27 March 1928, TLc, NN, Walsh Papers.

109. Darrow later wrote to Walsh saying that he had “thought a good deal of the movie matter” and that he wanted to do it if they could “arrange it to hold [the movie company] down to something that will not be too raw.” Darrow said that he wanted Jerome Walsh and his associate in Los Angeles to receive twenty-five thousand dollars from the movie company as part of the deal, and he had “some ideas about the disposition of [his] part of the money that would make it easier for [him] to do it.” Darrow to Frank Walsh, 4 April 1928, ALS, NN, Walsh Papers. Walsh believed that Darrow would give his part of the money to the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. See Walsh to Vivian Pierce, 26 April 1928, TLc, NN, Walsh Papers. The movie was apparently never made.

110. On 6 April 1928, the National Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of America, holding a convention at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., passed a resolution understood by many to be aimed at Darrow (but not mentioning him by name), barring any speaker with atheistic or agnostic views from speaking in its members’ churches. “Pastors Bar Pulpits to Unbelievers,” Chicago Defender, 7 April 1928. W.E.B. Du Bois described this resolution as the most “unfortunate” thing to happen “in the recent history of the Negro race”: “There is not a Negro church in the United States that ought not to throw wide its doors to Clarence Darrow and beg him to come in. . . . Clarence Darrow does not believe many things that Orthodox Christians believe; but he respects the beliefs of any sincere person and in turn he deserves respect for his own honest opinions. If the Negro race is going to start hunting Heretics, let it pause and remember that William Lloyd Garrison, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were nearly as radical religious freethinkers as Clarence Darrow.” W.E.B. Du Bois, “Postscript,” Crisis, June 1928, 203.

111. Darrow did not speak in a church the next time he spoke in Washington, D.C. On 27 April 1928, he spoke at an amusement park in Washington called Suburban Gardens, talking on the subject of race and religion. “Darrow Rips into Church,” Chicago Defender, 28 April 1928.

112. Mary Darrow Simonson.

113. Jessie Darrow Johnston.

114. Evans and Nunn are towns near Greeley, Colorado, where Blanche lived before moving to Chicago with her father and mother.

115. Ishill published the body of this letter in a limited-edition book of tributes to Ellis: Joseph Ishill, ed., Havelock Ellis: In Appreciation (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Oriole Press, 1929), 265. Among other contributors to the book were H.L. Mencken, Benjamin B. Lindsey, John Haynes Holmes, Bolton Hall, and Horace Traubel.

116. Darrow might be referring to James Freeman Clarke’s The Ideas of the Apostle Paul (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1884). Clarke (1810–88), a Unitarian minister, author, and scholar, attended Harvard College and was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Divinity School in 1867. His Ideas of the Apostle Paul maintained that St. Paul had “emancipated Christianity from its Jewish form” and that he “was the founder of Liberal Christianity, believing that there might be many members and yet one body.” Ibid., 5.

117. John Roach Straton.

118. William Bell Riley (1861–1947), Baptist preacher and fundamentalist leader. Riley was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and an active organizer of grassroots fundamentalism in the Midwest.

119. Darrow is probably referring to Science: The False Messiah (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), by Clarence Edwin Ayres (1891–1972). Ayers taught at the University of Chicago, Amherst College, and other schools after receiving his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1917. Most of his professional life was spent as a professor of economics at the University of Texas, 1930–68.

120. The books of Shirley Jackson Case to which Darrow is referring are The Historicity of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), The Social Origins of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923), and Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928).

121. Marcus Kavanagh (1859–1937), lawyer and judge. Kavanagh was a judge for many years on the Superior Court of Cook County in Chicago, 1898–1935, and author of The Criminal and His Allies (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1928), which was probably what prompted the discussion of Kavanagh by Darrow and Prewitt.

122. Darrow must mean Arthur Spingarn.

123. Harry F. Sinclair, an American businessman, was indicted in 1925 as part of the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. Charles Curtis (1860–1936), a lawyer and public official, was the Republican running mate of Herbert Hoover in 1928. Curtis’s son, Harry King Curtis (1890–1946), was also a lawyer. He worked as a member of the legal department of the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation, in New York and Chicago, 1923–29.

124. The Nation did eventually do a story on the subject, interviewing Curtis’s son. See “Curtis’s Oily Hands,” The Nation, 26 September 1928, 288–89.

125. Brand Whitlock, Transplanted (New York: D. Appleton, 1927).

126. Brand Whitlock, Big Matt (New York: D. Appleton, 1928).

127. Clarence Darrow, “Read Whitlock’s Book and Wonder, Says Darrow,” review of Big Matt, by Brand Whitlock, (Chicago) Daily News, 20 June 1928.

128. Darrow is referring to a short story by Paul T. Coonradt: “Effie,” Midland 14 (January–February 1928): 7–24. Coonradt (1897–1954) was a writer and journalist in Utica, New York. He later worked as a teacher at a boarding school for boys in Cooperstown, New York.

129. Mooney had apparently asked Darrow’s advice about publishing and circulating documents that were part of his pardon petition.

130. Darrow is probably referring to a report in 1918 of a “Mediation Commission” appointed by President Wilson to investigate Mooney’s case. William B. Wilson (1862–1934), secretary of labor under President Wilson, was chairman of the commission.

131. Alfred H. Spink (1854–1928), sports journalist and founder-editor of The Sporting News in 1886. Spink lived in Oakland, California, in 1916, next door to a former German consular for the Marshall Islands. In 1926, Spink described in an affidavit how this former consular’s talk and activities led him to believe that some of the consular’s friends or cohorts were behind the Preparedness-Day bombing. Mooney honored Spink’s request that his affidavit not be made public until after his death. See Curt Gentry, Frame-Up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 467–68.

132. Darrow means Frank C. Oxman (d. 1931), a cattleman who served as an important prosecution witness against Mooney and whose testimony was later shown to be perjured. Ibid., 196–206.

133. James B. McNamara.

134. Two of Paul Darrow’s daughters attended (and graduated from) Northampton School for Girls in Massachusetts: Jessie Darrow Lyon enrolled in 1928 and Mary Darrow Simonson enrolled in 1929. Interview with Mary Darrow Simonson, Honolulu, Hawaii, 16 September 1999.

135. Clarence Darrow, “The Myth of the Soul,” Forum (New York) 80 (October 1928): 524–33.

136. A stenographic account of Darrow’s speech to the bar association was published in its annual report. See Report of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the South Dakota Bar Association held at Yankton, South Dakota, September 5th and 6th, 1928, 110–27.

137. The book was published with this dedication by Barnes: “To Clarence S. Darrow, foremost American opponent of juristic savagery.” Harry Elmer Barnes, The Story of Punishment: A Record of Man’s Inhumanity to Man (Boston: Stratford, 1930).

138. George Ives (1867–1950), English author and criminologist. Darrow is referring to Ives’s A History of Penal Methods: Criminals, Witches, Lunatics (London: S. Paul, 1914).

139. What pamphlets Barnes sent Darrow is unknown.

140. Dietrich probably offered to send Darrow his recent book, The Fathers of Evolution and Other Addresses (Minneapolis: First Unitarian Society, 1927).

141. In late September 1928, Hinton G. Clabaugh (1882–1946), the chairman of the Illinois board of pardons and paroles, complained that Leopold and Loeb were “pampered pets” of the prison at Joliet, Illinois. He also complained that Leopold and Loeb might not remain in prison for life because “an error in the records made [their sentence] concurrent rather than consecutive,” making them eligible for parole after twenty years. Darrow publicly agreed that they would be eligible for parole after twenty years but doubted they could ever obtain parole. “Doubt Chances of Leopold and Loeb for Parole,” Chicago Tribune, 26 September 1928. The warden of the prison denied that Leopold and Loeb were pampered and the Associated Press published an interview of sorts with Leopold and Loeb in which they both denied that they were being given any special treatment. “Warden Green Answers Attack of Parole Head,” Chicago Tribune, 28 September 1928; “Loeb and Leopold Deny They Are Pets,” Washington Post, 1 October 1928.

142. Darrow actively campaigned for Al Smith against Herbert Hoover in the presidential election in 1928.

143. Darrow had cautioned Mooney against sending out printed material or otherwise immediately publicizing his case: “I think this printing should not go out unless the Governor denies your petition. It will be time enough to get it printed then in a general appeal to the people of the country. I do not believe anything could be done on the radio until after election. People are only listening to political speeches. However, I will do anything I can with the people here as soon as it is out of the way.” Darrow to Mooney, 27 September 1928, TLS, CU-BANC, Mooney Papers.

144. Nothing like this was published in Mencken’s American Mercury, and whether Darrow ever wrote the story is unknown.

145. Neither the court opinions nor the available appellate briefs in King’s case list Darrow or Hays as counsel, and it is unknown whether Darrow or Hays represented him.

146. Al Smith lost the presidential election to Hoover on 6 November 1928.

147. Darrow is probably referring either to Barnes’s Living in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928) or The Evolution of Penology in Pennsylvania (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927).

148. Stephenson asked Darrow if he would represent him in his post-conviction efforts to get released from prison. Stephenson to Darrow, 2 November 1928, TT, In, Stephenson Papers.

149. Darrow might be referring to the possibility of serving on the board of directors for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). Calvin Coolidge was honorary president of the AFB, and Keller was then an active fund-raiser for the organization. But Darrow never did serve on the board. Telephone interview with Allison M. Bergmann (information specialist with the AFB), January 1996.

150. Pierce wanted Darrow, who had been chairman of the executive committee of the League to Abolish Capital Punishment, to be chairman of what would be called the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. (He eventually served as president of the organization and as a member of its board of directors). Pierce told Darrow that she would be grateful just to use his name even if he did no work for the organization: “I need not tell you that it would be an enormous help to the organization to have your name at the heart of our committee, even if you do nothing more. And, of course, as you know, you always have done more than many on our executive committee.” Pierce to Darrow, 10 December 1928, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91.

151. A sold-out crowd at the Shubert Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, on 23 January 1929, heard Darrow and Stoddard debate on “whether the present immigration policy of the United States discriminating in favor of the North European races at the expense of the South European races is to the best interest of the United States.” Wilmington News, 24 January 1929. A transcript of the debate was later published as a little blue book: Is the U.S. Immigration Law Beneficial? A Debate: Clarence Darrow vs. Lothrop Stoddard, Little Blue Book No. 1423 (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1929).

152. The birth control sentence of Judge Harrison W. Ewing (1874–1955) of the Court of Common Pleas in Cleveland was widely reported as Darrow described it. See, e.g., “Birth Control Sentence Stirs Legal Criticism,” Decatur (Illinois) Evening Herald, 5 December 1928 (United Press account); “Birth Control,” Time, 17 December 1928. What Steffens said about a “Father Ryan” is unknown.

153. “Peter” was Steffens’s nickname for his wife, Ella Winter Steffens (1898–1980), and “little Pete” is Steffens’s son, Pete Steffens (1924–2012).

154. Pierce wanted Darrow to speak at the Hampden Theatre in New York City as a fund-raising event for the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment. She had already leased the theatre and advertised the event. Pierce to Darrow, 29 and 30 January 1929, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91. Darrow did give a speech at the event, saying, among other things, that he believed Americans were living in the most reactionary period since the Civil War and that a quarter of the people in prison were there for offenses that were not considered crimes fifteen years earlier. The novelist Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) also spoke at the event. See “Darrow Lays Crime to Curb on Liberty,” New York Times, 18 February 1929.

155. Joseph Lewis.

156. Macrae sent Darrow a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which E.P. Dutton published in 1928, with illustrations by the Greek American artist John Vassos (1898–1985).

157. Darrow is referring to Benjamin R. Tucker (1854–1939), an anarchist publisher who is best known for a newspaper that he published from 1881 to 1908 called Liberty. Tucker published an edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1899.

158. Edna Porter (1882?–1946), actress and writer. Porter lived in New York City and was an actress in many plays. She had a deep interest in the blind and she compiled a short anthology of writings about Helen Keller, including a short entry by Darrow. See Double Blossoms: Helen Keller Anthology (New York: L. Copeland, 1931), 13.

159. The Illinois Industrial Home for the Blind was created by Illinois in 1887 for the purpose of providing a home and training and employment for the blind. Both men and women lived at the home, which was located at Marshall Boulevard and Nineteenth Street in Chicago.

160. Belle Hyman Egler (1863–1926), whose parents were German immigrants, was born in Chicago. Her father was a prominent jeweler in Chicago. She was blind from the age of four, as a result of an illness. She studied at the State School for the Blind in Jacksonville, Illinois, and later studied music in Chicago and Europe. She was an accomplished musician and well known in Chicago for her efforts to benefit the blind and poor. She was an important influence in the establishment of the Illinois Industrial Home for the Blind in 1887 and she served as one of its trustees until 1897.

161. Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man (1895).

162. Anne Sullivan Macy (1866–1936), teacher and lifelong companion of Helen Keller.

163. The handwriting of Bicknell’s name—if, in fact, he is the person to whom this letter was addressed—is very poor. The first letter of the name could very well be a T or an F rather than a B, but the last letters are almost surely l. Given the subject and confidential nature of the letter, Bicknell was probably the intended recipient. But whether this letter was actually sent is unknown.

164. “John” is no doubt John Winters. Darrow and Bicknell represented Winters, who had been convicted of murder in the Vermont Supreme Court. See Darrow to Paul Darrow, 5 June 1927, n.74. On 22 March 1929, the Vermont Supreme Court issued an opinion setting aside the judgment and verdict against Winters and granting him a new trial. See State v. Winters, 145 A. 413 (1929).

165. Herbert G. Tupper (1877–1932) was a lawyer with a general practice in Springfield, Vermont. He was co-counsel with Darrow and Bicknell for John Winters. Darrow had a high regard for Tupper and they became friends as a result of their work together on Winters’s case.

166. John Winters did not plead guilty but was later tried again, convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. Darrow did not participate in the trial. Winters was paroled from Vermont State Prison at Windsor in 1949. See John Stark Bellamy II, Vintage Vermont Villainies (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2007), 129.

167. Darrow prepared at least one or two wills during his life, but none was probated. Interview with Blanche Darrow Chase and Mary Darrow Simonson, Wheaton, Illinois, 29 July 1995. See Darrow to Jessie Darrow Ohl, 20 July 1904, n.82 (transcript of one will).

168. Darrow is referring to the payment for his review of White’s study of lynching: “The Shame of America,” review of Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), by Walter White, New York Herald Tribune, 21 April 1929.

169. Baldwin replied: “I find making wills an interesting occupation almost any time. It gives a fellow a sense of having something, even when he hasn’t got much. Anyway we are touched by this thought of us in that connection, though we hope that you will have won the liberties of the American people in time for us to go out of business before you do.” Baldwin to Darrow, 6 May 1929, TLc, NjP, ACLU Archives.

170. Calverton had apparently asked Darrow to write a review of Walter White’s Rope and Faggot for the The Modern Quarterly, for which Calverton was the editor. Darrow mistakenly submitted a review of a recent biography of William Jennings Bryan instead.

171. Clarence Darrow, “Bryan,” review of Bryan (1929), by Morris R. Werner, The New Republic, May 1929, 363–64.

172. Blanche Darrow Chase, Mary Darrow Simonson’s sister, had surgery to correct a congenital hip disorder.

173. Jessie Darrow Johnston, Mary Darrow Simonson’s older sister.

174. Lillian (Anderson) Darrow, Mary Darrow Simonson’s mother.

175. This letter is a reply by Darrow to a letter from Baldwin that reminded Darrow of their earlier conversation about recent inroads on the rights of criminal defendants: “You remember when we talked some time ago about the new inroads upon defendants’ rights in criminal trials that I told you we would take this subject up and see what we can do about it. | I got the report of the American Law Institute with the revised Code of Criminal Procedure, which they are recommending all over the country, and I had Art Hays examine it. He has just reported that none of the provisions which you called our attention to is contained in the draft. There is no suggestion that defendants be compelled to take the stand or that juries bring in a three-quarters verdict, or that the judge may comment on the evidence as well as the law. | Do you know from what source these suggestions come and how we can get the dope in print? When we get wind of just how the attack is being made, we can act.” Baldwin to Darrow, 8 May 1929, TLc, NjP, ACLU Archives.

176. Darrow is probably referring to Clarence Darrow, “At Seventy-Two,” Saturday Evening Post, 6 July 1929, 23, 109, 114.

177. President Hoover delivered an address titled “Respect for Law a National Duty” at an annual luncheon of the Associated Press in New York City on 22 April. See William Starr Myers, ed., The State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1934), 1:42–47.

178. Wesley L. Jones (1863–1932), congressman and senator from Washington, was a staunch supporter of Hoover as well as an advocate of Sunday-closing laws, Prohibition, and other measures that Darrow found repugnant. On 2 March 1929—three months or so before this letter was written—Congress enacted what was popularly known as the Jones Act, which amended the National Prohibition Act to allow increased fines and imprisonment for anyone making, selling, or transporting liquor. Jones sponsored the bill in the Senate. See Jones Act, ch. 473, § 1, 45 Stat. 1446 (1929).

179. Darrow had asked Gerson to help Edythe Rubens (1897–1957), Darrow’s stenographer for many years, find a job in Los Angeles. Darrow to Gerson, 4 June 1929, TLS, CLU-SC, Theodore Perceval Gerson Papers (Collection 724).

180. Darrow is likely referring to stock in Union Pacific.

181. William Ross Kellogg (b. 1857), editor of the Alert newspaper in Jamestown, North Dakota. Kellogg was born in Pittsfield, Illinois. He obtained a B.S. from Illinois College, 1876. In 1882 or so, he moved to Fargo, North Dakota, and worked for the Argus newspaper. In 1886, he bought the Alert and worked as its publisher and editor until 1925.

182. Darrow probably misdated this letter. If he was writing the day after the “second big break” in the American stock market, he was probably writing the day after what is often called “Black Tuesday,” 29 October 1929. Black Tuesday was the most catastrophic day in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Black Tuesday followed an earlier collapse of the market on 24 October 1929, known as “Black Thursday.”

183. Fred Hamerstrom.

184. Darrow is quoting from Ingersoll’s eulogy for his brother in 1879: “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.” Robert G. Ingersoll, “A Tribute to Ebon C. Ingersoll,” in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: Dresden, 1912), 12:391.

185. Darrow is likely referring to Geoffrey D. Eaton (1984–1930), the editor of the monthly Plain Talk, a magazine that made its first appearance in 1927. Darrow was a contributor to the first issue. Eaton was the author of many magazine articles himself and he wrote a novel. Before editing Plain Talk, he had been literary editor for the (New York) Morning Telegraph. He also had worked for several newspapers in Detroit and on the staff of the Associated Press.

186. William A. Baehr.

187. In 1926, while Lindsey was a judge in Colorado, he had done some legal work in New York in the matter of a contested will. On 9 December 1929, the Supreme Court of Colorado issued a decision disbarring Lindsey from the practice of law on the ground that this work violated state laws prohibiting a judge from acting as an attorney in any court or cause and prohibiting a judge from receiving any compensation for legal services except a government salary. See People ex rel. Colorado Bar Assoc. v. Lindsey, 283 P. 539 (Colo. 1929). Disbarment proceedings were instigated by a former district attorney who had had public disagreements with Lindsey. Some members of the state supreme court also had a history of political disagreements with Lindsey. (The court reinstated Lindsey in 1935.) See Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 204–17, 236–37. This letter from Darrow is in response to a letter that Lindsey wrote (to other people as well) seeking advice about the matter of his disbarment. Lindsey’s letter was addressed to Darrow in Chicago, not Cannes. See Lindsey to Darrow, 14 December 1929, TLc, DLC-MSS, Lindsey Papers, Container 164.

188. Lindsey had written to Ruby Darrow asking what Darrow does with his large volume of mail, and he described the difficulties that he had in keeping up with his own large correspondence. Lindsey to Ruby Darrow, 21 November 1929, TLc, DLC-MSS, Lindsey Papers.

1930–1934

1. James Reed (1861–1944), lawyer and politician. Reed began practicing law in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1887. He was elected county prosecutor, 1898–90, and mayor, 1900–4, before being elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat, 1911–29. He continued practicing law in Kansas City after serving in the Senate, and he made unsuccessful bids for the presidency in 1928 and 1932. He opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal and supported Republicans for president after 1932.

2. Claude Bowers (1878–1958), journalist, historian, and diplomat. Bowers was an editorial writer for the (New York) Evening World, 1923–31, and a political columnist for the (New York) Evening Journal, 1931–33, before serving as United States ambassador to Spain, 1933–39, and minister to Chile, 1939–53. He was also the author of many historical and biographical works, including Jefferson and Hamilton (1925) and The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929). At the national Democratic convention in 1928, Bowers gave a keynote address attacking Harding and Coolidge.

3. The Associated Press reported that Ford had announced he would devote the remainder of his life to education, including building schools in which young men could learn a trade (to keep them “active and out of trouble”), and that he would spend perhaps $100 million in this effort. “Ford Will Give Rest of His Life to Education,” New York Times, 14 February 1930.

4. Barnum’s brother, Harry Hyde Barnum (1879–1951), was a lawyer in Chicago.

5. The identity of “Blanche” is unknown.

6. T. Perceval Gerson and his wife, Vera.

7. The identity of Darrow’s friend is not known.

8. The story in the New York Times reported that at a recent meeting to put together a patriotic May Day parade, the organizers had announced that Russian war veterans would be marching in the parade for the first time. The story also reported that a letter from Darrow was read at the meeting, which said: “It is time that everyone who really loves his country should rally to its defense.” “Russian Veterans to March on May Day,” New York Times, 18 January 1930.

9. Darrow is referring to the Pullman strike in 1894, which resulted in the imprisonment of Eugene Debs. See Darrow to Henry Demarest Lloyd, 22 November 1894, n.26. In January 1895, Darrow and other lawyers argued in Debs’s case before the United States Supreme Court.

10. Frank L. Smith (1867–1950), a Chicago businessman and Republican Congressman from Illinois, 1919–21, won a seat in the United States Senate in November 1926. He was also appointed the following month to fill out the last few months of the term of the recently deceased Senator William B. McKinley (1856–1926). Smith’s election and appointment were embroiled in charges of fraud and corruption, which stemmed mainly from a $125,000 campaign contribution from Samuel Insull (1859–1938), the well-known Chicago utilities magnate. In the end, the Senate refused to seat Smith. See Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). Beck defended Smith before a Senate investigating committee and also wrote a book (The Vanishing Rights of the States [New York: Geo. Doran, 1926]) that “challenged the constitutional right of the Senate to decide upon the moral fitness of a member-elect or the means by which he gained that status.” Morton Keller, In Defense of Yesterday: James M. Beck and the Politics of Conservatism (New York: Coward-McCann, 1958), 193.

11. Beck delivered a speech against Prohibition in the United States House of Representatives in February 1930, which was later published as a pamphlet: The Revolt against Prohibition (New York: Association against the Prohibition Amendment, 1930).

12. Dwight Morrow (1873–1931) was a lawyer, banker, diplomat, and United States Senator (Republican) from New Jersey, 1930–31. He attracted considerable attention by urging repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment during his campaign for the senate in 1930.

13. George Tinkham (1870–1956), Republican congressman from Massachusetts. Tinkham graduated from Harvard University, 1894, and held several local and state political offices before his election to the United States House of Representatives, where he served fourteen consecutive terms, 1915–43. He was a strong opponent of Prohibition.

14. Benjamin Gitlow (1891–1965) was active in the Socialist Party’s militant left wing when he helped form the Communist Labor Party in 1919. That same year, he was indicted under New York’s Criminal Anarchy Act for advocating communism. The act prohibited advocating the overthrow of organized government by force or violence. Darrow was Gitlow’s defense attorney in the trial court. Gitlow was found guilty in February 1920. The United States Supreme Court rejected his constitutional challenge to the state law but held that the free-speech protections of the First Amendment of the Constitution should restrict state actions. See Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925). Gitlow was released from prison in 1922, while his case was on appeal. Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, he was pardoned by Governor Al Smith. By the end of his life, Gitlow was a committed anti-communist.

15. Darrow told his literary agent in May 1930 that he was working on an article that had as its theme the “best method of getting rid of prohibition.” Darrow was worried about the market for his writings, and he hoped that this particular article would be published “without many refusals.” Darrow to George Bye, 13 May [1930], ALS, NNC, James O. Brown Collection. Whether the article was ever published is doubtful.

16. “The early bird” was probably a short story. According to Bye, one magazine later turned it down because it was too “pessimistic.” Bye to Darrow, 21 October 1930, TLc, NNC, James O. Brown Papers.

17. Darrow presented “Life and How to Live It” to some 2,500 people in East Aurora, New York, on 19 June 1930, the anniversary of the birth of Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915). See “News from the Birthday Celebration,” The Roycrofter, July 1930, 1–3. Hubbard, an author and publisher, founded an artists’ colony and the Roycroft Press in East Aurora, which published fine, handmade books in the Arts-and-Crafts tradition. His press published Darrow’s first book, A Persian Pearl, in 1899. Hubbard died on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915.

18. Darrow is probably referring to Barnes’s recent book on punishment: The Story of Punishment: A Record of Man’s Inhumanity to Man (Boston: Stratford, 1930). No review of the book by Darrow was located.

19. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Twilight of Christianity (New York: Vanguard Press, 1929).

20. This was apparently for Charles Yale Harrison, who was writing a biography of Darrow. In the upper-right corner of the letter is a handwritten note from Yarros to Harrison: “Dear Mr. H:— | This answers your last queries. | V.S.Y.”

21. Allen Crandall’s biography only includes a facsimile of the first page of this letter, and the transcript ends here.

22. The “Vermont campaign” was an effort by the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment to organize opponents of the death penalty in Vermont and to pursue state legislation that would abolish the death penalty. Darrow’s representation of John Winters before the Vermont Supreme Court in 1928 (see Darrow to Paul Darrow, 18 November 1927, n.95) provided at least part of the impetus for the league’s campaign in Vermont. See ALACP, Annual Report of 1930 at 2–3, MBNU, Sara Erhmann Papers, Box 32, Folder 5.

23. Roger William Riis (1894–1953), a publicist, writer, and magazine editor, was the league’s treasurer and a member of its board of directors. This letter (and the next letter from Darrow to Smith) was read in Darrow’s absence at a meeting of the board and copies were distributed to board members. The minutes of that meeting show only that Marie Sweet Smith had “incorrectly” represented the league’s proposed money-raising plan to Darrow. See Meeting Minutes, Board of Directors, ALACP, 24 October 1930, NN, Walsh Papers.

24. “Baumes laws” were state statutes that provided increased punishment for repeat criminal offenders, imposed mandatory sentences ranging from five to twenty-five years for anyone armed with a weapon when committing a felony, and life in prison for anyone who had a fourth conviction for a felony. The laws originated in New York. See NY Penal Law §§ 1941–44 (1930). The laws were named after their state legislative sponsor, Caleb H. Baumes (1863–1937), a state senator and chairman of the New York State Crime Commission.

25. Vivian Pierce had recently worked for several months on the league’s “preliminary organization campaigns” in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Indiana. Pierce to Walsh, 17 October 1930, TLS, NN, Walsh Papers.

26. Arthur Garfield Hays, who was also a member of the board of directors for the ALACP, received a copy of this letter from the league and wrote to Darrow, saying he agreed with him “one hundred percent and told Mrs Smith the same thing.” Hays to Darrow, 11 September 1930, TT, NN, Walsh Papers, Box 17, Folder: 1930, August.

27. Powys dedicated his An Hour on Christianity (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1930) to Darrow with the statement: “Dedicated to Clarence Darrow with affection and appreciation.”

28. Theodore Francis Powys (1875–1953), English novelist and short-story writer. Theodore and Llewelyn were brothers.

29. John Cowper Powys (1872–1963), novelist, essayist, poet, and lecturer. John was also Llewelyn’s brother.

30. Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944), English astronomer, author, and Cambridge professor.

31. James Hopwood Jeans (1877–1946), English physicist, astronomer, and author.

32. On 27 August 1930, Mencken married Sara Powell Haardt (1898–1935), a writer and native of Alabama.

33. This letter followed an exchange of correspondence between Sullivan and Darrow when Sullivan was preparing his multivolume Our Times. Sullivan had asked Darrow to comment about some events associated with the trial of William Haywood in 1907, including Darrow’s final argument to the jury, where Darrow said that he did not care how many wrongs labor had committed or how many brutalities for which labor was guilty, he believed that labor’s cause was just. At the time of the trial, Darrow received a great deal of criticism for that statement. After reviewing some of the proofs for Sullivan’s book, Darrow wrote back to Sullivan explaining that he meant regardless of how many wrongs labor committed, labor’s cause was still just: “I don’t believe anybody can fairly interpret it in any other way.” Darrow to Sullivan, 27 August 1930, TLS, location of original unknown (copy in editor’s files). Sullivan revised his book and referred to Darrow’s letter in a footnote. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States 1900–1925, vol. 3, Pre-War America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 493–94.

34. Eleanor Harris Rowland Wembridge (1883–1944), teacher, writer, and psychologist. Wembridge earned a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College, 1905, taught psychology at Mount Holyoke College, later became dean of women at Reed College in Oregon, and still later, in 1922, moved to Cleveland, where she performed psychological work for the Women’s Protective Association and served as a referee of the Women’s Department of the Juvenile Court. She wrote many books, including The Right to Believe (1909), Other People’s Daughters (1928), and Life among the Lowbrows (1931).

35. Darrow is likely referring to an article that Wembridge wrote while she was a referee in the juvenile court in Cleveland. In this article, Wembridge commented on differences that she observed between blacks and whites in court on misdemeanor charges and, in particular, on the exceptional manners and dignity of the African American grandmothers who appeared with their grandchildren. Wembridge, “Negroes in Custody,” American Mercury, September 1930, 76–83.

36. Sinclair had written to Darrow explaining, in a rather confusing way, that he had been approached by Albert Rogell (1901–88), a film director in Los Angeles, who wanted Sinclair and another person to “write a debate”—with Sinclair advocating Prohibition and the other person (Darrow) arguing against it. This written debate would then be incorporated into a script for a movie to be produced by Rogell, with the characters using lines from the debate. The storyline for the movie, according to Sinclair, was to involve “a boy who is lured by . . . bootleggers and becomes a murderer, and the debate on prohibition and what was to be done about it was to come in as a part of the trial scene of this boy.” Sinclair reminded Darrow that “there are restrictions imposed by the moving-picture censorship which there is no escaping if you are going to work for the movies. You cannot swear, . . . you cannot be obscene, and you probably cannot ridicule the church, and you certainly cannot call for the overthrow of the government.” Sinclair to Darrow, 25 September 1930, TLc, InU-Li, Sinclair Papers.

37. In 1928, Darrow had pledged some securities as collateral for a loan for Mary and her husband, Lem, so they could borrow four thousand dollars to buy a brownstone townhouse in New York City.

38. The identity of “Mr. Thompson” is unknown.

39. Sinclair responded to Darrow’s last letter with a long letter explaining that no preacher would be a character in the proposed story and that the story would not involve a boy lured by bootleggers but rather a boy “who is lured into the bootlegging business and becomes a murderer”: “What is desired is to have a story in which a boy commits murder as a result of our present intolerable liquor situation. We both agree that the situation is intolerable, and we differ only as to what is to be done. . . . Whether the boy is to be lured by a bootlegger, or whether he is to be lured by a prohibition agent, or whether he is lured by high-jackers—surely we could find some device by which the boy could be lured which we could agree was characteristic of the present situation, and which caused the boy to commit murder.” Sinclair assured Darrow that he would be free to say in the script what he said in his letter about how “prohibition is really religion,” but “[w]here the objection would come in would be if you should start to use abusive terms about the church and clergy, calling them ‘wowsers’ and ‘blue noses’ and all the other terms of ridicule which our friend, Mencken, employs.” Sinclair to Darrow, 29 September 1930, TLc, InU-Li, Sinclair Papers.

40. Sinclair wrote to Darrow again trying to work out the premise of the story and saying that they both should agree that Prohibition was producing crime: “Forgive me if I am inept in expressing to you what I am trying to get across. We would both agree, I presume, that the present condition of tolerated outlawry leads to murder. In other words, existence of an illegal traffic in the hands of gangsters, preyed upon by high-jackers, leads to murder, and the condition is getting worse, because the prizes offered are increasing.” Sinclair to Darrow, 6 October 1930, TLc, InU-Li, Sinclair Papers.

41. Darrow and Sinclair continued through an exchange of several letters to have misunderstandings about the proposal for a film. The producers sent Darrow a proposed contract in November, and Darrow responded to one of Sinclair’s final inquiries with uncertainty about the whole matter: “I would like to do what you wish, but, the business is new to me, although I have a number of propositions before me now. How far one would interfere with another I don’t know. Of course I want to be governed as much by what is fair and just as by what is legal. I would not think it right to sign a contract without telling what other ideas I have in my mind. I am getting to that time of life that I don’t believe in hurrying or being hurried.” Darrow to Sinclair, 4 December 1930, ALS, InU-Li, Sinclair Papers. With that, the idea for a film involving Darrow and Sinclair apparently faded.

42. Du Bois might have asked Darrow to write something for Crisis magazine on the subject of religion. The following year, Crisis published two competing views—one by Darrow and one by Robert Elijah Jones (1871–1960), a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church—on what benefit organized religion had been for African Americans. “The Religion of the American Negro,” Crisis, June 1931, 190–92.

43. John Haynes Holmes’s church was the Community Church of New York. Darrow’s speech at the church was announced as “Free Will, the Doctrine of Despair,” which is what Darrow requested. Holmes to Darrow, 11 November 1930, TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

44. Darrow is referring to Johnson’s poem “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” which was printed in an edition of two hundred copies in 1930 by Viking Press, for private distribution. Darrow probably received a copy directly from Johnson or Benjamin Huebsch at Viking. In the poem, Saint Peter tells how the Unknown Soldier, on Resurrection Day and in the presence of all the patriotic groups (including the Grand Army of the Republic, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Confederate veterans, and the Ku Klux Klan), rose from his grave and—to the horror of everyone present—turned out to be a black man. The poem was inspired in part by news accounts of the federal government sending a group of Gold Star mothers to France in 1930 to visit the graves of their sons who died in World War I and making the black mothers travel on a separate, second-class vessel.

45. Lawes’s Life and Death in Sing Sing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928) describes his experiences with prisoners at Sing Sing prison and his views on criminology.

46. By “the League,” Darrow is probably referring to the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment, for which Darrow and Lawes were officers and directors.

47. Darrow is probably referring to a passage by Lawes in which he maintained that public sentiment alone is no justification for allowing something to happen or to exist: “Frankly, I do not think that the mere fact that a large part or even most of the public ‘wants something’ is justification for furnishing it if the something is essentially detrimental and destructive in character. The South wanted slavery, the Jews of Jerusalem wanted Jesus crucified, and a large part of the public wants suggestive plays and books.” Life and Death in Sing Sing, 260.

48. Lawes wrote to Darrow explaining that he simply meant to draw an analogy by his statement: “I note your remark about the paragraph referring to the Crucifixion. It was not intended to confirm the traditional view. I cited it as an outstanding example of the application of the death penalty. Authority, popular or legal, no matter which, decreed its infliction. What might have been the course of history had there been no capital punishment in those days, can only be imagined. In a more limited way and perhaps less devastating—does not every execution involve its particular social upheaval?” Lawes to Darrow, TLS, 12 January 1931, DLC, Darrow Collection.

49. Ruby Darrow enclosed a note with this letter (dated “Sunday—January fourth”), wishing Lawes well with his book and “echo[ing] all that [Darrow] says.”

50. Darrow might have been returning an article of Barnes’s that had been published eighteen months earlier by Scientific Monthly on the conflicts between religion and science. See Harry Elmer Barnes, “The Role of Religion in a Secular Society,” Scientific Monthly, May 1929, 430–45.

51. In Barnes’s long response to this letter, he said that he was flattered by the “suggestion that [he] might fittingly wear even a patch of [Darrow’s] mantle.” Barnes to Darrow, 21 February 1931, TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers.

52. Pierce had twice set a date for a board meeting for the league and Darrow had apparently been unable to meet either date, which greatly disappointed Pierce: “The reason it was important—is important—to get you occasionally to a Board meeting is because of the effect you have on the Board. . . . With all your faults, we are all crazy about you. I told Dr [Miriam] Van Waters I was never going to send you another appeal or speak to you again. I had put a lot of people, including herself, to enormous inconvenience, over our meeting. But I knew I would weaken. We just can’t get along without you. And of course you know it.” Pierce to Darrow, 17 February 1931, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91.

53. The Kansas legislature was considering a bill that would restore capital punishment in that state. Pierce disagreed with Darrow’s assessment of the effect he would have on legislators if he made an appeal to them: “I do not agree with you that your very name would have antagonized the Kansas Legislature. These little lawyers that make up Legislatures are opposed to you perhaps. But don’t forget you have an immense effect on them. To them you are Success and Fame with a capital S.” Ibid.

54. The dramatization of the trial was broadcast on radio station NBC-WEAF on 22 March 1931. The state was represented by James Montgomery Beck, not “James S. Beck.” “Darrow and Beck to Participate in the ‘Famous Trials of History,’” New York Times, 15 March 1931.

55. Pierce wanted Darrow to speak at a public hearing before a joint committee of the state legislature in Albany, New York. The bill under consideration by the committee would have substituted life imprisonment for the death penalty and lessened the severity of the Baumes law. Pierce to Darrow, 10 March 1931, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91; “All Albany Bills in One Committee,” New York Times, 18 March 1931; Darrow to Marie Sweet Smith and “Mrs. Phelps,” 23 August 1930, n.24 (describing the Baumes law).

56. Charles Duff, A Handbook on Hanging: Being a Short Introduction to the Fine Art of Execution, and Containing Much Useful Information on Neck-Breaking, Throttling, Strangling, Asphyxiation, Decapitation and Electrocution (London: The Cayme Press, 1928). Pierce was in favor of trying to get a wider circulation for Lawe’s book but told Darrow that she thought The Handbook on Hanging was “a little highbrow for popular reading” and that she did “not think that satire on this subject appeals to a large number of people.” Pierce to Darrow, 10 March 1931, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91.

57. In addition to participating in the mock trial of Benedict Arnold, Darrow was one of the narrators of a motion picture about evolution called The Mystery of Life, which was produced by Universal.

58. Darrow might be referring to Henry L. Schoolcraft (1868?–1936), a neighbor of Paul Darrow who taught at colleges in the East and then became a real estate investor.

59. Pierce apparently wanted Darrow to solicit money for the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment from a “Mr. Brooks,” but his identity is unknown.

60. Pierce believed that the membership of the league should be changed in order to replace members who were uninvolved, and she wanted Darrow, as president of the league, to appoint a committee to review potential nominees. Pierce to Darrow, 13 April 1931, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91.

61. On 26 April 1931, radio station NBC-WEAF broadcast the “trial” of Aaron Burr, with Darrow defending Burr and George Gordon Battle (1868–1949), a prominent lawyer in New York City, representing the opposition.

62. Harrison was working on a biography of Darrow, which was published—despite this letter—before Darrow’s autobiography. See Charles Yale Harrison, Clarence Darrow (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931).

63. Harrison’s novel Generals Die in Bed (New York: Wm. Morrow, 1930), which is generally considered his finest book, is a realistic account of war told by a private in the Canadian army in World War I.

64. Solomon Sturges (1865–1940) was an associate for many years at the brokerage firm of David A. Noyes & Co. in Chicago, until he retired in 1938 and moved to California. Sturges was the adopted father of the screenplay writer and film director Preston Sturges (1898–1959).

65. Sidney Love (1872–1952) was once a wealthy stockbroker in Chicago. He lost his fortune through the market in 1909. Darrow later represented him in his divorce, which garnered a lot of attention in newspapers. See, e.g., “Love Quits after Market Mishaps,” New York Times, 28 January 1909; “Wife Calls Love Now Unlovable,” Chicago Tribune, 16 June 1911; “Name Mrs. Roy in Love Case,” New York Times, 18 July 1911.

66. Pierce read this letter as confirmation that the organization had to find someone to replace Darrow as president of the organization: “As a matter of fact, there are members of the Board who contribute far more than [Darrow] does, but it is not tactful to tell him so. | This letter confirms me in the belief that Doris [Stevens] has: that we should get Dr. [Miriam] Van Waters to agree to take the Presidency of the League.” Pierce to Dubrow, 17 June 1931, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91.

67. Darrow is probably referring to an article that was eventually published in Vanity Fair. See Clarence Darrow, “Why the 18th Amendment Cannot be Repealed,” Vanity Fair, November 1931, 62–63, 84.

68. Darrow is probably referring to an article that was eventually published in Scribner’s Magazine. See Clarence Darrow, “Who Knows Justice?” Scribner’s Magazine, February 1932, 73–77.

69. After Darrow agreed to help John Winters in the Vermont Supreme Court, he pledged to send one thousand dollars to the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment to support the organization’s effort to abolish capital punishment in Vermont.

70. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931).

71. In Steffens’s response, he said that he would take up the question with his publisher of where Darrow might place a review: “As to the book and a review thereof—it is almost enough for me that you like it, and so explicitly. And you, Clarence, have about all you should do to get on with your own book. But I will take it up with Harcourt and see if he has a suggestion to offer for a publication to exploit a review by you.” Steffens to Darrow, 21 July 1931, TLS, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers. No review of Steffens’s book by Darrow was located.

72. Fremont Older.

73. Darrow and Barnes debated with Preston Bradley and Rabbi Louis I. Mann (1890–1966) at the Sinai Temple in Chicago on 19 October (not 10 November). The title of the debate was “Can the Church Meet the Needs of Our New Age?” “Sinai Temple Lecture Series Opens Tonight,” Chicago Tribune, 19 October 1931. Rabbi Mann was the leader of the Chicago Sinai congregation from 1923 to 1962. Born in Kentucky, he had a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale. He was one of the founders of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now called the National Conference for Community and Justice) in 1927. Among his many activities, he was a strong proponent for birth control, an opponent of what was known as companionate marriages, a promoter of the theory of evolution, and a believer (at least in the 1930s) in the forced sterilization of certain criminals.

74. Here, “–?–” is written in Ruby Darrow’s hand.

75. Here, “in confidence” is written in Ruby Darrow’s hand.

76. Darrow is referring to Henry Salt’s Cvm Grano, Verses and Epigrams (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Oriole Press, 1931), in which Salt published a poem about Darrow titled “Darrow and the Sinner”: “Old preachers once, if heaven we hoped to win, / Bade us beware the Unpardonable Sin; / A threat that over-anxious minds would harrow, / Till wise Compassion found her spokesman, Darrow; / Darrow, so suave of speech, so nimble-witted, / His clients ever went their ways acquitted. / And now no needless fears our feelings rend; / For this we know: with Darrow to defend, / No court will be too harsh, no heart too hardened:—/ He’d get the Unpardonable Sinner pardoned!”

77. Henry B. Eldred.

78. Darrow is referring to Horace Liveright’s publishing firm, which published an edition of his Farmington in 1925.

79. The identity of “Connelly” is unknown.

80. Darrow is probably referring to an address on Liberia delivered by Starr at the University of Oregon in July 1931 entitled “The Crisis in Liberia.” In this address, Starr reviewed the harmful effects of the rubber plantation established in Liberia in 1926 by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. He also criticized the recent demands of the United States State Department and League of Nations on the government of Liberia, seeking far-reaching reforms that Starr believed would result in the destruction of Liberia’s government. Starr’s address was published in Unity on 17 August 1931.

81. Darrow is referring to his involvement in the Scottsboro cases. In late March 1931, nine black youths, ranging from twelve to nineteen years of age, all poor and generally illiterate, were accused of raping two white women in a railroad freight car traveling through Alabama. In early April 1931, the accused—represented by inept lawyers in a tense and hostile courtroom atmosphere—were convicted and all but the youngest were sentenced to death after brief trials in Scottsboro, Alabama. In September 1931, Darrow (and later, Arthur Garfield Hays) was retained by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to represent the defendants in their appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. The NAACP was competing, in effect, for the right to represent the defendants with the International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the Communist Party in the United States. See Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 97–103.

82. George W. Chamlee (1872–1958), lawyer. Chamlee graduated from Mercer College, 1891, and opened a law office in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1893, with three of his brothers. He was city attorney for Chattanooga, 1902–08, and later elected district attorney for Hamilton County, Tennessee, 1918–29. He was the most prominent of the ILD-sponsored lawyers representing the defendants in the Scottsboro cases, and he was not affiliated with the Communist Party.

83. Johnson reportedly had written to Darrow asking him to come speak in McPherson. See The McPherson (Kansas) Sentinel, 6 September 1974.

84. Walsh was Thomas J. Mooney’s principal attorney from 1923 to 1939.

85. These efforts to persuade California governor James Rolph (1869–1934) to pardon Mooney were unsuccessful. On 21 April 1932, the governor denied Mooney’s application for a pardon, saying he was convinced of Mooney’s guilt. Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 409.

86. In Porter’s reply to Darrow’s letter, she told Darrow of her family (she was raised in nearby Burghill, Ohio), and she recalled memories of people whom they knew in common, including Darrow’s first wife’s family (the Ohls) and Hubert Darrow and Herman Darrow (Darrow’s brothers). She told Darrow that she believed he would find a broader, more tolerant, and kindlier class of people in Kinsman today than when he had lived there. Porter to Darrow, TLS, MBU, Leo Cherne Papers, Box 3, Folder 10.

87. Darrow probably intended to write this sentence as “Not the lives of twelve boys . . .” He is likely referring to the Scottsboro cases, although only nine youths were involved in Scottsboro. See Darrow to White, 31 December 1931, n.81.

88. Elmer Gertz and A.I. Tobin, Frank Harris: A Study in Black and White (Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1931).

89. Harris died in August 1931 and Gertz, who had been his lawyer, was planning a memorial meeting in Harris’s honor. See Elmer Gertz, “Clarence Darrow: An American Legend,” Progressive, May 1957, 12, 13.

90. Harris’s last book was a biography of Bernard Shaw (Bernard Shaw [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931]).

91. Darrow is referring to the Massie case—a case rife with racial implications, which concerned both Darrow and Barnes. In September 1931, Thalia Massie (1911–63), the wife of Thomas Massie (1904–87), a lieutenant in the United States Navy stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and daughter of a prominent mainland family, told police in Honolulu that she had been beaten and raped by five dark-skinned Hawaiians. Her accusation led to the arrest and indictment of five men (two Hawaiians, two Japanese, and one Hawaiian-Chinese) whose trial ended in a mistrial in December 1931, when the jury was unable to reach a verdict. The accused men were released on bail pending retrial. One morning in January 1932, police officers in Honolulu stopped a speeding automobile occupied by Thomas Massie, an enlisted man, and Thalia Massie’s mother. In the automobile with these three was the dead body of one of the accused men. The three occupants of the automobile and another enlisted man were indicted on 26 January 1932 for murder in the second degree, and they wanted Darrow to defend them.

92. Clarence Darrow, Argument of Clarence Darrow in the Case of Henry Sweet (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1927).

93. The bracketed “x” in this sentence is not an illegible word; there is a half-inch of blank space on the line between the typewritten words “not” and “from.”

94. On 29 April 1932, the jury in the Massie case returned a verdict of manslaughter for each defendant, with a recommendation for leniency. On 4 May 1932, the trial judge sentenced each of the defendants to ten years in prison and their sentences were immediately commuted to one hour by the territorial governor, Lawrence M. Judd (1887–1968), under pressure from the federal government.

95. Darrow may not have written “Swift”; his handwriting is difficult to read. If he did mean “Swift,” he might be referring to Isaac Morrison Swift. Darrow had known him for more than forty years.

96. The book of fables to which Darrow is probably referring is Hall’s The Game of Life (New York: A. Wessels, 1902), a collection of short parables on labor, religion, politics, and other subjects.

97. Hall and Ernest Howard Crosby were both advocates of the single-tax ideas of Henry George. They often worked on reform activities together, including cofounding the anti-imperialist American League of New York City in 1899.

98. Russell McWilliams (1914–1997) shot and killed a streetcar conductor during a robbery in Rockford, Illinois, in August 1931. He had just turned seventeen. Darrow began representing him after he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death. In his first appeal, the Supreme Court of Illinois, in April 1932, remanded the matter for further proceedings because the trial court judge had not heard and (to some extent) had not allowed evidence of McWilliams’s character, background, habits, etc., before sentencing him to death. See People v. McWilliams, 348 Ill. 333, 180 N.E. 832 (1932). On remand, McWilliams was sentenced to death again. In his second appeal, decided in December 1932, the court remanded the matter for a change of venue. See People v. McWilliams, 350 Ill. 628, 183 N.E. 582 (1932). On remand, before a different judge, McWilliams was sentenced to death a third time, in February 1933. Finally, in April 1933, Henry Horner (1879–1940), democratic governor of Illinois, 1933–40, acting on the recommendation of the state pardon board, commuted McWilliams’s sentence to ninety-nine years in prison. McWilliams was paroled in 1950.

99. Winnie Ruth Judd (1905–98) was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in February 1932 in Phoenix, Arizona. She had been charged with the murder of two young female friends whose bodies were found in Judd’s luggage trunks. One of the victims had been dismembered to fit in the trunk. Judd’s case received nationwide attention. In April 1933, shortly before her scheduled execution, the warden of the state prison petitioned the court to determine Judd’s sanity, and a jury found that she was insane. She was committed to the state hospital for the insane, where she remained for the next nearly forty years (except for several periods during which she escaped). See Jana Bommersbach, The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

100. George W.P. Hunt (1859–1934), Democratic governor of Arizona. Hunt served seven two-year terms as governor, 1912–19, 1923–29, 1931–33. Before becoming governor, he was (at various times) a rancher, businessman, mayor, and member of the Arizona territorial legislature.

101. Jessie Florence Binford.

102. Pierce had intended to resign from her position as director of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment two years before this letter because she was “worn out with the growing responsibility” and thought “a new office group and new or additional board members would be a good thing.” Pierce to Darrow, 26 August 1930, TLc, MBNU, Sara Ehrmann Papers, Box 16, Folder 91. She apparently had a change of heart both then and in 1932, because she remained in her position.

103. Darrow is referring to Russell McWilliams’s case.

104. Julia Lathrop (1858–1932), social worker. Born in Rockford, Illinois, Lathrop attended Rockford Female Seminary, 1876–77, and then graduated from Vassar College, 1880, after which she worked in her father’s law office in Rockford. In 1890, she moved to Hull House to work with Jane Addams. In 1892, she was appointed by the governor to the State Board of Charities, in which capacity she was responsible for many reform efforts. In 1899, she helped establish a juvenile court in Chicago, the first of its kind in the United States. In 1912, President William Howard Taft appointed her chief of the Children’s Bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor, a position she held until 1921. In the remaining years of her life, she continued her reform efforts, including as a member of the Child Welfare Committee for the League of Nations.

105. The Democratic Party had recently held its national convention in Chicago and nominated Roosevelt over Smith on the fourth ballot.

106. President Harding’s death in 1923 was probably caused by a heart attack or a cerebral hemorrhage. But widespread and persistent rumors followed his death, claiming that he had not died by natural causes. These included rumors that Harding’s wife, Florence Harding (1860–1924), had murdered him with poison. Gaston Means (1879–1938) contributed to these rumors with the publication in March 1930 of his as-told-to book, titled The Strange Death of President Harding (New York: Guild Pub., 1930). Means had worked for William J. Burns’s detective agency and was also employed briefly during Harding’s presidency as an agent under Burns in the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, until Harry M. Daugherty fired him. Means had a lifelong history of criminal conduct. One historian has described him as “an out-and-out scoundrel, in almost any way one might have imagined.” Robert H. Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 40. Means’s book on Harding claimed that Florence Harding had hired him to investigate her husband’s adulterous connections with Nan Britton (1896–1995), and that Florence Harding murdered the president with poison sometime after Means reported the results of his investigation to her. Ibid., 30–49.

107. Here, in the margin, in Ruby Darrow’s hand, is written: “write first | am away good deal.”

108. Lewis E. Lawes, Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing (New York: R. Long & R.R. Smith, 1932) (largely devoted to describing Lawes’s experiences as warden of Sing Sing prison).

109. Darrow might be referring to his visit to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, four years earlier, during which he gave a public lecture on crime.

110. Darrow and Mantinband debated the question “Is Religion Necessary?” on 30 November 1932 at the Majestic Theatre in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The debate was sponsored by the Jewish Civil League in Williamsport and presided over by a rector of a local Episcopalian church.

111. In late 1930, some political promoters in the South began organizing “Roosevelt Southern Clubs” and soliciting memberships at one dollar apiece. The clubs were not sanctioned by Roosevelt’s campaign, and in early 1932, the campaign disavowed any association with the clubs and refused to reimburse the promoters for their expenses. In retaliation, the promoters revealed that they had the backing of the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta, Georgia, and they tried to connect Roosevelt publicly to the Klan. The charges against Roosevelt spread throughout the country. See Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), 276–77. Darrow is apparently referring to the effect that these charges had on some attendees of the Democratic convention in Chicago in late June and early July 1932.

112. House’s response to Darrow said that he was sending a copy of Darrow’s letter to Roosevelt and explained that Darrow had hit on “one of the serious problems of [the] campaign.” According to House, the “Big Interests” had “fanned the flame in the only direction that would produce results unfavorable to Roosevelt”: “They were never more bent on beating a man for the nomination than they were Roosevelt. The Boston News Bureau and the Wall Street Journal both had items a few days before the Convention stating that the betting was five to one against Roosevelt’s nomination. We ran this down and found that there were no such betting odds but that it was merely propaganda.” House to Darrow, 26 August 1932, TLc, CtY-BR, House Papers, Box 35, Folder 1106.

113. Newspapers reported in September 1932 that Darrow had joined the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, where Dietrich was minister. See “Darrow Joins Unitarian Church and Will Lecture on Humanism,” New York Times, 19 September 1932.

114. Charles Francis Potter (1885–1962), minister, author, and lecturer. Potter started his career as a Baptist minister, converted to Unitarianism by 1914, and eventually became a Humanist. He established the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929. He also served as a consultant for the attorneys for John Scopes in 1925. Potter wrote several books in the last thirty or so years of his life, including an autobiography and a popular study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

115. The book to which Darrow is referring is The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (New York: Macmillan, 1932), a collection of Addams’s memorial and funeral addresses. Addams sent the book to Darrow with a note saying that Jessica Binford had told her of his recent “fine address” for Russell McWilliams before the state supreme court. Addams to Darrow, 20 October 1932, ALS, MnU-L, Darrow Collection.

116. Bennett had arranged for some type of contract for Darrow in the movie industry. Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbee, The Bennett Playbill (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 229.

117. Technocracy was a political movement that became popular in the early 1930s. Its adherents believed that technicians, especially engineers—and not politicians or businessmen—were the ones most capable of making the changes in the economic order that were necessary to respond to the Great Depression. William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), x.

118. Benjamin Lindsey had moved to Los Angeles in 1931, after the disbarment proceedings against him in Denver. See Darrow to Lindsey, 17 December 1929, n.187.

119. Darrow is referring to his defense of Russell McWilliams. See Darrow to Taylor, 16 May 1932, n.98.

120. In December 1932, Darrow joined the defense of seventeen-year-old James (“Iggy”) Varecha (1915–78). Varecha, who had an extensive juvenile record, had pleaded guilty to the charge of murdering a man during a holdup. He confessed not only to the murder but also to raping the niece of a deputy police commissioner on the night of the murder. He was sentenced to death on 16 December 1932. Darrow began working with Verecha’s lawyer a week later, but all of their post-sentencing efforts to have the death sentence vacated in the trial court failed. See, e.g., “‘Iggy’ Varecha Must Die, Is Court Ruling: Darrow Loses Plea to Vacate Sentence,” Chicago Tribune, 6 January 1933. In June 1933, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Varecha because he was an escapee from the state hospital at the time of the crime and had been placed there after a juvenile court determined that he was “feeble minded.” People v. Varecha, 353 Ill. 52, 186 N.E. 607 (1933). Before his new trial, Varecha was judged by the court to be sane and he pleaded guilty again. This time, he was sentenced to one hundred years in prison. One of Darrow’s former law partners (William W. Smith) represented Varecha in his appeal and later in the trial court. Darrow apparently did not participate in the appellate proceedings or in later trial court proceedings. Ibid. (listing attorneys for Varecha); “Varecha’s 2d Murder Trial Starts Dec. 4,” Chicago Tribune, 19 November 1933; “Varecha Gets 100 Years for Holdup Killing,” Chicago Tribune, 5 December 1933.

121. Matthew Quay (1833–1904), politician. Quay was a Republican political boss in Pennsylvania. He served in the Civil War with distinction and later owned and edited a newspaper He was secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1873–78, 1879–82, managed the presidential campaign of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and served in the United States Senate, 1887–99, 1901–02, with an interruption in service caused by corruption charges.

122. Boies Penrose (1860–1921), politician. Penrose, a political lieutenant of Matthew Quay and later a political boss himself, served as a representative, 1884–86, and senator, 1886–97, in the state legislature in Pennsylvania before serving four terms in the United States Senate, 1897–1921. He was an isolationist, a friend of big business, a staunch conservative, and a strong opponent of many reforms, including Prohibition, female suffrage, federal income tax, and labor rights. One of his brothers, Richard Penrose (1863–1931), was a geologist who taught for a time at the University of Chicago and another brother, Charles Penrose (1862–1925), was a surgeon in Philadelphia.

123. Simon Cameron (1799–1889), businessman and politician. Cameron invested in banks, railroads, and other businesses before he was elected to fill a vacancy for Pennsylvania in the United States Senate, 1845–49. Later, he was reelected as a Republican, 1857–61, before becoming secretary of war, 1861–62, in the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln (1809–65). After a brief stint as United States minister to Russia, 1862, he was reelected to the United States Senate, 1867–77. He lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and had a scandalous career, often facing charges of corruption. Cameron controlled the Republican political machine in Pennsylvania (until Matthew Quay took charge), and this control benefited Cameron’s son, J. Donald Cameron (1833–1918), who was secretary of war, 1876–77, in the cabinet of Ulysses Grant (1822–85), and who succeeded his father in the United States Senate, 1877–97.

124. Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946), conservationist and politician. From 1898 to 1910, Pinchot was in charge of the federal government’s forest work. His last position was chief of the United States Forest Service. He was also a professor of forestry at Yale University, 1903–36. For two terms, he was a Republican governor of Pennsylvania, 1923–27, 1931–35. While governor, he strongly supported Prohibition and other Progressive-era causes. His wife, Cornelia Pinchot (1881–1960), was a suffragist, proponent of Prohibition, supporter of trade unions, and twice an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, in 1928 and 1932. His brother, Amos Pinchot (1873–1944), was a lawyer in New York City. He helped organize the Progressive Party in 1912 and established himself as a liberal reformer, campaigning for labor and civil liberties, among other causes.

125. Rockwell explained his concept of God in his letter to Darrow:

You have kidded me about “God” and Jesus a lot, and I am coming back at you in this brief comment, declaring my concept of God, with the odds of about 1000 to 1, against me that I can convert you to reason!

My God is self existant perfect life, perfect intelligence, The Creative Principle, ageless, diseaseless, free whole and end endless. Infinite Mind and its Infinite manifestation, hence ever & always present, and available, all same as the law or “principle” of music or mathematics. Old Habakkuk whom you have read and disected also has “declared” saying: “(God) Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity. It must be obvious then, even your hardened encysted burl of unrighteousness, that Perfection cannot know of imperfection. Perfection and Principle are Siamese twins, cannot be separated; Cause & Effect as self existant Law cannot be reversed,—just IS.

Now the honest simple Truth about your activity in mixing with things during your long life, is that you have proven a thousand times and more, that you DO love God! “God” used to have four letters in His name GOOD—the Icelanders still say it that way. And you have loved Good; you not only love it, but you have been doing good for the 40 years more or less that I have known you. I know of a single Good deed that you did, that cost you a $100,000 and bankrupted you for ten years or twenty? And you didn’t have to do it; no compulsion at all, and nobody asked you to do it—and ALL be cause you loved GOOD more than you did safety or security or any other one thing in life. So your “two foot rule” goes out of the window.

Now dear Clarence, all you need to do is to keep right on loving and doing “Good” and I’ll meet you another day in the Kingdom of heaven!

Lovingly Rock (Himself). | Affectionate regards to Ruby.

Rockwell to Darrow, 14 May 1933, TLS, IdBB, Rockwell-Darrow Collection.

126. Llewellyn Jones (1884–1961), author and literary critic, and his wife, Susan. Llewellyn Jones was literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, 1914–32, on the editorial staff of the Chicago Herald-Examiner, 1933–34, and later, after he moved to Boston, editor of the Christian Register, 1938–41, a weekly journal of the Unitarian churches. He was the author of several books, including How to Criticize Books (1928) and How to Read Books (1930), as well as many articles and reviews, including a favorable review of Darrow’s autobiography: “Clarence Darrow Is a Don Quixote Who Can Go on without Illusions,” Chicago Evening Post, 5 February 1932.

127. What address Adelman sent to Darrow is unknown.

128. James Gillespie Blaine (1830–93), politician. Blaine was a Republican congressman, 1863–76, and senator from Maine, 1876–81, and secretary of state in the cabinets of Presidents Garfield and Arthur, 1881, and Harrison, 1889–92. He was also the Republican nominee for president in 1884 and several times an unsuccessful candidate for the nomination. Charges of corruption dogged Blaine much of his political career.

129. Murphy’s notes written on this letter and his response show that the “young woman” was Stella Pukas (b. 1912?), who was writing about her brother, Edward Pukas (1914–1969), who had been sentenced to prison for “12¹/₂ to 25” years for armed robbery in 1930. The Pukases lived in Chicago with their mother. Their parents, both Lithuanian immigrants, were divorced. Among other notes written on Darrow’s letter were some facts of the case: “No record in Chicago. Stopped for gas and used guns. Recd no money. 16 yrs old when sentenced.”

130. Murphy assured Darrow that he would look into Pukas’s case: “You may be assured that I will be very happy to take a person[al] interest in this case and call upon Miss Pukas’ brother in Jackson Prison. After I talk with Mr. Pukas and the parole commissioner I will again communicate with you.” Murphy to Darrow, TLc, 8 September 1933, MiU, Murphy Collection. Whether Darrow and Murphy’s interest in Edward Pukas had any effect on his sentence is unknown. Pukas was paroled to Chicago in December 1936. Prisoner Record for Edward Pukas, Serial No. 27997, Mi-SA, Jackson Prison Archives.

131. In late August 1933, Darrow, at Murphy’s apparent urging, spoke at a hearing of the National Recovery Administration in Washington, D.C., to encourage the NRA to remove a clause in its tentative code that would have prohibited merchants from buying prisoner-made goods. Darrow argued that prisoners should be made to feel useful: “A man must do something besides pounding rocks if our penitentiaries are ever to be more than crime factories. . . . What he does must be useful.” “Use of Prison-Made Goods,” Washington Post, 29 August 1933. See Murphy to Darrow, 8 September 1933, TLc, MiU-H, George Murphy Collection (“You were so considerate, as usual, in speaking before the N.R.A. committee in Washington. . . . Before I left Washington I was given to understand from parties in the legal department of the N.R.A. that the clause in the code you spoke about would be at least modified and possibly eliminated.”).

132. Patrick H. O’Brien (1868–1959), lawyer and judge. O’Brien practiced law in Wisconsin and Michigan before becoming a state court judge in Michigan, 1912–22. He moved to Detroit in 1922, where he was active in the local operations of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, 1932, before being elected state attorney general, 1933–34. Later, he was elected to a probate judgeship, 1939–56.

133. The identity of “Judge Clark” is unknown. He might have been a retired judge; no sitting federal, state, or local judge in Salt Lake City in 1933 with the name of “Clark” was identified.

134. In late November 1933, two men were arrested in San Jose, California, in connection with the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart, a twenty-two-year-old son of a wealthy department store owner in San Jose. While the suspects, who had reportedly confessed to the crime, were waiting in jail, a mob of people stormed the jail and lynched them. After the lynching, California governor Rolph issued a statement praising the work of the mob, which prompted a rebuke from President Roosevelt. Older later published an editorial describing the lynching and doubting whether mankind was any less cruel now than in ancient times: “Two cold-blooded murderers were taken from the jail in San Jose, by a mob, a gay, laughing, joking mob, and hanged to trees in St. James Park. Before they were killed their clothes were stripped from their bodies, their faces were stamped upon by the heels of the lynchers and an attempt was made to burn one of them. The women laughed merrily and applauded each cruel act. While one of the murderers was writhing in agony some of the women shouted a line from a coarse play, ‘Come up and see me sometime!’” Fremont Older, “Man’s Advance Is Slow,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 6 December 1933.

135. The day before Darrow wrote this letter, Essling had heard Darrow speak at a convention of the Northwest Shoe Retailers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and he had a brief conversation with Darrow after the speech. See “Many Faults in NRA, Clarence Darrow Tells Shoe Men,” Commercial Bulletin and Apparel Merchant, February 1935, 38–39 (text of Darrow’s speech). Sometime before the convention, Essling had sent a letter to Darrow complimenting him on his autobiography and enclosing an appreciative note from Paul Stauff (1887–1983), a chemist and friend of Essling’s who worked for the Eveleth Water Company in Eveleth, Minnesota. Telephone interview with William Essling, St. Paul, Minnesota, 3 June 1996.

136. Essling had asked Darrow for a copy of a speech that Darrow delivered on the subject of tariffs during a “Free Trade Convention” at Central Music Hall in Chicago in 1889. Ibid. Henry George spoke at the same meeting. In his autobiography, Darrow described this speech as being very favorably received by his audience. Story, 46–48. See “The Workingmen and the Tariff,” Chicago Herald, 21 February 1889 (text of Darrow’s speech).

137. Some forty attorneys, including Darrow, Altgeld, Daniel Cruice, and Edgar Lee Masters, met in March 1902 to organize a local bar association. The aim of the organization was reportedly to “do work [that the Chicago Bar Association had] neglected.” The desired reforms included raising “the limit of $5,000 indemnity for a human life, the revision of government by injunction, . . . the selection of better men for the judiciary, . . . uplift[ing] the character of the bar and . . . see[ing] that men who commit offenses worthy of such punishment [are] disbarred.” “Lawyers to Form New Body,” Chicago Tribune, 8 March 1902.

138. Johnson had sent a telegram to Darrow explaining that Gerald P. Nye (1892–1971), United States senator (Republican) from North Dakota, had recommended that Darrow serve as a member of President Roosevelt’s new National Recovery Review Board. Johnson invited Darrow to accept the position. See Johnson to Darrow, 16 February 1934, Tele, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers. Nye also sent a telegram encouraging Darrow to accept the position. See Nye to Darrow, 16 February 1934, Tele, DLC-MSS, Darrow Papers. The NRRB was conceived by Nye as a means of studying the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a federal agency established in mid-1933 to develop and administer a system of fair-competition codes for a variety of industries. The NRA was supposed to encourage industrial recovery and combat widespread unemployment. But by late 1933, the agency (and Johnson) had been accused of being authoritarian and its five-hundred-some codes were considered by many as encouraging monopolies and thwarting competition and labor unionization. See John Kennedy Ohl, Hugh S. Johnson and the New Deal (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 138–217.

139. The last ten words of this sentence were added in the hand of Ruby Darrow.

140. Lowell B. Mason (1893–1983), lawyer. Mason was the son of William E. Mason (1850–1921), Republican senator from Illinois, 1897–1903, and a friend of Darrow. He obtained an LL.B. from Northwestern University, 1914, and practiced law in Chicago before Darrow hired him as general counsel for the National Recovery Review Board in 1934. In Chicago, Mason had worked with Darrow on some criminal law matters. He had been made nearly penniless by the stock market crash of 1929. See Stephen J. Sniegoski, “The Darrow Board and the Downfall of the NRA,” Continuity, Spring/Fall 1990, 69 (citing author’s interview with Mason).

141. This letter was published by the Chicago News during a controversy involving Carlson and Irene Castle (1893–1969), a popular dancer and actress who was active in the anti-vivisection and animal-rights movement. Castle (then Irene Castle McLaughlin) wanted the city council of Chicago to stop allowing unclaimed dogs and other animals at the city pound to be used for scientific experimentation. See “Anti-Vivisection Move Assailed as Blow to City,” Chicago Tribune, 28 November 1934. Carlson asked the Chicago News to publish this letter after Castle claimed that Darrow was among her supporters. The letter was introduced with the following note from Carlson: “Irene Castle McLaughlin lists Clarence Darrow as an antivivisectionist. In order to correct that will you kindly print the inclosed letter from Clarence Darrow to me March 11, 1934. I have Mr. Darrow’s permission to publish this letter.” Carlson was a strong supporter of animal research at the University of Chicago and one of the people who used the animals from the pound in experiments. (In 1946, Carlson founded and organized the National Society for Medical Research, for the purpose of ensuring that medical researchers could use animals in their work.)

142. John F. Sinclair (1885–1950), banker and writer. Sinclair obtained an A.B., 1906, and LL.B., 1909, from the University of Minnesota and worked in banking, 1912–22. He also worked as a newspaper editor and writer in New York City, 1923–31, and wrote a syndicated column on business for newspapers, 1927–31.

143. Darrow apparently did not know that Sinclair had tendered his resignation to President Roosevelt two days earlier. Sinclair told Roosevelt that the National Recovery Review Board, under the chairmanship of Darrow, was “really a one-man institution” that showed an “utter disregard for fair play or the basic facts.” Sinclair to Roosevelt, TLS, 28 April 1934, NHyF. According to newspaper reports, Sinclair “was opposed to the board’s policies because it made recommendations on specific codes without getting the views of code authorities or NRA officials.” “J.F. Sinclair Quits the Darrow Board,” New York Times, 8 May 1934. Sinclair submitted a report dissenting from the findings of the NRRB. “Text of Sinclair Report,” Washington Post, 21 May 1934.

144. Samuel C. Henry (1869?–1949) was a former president of the National Retail Druggists Association. Henry and the other signatories of this letter were appointed by President Roosevelt to the NRRB by executive order on 7 March 1934.

145. Fred P. Mann Sr. (1869–1942) was the owner of a successful department store in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.

146. William W. Neal (1896–1946) was owner of the Marion Hosiery Mills in Marion, North Carolina.

147. In a series of three reports sharply critical of the National Recovery Administration, the NRRB concluded that the “fair-competition codes” established by the NRA promoted monopolistic practices and oppressed small businesses. The NRRB’s first report was followed by scathing replies from Hugh Johnson and the NRA, criticizing the substance of the report and the investigative methods of the NRRB. “Darrow Board Finds NRA Tends toward Monopoly: Johnson Condemns Report,” New York Times, 21 May 1934; “Reply of the Recovery Administration to the Criticisms by the Darrow Board,” New York Times, 21 May 1934.

148. In late November 1934, unarmed, fifteen-year-old Millard Crow, of Buffalo, New York, was shot and killed outside an apartment building by policemen who said that they suspected him of being a burglar. In early December, the district attorney, Walter Newcomb, conducted an investigation and announced that there was no wrongdoing on the part of the police. “Newcomb Avoids Controversy over Boy’s Death,” Buffalo Courier-Express, 2 December 1934. Several years later, a new district attorney cleared Crow of any criminal activity. “Prosecutor Thanked,” Buffalo Courier-Express, 13 November 1940.

AFTER 1934

1. Ruby’s signature is in her hand.

2. The identity of “William McKnight” is unknown. He was apparently a young man interested in becoming a lawyer and he wrote to Darrow for advice.

3. Darrow was traveling in the Western Reserve area of Ohio, visiting friends and acquaintances from when he lived in the area as a child and young man.