Clarence Darrow Speaks in Quincy

On October 5, 1913, the

Quincy
Daily Whig

informed readers that “the prominent Chicago lawyer” Clarence
Darrow would “address Quincy unionists and sympathizers of labor” at the Labor Temple.
An October 8 story reported—without a byline—his presentation, observing that
Darrow “at the age of 56 is in the zenith of mental power…gifted to the point
that approaches brilliance…is dissatisfied, discontented and disgruntled.”

In 1894, he had resigned as corporate counsel
for a Chicago railroad to represent Eugene V. Debs and the American Railway
Union striking against the Pullman Palace Car Co. The strike had disrupted mail delivery, and
Attorney General Richard Olney had obtained an injunction prohibiting Debs and
union leaders from “compelling or
inducing” any employees of the railroads “to refuse or fail to perform any of
their duties.”

A federal district court found
Debs in contempt, and the Supreme Court affirmed his jail sentence. The

Quincy
Daily Herald

reported on July 18 that “Debs Slept in
a Cell Last Night—Refuses to Give Bail and Goes to Jail”, quoting his
statement, “We will see whether a man can be sent to jail without trial for
organizing against oppression.” Despite Darrow’s loss in this important case,
he became the preeminent union lawyer in the United States.

Before enactment of the National
Labor Relations Act of 1935, courts often deemed union organizing and strikes
“conspiracies” injuring businesses and impairing contractual relationships
between employers and workers. Writing in 1931, Harvard law professor Felix
Frankfurter (later a Supreme Court justice), and law student Nathan Greene argued
that these rulings led “to grave abuses that intensify rather than compose industrial
conflicts.”

Consequently, Darrow’s labor law
practice compelled him to be a criminal defense attorney. A June 25, 1907 front-page

Daily Whig

story pictured Darrow addressing the jury as he successfully defended
William “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”),
for conspiracy to murder former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg.

Darrow’s Quincy audience likely knew of Darrow’s great crisis in 1911. While
representing brothers James and John McNamara, California union leaders accused
of bombing the anti-labor

Los Angeles Times

, and causing 21 deaths with
many others injured, Darrow had concluded that only a plea agreement for prison
would prevent their conviction and execution. Many labor leaders and workers
thought Darrow had surrendered too easily.

Simultaneously in that case, prosecutors alleged that Darrow had attempted
to bribe jurors by directing his investigator to approach a juror, who then
alerted authorities. In what was either a legitimate sting operation or an
illegal entrapment, the police claimed that Darrow arrived at the scene just as
they observed the investigator hand money to the juror.

At trial jurors acquitted Darrow
after deliberating 27 minutes. Although represented by California lawyer Earl
Rogers, Darrow addressed the jury: “I am not on trial for having sought to
bribe a man … I am on trial because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend
of the oppressed, because I have stood by labor all of these years.” A second jury, considering evidence of a separate
alleged bribe, could not agree on a verdict, and prosecutors withdrew charges
upon Darrow’s agreement never to appear again in a California courtroom.

Most biographers have accepted Darrow’s claim of innocence, although doubt
remains. Fearing the episode would destroy his law practice, he returned to wider
intellectual interests: reforming criminal law and protecting intellectual
freedom. In Chicago he had been the law partner of John Peter Altgeld (Illinois’s
future reform governor) and, in the city’s cultural circles, an unsurpassed
debater of public issues. His Quincy visit was part of a speaking tour.

The

Daily Whig’s

1913
sub-headline that he “Tears Up the Constitution and Jumps on the Courts”
conveyed the anxiety he elicited among the establishment of his day. The story
quoted what Darrow probably considered his personal creed: “Hasten the day when
every laboring man will be a capitalist and every capitalist a laboring man
jointly to own” the earth “and govern it for the common good”; a “universal
brotherhood to take the place of narrow creed of religion.”

His law practice did not collapse, and he
remained the nation’s foremost trial lawyer with three cases establishing his iconic
reputation. In 1924, after advising Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb to admit
murdering a teenage boy, with Chicago demanding revenge amid homophobic and
anti-Semitic rage, he convinced a judge to impose sentences of life
imprisonment, not death.

In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union retained Darrow to represent
Tennessee school teacher John T. Scopes whom a jury convicted for teaching the
theory of biological evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed because
the trial judge had fined Scopes $100, a function assigned to the jury.
Tennessee never retried Scopes and repealed the evolution law in 1967.

Additionally, retained by the
NAACP in 1925, Darrow won acquittal on self-defense grounds of African American
brothers Dr. Ossian and Henry Sweet, charged with murder for a death occurring when
a mob threatened Dr. Sweet’s home in a segregated white Detroit neighborhood. Apart from the legal issues litigated, each of
these cases allowed Darrow to address problems of great concern to him: capital
punishment, free speech and racial equality.

On March 14, 1938, the

Herald Whig

carried a length Associated
Press obituary of the “noted lawyer-philosopher” who was “not a criminal
lawyer” but “a practicing philosopher, a student of society, of crime and its
causes and cures.” A federal judge delivered a eulogy for a lawyer who had so
often challenged the legal system. Perhaps some readers remembered the 1913
speech by that “dissatisfied, discontented and disgruntled” visitor from
Chicago.

SOURCES

In
re Debs,

158 U.S. 564 (1895). Online
copy of opinion:

.

“Clarence Darrow’s Death
Ends the Famous Career of Lawyer Philosopher”,

Quincy Herald Whig,

March
14, 1938, p.1.

“Darrow at the Temple”,

Quincy
Daily Herald

(October 8, 1913), p.8

“Darrow Will Speak to the
Unionists”,

Quincy Daily Whig,

October 5, 1913, p.1

“Debs Slept
in a Cell Last Night”,

Quincy Daily Herald

, July 18, 1894, p.8.

Frankfurter, Felix, and Nathan Greene, “Congressional
Power over the Labor Injunction”, 31 Columbia Law Review, pp. 385, 387 (1931).

“Haywood
is Plot Victim—Charge of Clarence Darrow in His Speech for the Defense”,

Quincy
Daily Whig,

June 25, 1907, p.1.

North, Luke, ed., “Plea of
Clarence Darrow in his Own Defense…” (1912), p.4, University of Minnesota Law
Library, Clarence Darrow Digital Collection.

Online copy of transcript: