On the first page of this
biography, Andrew Kersten calls Clarence Darrow America's greatest lawyer. That's
not quite right. The title cannot belong to a man who tried to bribe a jury,
represented the mafia, and defended unrepentant murderers and terrorists for
the right fee—not when there are Thurgood Marshall, Louis Brandeis, and Charles
Hamilton Houston to choose from. That said, it is beyond dispute that Darrow
was a master in the courtroom, particularly in cross-examination and closing
argument. He married a skeptical intellectualism to the savvy of an expert huckster, resting his foot on the jury box as
he quoted Tolstoy and aimed for the spittoon.
Darrow had a talent for finding his way into cases
that combined great liberal principles with flashbulb publicity. He fought
creationism in the Scopes monkey trial; defended labor leaders and anarchists
from conspiracy charges; and represented blacks in Detroit who fired back at a
lynch mob. He also served a term as a state legislator in Illinois, and made
speeches and wrote books espousing a surly, progressive, but unpredictable
politics. Today we might call him a lefty maverick.
Mavericks make enemies, and Darrow
had plenty. The labor movement and its socialist captain, Eugene V. Debs, never
forgave Darrow for directing his clients to plead guilty in the Los Angeles Times bombing case. (A pair
of labor activists dynamited the editorial offices of the anti-union paper,
killing 21, and Darrow led the defense.) Civil rights leaders were appalled
when he defended the white murderers of a native Hawaiian who had been falsely
accused of raping a white woman. And the women's movement—which Darrow had once
supported—watched him turn away during the debate and passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment, which gave women the vote. One of his most famous cases, the defense
of young murderers Leopold and Loeb, was on one level a struggle against the
death penalty and a retributive system of criminal punishment. Closer to the
pavement, Darrow defended the two sadistic killers because their families were
rich and promised to pay handsomely.
Clarence
Darrow: American Iconoclast is, as Kersten admits,
the umpteenth biography of the Old Lion. At under 300 pages it cannot compete
with the comprehensive studies like Kevin Tierney's Darrow: A Biography. Yet the book is a
highly readable survey of Darrow's major cases and adventures, given from the
perspective of a labor historian. It has two weaknesses. The first is the
author's tendency to give his subject a free pass. For instance, Kersten leaves
intact Darrow's absurd justification for abandoning women's suffrage: "He
doubted that widening the polity would have any effect on politics for average
Americans." Second, Kersten defines Darrow's political and social mission
so broadly that it becomes meaningless: an inconsistent civil libertarian,
labor man, and civil rights advocate, Darrow always sought to advance "freedom
and liberty." Under this squishy definition, every
case Darrow took fits under the same enormous roof that also houses the John
Birch society, birthers, and Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The attempt to label Darrow fails not only because
of his unpredictability, but also because, like most lawyers, he was at bottom
a hired gun, motivated less by right and wrong than by what his client
required. It is for this reason that few lawyers are remembered. Then again,
few of them could put on a show quite like Darrow.
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