Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow was born on April 18, 1857, in Kinsman, Ohio. He was a prestigious civil and criminal lawyer and a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. His most famous trials to date are the Scopes trial and the Leopold v. Loeb case. Born into a family of eight, his father was a non-believer living in a highly religious community. It was from this influence that Darrow developed a particular skepticism and attitude towards religion as a whole. In 1880, Darrow married Jessie Dohl, and the couple had a son three years later.

Seeking more opportunities, Darrow and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1887. There he became a close friend of Judge John Peter Altgeld, who would later be elected governor of Illinois in 1892. Altgeld’s ideas and actions regarding better working conditions and worker’s rights influenced Darrow’s own ideas regarding these themes, which he would carry a long way. Darrow started as a common civil lawyer, but in 1894, he decided that his career for the next 20 years would be shaped around labor law. In that same year, Darrow defended Eugene V. Debs, a labor leader against a court order that accused Debs of leading a worker’s strike on the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. Although Darrow was unsuccessful, in 1906-1907 he successfully defended William D. Haywood, the leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who was charged with murdering a former governor of Idaho. This trial would be one of his last as a labor lawyer, because in 1911 while defending two brothers accused of murdering 21 people by blowing the Los Angeles Times building, was rumored to have bribed one of the members of the jury. Darrow was charged with misconduct, and even though he was found not guilty, this marked the end of his career as a labor lawyer.

Darrow was always an opponent of capital punishment, which was a big factor in influencing him to become a criminal defense lawyer. Darrow’s most famous trial came in 1924, the Leopold v. Loeb case, where two Chicago students murdered somebody to see if they could get away with it. Instead of defending their innocence, Darrow focused on making sure that the two students didn’t receive the death penalty, and was eventually successful due to the numerous testimonies given by psychiatrists supporting Darrow’s ideas on capital punishment. During this period, Darrow was also involved in the Scopes trial in 1925. The issue in this trial was whether the state legislature could prohibit the teachings of Charles Darwin’s religious philosophy in schools. Darrow sought to defend John T. Scopes, the teacher that brought up the issue of Darwinism in his classroom. Ultimately, Darrow was unsuccessful, but this trial was so significant because of the cross-examination that Darrow conducted on William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate during that time, which caused people to question the idea of a strict interpretation of the Bible and the validity of it.

Darrow died on March 13, 1938, in Illinois, Chicago. By then, he was an extremely accomplished lawyer and had defended his ideas to the fullest. Towards the end of his life, Darrow wrote many books including Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1929) and The Story of My Life (1932). His legacy lives on through his passion for worker’s rights, anti-capital punishment, and his fight against religious exclusion.

Sources cited:
https://www.notablebiographies.com/Co-Da/Darrow-Clarence.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clarence-Darrow