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Darrow, Clarence Seward, 1857–1938, American lawyer, b. Kinsman, Ohio. He first practiced law in Ashtabula, Ohio. In 1887 he moved to Chicago, where he was corporation counsel for several years and conducted the cases that the city brought to reduce transit rates. Later, as general counsel for the Chicago and Northwestern RR, he resigned (1894) to defend Eugene V. Debs Debs, Eugene Victor, 1855–1926, American Socialist leader, b. Terre Haute, Ind. Leaving high school to work in the railroad shops in Terre Haute, he became a railroad fireman (1871) and organized (1875) a local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen.
..... Click the link for more information. and others in connection with the Pullman strike. The defense was unsuccessful. Darrow soon renounced his lucrative practice to defend the "underdog." A staunch opponent of capital punishment, he exerted his tremendous courtroom skill in behalf of those charged with murder; none of his murder trial clients was ever sentenced to death, although he failed to win a reprieve (1894) for Robert Prendergast, who had already been convicted of murdering Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison before Darrow took his case. Darrow procured, in 1906, the acquittal of William D. Haywood Haywood, William Dudley, 1869–1928, American labor leader, known as Big Bill Haywood, b. Salt Lake City, Utah. He began work as a miner at 15 years of age.
..... Click the link for more information. and his associates on the charge of murdering former Governor Steunenberg of Idaho. He offended many socialists (with whom he had been popularly identified) by introducing a plea of guilty in his defense of the McNamara brothers in the Los Angeles Times dynamiting case (1911). Darrow was himself tried for allegedly bribing a juror in the trial, but he was acquitted. In the Chicago "thrill" murder trial (1924) of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb he saved the defendants from execution by a plea of temporary insanity. Long an agnostic, Darrow fought fundamentalist religious tenets in the Scopes evolution case (1925; see Scopes trial Scopes trial, Tennessee legal case involving the teaching of evolution in public schools. A statute was passed (Mar., 1925) in Tennessee that prohibited the teaching in public schools of theories contrary to accepted interpretation of the biblical account of human
..... Click the link for more information. ). Pitted against William Jennings Bryan Bryan, William Jennings (brī`ən), 1860–1925, American political leader, b. Salem, Ill.
..... Click the link for more information. , he defended without success a schoolteacher charged with violating a Tennessee statute prohibiting teaching that man descended from other forms of life. Many felt, nevertheless, that Darrow's examination of Bryan on the witness stand did much to discredit fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Among Darrow's books are a novel, Farmington (1904); Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922); and Attorney for the Damned, a collection of his defense summations, ed. by Arthur Weinberg (1957).

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1932); biographies by I. Stone (1941, repr. 1971) and M. Gurko (1965).