Darrow, Clarence (Seward)

Clarence Darrow, 1924.

(credit: Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society)

(born April 18, 1857, near Kinsman, Ohio, U.S.—died March 13, 1938, Chicago, Ill.) U.S. lawyer and orator. He attended law school for only one year before being admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. Darrow moved to Chicago in 1887 and immediately joined the effort to free anarchists charged with murder in the Haymarket Riot. He was appointed Chicago city corporation counsel (1890) and then became general attorney for the Chicago and North Western Railway. His defense of Eugene V. Debs on charges stemming from the Pullman Strike (1894) established Darrow's reputation as a union and criminal lawyer. He represented striking Pennsylvania coal miners, drawing attention to working conditions and the use of child labour (1902–03); secured the acquittal of William Haywood in the assassination of Gov. Frank R. Steunenberg of Idaho (1907); and sought to defend the McNamara brothers, accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times building (1911). He saved Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold from a death sentence for the murder of 14-year-old Robert Franks and won acquittal for members of an African American family who had fought a mob trying to expel them from their home in a white Detroit neighbourhood (1925–26). Perhaps his most famous case was the Scopes trial (1925), in which he defended a high school teacher who was charged with violating a Tennessee state law against teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

Darrow, Clarence (Seward) (1857–1938) lawyer, social reformer, author; born in Kinsman, Ohio. Admitted to the bar in 1878, he began as a small-town Ohio lawyer, but moved to Chicago in 1887. Political involvement with reform-minded Democrats led to a successful civil practice, then to two decades of labor law, ending in 1913. He gained a national reputation defending Eugene V. Debs and other railway union leaders in connection with the 1894 Pullman strike. Later came sensational criminal cases that displayed his eminence as a defense lawyer, especially the Loeb-Leopold kidnap, murder, and ransom case (1924) and the Scopes anti-evolution "monkey trial" (1925) in which he argued against William Jennings Bryan. (This is the case celebrated in Jerome Lawrence's play, Inherit the Wind.) He opposed capital punishment and was a popular public speaker on religious, social, political, scientific, and literary issues. One of his law partners (1903–11) was the poet Edgar Lee Masters. His many books include Crime: Its Cause and Treatment (1922).

Darrow, Clarence

(1857–1938) lawyer; Bryan’s nemesis in Scopes trial (1925). [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 131]

See : Defender