Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast

FOR MY GRANDFATHER,

Irving W. Kersten

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

1. A Midwestern Childhood

2. A Bum Profession

3. Becoming the Attorney for the Damned

4. Fighting for the People in and out of Court

5. Labor’s Lyrical Lawyer

6. In Defense of Dynamiters

7. Darrow Defends Darrow

8. War and Regret

9. The Old Lion Still Hunts

10. No Rest, No Retirement, No Retreat

Afterword

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

Acknowledgments

Index

Also by Andrew E. Kersten

Copyright

Preface

I imagine Clarence Darrow would have winced at the thought of yet another biography. Certainly it was not because the celebrated lawyer was afraid of the airing of his imperfections. As he once told an adoring crowd of unionists, most lawyers only tell you about the cases they win. I can tell you about some I lose.¹ And it is not because he wanted to avoid scrutiny. He wrote two autobiographies, a few pieces of fiction, and dozens of statements of his political and philosophical beliefs. Indeed, there was a time when he worried that his life might be forgotten. I fear that I shall die, and future generations will never know that I have lived, he wrote in 1904, or I am quite certain that no one else will ever write my story.² But historians, journalists, lawyers, playwrights, filmmakers, and avid admirers have produced numerous accounts of his life and his work. What could be left to say?

Further, Darrow might have thought twice about my writing this biography. In many ways, I’m not like those who have come before. I am not directly connected to the grand tradition of writers on the left. I have no legal training, nor am I a part of any crusading lawyer’s quest. I have not dedicated my life in pursuit of understanding or investigating or memorializing Darrow’s life and legal career. But those deficits aside, I do share a long-standing fascination with America’s greatest attorney. My first introduction to him came when I was a young boy. In 1975, my father’s mother died, and my grandfather, to whom I’ve dedicated this book and who had suffered a massive stroke just weeks before my birth, moved into a nursing home. His and his wife’s book collection ended up in my family’s garage. On slow, hot summer days, I often dug through those boxes, hoping for old baseball cards and finding neat books instead. Among my first discoveries was Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense, the abridged paperback edition, now held together with a rubber band. For thirty years, I have turned to Stone’s Darrow for my sensibilities, for comfort, and for inspiration. Yet up to now that passion has been private. I cherish Darrow for the same reasons others do. Darrow lived life fearlessly, sometimes recklessly. But if you were in trouble, he was the lawyer you wanted, and he was the friend you needed. He was extraordinarily kind and sensitive, especially to those in need and to those less fortunate. He noted no distinction among people. This in part explains why Darrow is the subject of more than one loving biography, poem, and work of art. This biography does not share that devotion, though I admire Darrow and his life’s work very much. What it does add to the literature is an emphasis on his politics. In my view, what made Darrow an American icon was his social and political activism. Although we can see his life as a compendium of cases, many of them major, groundbreaking ones, I argue that his importance to United States history is not so much as a jurist but as a politico. It was Darrow’s dedication to transforming American and even world politics that explains his life, and it is through the prism of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century politics that Darrow can be seen and understood.

From the end of the Civil War through the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, American politics was defined by a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. For nearly his entire life, and with a few exceptions, Clarence Darrow sided with the latter against the former. He was the attorney, representative, and spokesman for the poor, weak, and oppressed. He hated and railed against those people, organizations, and institutions that chained the less fortunate to horrible, torturous fates. He saw it as his mission to help defeat conspiracies against the lowly members of society and against liberty and freedom. Always a pessimist, Darrow never held out great hope that his battles would result in a permanent victory. Rather, it was the fight, regardless of results, that Darrow was interested in. He was a scrappy lawyer who used his brashness and brains in the courtroom, and importantly outside it too, to move his goals forward.

A lifetime of service to expand and defend freedom and liberty and on behalf of the downtrodden, unionists, radicals, condemned men, skeptics, and those individuals striving to live thoughtful, peaceful lives has earned Darrow lasting historical reverence. But Darrow was no paragon of virtue. His significant foibles, faults, and failures—personal, professional, and political—dramatically influenced his life and the lives of his clients, comrades, and colleagues in various social and political movements. In modern political parlance, Darrow was occasionally a flip-flopper. His political commitments and loyalties were not always firmly held. Further, his philosophy of life was full of contradictions. Darrow was not a systematic thinker, and at times he acted in unthoughtful, self-serving, and even unethical ways. He was always more comfortable with his inconsistencies, fickle commitments, and bad behavior than his contemporaries were. As we shall see, Darrow disappointed a lot of people by changing his mind on political and social issues, by pushing the boundaries of professional propriety, and by giving up pledges and alliances.

It’s hardly surprising that Darrow was human. No more than anyone else’s, Darrow’s life was not neat and involved inexplicable twists and turns. However, it is clear that he adhered to several irreducible core philosophical and political principles throughout his life. Darrow was a skeptic and a pessimist. He fundamentally thought that reality was essentially evil and that happiness was just beyond reach. How one carves out an existence in this world—he cared little for thoughts of an afterlife—was a lifelong project. Darrow was squarely political left, although he never joined the Socialist Party and remained a Democrat, more or less, since he began voting in the late nineteenth century. He did not reject capitalism, but he did believe that it was the state’s duty to ameliorate the sad condition of the working class. Additionally, he devoted much of his life in politics and in the courtroom to rectifying the injustices that plagued the typical American. Darrow was an iconoclast; he was dedicated to smashing the structures and systems of social control that impinged on the liberties and freedoms of average people and that caged their aspirations. To do that, he sometimes believed that the ends justified the means, that he had to give up former and very publicly expressed views, and that he had to abandon friends and allies and collaborate with politicians and political movements he normally would not have. Darrow was far from perfect or irreproachable, as his former friends, former law partners, and enemies loved to point out. Darrow was a flawed champion of freedom and liberty. Darrow’s story is decidedly not the chronicle of a saint; it’s the story of a legal and political genius who, despite his defects, missteps, and errors, advanced democracy in America and around the world. Darrow remained true to his core beliefs throughout his adult life. What changed were the movements and causes that he supported. As a young man he was dedicated to the labor movement and fought for it as a means to help average Americans. As he grew older, Darrow became increasingly pessimistic about mass political movements of all kinds. In time, he even abandoned his allegiance to organized labor, choosing instead to fight a handful of such social structures as the death penalty and white supremacy so that regardless of their station in life, individuals had a chance to live as they chose. Thus, over the course of his life, Darrow distilled, sifted, winnowed, and shifted through his commitments and causes while maintaining a public and political fidelity to supporting the advancement of freedom and liberty, especially civil liberties and civil rights.

This biography is largely about Darrow’s political activism inside and outside court. Consequently, his early years are not as important as other biographers have purported. His parents were freethinkers and political radicals, but that inheritance was less sizable than others have made out. I grant that Darrow drew inspiration from his parents. However, most of his political and social hobbyhorses were his own. Moreover, if Amirus and Emily Darrow’s influence was so overwhelming to Clarence’s development, why did his siblings not take up similar political causes? Darrow’s childhood was, as Henry Adams declared of his own famous family, rather an atmosphere than an influence.³ Darrow’s early surroundings were indeed important, but they were not as predictive and as transformative as the most decisive moment in his life, his move to Chicago in 1887. When Darrow entered America’s quintessential Gilded Age city, it was in the midst of an epic, bitter, and bloody struggle between capital and labor. By day Darrow worked for the capitalists, and by night he spoke out against the pillage and plunder of the robber barons. Eventually he had to make a choice, and he concluded that he could not, as he put it, wear the collar of any corporation. ⁴ Backing labor over capital changed his life, his fate, and his fortune. Had he gone the other way, he probably would have become a railroad mogul himself, or a mayor, or a governor, or a U.S. senator. Instead, he became America’s most famous and long-lived public crusader.

1

A Midwestern Childhood

Clarence Darrow read autobiographies and biographies with suspicion. He disliked their self-serving nature, particularly those beginning with a list of famous ancestors. The purpose of linking themselves by blood and birth to some well-known family or personage, he wrote, stimulated only the ego and little else.¹ Like most people’s, Clarence Darrow’s distant relatives had no direct connection to him other than to set in motion a series of events that eventually resulted in his birth. That said, Darrow’s immediate family and his childhood, especially the relationships with his mother and father, mattered to some degree. But those youthful experiences did not create the Clarence Darrow, that transformative and towering historical figure, that we know. Darrow’s story is not a slow march to greatness and influence. Rather, his initial notions about right and wrong, about fairness and equality, and about citizenship and liberty sprang from his childhood experiences and his environment, the rural Midwest.

Despite writing about his childhood himself, Darrow had misgivings about exploring the sacred ground of his youth.² We ought to heed his warning, especially since most of the information about his childhood comes from his own writings. Like others who have written about their pasts, Darrow sometimes blurred the lines between reporting his life and artfully creating it. It is best to see his two autobiographies—especially the second, which was published in 1932 and titled The Story of My Life—as the iconoclastic lawyer’s closing statements in the defense of his reputation and legacy. Both works have truths in them, but both are also part of Darrow’s project to build his own public image as a hedonistic pessimist, a skeptic, and an unerring, unstinting, and unflappable champion of freedom and liberty. But as we shall see, Darrow made mistakes, distilled his views, winnowed his causes, and changed his alliances. All this is largely absent in his own writings about his life. As he explained in The Story of My Life, autobiography is never entirely true.³ This much we know: Darrow’s family was an old one and one that belonged to the working class and had at various times fought privilege. Tongue in cheek, he once wrote that some Darrow genealogists claimed a relationship with Adam and Eve, but that he should not like to guarantee the title.⁴ In fact, his pedigree went back to England, likely among the lower sorts who came to the New World seeking the fortunes that they were unable to make in the Old. But this does not matter, Darrow wrote dismissively. "I am sure that my forbears [sic] run a long, long way back of that, even—but what of it anyhow?⁵ Darrow saw himself as a product of chance, not relatives. He stood at the end of a long line of historical accidents, odd twists, and freak happenings. When I think of the chances that I was up against, he remarked, it scares me to realize how easily I might have missed out. Of all the infinite accidents of fate farther back of that, I do not care or dare to think. And ever the pessimist, at the end of his life, he mockingly wrote that had I known about life in advance and been given any choice in the matter, I most likely would have declined the adventure."⁶ Darrow was correct: he did not have that choice. But he was not a completely self-made man. For Darrow, that familial atmosphere of which Henry Adams spoke was as much about place as about a family whose members were revolutionaries and skeptics and farmers who struggled to eke out a living.

In 1630, the first Darrow arrived in the New World. He was among a party of sixteen that held a royal land grant for the town of New London, Connecticut, along the Thames River, where they scratched out a meager existence. These Connecticut Darrows were also revolutionaries, forgetting, as Clarence put it, the lavish gift of the King in order to fight at Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and Brandywine.⁷ Thus Darrow once joked that he was eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, although I would not exactly fit their organization, for, amongst other handicaps, I am proud of my rebel ancestry.⁸

The Connecticut Darrows prospered moderately for more than a century and a half before branching out. In 1795, the Ammiras Darrow family left Connecticut for Boonville, a small town in upstate New York. Financial success remained just beyond the family’s reach, so in 1824, after Ammiras’s passing, his son (and Clarence’s grandfather) Jedediah led his spouse and seven children on another trek west along the Lake Trail, which ran parallel to the bluffs along Lake Erie. This arduous and long five-hundred-mile trip led them to Trumbull County, Ohio. Their reward was inexpensive but excellent farmland in Kinsman.

Clarence Darrow’s maternal ancestors, the Eddys, shared a similar migration story following the same path to the Western Reserve. Darrow rightly estimated that both families were poor and obscure, else they would have stayed where they were.⁹ John and Samuel Eddy arrived in Plymouth in 1630. Later, like so many of his contemporaries, Great-grandfather Eddy drove west with purpose, moving to Connecticut, then to upstate New York, and finally to Windsor, Ohio, in the Western Reserve.¹⁰

The families homesteaded two dozen miles apart. Given that distance in the mid-nineteenth century, it was highly unlikely for a Darrow and an Eddy to meet, let alone marry and raise a family. But Amirus Darrow and Emily Eddy—Clarence’s parents—did meet and fall in love while attending Ellsworth Academy in Amboy, Ohio, thirty-five miles from Windsor and sixty from Kinsman. The Eddys, who were quite well off, had no trouble sending Emily, but the Darrows had to scrape together the money to send Amirus. Emily Eddy and Amirus Darrow became schoolyard sweethearts with a shared passion for reading. Amirus’s thirst for knowledge and his zeal for books were legendary in Clarence’s hometown. Amirus had a personal library unlike any other. In his 1893 reminiscence, Kinsman native Colonel Ralph Plumb recalled that nearly every house had a Bible and an almanac, but beyond that books were very scarce. A neighbor might have another book, like "Riley’s Narrative [but that] was lent from house to house and did good work in cultivating a taste for reading."¹¹ Outside the family, Amirus’s book collection must have seemed an outlandish, immoral indulgence. Even Clarence Darrow thought it odd that his parents were such bibliophiles. No one else in either extended family was. Aside from one of his mother’s brothers who seemed fairly well-informed, Darrow could not remember another relative who cared at all for books. Furthermore, Emily’s parents were inclined to believe that a love of books was a distinct weakness, and likely to develop into a very bad habit.¹² Darrow said the same of his father’s family. However, this was no mere bad habit. Amirus never had much money, yet he bought books like an aristocrat. His house was littered with them. They were in bookcases, on tables, on chairs, and even on the floor. The house was small, the family large, the furnishings meager, but there were books whichever way one turned.¹³

Like their parents, Amirus and Emily Darrow emphasized education in their children’s upbringing, even to the point of straining the family’s finances. Amirus was a learned man. In 1845, after they graduated from Ellsworth Academy, Emily and Amirus married and moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, so Amirus could attend Allegheny College, a Methodist institution. He did not finish. Likely his faith in Methodism ended after the schism in the American Methodist Church over slavery. Instead, Amirus and Emily, who had become abolitionists, joined the Unitarian congregation in Meadville. In 1849, Amirus completed his theology degree but decided not to become a minister. By that time, he and his wife both were freethinkers, who sought the answers to life’s questions through investigation, reason, and rigorous debate. They were also political activists, seeking justice for the oppressed.

Perhaps the most meaningful and influential part of Clarence’s childhood relates to his parents’ freethinking beliefs. Amirus and Emily belonged to one of the most important intellectual, political, and cultural movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freethinkers influenced all aspects of American life from politics and politicians such as Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) to social movements like abolitionism and women’s rights. Both Amirus and Emily adopted free thought well before its golden age between Reconstruction and the First World War. Historian Susan Jacoby has defined American free thought as an encompassing philosophy running the gamut from the truly antireligious—those who regarded all religion as a form of superstition and wished to reduce its influence in every aspect of society—to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith revering some form of God or Providence but at odds with orthodox religious authority.¹⁴ What united freethinkers was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence—a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world.¹⁵ Both Amirus and Emily were avid readers of the great American and French skeptics, they participated in free thought–inspired movements to emancipate slaves and married women, and they were unflinching supporters of public education. And yet they celebrated Christmas, and Emily never completely broke from the church. Moreover, unlike many freethinkers, Emily was a temperance advocate. Thus, as freethinkers Darrow’s parents were middle of the road.

In 1849, forgoing any idea of becoming a minister and a minister’s wife, Amirus and Emily, along with their two sons, Everett and Channing, moved to Farmdale, Ohio, a short distance from Kinsman. Amirus took up the trades of his forefathers and became a furniture maker as well as an undertaker. Emily assumed the role of the rural housewife, managing the household and taking care of their children: Edward Everett (who went by Everett), born in 1846; Channing, born in 1849; Mary, in 1852; Herbert (who died in infancy), in 1854; Clarence, in 1857; Hubert, in 1860; Herman, in 1863; and, finally, Jenny, in 1869. All but Everett, Channing, and Jenny were born in Farmdale. The family had moved back to Kinsman in 1864. Both Kinsman and Farmdale were small, rural towns that owed their existence to the banking, insurance, legal, agricultural, and modest cultural services that they offered farmers. They were the places for farmers to buy implements, sell their produce, mail letters and packages, consult a lawyer, deposit money, attend holiday parades, and join local celebrations.

Darrow maintained an uneasy love affair with his childhood hometown. Kinsman was confining, stilted, intolerant, and homogeneous, but it also was as ageless as it was idyllic. Nestled in a sleepy green valley near the west bank of the Shenango River Lake, and close to Pymatuning, Stratton, and Sugar creeks, Kinsman had the indelible mark of a New England village, as the writers of Ohio’s Work Progress Administration guide described it.¹⁶ It was also a quintessential small Ohio town—much like the hometowns of other Ohio notables: Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), Thomas Edison (1847–1931), Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), and William Dean Howells (1837–1920). Kinsman had a gristmill, a sawmill, a blacksmith, a shoemaker (in whose shop men met to argue about politics), a carriage factory, a town square, a whiskey distillery, a tavern, a few churches—Presbyterian, Methodist, and Catholic—and houses that denoted the class of the townspeople. The largest houses were near the center of town, with the fanciest of them prominently positioned on one end of the town square.

Kinsman was known both for its groves of heavy timber—especially oak, beech, maple, hickory, chestnut, elm, and white pine—and for its soil, which was of a superior quality, according to the History of Trumbull and Mahoning Counties.¹⁷ Most farmers grew corn and raised cows, chickens, and pigs. They made money, however, from the wheat crop. Kinsman never had a large population, at most a few hundred, and from a child’s perspective the town seemed rather staid and uninspiring. If I had chosen to be born I probably should not have selected Kinsman, Ohio, for that honor, Darrow wrote in his second autobiography. [I]nstead, I would have started in a hard and noisy city where the crowds surged back and forth as if they knew where they were going, and why. Yet Darrow could never escape the fact that his intellectual roots were in small-town America. As he wrote in the very next sentence of that later autobiography, my consciousness returns to the old place. My mind goes back to Kinsman because I lived there in childhood, and to me it was once the centre of the world.¹⁸

His first book, a semiautobiographical novel, Farmington, was a thinly disguised reminiscence of his hometown. Looking back after he had already established himself as a crusading lawyer and a political insider of national significance, Darrow claimed that the roots of his philosophy of life had sprung from the homespun, sleepy confines of rural Ohio. Midwestern farm life, he wrote, taught him some cherished basic life lessons about pessimism, fatalism, and skepticism as well as about liberty, freedom, democracy, and tolerance. In these rural areas, neighbors depended upon one another so much as to look past and forgive what they might label as antisocial behavior—of course, within reason. Tolerance, even of town skeptics like Clarence’s father, was a valued ideal. Moreover, Darrow imbibed and imbued midwestern sensibilities about charity, decency, fairness, and citizenship. Like his neighbors, he cherished the liberties and freedoms that rural life afforded, from owning land to profiting from hard labor. At the same time, he came to reject the darker sides of small-community life, particularly its tendency to promote intellectually suffocating homogeneity, especially in church and in school, and certain kinds of provincialism that were antithetical to skepticism. He also drew other, more saturnine philosophical lessons from his childhood in Trumbull County that eventually lent themselves to his pessimistic outlook on life.

Clarence Darrow had a similarly complex relationship with his immediate family. With only a few exceptions, he claimed his siblings hardly had any significant impact upon his life, and as an adult he did not keep close tabs on most of them. I was only one of a large family, mostly older than myself; but while I was only one, I was the chief one, and the rest were important only as they affected me, he wrote egotistically.¹⁹ And there was a pecking order among the young Darrows. It must have been the rule of our family that each of the children should have the right to give orders to those younger than himself. At work or at play, the children rarely got along. We quarreled, he wrote, simply because we liked to hurt each other.²⁰ Chores also brought out their ugly side. We children were supposed to help with the chores around the house; but, as near as I can remember, each one was always afraid that he would do more than his share.²¹ Of course, the exception was when someone was ill. In his first autobiography, Darrow recalled a time when his brother, most likely Everett, was quite sick. I was wretched with fear and grief, he recounted. I remember how I went over every circumstance of our relations with each other, and how I vowed that I would always be kind and loving to him if his life were saved.²² The brother lived, but the young Clarence did not change; neither did anyone else in the family. Darrow blamed it on their New England roots. His parents, he surmised, were raised in the Puritan school of life, and I fancy that they would have felt that demonstrations of affection were signs of weakness rather than of love.²³

Although they had his respect and admiration later in his life, Darrow felt alienated from his parents. Both my father and mother must have been kind and gentle and tender to the large family that so sorely taxed their time and strength; and yet, as I look back, I do not have the feeling of closeness that should unite the parents and the child.²⁴ Still, they did affect the man Darrow became. And while most biographers have focused heavily on Amirus’s role as father and as a teacher, believing that he had the greatest responsibility in shaping his son, Clarence himself believed that it was his mother, not his father, who was more influential in his life.²⁵

Sadly, we don’t know much about Emily or her relationship with Clarence. In his 1932 autobiography, he praised her maternal abilities. She was efficient and practical and was the one who saved the family from dire want as her husband spent much of the family’s income on books. She also made up for Amirus’s lack of business and financial acumen. Darrow felt that it was her ability and devotion that kept us together, that made so little go so far, and did so much to give my father a chance for the study and contemplation that made up the real world in which he lived.²⁶ Thus, through my mother’s good sense my father was able to give his children a glimpse into the realm of ideas and ideals in which he himself really lived.²⁷ Little is known about Emily’s outlook on life. She was a prohibitionist and women’s rights advocate. She shared her husband’s views on religion, slavery, prohibition, and party politics. Darrow remembered her taking him to temperance rallies. She also shared Amirus’s parenting skills. I cannot recall that my mother ever gave me a kiss or a caress, Darrow wrote. But he did remember that when I had a fever, and lay on my bed for what seemed endless weeks, she let no one else come near me by day or night … she seemed ever beside me with the tenderest and gentlest touch.²⁸

Why we don’t know more about Emily is unclear. Her quiet, stern, and stolid parenting might have kept Clarence too far from her emotionally for him to remember more. Further, she died young after a short illness at the age of forty-eight, in 1871, when Clarence was fourteen years old. He was away from home at the time and never could tell whether I was sorry or relieved that I was not there.²⁹ He did remember the blank despair that settled over the home when we realized that her tireless energy and devoted love were lost forever.³⁰ The cause of death was never determined. Darrow biographer Charles Yates Harrison asserted that years of drudgery for her visionary husband and her children at last took their toll.³¹ Or she may have contracted a viral infection that devastated her body. No one knows for sure. Despite the family’s status as the village freethinking outsiders, much of Kinsman turned out for the funeral and burial next to Herbert near the Presbyterian church. It was a shock that never left Clarence, and her early death may have caused him to exaggerate her influence upon him. Regardless, upon reflection years later, he marked her death as a moment that awakened me to conscious life.³² In other words, he grew up after his mother’s death and to her infinite kindness and sympathy owed some substantial part of the empathy for which he would be known.

There is no denying the intellectual inheritance of Clarence’s freethinking father, but it was not as large or immediate as others have surmised. Clarence and Amirus had a close, meaningful, yet difficult and contentious relationship. Later in life, Darrow was quite sympathetic to him. He praised his father’s character, writing that Amirus was a just and upright man, kind and gentle as well as a visionary and dreamer, always with his nose in a book.³³ Even when he sorely needed the money he would neglect his work to read some book.³⁴ Amirus stayed up late to read and write. His penchant for reading over work partly made him an outcast among his neighbors, who adhered apparently both to Puritan ideals of labor and to Ben Franklin’s quips about industry and thrift. They still bought his furniture and utilized his undertaking services, but they were skeptical about his commitment to his family and to the community. To add further injury to his social repute, Amirus avoided church. In Kinsman, the Presbyterians outnumbered all other denominations, and they had the largest church on the tallest hill. Amirus came to reject Christianity, not just Presbyterianism. Because of his affinity for book learning and his rejection of congregational life, Amirus became the village infidel.³⁵ His life was rather lonely, especially after Emily died. The only two neighbors who visited Amirus regularly were the old Presbyterian parson and the town doctor, both of whom came to talk about ideas and books. Likely only they comprehended the unquenchable thirst for knowledge that drove Darrow’s father to stay up late at night in scholarly pursuit.³⁶ Darrow never found out what his father was researching. Amirus spent his adult life laboring under his lamps, hoping his reading and writing would propel him out of Kinsman. They never did. Years of work and resignation had taught him to deny [his ambitions] even to himself, and slowly and pathetically he must have let go his hold upon that hope and ambition which alone make the thoughtful man cling fast to life.³⁷

All that reading and writing did convince Amirus Darrow that there was more to life than Kinsman, and he wanted his children to experience it. As his famous son wrote, he looked at the high hills to the east, and the high hills to the west, and up and down the narrow country road that led to the outside world. He knew that beyond the high hills was a broad inviting plain, with opportunity and plenty, with fortune and fame; but as he looked at the hills he could see no way to pass beyond. As Amirus gave up his ambitions, he slowly looked to his children to satisfy the dreams that life once held out to him.³⁸ Like his parents, Darrow’s father thought that the way out of Kinsman was a sound education. Clarence himself did not remember a time when he did not read. Probably under Emily’s tutelage, it started with lettered blocks on the kitchen floor and gradually moved to books. Darrow learned his letters quickly and early but not as early as Everett, who was something of a prodigy.³⁹ Amirus fiercely pushed his children, telling them when they complained that his idol, the British philosopher and women’s rights advocate John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), had begun studying Greek when he was only three years old. Darrow felt that Mill’s father must have been a cruel and unnatural parent who made miserable not only the life of his little boy, but thousands of other boys whose fathers could see no reason why their sons should be outdone by John Stuart Mill.⁴⁰ Regardless, Clarence pressed on with his lessons. Darrow despised his Latin studies perhaps most of all and argued with his father about their utility, telling his teacher that he did not want to be a scholar and that he would have no use for Latin.⁴¹ His father weathered the storm stoically and then made his son recite the Roman word for table in every case. Slowly and painfully, he learned mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa, and mensa.⁴² Despite his griping, Darrow had access to the town’s, probably the county’s, best library. It was there that he came to share his parents’ love of reading, though not necessarily what his father wanted him to read. Still, he read what they read: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Voltaire (1694–1778). He also encountered Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899), and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). As an adult he came to adore these thinkers and writers.

Radical free thought was only one element of the atmosphere in the Darrow home; there was a political charge to it too. Like his parents, Clarence became quite an active and engaged citizen but, significantly, not as a young man. Amirus and Emily were integrally involved in the major political and social reform movements of the antebellum period. Both were abolitionists and thus members of the most important and successful reform movement of the nineteenth century. They were not alone. Trumbull County was antislavery territory. Local abolitionist leaders met in the Darrows’ distinctive octagon-shaped house, and Clarence remembered hearing about Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), and John Brown (1800–1859). Darrow lore maintains that the household was a stop for the Underground Railroad, but it is very unlikely that Amirus and Emily would have risked their young family even for such a noble cause. Abolitionist work was extraordinarily dangerous.⁴³

Similarly implausible is Irving Stone’s claim that Clarence Darrow met John Brown, who allegedly put his hand on the boy’s head and said, ‘The Negro has too few friends; you and I must never desert him.’⁴⁴ Darrow was two when Brown was hanged for his raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Nonetheless, the Darrow home was always open to agitators and reformers who wandered through, looking for a warm meal, a soft bed, and sympathetic company on their journeys.

Debunked myths do not diminish the Darrow family’s commitment to ending slavery. Amirus and Emily named three of the first four sons after famous abolitionists. Everett was named after Edward Everett (1794–1865), who must have appealed to Amirus for many reasons. He was the first American to earn a Ph.D. Like Amirus, Everett was also a Unitarian minister who had put down the collar for other pursuits. Everett, who became noted for his two-hour oration at Gettysburg before President Abraham Lincoln’s legendary brief closing remarks, became a Whig representative and later a senator from Massachusetts and was a moderate politician but at times outspoken on the issue of slavery. Likewise, the Darrows named their second son Channing to honor William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), the Unitarian minister, prolific writer, and early abolitionist. Clarence Seward Darrow’s namesake was William Henry Seward (1801–1872), also an abolitionist, who helped found the Republican Party and became Lincoln’s secretary of state. Appreciative of the political allusion of