Everything You Didn’t Know About Clarence Darrow
A great interview with the author of a new biography about Clarence Darrow that’s due to be released on June14th, and which promises to be fascinating if the author writes half as well as he speaks.
The part about the Scopes trial really struck me in light of current events. Amazing that nearly 100 years later we’re still arguing over evolution. Ditto for Darrow’s work on behalf of labor unions and the mess created by Gov. Scott Walker up in Wisconsin.
Do we NEVER learn? I think I’ll pre-order this one.
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A newly released book brings new insight into the trial attorney made famous by the Scopes monkey trialBy T.A. Frail
smithsonian.com, June 11, 2011Clarence Darrow exists foremost in the public memory as Spencer Tracy, who played a lawyer based on Darrow in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. That film, in turn, was based on Darrow’s 1925 defense of a Tennessee educator accused of breaking a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. (Darrow lost The State of Tennessee v. Scopes, or the “monkey trial,” as it was known; the law was later repealed.) But as John A. Farrell makes clear in his new biography, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, Darrow’s life was even more tumultuous than that sensational trial would suggest.
Before Darrow became the champion of labor, proponent of the poor and defender of the most hopeless of death-row cases, he was a corporate lawyer—and for a railroad, no less. What turned him away from a career as a fat cat?
He couldn’t look at himself in the mirror. He was at heart one of the most compassionate people you could imagine meeting, and that part of him was always at war with the striver, the go-getter. But whenever the chips came down, they always came down on the side of the guy who needed a good lawyer. Depending on how he was fixed at any given time, a third to a half of his cases he was handling for free for indigent clients. He didn’t charge big fees for his most notorious clients if there was a good cause behind it. It was just conscience, basically, that forced him to give up that job as counsel for the Chicago & North Western Railway. He was also prompted by his boss, his patron at the railroad, who had a sudden heart attack and died, so Darrow’s decision was helped along by the fact that he no longer had a career there.
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