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From The New International, Vol. XXIV No. 2–3, Spring–Summer 1958, pp. 143–144.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Attorney for the Damned
edited by Arthur Weinberg
Simon & Schuster, New York, 552 pp., $6.50.
It has become eminently fashionable and intellectually chic to have a jaundiced and, even worse, a patronizing attitude toward many turn-of-the-century American radicals and socialists. It is therefore all the more refreshing and inspiring in this age of mediocrity and conformity to read a collection of speeches and pleas by Clarence Darrow recently published under the title Attorney For The Damned which gives the lie to such unwarranted and misplaced cynicism.
Editor Arthur Weinberg who at present teaches a course at the University of Chicago entitled Clarence Darrow, His Cases and Causes offers a collection of Darrow’s summations, each prefaced by a full account of the case, the setting and the emotional atmosphere in which the trial took place. He has divided the material under the four headings which best express Darrow’s radicalism, his deep concern for man and mankind – Against Vengeance, Against Prejudice, Against Privilege, For Justice.
The speeches range from an address to the inmates of the County Jail in Chicago offering his revolutionary theories of crime (“Too radical” was the comment of one prisoner when a guard later asked him what he thought of the speech.) to his plea to the jury in his own defense in 1912 when he was indicted and tried for attempting to bribe a juror in the McNamara case. Also included are the Scopes evolution case, the Leopold-Loeb trial, his defense of the twenty members of the Communist Labor Party of Chicago in 1920 for conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the government by force, the trial of Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone for the murder of ex-Governor Steunenberg of Idaho, and others.
Although Darrow never joined the Socialist Party (“they’re so damned cocksure of everything”) he was always friendly and it was his radicalism and utter non-conformism – a mixture of anarchism, socialism, pacifism and pure cussedness which led him to espouse every progressive cause and defend the weak, the victimized, the unpopular. Only once did he withdraw from a case despite his conviction of an outrageous injustice. He said about the Scottsboro defense:
“The case was controlled by the Communist Party, who cared far less for the safety and well-being of those poor Negro boys than the exploitation of their own cause.”
A READING OF DARROW’S SPEECHES turns up little that is simple or vulgar; rather it reveals much that is as complex as man’s motives always are and one can only wish that many of the crusades he led in his day were as compelling and alive today when we are sadly in need of them to combat the same evils: crime, bigotry, intolerance, stupidity and lethargy.
In a foreword to the book Justice William O. Douglas writes of Darrow:
“His words were the simple discourse of ordinary conversation. They had the power of deep conviction, the strength of any plea for fair play, the pull of every protest against grinding down the faces of the poor, the appeal of humanity against forces of greed and exploitation.”
Such words are well worth reading.
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Last updated on 13 January 2020