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##### March 14, 1938 OBITUARY ## Clarence Darrow Is Dead in Chicago ##### Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES CHICAGO, March 13.--Clarence Darrow, famous criminal lawyer, recently described as one who thoroughly understood human nature yet loved his fellow-man, died this afternoon at his home here at the age of 80. For two months he had been confined to bed because of heart disease; for two years he had been retired, for many years he had been trying to retire. With him when he died were his wife, Ruby; his son, Paul, and a sister, Mrs. Jennie Darrow Moore. His close friend and long-time associate, Federal Judge William Holly, arrived soon afterward and made the announcement that the colorful life had come to an end. Judge Holly announced that Mr. Darrow's body would lie in state after 10 o'clock tomorrow morning at the Skeeles-Biddle Funeral Parlors, 730 East Sixty-third Street. Funeral arrangements will be announced later. Mr. Darrow was known internationally as a criminal lawyer. Defender in a hundred or more murder trials, no client of his had ever died on the gallows or electric chair. He had built up a reputation for himself as a friend of labor and of the downtrodden. His oratory and his philosophy made him known to millions. A kindly, homely personage who dressed in the certainty that clothes do not make the man, he went through life declaring himself an agnostic. But three years ago he declared he no longer had any doubts. He proclaimed himself a materialist whom it had taken fifty years to find out that there is nothing after death. Massie Case Last Big One CHICAGO, March 13 (AP).--Mr. Darrow's last recorded act on behalf of unfortunates occurred March 31, 1936, when he drove to the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, accompanied by a priest and two nuns, to appear as a witness before a subcommittee of the State Parole Board to urge the release on parole of Jesse Binga, 71-year-old Negro ex- banker serving a one to ten year sentence on a charge of embezzlement. His last big case was the trial in Honolulu of Lieutenant Thomas Massie, U.S.N., and three others, including Massie's mother-in-law, Mrs. Granville Fortescue, who were convicted of manslaughter in the death of a native accused of assaulting Massie's wife, Thalia. Their ten-year sentences were commuted to one hour in the custody of the territorial sheriff. Back in America, he was prevailed upon to come out of retirement to appeal the case of Russell McWilliams, Rockford, Ill., boy slayer, who was twice sentenced to die. After the verdict was upheld Mr. Darrow went before the Pardon Board to plead for leniency. The youth's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. A Fighter for "Lost Causes" Clarence Seward Darrow spent his life fighting for "lost" causes, most of which he won. His philosophy, which he recently stated in his autobiography, was made up of an ardent championship of such segments as agnosticism, personal liberty, the abolition of capital punishment, the improvement of labor conditions. These and other similar ones were the "lost" causes which dominated his career, weaving the pattern of his story out of the lives of those whom he saved from the gallows through his devotion to one or another of his causes, making him, because of his sympathy with human beings and his fundamental understanding of their emotions, perhaps the greatest murder defense lawyer of his time. His most famous trials were those in which the defendants were accused, or confessedly guilty, of murder. His object was not always to bring off an acquittal, but to cheat the gallows of another victim of "organized, legalized murder," as he called it. Clarence Darrow esteemed himself a humanitarian. He had no belief in God or immortality, and to him man was merely a clod, a helpless organism continually "condemned for getting out of step with the crowd, not for doing evil." His life began on April 18, 1857, in the little town of Kinsman, Ohio, where his father, who had wanted to be a minister but who had round himself unable to hold his faith in one sect long enough to be ordained, finally settled down to keeping a furniture store and building up a library. Mr. Darrow was educated rather in that library than in any other place. He attended the public schools of Ohio, studied for a time at Allegheny College and another time at the University of Michigan, but received no degree from either. Began Work as a Farm Hand His first job was as a farmer's helper, but the work was too difficult. He turned to law, because it seemed to him that lawyers lived rather well without having to toil very hard to do it. In Youngstown, Ohio, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1877. Some time after that, having served for a time in the law offices of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway, he moved to Ashtabula, where, in 1887, he was elected to his first public position, City Attorney. In 1888 he moved on to Chicago. There one night he attended a meeting where Henry George, the impassioned pleader for the single tax, made a speech. Darrow was moved to make a speech in reply, embroidering George's notions of social justice with some added scrolls and figures of his own. His speech was as eloquent, at least, as that of George. At any rate, after the meeting John P. Altgeld--who even then had held a Supreme Court judgeship in Illinois and who later, as Governor of the State, was to pardon some of those convicted in the Haymarket riot with a fiery statement that legal massacre had gone far enough--came over and made himself acquainted. Mr. Darrow was unknown. Altgeld was powerful. The two became law partners, a junction of liberal talent which was broken by Altgeld's death in 1902. Won an Acquittal for Debs Mr. Darrow, meanwhile, had again become connected with the Chicago & Northwestern Railway. In 1893 he resigned his post to become the counsel for Eugene V. Debs, who had organized the American Railway Union and had called a strike, for which he was arrested. Darrow won an acquittal for Debs. He next was identified with labor by appearing as counsel for the miners in the Scranton arbitration in 1885 and serving as labor counsel to the Roosevelt Commission in Philadelphia during the early part of the present century. While in Philadelphia, a thousand miles from home, he was elected a member of the Illinois Legislature from Chicago in 1902. His chief distinction in the two years he served was that he tried every means he could to jam through a bill abolishing capital punishment. There, however, he failed. That failure he discounted in 1905 when he jumped to the peak of national prominence by defending William D. (Big Bill) Haywood, C. H. Moyer and George Pettibone, officials of the Western Federation of Miners, who were accused of plotting the assassination of Governor Steunenberg of Idaho. The trial went on in Boise. Senator William Borah was the prosecutor--"the ablest man" he ever contended against, Mr. Darrow said--and Mr. Darrow won an acquittal. Mr. Darrow was not at heart a Socialist, although he had come to be known as such through his associations with Debs, Haywood and the labor movement in general. He was too much and too thoroughly the individualist to accept the manifestos of Karl Marx or any one else. Whether this or some other essential incompatibility forced his action, he broke with Haywood after the trial. His split with the Socialist movement widened beyond repair during 1911 in Los Angeles, where he had gone to defend John J. and James B. McNamara, brothers, charged with the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building. Tried on Bribery Charge Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor were raising a large fund for the defense of the accused men. Job Harriman was making an intensive drive for election in Los Angeles as a Socialist candidate. As election time came on things began to happen with lightning rapidity. First Burt Franklin, a detective in the employ of the defense counsel, was arrested on a charge of paying a juror $500 and promising him $3,500 more to hold out for acquittal. Several days after Franklin's arrest and a few days before the election, the McNamara brothers entered a plea of guilty to the charge, shattering the Socialist hopes for any chance at election. Subsequently Mr. Darrow was indicted--with the McNamaras off to San Quentin prison-- for attempting to bribe a juror. Franklin testified that Darrow had given him the $4,000 for bribery purposes, having ostensibly procured the money from Job Harriman. Mr. Darrow, denying each and every charge from the witness stand, threw every ounce of his dramatic power of appeal into his argument before the jurors. At one point in that speech he said: "I know the mob. In one way I love it, in another way I despise it. I know the unreasoning, unthinking mass. I have lived with men and worked with them. I have been their idol and I have been cast down and trampled beneath their feet. I have stood on the pinnacle and I have heard the cheering mob sound my praises. And I have gone down to the depths of the valley where I have heard them hiss my name--this same mob-- but I have gone on--gone on my path unmoved by their hisses or their cheers." And at another point he said: "Where men toil with their hands--where women, weak and weary, are sewing tears into garments to be worn by the rich--I know that there are prayers going up for me today, prayers that this jury will acquit me." The prayers were answered. The jury took thirty-five minutes to reach a verdict of not guilty. Defended Leopold and Loeb The trial of Nathan F. Leopold Jr. and Richard A. Loeb, youthful sons of rich families in Chicago, was Mr. Darrow's next courtroom epic. They had murdered the 13-year-old Bobby Franks. Mr. Darrow had them plead guilty and then going before Justice Caverly in Illinois Supreme Court he pleaded mitigating circumstances of insanity and brought both off with life terms in prison. Aside from the dramatic moment in the trial of Mrs. Fortescue and Lieutenant Massie in Honolulu, when Mrs. Thalia Massie, the wife of the defendant, tore up a paper which had been handed her by the prosecutor, perhaps the greatest moment in Mr. Darrow's life was when he faced William Jennings Bryan in the evolution trial in Dayton, Tenn. Here again was the element of the "lost" cause--Mr. Darrow, the agnostic, facing Mr. Bryan, the believer. The issue was God, the veracity of the Bible; in sum, the religion of Christians. The two titans, perhaps the two best orators in America at the moment, argued all afternoon on the lawn of the Rhea County Court House, fought with logic until each was purple faced and weary. Here again Mr. Darrow won the case, but as between the personal opinions of the two men it was a draw: Mr. Darrow remained the doubter and Mr. Bryan the believer. Not for "Court-Packing" Plan In the last few years Mr. Darrow lived in seclusion, emerging only occasionally with some characteristic comment on public affairs or the meaning of life. His economic opinions were reflected in the report of the committee of which he was a member on the effects of the NRA on the fortunes of the small business man. The report was very critical and aroused much controversy. His attitude was not surprising, for he was too much of an individualist not to resist the encroachments of an omnipotent State into the lives of human beings. Thus, on the issue of reorganization of the Supreme Court as proposed by President Roosevelt, Mr. Darrow reacted with his usual skepticism. While regarding the Supreme Court as fallible as any other human institution, he showed little sympathy for the "court-packing" plan. "Just because a man is 75 or 80 does not mean that he is senile," he told a representative of THE NEW YORK TIMES, "and he may be incapable of judgment at a much younger age. Few of us are capable of judgment, just as few of us ever think, and few can ever mete out justice to our fellows, no matter how sincerely we try. And to reconcile the law with justice and human progress is sometimes impossible. I am not a conservative, as everybody who knows me realizes: I am a pessimist with hope. But I don't like to see the fundamental structure of our government changed quickly. This is a better country than it used to be, just as most people are more humane, more sympathetic with the other fellow than they were years ago. I don't think much of some of our processes, but I don't see how we can get much better ones until the human race is a lot nearer perfect than it is now. There isn't much freedom anyway, and we might as well hang on to what we have." Foe of Sit-Down Strike A life-long champion of labor, Mr. Darrow looked askance at sit-down strikes, for he orred force and violence in any form. "Violence never accomplishes much," he said. "If men substituted reason and understanding for violence, there would be no sit-down strikes. I sympathize with their objectives, but I don't like their methods. I'm enough of a lawyer for that. It pays to get what you want by legal methods. It makes the pact more binding, leaves less bitterness to be forgotten." Mr. Darrow did not look for consistency in life or individuals and he was not unaware of his own inconsistencies. A revolutionist in heart and mind, he was essentially a conservative in action and conduct. He was opposed to violence, but supported the war because of his sympathy for Belgium, the underdog. On the other hand, in line with the dictum that one could not indict a whole people, he refused to join in the war hysteria against Germany, and did not believe the stories of German atrocities. He campaigned for Liberty Bonds and later defended his German friends in this country. Samples of His Philosophy Here are some of Mr. Darrow's sayings, illustrating his skeptical philosophy. "My learned opponent says the League of Nations isn't much good, but that it may be better some day. Men go to hell on the same theory." "Everybody is a potential murderer. I've never killed any one, but I frequently get satisfaction reading the obituary notices." "Saving criminals is only saving children, and saving children means not only saving criminals, but their victims, too." "Even the civil lawyers know that poverty is the cause of crime, and that is why they don't practice criminal law. There is no money in it." "There isn't a man of the intelligence of an ordinary moron who doesn't know that people believe in enforcing only those laws that they believe in." "I never studied geometry or history, or much Greek, and I studied scarcely any Latin, and not much arithmetic; and I never did anything with grammar, except to study it--in fact, I always thought that this was the only purpose for which grammar was invented." "There is no logical consistency in what a man does with his life. I run on emotions, like everybody else." "In spite of all the yearnings of men, no one can produce a single fact or reason to support the belief in personal immortality." "I wish some fellow like Henry Ford or Rockefeller or some other patron saint of America with great organizing ability would teach us how to be inefficient and happy." "I couldn't join the Socialist party because I'd be too lonely, and I don't like being lonely." "You can take $5 to a drug store and buy everything that makes up a man." "I am sure of very little, and I shouldn't be surprised if those things were wrong." Praised by Dr. Wilson PORTLAND, Ore., March 13 (AP).--Dr. Clarence True Wilson, church and temperance leader, expressed sorrow today at the death of Clarence Darrow, whom he met in forty- six joint debates between 1925 and 1935. "I feel lonely to think he is gone," Dr. Wilson said. "He was a kind, considerate friend, and I had a great love for him. "He was a very able man--a most able one. He was one of the most affable, lovable men I ever met in friendship, and we have corresponded ever since our debates ended. "Before I knew him well, I used to think he was the worst type of man we had in our nation, a defender of crime, but I learned to know differently. He simply did not believe in capital punishment." Malone Also Saddened Dudley Field Malone, who was associate counsel to Mr. Darrow in the evolution trial at Dayton, Tenn., and later in the Massie trial at Honolulu, was grief-stricken at the loss of his friend. In tribute to the famous lawyer, he said: "In universality of information, quality of mind, great heart, honesty, courage and character, Clarence Darrow was the most distinguished human being I've ever known. My service with him in many cases and causes will always be my most precious professional memory. "The American bar has lost a great leader, for ideals rather than legal interpretation. The thousands of men and women whom he so unselfishly served will never forget him and the American people have suffered an incalculable loss."
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