Darrow, Clarence (Seward)

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.

Clarence Darrow, 1924.

Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society

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