BOOK OF THE DAY: The Old Devil – Clarence Darrow: The World's Greatest Trial LawyerBy Donald McRae Simon & Schuster pp432, £18.99
THIS IS in one respect an eccentric book.
Donald McRae has chosen for reasons best known to himself or his agent to apply a thin veneer of fictional sentimentality to his recounting of the final phase of the career of the great American trial lawyer Clarence Darrow.This principally entails imputing sentiments of a generally maudlin character to persons in the narrative which they may or may not have felt, interweaving the story of the married Darrow’s relations with the journalist Mary Field and interposing much comment about the weather.
The varnish of schlock does McRae’s book a disservice. His narrating of trial scenes is consummately skilful, and one realises with a start from the formidable scholarly apparatus at the back of the book that he has undertaken prodigious research and knows much about Darrow.
Darrow’s career as a defender of the cause of labour had touched a near-terminal nadir in 1912-1913. Arising out of his defence of the radical McNamara brothers charged with the firebombing of the Los Angeles Times building with considerable loss of life, he was indicted on two counts of seeking to bribe jurors.
Darrow scraped an acquittal on the first. The jury disagreed on the second. He avoided a third bribery trial only by submitting to a lifelong ban from practising law in California. Professionally mauled and financially reduced, he retreated to Chicago.
McRae’s book turns on three trials that Darrow undertook in the late 1920s, when he was not far short of 70, and which, in exemplary American manner, restored the lustre of his renown.
He defended Nathan Leopold jnr and Richard Loeb, two extremely privileged 19-year-old lovers who had murdered a boy in Chicago in 1924. Controversially averting a jury trial, by a plea of guilty, he successfully elicited what was then cutting-edge psychiatric evidence in mitigation to avoid the death penalty.
He attained his greatest public celebrity in his courtroom confrontation with former Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.
In this case, John T Scopes, who taught science in Dayton, Tennessee, was prosecuted under a statute of that state for teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan represented the World Christian Fundamentals Association as counsel at the trial.
Faced with a bigoted judge, Darrow contrived to call Bryan as witness and destroyed him in cross-examination.
He then deprived Bryan of the opportunity to deliver the redemptive peroration on which he had been labouring by inviting the court – "to save time" – to bring in the jury and instruct its members to find the defendant guilty. The Tennessee Supreme Court eventually directed a nolle prosequito preserve "the peace and dignity of the state".
Darrow also defended Ossian Sweet, a black doctor who had bought a house in a white area of Detroit. The house was besieged by a mob and defended by those within. One of those in the crowd, the pipe-smoking Leon Breiner, was shot dead, possibly by Sweet’s younger brother Henry. The jury disagreed. Only Henry Sweet was retried, and acquitted.
Darrow’s career exemplifies the kinship of law and politics. Unafraid to let the strategy he had conceived bear the whole weight of the case, he made professional judgments of the same order as a politician of high capacity.
He calmly assigned the responsibilities of the other actors in the judicial process. In the Leopold and Loeb trial he told the judge “If these boys hang, you must do it.” In the Sweet trial he addressed the jury similarly. Unflinchingly (and ruthlessly), he asked “Who was Breiner anyway? I will tell you who he was. He was a conspirator in as foul a conspiracy as was ever hatched in a community; in a conspiracy to drive from their homes a little family of black people.”
Frank Callanan is a member of the Irish bar