Clarence Darrow

attorney for the damned

588 pages

English language

Published Feb. 20, 2011 by Doubleday.

ISBN:
978-0-385-52258-8
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OCLC Number:
670479380

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5 stars (1 review)

Clarence Darrow is the lawyer every law school student dreams of being: on the side of right, loved by many women, portrayed by Spencer Tracy. His days-long closing arguments, delivered without notes, won miraculous reprieves. Darrow left a promising career as a railroad lawyer during the tumultuous Gilded Age in order to champion poor workers, blacks, and social and political outcasts against big business, Jim Crow, and corrupt officials. He became famous defending union leader Eugene V. Debs in the landmark Pullman Strike case and went from one headline case to the next--until he was nearly crushed by an indictment for bribing a jury. He redeemed himself defending schoolteacher John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial," cementing his place in history. Journalist John A. Farrell draws on previously unpublished correspondence and memoirs to offer a candid account of Darrow's divorce, affairs, feuds, tactics, and controversies.--From publisher description.

2 editions

Review of 'Clarence Darrow' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I am haunted by the ghosts of the breaker boys. At the beginning of the twentieth century, little boys of 10 and 12 worked six days a week for ten-hour days perched over coal chutes from which they plucked bits of rock. Clarence Darrow, at the time the most famous attorney for the coal miners, described the fate of one such boy as follows:

One day his little companion who always sat beside him leaned too far over as he picked the slate. He lost his balance and fell into the trough where the lumps of coal ran down. He plunged madly along with the rushing flood into the iron teeth of the remorseless breaker.... It took a long while to stop the mighty machine, and then it was almost an hour before the boy could be put together in one pile. Several days thereafter a man in a little …

Subjects

  • Lawyers
  • Biography

Places

  • United States