Clarence Darrow
2002
Lawyer· Civil Liberties Advocate · Social Reformer
Clarence Darrow was an intelligent man who, as a child, was taught to investigate, think, differ, and speak out against injustice. He is best known today for being a criminal defense lawyer who, unlike many other lawyers of his time, fully believed the law should be used to defend anyone who needed defending. This led him to defend union leaders, anarchists, miners, laborers, protestors, people of color, and more.
“Laws should be like clothes. They should be made to fit the people they serve.”
In 1925, Darrow was hired by the ACLU to defend a teacher who had broken the law by presenting the Darwinian theory of evolution to his class. This issue was hotly contested across America, with many states making it illegal to teach anything aside from Biblical Creationism.
“Education was in danger from the source that always hampered it—religious fanaticism.”
During the trial, the state was represented by a prominent Presbyterian lawyer, who took the stand himself to defend the Bible. Darrow, however, was a known agnostic and scholar. He questioned the other lawyer using facts and readings from the Bible itself, asking questions about the Bible’s consistency and accuracy that the other lawyer was unable to answer.
“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”
As a wordsmith, Darrow wrote both fiction and nonfiction. His book, An Eye for an Eye, was a tragic story of a man who had murdered his wife, the raw truth and thoroughness of which earned him the respect of the sociological community as well as the literary community. His non-fiction writings looked intently at the law, crime, criminals, and communism, and provided insights about Prohibition, tariffs, capital punishment, and the downfalls of restricting freedom.
“As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.”
In each of his writings, speeches, and courtroom arguments, Clarence Darrow revealed himself to be a continual learner, a truth seeker, and a freethinker.