Description:

Darrow Clarence



Clarence Darrow Enormous Signature on Verso of a Postcard

 


Postcard postmarked "Jun 11, 1937", 5.5" x 3.25". Signed by Clarence Darrow on the verso in a large 4" vibrant signature "Clarence Darrow". Card is toned, addressed to the front to "Alexander Nahas" and contains with two pieces of leftover mounting remnants. 

 

Clarence Darrow's legal and persuasive techniques became his legacy, and are highly respected to this day. Darrow had begun as a common civil lawyer. Even in Chicago his first jobs included appointment as the city's corporation counsel in 1890 and then as general attorney to the Chicago and North Western Railway. In 1894, however, he began what would be his main career for the next twenty years—labor law. During 1894 he defended labor leader Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) against a court order trying to break the workers' strike Debs was leading against the Pullman Sleeping Car Company. Darrow was unsuccessful, though; the order against Debs was finally upheld by the Supreme Court.


In 1906 and 1907 Darrow successfully defended William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, the leader of the newly formed Industrial Workers of the World, against a charge of plotting to murder the former governor of Idaho. But in 1911 disaster struck, as Darrow, while defending two brothers against a charge of killing twenty-one people by blowing up the Los Angeles Times building, was suddenly faced with his clients' changing their previous plea of innocent to guilty. There were also rumors that Darrow had attempted to bribe one of the members of the jury. As a result, Darrow was charged with misconduct, although he was found not guilty on all charges. This event ended his career as a labor lawyer, however.

Darrow had always been interested in criminal law, in part because of his acceptance of new theories involving the role of determination in human behavior. He believed that criminals were people led by outside factors (such as personality and environment) into committing unlawful acts. For this reason he was a bitter opponent of capital punishment, viewing it as an inhuman practice. Now he began a new major career as a criminal lawyer.


Without a doubt Darrow's most famous criminal trial was the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case, in which two Chicago college students had murdered a youngster simply to see if they could get away with it. For the only time in his career, Darrow insisted that his clients plead guilty. He then turned his attention to saving them from the death penalty. He was successful in this, partly because he was able to introduce a great deal of testimony from psychiatrists (doctors who deal with mental or behavioral disorders) supporting his theories regarding the determining influences on individual acts. In another successful case he defended members of an African American family charged with murdering a member of the KKK who had attempted to drive them from their home.


The Scopes Trial entered him into another realm of law and fame in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. The issue was the right of a state legislature to prohibit the teaching in public schools of Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) theories of evolution (which suggested that the origins of humans and apes could be traced back to a common ancestor). Darrow, as a nonbeliever in religion and a believer in evolution, was annoyed with the religious tone of the law that had been passed. He sought to defend the young schoolteacher, John T. Scopes, who had raised the issue of evolution in his classroom. Technically, Darrow was unsuccessful, as Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for what the court believed was a crime. But Darrow's defense, and particularly his cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the three-time Democratic candidate for president who spoke for the religious, antiscientific side, won national attention and led many to question the wisdom of strict interpretation of the Bible.



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