Donald McRae. The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow. New York: William Morrow, 2009. 422 pages.
Clarence Darrow was one of the most polarizing figures of the early 20th century. He was at the forefront of several of the era’s most widely publicized trials, including the McNamara brothers’ 1912 trial for allegedly bombing the LA Times building, the 1924 defense of notorious Chicago thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, Tennessee’s famous 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” and the 1925-6 Detroit trials of Ossian Sweet and others, black men accused of killing a white man in defense of Sweet’s home.
In this book, McRae looks at the last three of those trials, with a new spin: he brings in Mary Field Parton, Darrow’s lover. Parton and Darrow had an affair from 1908-1912 and rekindled it, though Parton was happily married.
McRae portrays Darrow as an eloquent, complicated warrior for justice, and makes good use of existing accounts of his career and personality. We see a man devastated by his 1912 trials for alleged jury-tampering begin to rebuild his reputation with the Leopold and Loeb case. The two men had already confessed to murdering a 14-year-old boy as an experiment, and their conviction and execution was widely considered a done deal. Yet Darrow, through ingenious legal footwork and emotive argumentation, was able to spare them the electric chair.
Here lies one of the unspoken contrasts of the book. Darrow is constantly lauded by his admiring contemporaries and the author as a brilliantly logical lawyer. Yet most of his triumphs came as a result of his openly emotional rhetoric and oratory. Several times in the book, Darrow ends an hours-long summation in wiping away tears, along with members of the jury and even the judge. It’s just one of the complexities of Darrow that is hinted at here.
It’s an unvarnished, though largely uncritical portrait, of one of the major legal and political figures of the period, and a introduction into that time.