Closing Arguments: Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938) was born in northeast Ohio and served as a small-town lawyer there for nine years. He left for Chicago and made history as America's greatest defense attorney. He said of himself, "I have lived a life in front trenches, looking for trouble." Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America's greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. Darrow gained fame for being at the center of momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial." Some have traced Darrow's lifelong campaign against capital punishment to his boyhood terror at seeing a Civil War soldier buried—and no client of Darrow's was ever executed, not even black men who were charged with murder for defending themselves against a white mob. Editor S. T. Joshi is the author and editor of many books, including H.L. Mencken on American Literature (Ohio, 2002) and Mencken's America (Ohio, 2004).