Clarence Darrow by John A. Farrell

Author:John A. Farrell [Farrell, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53451-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT WAR cleaved wounds in the radical community. Socialists like Debs and pacifists like Jane Addams decried the slaughter, which they blamed on militarists and industrialists from both sides. But other liberals and progressives, like Gompers and Darrow, condemned Germany. In the spring of 1915, Sara visited Chicago, and she and Darrow had a heated quarrel. “Imagine Sara and I fighting when either one of us would go to hell for the other,” he told Mary. But “here was Germany preparing for years to destroy civilization … to make the world Prussian. They trampled Belgium under foot violating their written word. They invaded France and Poland. They ran their submarines under ships and destroyed them without warning … The world had to submit to Germany and to go back to barbarism, or fight.…

“There can be no peace while Prussian militarism lives,” he wrote, “and I want to see it destroyed.”

Darrow’s old flame Katherine Leckie, Addams, and other pacifists took advantage of Henry Ford’s offer to finance the journey of a “peace ship” that would tour European ports. Darrow was asked to join them but turned down the invitation. “I can make a damned fool of myself without leaving Chicago,” he said.16

“Can’t help being glad U.S. is getting into the war,” Darrow wrote Paul when President Wilson brought America into the conflict. “It is time Germany was licked.”17

Darrow enlisted with Gompers in a campaign to rally labor behind the war. He joined groups like Labor’s Loyal Legion, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, and the National Security League. He toured as a speaker, wrote essays, and contributed to a pamphlet called “The War for Peace,” published by the government’s new Committee on Public Information. Teddy Roosevelt praised his patriotism, and wealthy industrialists served beside him. He was “right in it with the fellows who have always been against me,” he told Paul, but if they needed to raise money for the gas business, he noted, that might be helpful.

A special target was Chicago’s Republican mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson, who was pro-German and antiwar. Darrow compared him to “a biting adder … that lies lurking in the grass,” and said that Thompson and other opponents of the war were being used by German agents “in a conspiracy of treason.” In October, Darrow spoke on “Loyalty Day,” when 150,000 people gathered in Grant Park for fireworks, anthems, and martial rhetoric. “I believe in liberty; I believe in the greatest possible freedom of speech and of the press, but I know this: the rules for war and the rules for peace … cannot be the same,” Darrow said. “This country is at war and this country will win and you are playing with fire when you fight us in the rear.”

In a New York speech to the National Security League, Darrow sounded Prussian himself: “Be it said to the honor and glory and idealism of America, that she accepted the gage of battle from the German empire and prepared to fight! …

“It ill becomes any American to criticize the President in this great crisis,” he said.

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