If Clarence Darrow Were Alive Today

Clarence Darrow, arguably the most famous American lawyer of all time, is best remembered for the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1926, immortalized in the Broadway play and two film versions of "Inherit the Wind." But one hundred years ago, during the first decade of the twentieth century, Darrow was the nation's leading labor lawyer, fighting for union causes across the country. His most colorful labor cases included:

• The 1904 Anthracite Coal Arbitration in Scranton and Philadelphia (PA) that won the United Mine Workers an eight-hour day and a ten-percent pay raise.
  
  
• The 1906 Big Bill Haywood murder trial in Boise, Idaho, which cleared the Western Federation of Miners of the assassination of a former state governor.
  
  
• The 1911 Los Angeles Times bombing case, which ended in an ignominious guilty plea by Darrow on behalf of his terrorist-clients. That plea marked the end of Darrow's days as the darling of the American Federation of Labor.

These are the cases with which I like to open my law course at Rider University: "Celebrated American Trials of the 20th Century." And so old Clarence was much on my mind, as I sat down to write this article on this past September 11th, which marks the third anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.

A comparison of the first decade of the twentieth century with the first decade of this new millennium is compelling. During the decade of the 1900s John D. Rockefeller, the nation's richest man, controlled the oil industry--the most important industry of the Industrial Age. In 2004 the nation's wealthiest citizen by far is Microsoft's Bill Gates, whose PC platform plays the role on the Information Highway that Standard Oil's wells, pipelines and refineries once played on America's concrete and asphalt highways and byways. Meanwhile, organized labor --- after rising to its peak of power in the 1940s and 1950s, when it claimed one out of every three American workers among its membership --- has nose-dived back down to 1900 levels, representing a little less than 10 percent of the private-sector workforce today. And, as in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the gap between the nation's very rich and very poor is again glaring.

And, once again, terrorists stalk the American landscape.

So, I wondered, what might Clarence Darrow say and do, if he were alive today?

First, I think he would decry the "corporatization" of Big Labor. He would remind organized labor that circling the wagons in the face of declining numbers and government hostility --- starting in 1981, when Ronald Reagan "busted" the air traffic controllers' union --- only postpones, but does not prevent, the death of unionism. He would argue for vigorous organizing on a global scale as a relatively-new "Global Union" movement is at last endeavoring to do. He would add that labor leaders who want to walk, talk and get paid like corporate executives are little better than their greedy company counterparts. A global labor movement, matching stride for stride the globalization of business and industry --- with its outsourcing of high-paid American manufacturing jobs to Third World "sweatshops" --- might help eradicate some of the grass roots causes of terrorism. I'm referring to the poverty, hopelessness, frustration and envy that lead young men and women of the underdeveloped world to strap bombs to their backs.

Second, he would be a leader among the lawyers who champion such social outcasts as the Guantanamo detainees and the Abu Ghraib prisoners. He would realize that, while the terrorist threat --- like the Cold War in my time and the 1919-20 Red Scare in his own --- must be met, more important is the status of our civil liberties when the crisis has passed. A lover of science and a proponent (albeit skeptical) of human progress, he would own a great sound system and CD collection. And he'd nod in agreement on hearing the line in that U2 song, which says, "We become a monster, so the monster cannot take us." He would read about the abuses that occurred in Abu Ghraib Prison and wonder what have we won, if to win we act no better than our enemies.

And, last but not least, I believe that Darrow --- the son of an "engineer" who transported escaping slaves on the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad, and himself a lifelong opponent of the death penalty and the so-called "Attorney for the Damned" --- would argue, as he always had, that human life and human liberty count above all else.

That, I think, is what Clarence Darrow would say and do, were he alive today.

That's the message I'll try to deliver to my Rider law students again this fall. And that's the thought for the day from your Attorney at Large.