Clarence Darrow: American Iconoclast by Andrew Kersten by Brett Warnke for Providence Journal

By Brett Warnke 

Clarence Darrow “American iconoclast” by Andrew E. Kersten

In the so-called Gilded Age men like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Morgan did not just wield power, they set policy.  George Pullman refused to discuss terms with the unions in his boxcar factories and when confronted with a roll of demands (an eight-hour work day, no child labor, freedom to purchase goods independent of the company, etc.) one corporate leader “referred the list to the dustbin.”  Lincoln Steffens referred to these demi-gods of capitalism as “plutogogues.”  Their most mellifluous adversary and the working man’s fiercest advocate was Clarence Darrow, “Labor’s lawyer.” 

In “Clarence Darrow:  American Iconoclast” Andrew Kersten has produced a concise and engaging history of Darrow and his times.  If Kersten’s book is sometimes repetitious and clunky it succeeds in contextualizing Darrow’s era and remains a pithy alternative to the lyricism and narrative of Irving Stone’s 500-page biography.  Kersten writes that in the middle of Darrow’s life the old lion “had finally become a public intellectual, an opinion maker and at times a cynic, who loved to engage and enrage the American public while singling out the foes of liberty and freedom for ridicule and advocating tolerance as well as those ideas that might advance civilization.”

Darrow, an Ohio lawyer, was the skeptic—the humanist—who defended Leopold and Loeb and challenged the strutting fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan at the Snopes “Monkey Trial.”  Yet Darrow’s true ambition was thinking and demanding that task of others.  His progressive and contrarian mission produced disappointment—bootlickers of the establishment were repeatedly elected and men like Jay Gould (who famously said he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,”) grew in power and stature.  Kersten’s strength is sketching the age Darrow occupied and illustrating its antagonisms.  His Darrow, whether New Deal skeptic, women’s suffrage opponent, or naïve World War I cheerleader, was human.  But at least he was for humanity.