When HG Wells visited America in 1918, a reporter asked him how he had enjoyed his stay. “Well,” he beamed, “I met Clarence Darrow!” The “Great Defender” was a celebrity in his time, and his attractiveness, as Donald McRae’s evocative biography of America’s most famous trial lawyer shows, has not weakened with the years.

Darrow (1857-1938) was a criminal defender — the son of an abolitionist father and a suffragette mother from Ohio — who became, in the words of Variety magazine, “the greatest one-man draw in America”. However, it was not until he was well into his sixties that he made, or rescued, his reputation. Earlier in his career, he had been caught bribing two members of a jury in California. He was so shamed that he bought a revolver, and seriously considered suicide. When, years later, he acted in the three most celebrated cases of the 1920s — the murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the Scopes “monkey” trial, and the trial of Ossian Sweet (in which a black family was acquitted of killing a member of a white mob) — he conquered not only public foes, but private demons.

McRae is a talented sports writer who has twice won the William Hill award for his books on boxing, and his re-creations of these pugilistic debates nail you to the spot. During his description of the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924, where Darrow represented two rich young men who had killed a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks, you can smell the public’s bloodlust. One Michigan pensioner offered $100 for the privilege of hanging the two accused. “I am 66 years old,” he wrote, “but I am game. I have no use for such fiends.” Their murder of Franks was part of an odd sexual pact between them, and a product of their reading (or misreading) of Nietzsche. They had killed the boy simply for “the thrill” of it. Leopold said at the time that the murder was “an experiment. It is just as easy to justify such a death as it is to justify an entomologist killing a beetle with a pin”.

It was against this inauspicious backdrop that Darrow — a firm opponent of the death penalty — pleaded for clemency. By using psychiatric reports, and by inveighing against the mob’s desire for vengeance, he won the day. The boys were sentenced to life in prison, but they did not swing.

“I am pleading for the future,” said Darrow, in his closing speech. “I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men, when we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.”

In each of these three trials, ­Darrow showed himself to be a skilled orator, with the ability to reduce judge and jury alike to tears in speeches that sometimes lasted three days. He was occasionally laughably overblown, but the central plank of his arguments was always compelling. “Hate the sin,” he said, “and not the sinner.”

More importantly for his clients, he was a warrior.

The Scopes trial of 1925, in which John Scopes, a Tennessee biology teacher, was charged with illegally teaching evolution rather than the book of Genesis, was perhaps Darrow’s finest performance. “It’s going to be a gouging, roughhouse battle,” said Scopes, when choosing Darrow to represent him. “And if it’s going to be a gutter fight, I’d rather have a good gutter fighter.” The trial developed into a “duel to the death” between Darrow and his fundamentalist Christian opponent, the former presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. The latter had warned, “If evolution wins, Christianity goes.” Darrow responded, “The prosecution is opening the doors for a reign of bigotry equal to anything in the middle ages.”

In the end, Bryan won the judgment, but Darrow won the argument in the eyes of every reporter and witness. Indeed, Bryan was so broken by the ordeal that the hyped “duel to the death” took on a literal aspect. A week after the case, the fulminating creationist suffered a massive stroke, and expired.

It seems a shame that, alongside these compelling tales from the courtroom, McRae has chosen to interweave a largely pointless narrative concerning the lawyer’s relationship with a married woman named Mary Field Parton. McRae loses momentum in these diversions, not least because he abandons his normally taut prose, and begins writing like a minor Victorian novelist.

What becomes clear, though, as this second story progresses, is just how much Darrow was brilliant in his profession, and flawed outside it. As Mary writes in her journal, “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” Several Hollywood producers have also noted Darrow’s potential. At least four films, including Hitchcock’s Rope, have been inspired by his most famous cases. The Old Devil has drawn on this filmic legacy — an explanation, perhaps, for the saccharine subplot that punctuates an otherwise engaging narrative.

Never mind, Darrow was a giant, and is a delicious subject for a biography. HG Wells called his friend “a fine flower of American insurrection…He is for an imaginary ‘little man’ — against monopoly, against rule, against law, any law”. We could use more Darrows now.

The Old Devil by Donald McRae
Simon & Schuster £18.99 pp410

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