9x11 black and white publicity photograph of Clarence Darrow wearing
a suit and tie.
Photograph inscribed and signed:
"Clarence Darrow/Warmest wishes
to/Gifford Ernest/Chicago Feb'y 2, 1936". B/w, 9x11 overall, image 7½x9¼
(one surface). Attorney
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who specialized in
corporate law,
shot to fame in 1894, when he
defended American
Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, President of the American Railroad Union,
arrested on a federal contempt of court charge arising from a strike at the
Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company. Although Darrow lost the case, he won a
national reputation as a champion of radical causes. A brilliant orator
and a master of reforming the law, framing pleas and eliciting evidence, he
became
one of America's most renowned defense lawyers, and he used his
position to campaign against capital punishment. In his sixties, Darrow
successfully defended
Leopold and Loeb (1924) in getting life
imprisonment instead of death for kidnapping and killing a 13-year-old boy. In
1925, he
defended John T. Scopes, accused of violating a Tennessee law by
teaching evolution, in the "Scopes Monkey Trial".
Darrow's autobiography,
The Story of My Life, was published in 1932. Blank areas are lightly
soiled. Lightly creased.
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