Clarence Darrow Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

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.