Clarence Darrow

From Philosopedia

Darrow, Clarence (18 April 1857 - 13 March 1938)

Darrow, the famed Scopes Trial lawyer, said:

• I don’t believe in God, because I don’t believe in Mother Goose. . . . I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure—that is all that agnosticism means.

Although called a “most religious man” and “one of the few true Christians” by some, others termed him an atheist and an antichrist. However, he clearly had stated,

• I am an agnostic because no man living can form any picture of it (God). You may believe in the force but not in the object.

Darrow was highly influenced by Schopenhauer and, according to John R. Burr in Encyclopedia of Unbelievers, held that the “mistaken belief that men deliberately choose to be sinners and criminals has provided the excuse for inflicting pain and punishing them, and for imagining a God who will torture them in hell forever.”

Darrow used his philosophy to replace hatred with compassion, and he fought against capital punishment. In the trial of the so-called “Nietzschean” murderers Loeb and Leopold, he was successful in their not being given the death sentence. To Joseph McCabe, he said that he never sought to enable such criminals to escape punishment but only the death sentence, to which he morally objected.

Not About Nightingales (1938) by Tennessee Williams commences:

• This play is dedicated to the memory of Clarence Darrow, The Great Defender, whose mental frontiers were the four corners of the sky.

The work described a prison atrocity in which convicts on a hunger strike in a Pennsylvania prison were roasted to death in a steam-heated cell. Williams was aware of the Loeb and Leopold executions and their nationally famous lawyer. In the “monkey trial,” in which biology teacher John T. Scopes was charged with teaching Darwinian views, Darrow eloquently spoke out against religion. His works include Resist Not Evil (1904), Farmington (1905), Crime, Its Cause and Treatment (1925), Infidels and Heretics (1927), and The Story of My Life (1932). His law partner at one time was Edgar Lee Masters.

Darrow was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, which Charles A. Watts founded in 1899.

{CE; EU, John R. Burr; FUS; HNS2; JM; PA; TRI; TSV; TYD; U}