[5] Called a "sophisticated country lawyer",[6] Darrow's wit and eloquence made him one of the most prominent attorneys and civil libertarians in the nation.

[citation needed] Following his departure from the University of Michigan Law School in late 1879 Darrow moved to the small village of Harvard, Illinois, with his classmate L.H.

After two years Darrow felt he was ready to take on new and different cases and moved his practice to Ashtabula, Ohio, which had a population of 5,000 people and was the largest city in the county.

Darrow worked in the city law department for two years when he resigned and took a position as a lawyer at the Chicago and North-Western Railway Company[10]in 1891.

[13] In 1894, Darrow represented Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who was prosecuted by the federal government for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894.

He represented the woodworkers of Wisconsin in a notable case in Oshkosh in 1898 and the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in the great anthracite coal strike of 1902.

[17][16] From 1906 to 1908, Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone when they were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905.

[citation needed] In 1911, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) called on Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers, John and James, who were charged in the Los Angeles Times bombing on October 1, 1910, during the bitter struggle over the open shop in Southern California.

[citation needed] In the weeks before the jury was seated, Darrow became increasingly concerned about the outcome of the trial and began negotiations for a plea bargain to spare the defendants' lives.

[24] Darrow's early biographers, Irving Stone and Arthur and Lila Weinberg, asserted that he was not involved in the bribery conspiracy, but more recently, Geoffrey Cowan and John A. Farrell, with the help of new evidence, concluded that he almost certainly was.

[21][25] In the biography of Earl Rogers by his daughter Adela, she wrote: "I never had any doubts, even before one of my father's private conversations with Darrow included an admission of guilt to his lawyer.

[citation needed] In the summer of 1924, Darrow took on the case of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, the teenage sons of two wealthy Chicago families who were accused of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy, from their stylish southside Kenwood neighborhood.

Chicago newspapers labeled the case the "Trial of the Century"[28] and Americans around the country wondered what could drive the two young men, blessed with everything their society could offer, to commit such a depraved act.

The killers had been arrested after a passing workman spotted the victim's body in an isolated nature preserve near the Indiana border just half a day after it was hidden, before they could collect a $10,000 ransom.

Darrow stunned the prosecution when he had his clients plead guilty in order to avoid a vengeance-minded jury and place the case before a judge.

The trial, then, was actually a long sentencing hearing in which Darrow contended, with the help of expert testimony, that Leopold and Loeb were mentally diseased.

[27] The Leopold and Loeb case raised, in a well-publicized trial, Darrow's lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior.

The trial, which was deliberately staged to bring publicity to the issue at hand, pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a court case that tested Tennessee's Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925.

Popular media[citation needed] at the time portrayed the following exchange as the deciding factor that turned public opinion against Bryan in the trial: After about two hours, Judge John T. Raulston cut the questioning short and on the following morning ordered that the whole session (which in any case the jury had not witnessed) be expunged from the record, ruling that the testimony had no bearing on whether Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution.

Darrow, alongside Thomas Chawke, would first defend Ossian's brother Henry, who had confessed to firing the shot on Garland Street.

[37] Darrow's closing statement, which lasted over seven hours, is seen as a landmark in the civil rights movement and was included in the book Speeches that Changed the World (given the name "I Believe in the Law of Love").

In his last headline-making case, the Massie Trial, Darrow, devastated by the Great Depression, was hired by Eva Stotesbury, the wife of Darrow's old family friend Edward T. Stotesbury, to come to the defense of Grace Fortescue, Edward J. Lord, Deacon Jones, and Thomas Massie, Fortescue's son-in-law, who were accused of murdering Joseph Kahahawai.

Kahahawai had been accused, along with four other men, of raping and beating Thalia Massie, Thomas's wife and Fortescue's daughter; the resulting 1931 case ended in a hung jury (though the charges were later dropped and repeated investigation has shown them to be innocent).

Enraged, Fortescue and Massie then orchestrated the murder of Kahahawai in order to extract a confession and were caught by police officers while transporting his dead body.

[49] In a 1925 essay, "The Edwardses and the Jukeses", he imitated the eugenicists' tracking of pedigrees as a way to demonstrate that their retrospective centuries-long family tree studies were omitting literally thousands of relatives whose lives did not support the researchers' preconceptions.

[50] "On the basis of what biological principles, and by what psychological hocus-pocus [Dr. William McDougall] reaches the conclusion that the ability to read intelligently denotes a good germ-plasm and desirable citizens I cannot say," he wrote.

[51] Darrow served in the Illinois House of Representatives from the 17th district during the 43rd General Assembly as one of two members of the Public Ownership Party along with John J.

[56][57] Today, Clarence Darrow is remembered for his reputation as a fierce trial attorney who, in many cases, championed the cause of the underdog; because of this, he is generally regarded as one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers in American history.

Darrow shared offices with Edgar Lee Masters, who achieved more fame for his poetry, in particular, the Spoon River Anthology, than for his advocacy.

Darrow successfully defended strike organizers charged with crimes (State of Wisconsin vs. Kidd, Zentner, and Troiber) with a six hour closing argument resulting in a jury verdict of “not guilty” at 4:15PM on 11/2/1898,(an important precedent for organized labor in the United States that laborers could not be criminally charged by exercising their right to seek better working conditions).