Farmington

by Clarence Darrow

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277 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1904

About the author

in 1857, Clarence Darrow, later dubbed "Attorney for the Damned" and "the Great Defender," was born. For a time he lived in an Ohio home that had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. His father was known as the "village infidel." Darrow attended the University of Michigan Law School for one year, then passed the bar in 1878 and moved to Chicago. There he joined protests against the trumped-up charges against four radicals accused in the Haymarket Riot case. Darrow became corporate counsel to the City of Chicago, then counsel for the North Western Railway. He quit this lucrative post when he could no longer defend their treatment of injured workers, then went on to defend without pay Socialist striker Eugene V. Debs. In 1907, Darrow successfully defended labor activist "Big Bill" Haywood, charged with assassinating a former governor. His passionate denunciation of the death penalty prompted him to defend the famous killers, Loeb and Leopold, who received life sentences in 1924.

His most celebrated case was the Scopes Trial, defending teacher John Scopes in Dayton, Tenn., who was charged with the crime of teaching evolution in the public schools. Darrow's brilliant cross-examination of prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan lives on in legal history. During the trial, Darrow said: "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." Darrow wrote many freethought articles and edited a freethought collection. His two appealing autobiographies are The Story of My Life (1932), containing his plainspoken views on religion, and Farmington (1932). He also wrote Resist Not Evil (1902), An Eye for An Eye (1905), and Crime, Its Causes and Treatments (1925). His freethought writings are collected into Why I Am an Agnostic and Other Essays. He told The New York Times, "Religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either" (April 19, 1936). D. 1938.

More: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytr...

http://darrow.law.umn.edu/index.php?

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history...

Reviews

[David Ambrose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dry but entertaining, and I guess I would say informative. This book is at least a slightly fictionalized account of Darrow's childhood. According to Wikipedia, Darrow was from Farmdale, Ohio, and was the son of a cabinetmaker. In the book, the main character's name is Smith, is from Farmington, Pennsylvania, and is the son of a miller. Other than small changes such as these I assume that the book gives an accurate picture of Darrow's experience growing up in this kind of community in the second half of the 1800s. In this way it's kind of similar to the Little House books, showing what a child's life was like in a farming community in that time period. Darrow's book can't be said to have a plot, though. In all, I'm glad that I read it, but I'm also glad that it wasn't longer.