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Clarence Darrow, the famous defense attorney of the early 20^th Century, was a noted civil libertarian who built his reputation in a series of high-profile cases: He defended Eugene Debs, the labor union leader who led the 1894 Pullman strike, against Federal charges. An opponent of the death penalty, his most notable success came when he persuaded the judge in the 1924 case of Chicago “thrill killers” Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to sentence them to life in prison rather than death, a case that attracted national attention. He was back in the national spotlight the next year when he defended Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes against charges of breaking state law by teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution instead of  the state-mandated creationism. Darrow was a persuasive speaker and, in the Scopes trial, he was matched against one of the most famous orators of the late 19^th Century, William Jennings Bryant, a three-time candidate for President. Their confrontation was memorialized in a fictionalized account as a play and subsequent movie, Inherit the Wind.

In and speeches and in his writing, Darrow exhibited a sly wit and the intellectual’s skepticism. Much of what he said still rings true a century later. To wit:

“With the land and possession of America rapidly passing into the hands of a favored few; with great corporations taking the place of individual effort; with the small shops going down before the great factories and department stores; with thousands of men and women in idleness and want; with wages constantly tending to a lower level; ... with bribery and corruption openly charged, constantly reiterated by the press, and universally believed; and above all and more than all, with the knowledge that the servants of the people, elected to correct abuses, are bought and sold in legislative halls at the bidding of corporations and individuals: with all these notorious evils sapping the foundations of popular government and destroying personal liberty, some rude awakening must come. And if it shall come... when you then look abroad over the ruin and desolation, remember the long years in which the storm was rising, and do not blame the thunderbolt.”

"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and if no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.”

“The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.”

“The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.”

“To think is to differ.”

“Some false representations contravene the law; some do not. The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business, and, besides, could not be done. The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.”

“True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”

The defense rests.