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Archive for the ‘Clarence Darrow’

Dershowitz on the Darwin Darrow Defended

November 09, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Alan Dershowitz, Clarence Darrow, Evolution, Jeff Gamso, Mike Cernovich, Religion

Check out this eye-opening essay by Alan Dershowitz (H/T Evolution News & Views) at the website of a new movie about the Scopes Monkey Trial, “alleged,” starring Brian Dennehy as Clarence Darrow and Fred Thompson as William Jennings Bryan. As Dershowitz shows, the textbook from which John Scopes was accused of teaching, Hunter’s Civic Biology, was replete with racism and eugenic advocacy.

On a related note, Jeff Gamso credits Mike at Crime & Federalism with having the best tag line in the whole blogosphere:

Because everything I was ever told was a lie.

Darrow “often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair.”

October 10, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Claire Wolfe, Clarence Darrow, Gerry Spence, Thomas Knapp

Noted A. E. Housman, whom Darrow visited in 1927. Housman has long been a personal favorite of mine, ever since I was turned on to him (and Omar, and Reading Gaol) by Robert Service’s poem “Bookshelf.” Here’s a representative sample:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

I am, alas, not particularly inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement,  for sentiments suggested by the poem above and reasons expressed by Thomas Knapp, Gerry Spence, and especially Claire Wolfe, who advises: “Occupy Your Ownself.”

Giving the devil his due

October 06, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Clarence Darrow, Determinism, Henry George, Religion

I’ve been reading Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (2011), by John A. Farrell. Here’s a couple excerpts from the first few chapters which particularly spoke to me.

From Chapter 2 (“Chicago”):

George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”

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Clarence Darrow on the Single Tax

January 17, 2011 By: John Kindley Category: Clarence Darrow, Henry George

Darrow is not as high on my list of all-time favorite people as he is on that of other criminal defense attorneys, but I thought they might not have seen these essays by him and find them of interest:

How to Abolish Unfair Taxation (1913)

The Land Belongs to the People (1916)

  • "[T]here is just nothing wrong with telling the American people the truth." - Allen v. United States

  • Lysander Spooner

    Henry George

    Harriet Tubman

    Sitting Bull

    Angelus Silesius

    Smedley Butler

    Rose Wilder Lane

    Albert Jay Nock

    Dora Marsden

    Leo Tolstoy

    Henry David Thoreau

    John Brown

    Karl Hess

    Levi Coffin

    Max Stirner

    Dorothy Day

    Ernst Jünger

    Thomas Paine