No, that’s not “Clarence the Angel” of It’s a Wonderful
Life fame. The Clarence in this title is much less inspiring,
not exactly angelic — a humbug, really. I’m thinking of Clarence
Darrow, dogmatic defender of atheists.
As Christians this time of year absorb another spate of
snipes at their revered holy day, they might pause to remember
Darrow. Darrow’s actions and triumphs stand at the crux of the
secular-progressive long march against Christian interests, whether
prayer in public schools or the latest ACLU lawsuit against
Christmas carols.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938) was the wise-cracking,
aggressive lawyer who tore into William Jennings Bryan in the 1925
“Scopes Monkey Trials,” an epic battle over evolution vs.
creationism. Bryan, for the record, was a three-time Democratic
Party presidential nominee. He was old-school, when Democrats were
more conservative and far less secular, more in the mold of Harry
Truman and Jack Kennedy than Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Darrow’s
courtroom denunciation of Bryan is immortalized in the awful movie,
Inherit the Wind, which portrays Bryan as an idiot and
Darrow as brilliant defender of civil liberties, “tolerance,” and
“reason.”
These are reasons why modern secular liberals uphold
Clarence Darrow as conquering hero. These liberals are a sharp
departure from religious progressive forebears like Bryan, Woodrow
Wilson, Dorothy Day, and Jane Addams, among others. Today’s
progressive professors love Darrow.
That’s all well-established. What surprised me, however,
was the discovery that the farthest extreme of the political left
— namely, American communists — likewise loved Darrow. This was a
shock, absolutely unexpected, as I encountered Darrow’s name
repeatedly in the Soviet Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA
(CPUSA).
Why did communists adore Darrow? For one, they greatly
appreciated his work against religion in the Scopes Trials. There
were no angrier foes of faith than communists, from Moscow to New
York. Darrow was the toast of the movement for his yeoman’s work
countering God and exposing the silly “superstitions” of Bryan and
his slack-jawed fundamentalists.
But there’s more to it. Another reason for the communist
reverence of Darrow is a fact not taught in schools: Darrow
defended them, and particularly communist leader Ben Gitlow,
beginning with a series of dramatic incidents and
cases that ran from 1919 into the 1920s, when they were being
(properly) pursued for advocating armed revolution and the
overthrow of the American system, which they wanted to replace with
a “Soviet American republic.” (To view some of these documents from
the Comintern Archives, click here.) They were being
challenged by President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general,
Alexander Mitchell Palmer, for their blatantly subversive,
anti-American, pro-Bolshevik activities.
One might figure liberals/progressives more ambivalent on
this one. Here were Darrow and American communists pitted against
the progressive’s progressive, Woodrow Wilson. However, any liberal
sympathies were cleverly reversed when Darrow shrewdly attacked not
communists but anti-communists. For liberals, anti-communism has
always been a worse sin than pro-communism. Their eternal demon is
Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin.
Significantly, Darrow was an early member of the ACLU,
founded in 1920 by fellow atheist, Roger Baldwin, who also, at that
point, was a pro-Soviet communist. The ACLU was founded mere months
after the American Communist Party and the Soviet Comintern. As I
wrote here last week, a huge component of the group’s initial
work was defending American communists. ACLU members and American
Communist Party members flocked to one another.
As for Darrow, he unflinchingly adopted the party line of
the ACLU and American Communist Party, arguing that America was
being consumed by hysterical anti-communism. This, of course, was
decades before Joe McCarthy. No surprise. The American left, from
the start of the founding of the American Communist Party, has
portrayed innumerable anti-communists, Democrat or Republican, as
incarnations of McCarthy.
But Clarence Darrow’s courtroom defense of Gitlow and
American communists was cruder than that. In fact, his antics were
outright deceptive. Not only were American communists not loyal to
the USSR, insisted Darrow, in the face of fliers dropped on
doorsteps and posted on buildings by the Communist Party (click here), but they were the
embodiment of the American Revolution and Founding Fathers. “For a
man to be afraid of revolution in America,” argued Darrow to the
court, “would be to be ashamed of his own mother!”
“Revolution?” scoffed Darrow. What was more
quintessentially American? These American Bolsheviks, who wanted to
replace the American Constitution with the Soviet “Constitution,”
were modern incarnations of Jefferson and Madison.
As if that were not offensive enough, Darrow, atheist
champion, invoked the Almighty on behalf of this exalted
revolution: “There is not a drop of honest blood in a single man
that does not look back to some revolution for which he would thank
his God that those who revolted won.”
The bad guys weren’t the communists, according to this
narrative; no, Woodrow Wilson and his vile anti-communist crusaders
were the bad guys. Darrow argued that if Abraham Lincoln were
alive, Wilson’s Justice Department would send in “night riders to
invade his office and the privacy of his home and send him to
jail.”
Tellingly, these words from Darrow are cited in the 1940
autobiography of Ben Gitlow. By then, a reformed Gitlow recalled
the words with embarrassment, as he had since fled the communist
movement. It was quite a conversion. Gitlow twice ran as the
Communist Party’s candidate for vice president of the United
States, and had even served on the Comintern’s Executive Committee.
After a long silence, Gitlow emerged to testify before Congress
(1939) and to write two major books, I Confess (1940), and
The Whole of Their Lives (1948), where he laid out a
litany of disturbing facts on CPUSA’s relationship with Moscow,
from its “fanatical zeal” to the Soviet Union, to its continuing
pledge of “ultimate victory over the capitalist world,” to its
espionage and acceptance of funding from the Stalin regime,
including subsidies for the Daily Worker. For blowing the
whistle, Gitlow’s erstwhile comrades labeled him a
“fascist.”
When Gitlow unloaded these revelations, it begged key
questions regarding Darrow, who by then was recently deceased: How
much did Darrow know? Had Darrow been
duped by communists, or did he help them do the
duping?
Either way, the communists were eternally grateful to
Clarence Darrow.
Finally, it’s key to understand that communists embraced
Darrow because Darrow countered Democrat icons like Woodrow Wilson
and FDR, both of whom the communists despised. In fact, it was
Darrow’s criticisms of the New Deal that brought him on my radar —
actually, my microfiche screen — in the Comintern Archives. The
communist line was that FDR was a “fascist,” bent on “world war,”
seeking to impose “forced labor.” (Click here to see
examples.)
In one case, I found the communists trumpeting the “Darrow
Report,” which sliced and diced the New Deal. “The Darrow Report,”
said the pages of one CPUSA publication, “tells the truth” about
the New Deal. “It says what the communists have been saying from
the beginning.”
Will this history surprise liberals? Of course.
None of this is taught in our schools, a product of the
left’s own biases — specifically, its hatred of anti-communism.
Encyclopedia references on Darrow ignore these associations. A
Google search on Darrow first generates his Wikipedia entry,
which, at the writing of this article, contains not a single
mention of any of this, with the word “communist” never appearing
once.
Alas, Clarence Darrow, hero of the Scopes Monkey Trials —
and so much more. Don’t expect to learn that in your civics class.
You have a better chance of hearing Darrow’s dire words on
creationists than you do Darrow’s glowing words on
communists.
