New Donation: The Travels of Clarence and Ruby Darrow

The Law Library and Riesenfeld Center have recently received a wonderful new donation of letters to and from Ruby Darrow, and memorabilia related to Clarence and his wife Ruby's travels together abroad, particularly during 1929 and 1930, during an important period in their lives. The new donation, generously gifted by Elva Paulson, a relative of Ruby Darrow, adds to the Law Library's extraordinary collection of material related to Clarence Darrow's life and career and sheds further light on Clarence and Ruby's lives. 

The group of letters associated with Ruby reveal family details, such as support she offered for her young nephew's writing career, and some add to a small collection of material from Ruby's life after Clarence passed away in 1938. The collection of travel memorabilia documents Ruby and Clarence's travels to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, particularly from 1929 and early 1930, and includes hundreds of postcards picturing locales that they visited, as well as itineraries, a passport, casino tickets, menus, photographs, hotel brochures, and more. Some of the material can be correlated by location to letters written and received by Darrow at the time. 

During the period when they were travelling, the Darrows were significantly affected by the "great" American stock market crash, beginning on October 24, 1929, which ended the "Roaring Twenties" and triggered the Depression. The growing reality of the new financial environment and anxiousness surrounding it appear in some of Clarence's letters, particularly those written to his son, Paul, which are housed in the Library's Darrow Collection. In letters from abroad, Darrow instructs Paul to look after family business arrangements, and receives word from other family members on how the crash has affected them. 

The Library's Darrow Collection holds more than one thousand letters to and from the great American trial attorney, as well as publications by and about Darrow, photos, selected case material, books from Darrow's library, and a small archive of documents from Ruby's later life. The new letters and travel memorabilia are a great addition to the Darrow collection and will enrich our knowledge of Clarence and Ruby. 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections

New Darrow Acquisitions & Darrow’s Library

The Riesenfeld Center has recently acquired several new items relating to Clarence Darrow’s interests and career, as well as those of his wife, Ruby. These items join the Law Library’s Darrow collection, which includes more than 1,000 letters, as well as books, speeches, debates, trial briefs and transcripts, and other material about Darrow and his noteworthy career and life. To learn more about Darrow, you can visit our award-winning digital research site, which makes available extensive material from our collection.

 

Two of the library’s newest acquisitions are pamphlets featuring some of Darrow’s work. The first, an issue of the leftist periodical The Debunker published in 1931, features Darrow’s essay, “Absurdities of the Bible.” Darrow, a known agnostic, delves into a handful of stories from the Bible, including the creation of Adam and the performing of several miracles. Darrow states that “I am an agnostic because I trust my reason…Anybody who can believe those old myths and fables isn’t governed by reason.”

Another new pamphlet to the collection relates to Benjamin Gitlow, a communist whose civil liberties Darrow defended in a noted ‘Red Scare’ trial in 1920. Gitlow, a member of the Labor Committee of the Communist Labor Party and a staffer for the left-wing magazine The Revolutionary Age, was tried under New York’s Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902. This was done on the grounds that the magazine’s printing of the Left Wing Manifesto constituted encouragement of the violent overthrow of the government. Darrow was hired as part of the defense team, and his speech in Gitlow’s defense is excerpted in this pamphlet. Ultimately, Gitlow was found guilty and sentenced to five to ten years of hard labor, being released in 1922 after successful appeals.

We have also acquired several books belonging to Darrow and members of his family. The first, Darrow’s wife Ruby’s copy of The Summing Up, by Somerset Maugham, connects to several letters in our collection, in which Ruby discusses Maugham, his books, and his relationship to Darrow. This copy features pasted-in newspaper clippings related to Maugham and penciled-in annotations by Ruby, showing her admiration for Maugham and proving this to be a well-read copy of his work. We also acquired two books belonging to Darrow’s son, Paul. The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air was a Christmas gift inscribed to Paul from Darrow in 1889, when Paul was six. The other, Sailor on Horseback, by Irving Stone, was inscribed to Paul and his wife with a note about Stone’s biography on Darrow that was to come: “I pledge myself to give everything I’ve got to make the Clarence Darrow biography at least as good as this book, and I hope a great deal better.”

Two other books with inscriptions to Darrow also join our collection. The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle, by John Drinkwater, includes a warm inscription written to Darrow by the author. Laemmle was an influential German-American film producer, who produced Mystery of Life (1931), a film about evolution, which Darrow narrated and appeared in. The Child You Used to Be was sent by the author, Leonora Pease, to Darrow. While most of our collection includes kind notes to Darrow, this one includes a criticism of Darrow’s novel, Farmington: “To Clarence Darrow--A man who wrote a human boy’s book, with allusions in it to little girls, all dressed up and sitting in a row like dolls or painted angels, I offer this c[h]ronicle of real ‘little girlhood.’”

This assortment of books joins our growing collection of materials owned by Darrow and members of his family. We are excited to have created a new collection designation for these materials, which allows for browsing the interests and relationships found through this associative ownership. All of these new acquisitions provide additional context and depth to what we know about Darrow’s beliefs, career, and relationships, viewed through the collection.

 

- Sophia Charbonneau, Special Collections Assistant