Clarence Darrow's Defense of Labor

Harvard history professor Jill Lepore has reviewed two biographies on trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, and in doing so, gives us an exciting look at the man's philosophies, paying special attention to his eight-hour closing statement in an important but lesser known trial, the 1898 labor case, Wisconsin v. Kidd. (See the abstract of the May 23, 2011 New Yorker article here).

Working closely with industrialists that opposed strikes, the State of Wisconsin tried to convict union organizer Thomas Kidd, the general secretary of the Amalgamated Woodworkers International. If Kidd was convicted, there was no right to strike. Darrow successfully defended Kidd and the right to strike by appealing to the jurors' sense of importance and social justice. Darrow, in his summing up, stated, "Back of all this prosecution is the effort on the part of  [lumber company owner] George M. Paine to wipe these labor organizations out of existence, and you know it. That's all there is to it."

The Kidd trial "was a landmark in the Gilded Age debate about prosperity and equality" (P.45), a test case of the interests of the workers against wealthy industrialists and their allies in government. Lepore tries to extend this debate to current controversies over public-sector bargaining in Wisconsin. This is a bit of a stretch. Few are against unionization in the private sector. The public sector is altogether different. Public sector unions have been consistently opposed by conservatives throughout the 19th and 20th centuries--Calvin Coolidge's opposition to the Boston Police and Ronald Reagan bust of the overreaching air traffic controllers come to mind. But Franklin Roosevelt also opposed bargaining rights for public sector unions. (See NYT editorial on the subject here.) The public sector union's interests may or may not not align with the taxpayers that support it. Fortunately, the unionization of public school teachers has worked out reasonably well. (See my analysis of public school tenure here.)