G. K. Chesterton
Born	Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-05-29)29 May 1874 Kensington, London, England
Died	14 June 1936(1936-06-14) (aged 62) Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation	Journalist, Novelist, Essayist
Genres	Fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic apologetics, Mystery, Poetry
Influences Christianity, Catholicism, St. Thomas Aquinas, George MacDonald, William Blake, Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilaire Belloc
Influenced C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Franz Kafka, G. B. Shaw, Marshall McLuhan, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, David Dark, Gabriel García Márquez, Karel Čapek, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Anthony Burgess, E. F. Schumacher, Orson Welles, Dorothy Day, Brian McLaren, R. A. Lafferty, Philip Yancey, Rich Mullins, Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Alan Watts, Don Miller, Garry Wills, Susanna Clarke, Carl Amery, Hannah Arendt, Slavoj Žižek, Aka Morchiladze

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer.^[1] He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox".^[2] Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."^[3] For example, Chesterton wrote "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."^[4]

Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.^[3][5] Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both progressivism and conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."^[6] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify such a position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton's "friendly enemy" according to Time, said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius".^[3] Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and John Ruskin.^[7]

Life[link]

Chesterton at the time of his engagement, 1898

Born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School. He attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at University College London but did not complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he would continue to write for the next thirty years.

According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.^[8] However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox Christian, culminating in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.^[9]

Chesterton early showed a great interest and talent in art. He had planned to become an artist and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Even his fiction seemed to be carefully concealed parables. Father Brown is perpetually correcting the incorrect vision of the bewildered folks at the scene of the crime and wandering off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition and repentance. For example, in the story "The Flying Stars", Father Brown entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: "There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime."^[10]

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (130 kg; 290 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he was not 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.'^[11] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw: "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England". Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it".^[12] P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin."^[13]

Chesterton usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton had a tendency to forget where he was supposed to be going and miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife Frances from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home."^[14] As a result of these memory problems and of Chesterton being extremely clumsy as a child, there has been speculation that Chesterton had undiagnosed developmental dyspraxia.^{[15][citation needed]}

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released.

Death[link]

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His last known words were a greeting spoken to his wife. The homily at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox on June 27, 1936. Knox said, "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton."^[16] He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at £28,389, approximately equivalent to £1.3 million in 2005.

Near the end of his life he was invested by Pope Pius XI as Knight Commander with Star of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great (KC*SG).^[17] The Chesterton Society has proposed that he be beatified.^[18]

Writing[link]

Chesterton in 1905 by photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.

Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England" ; Ker treats Chesterton's thought in Chapter 4 of that book as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.

Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics.

Views and contemporaries[link]

Self-portrait of Chesterton based on the distributist slogan "Three acres and a cow"

Chesterton's writing has been seen by some analysts as combining two earlier strands in English literature. Dickens' approach is one of these. Another is represented by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton knew well: satirists and social commentators following in the tradition of Samuel Butler, vigorously wielding paradox as a weapon against complacent acceptance of the conventional view of things.

Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often opposed to those of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde: "The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw."^[19] More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

Chesterton and Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good-will toward and respect for each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:

After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.^[20]

Shaw represented the new school of thought, modernism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more focused towards the Church. In Orthodoxy he writes: "The worship of will is the negation of will... If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, 'Will something', that is tantamount to saying, 'I do not mind what you will', and that is tantamount to saying, 'I have no will in the matter.' You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular."^[21]

This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using 'Uncommon Sense' — that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that were nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy: "Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different", he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."^[22] Or, again from Orthodoxy:

The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.^[22]

"All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane."^[23] In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states: <poem> For the great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.^[24] </poem>

Another contemporary and friend from schooldays was Edmund Bentley, inventor of the clerihew. Chesterton himself wrote clerihews and illustrated his friend's first published collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners (1905), which popularized the clerihew form. Chesterton was also godfather to Bentley's son, Nicolas, and opened his novel The Man Who Was Thursday with a poem written to Bentley.

Chesterton faced accusations of anti-Semitism during his lifetime, as well as posthumously.^[25] In a work of 1917, titled “A Short History of England,” Chesterton considers the year of 1290, when by royal decree, Edward I expelled Jews from England, an edict not rescinded until 1655. In writing of the official expulsion and banishment of 1290, Chesterton writes that Edward I was “just and conscientious” a monarch never more truly representative of his people than when he expelled the Jews, “as powerful as they are unpopular.” Chesterton writes Jews were “capitalists of their age” so that when Edward “flung the alien financiers out of the land,” he acted as “knight errant,” and “tender father of his people.”^[26] In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.^[27] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause.

The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."^[28] Chesterton, like Belloc, openly expressed his abhorrence of Hitler's rule almost as soon as it started.^[29]

[edit] The Chesterbelloc

See Also G. K.'s Weekly.

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. George Bernard Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism. G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.

Literary legacy[link]

• Chesterton's The Everlasting Man contributed to C. S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity. In a letter to Sheldon Vanauken (14 December 1950)^[30] Lewis calls the book "the best popular apologetic I know", and to Rhonda Bodle he wrote (31 December 1947)^[31] "the [very] best popular defence of the full Christian position I know is G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man." The book was also cited in a list of 10 books that "most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life."^[32]
• Chesterton's 1906 biography of Charles Dickens was largely responsible for creating a popular revival for Dickens's work as well as a serious reconsideration of Dickens by scholars.^[33]
• Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday inspired the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins with the idea: "if you didn't seem to be hiding nobody hunted you out."^[34]
• Etienne Gilson praised Chesterton's Aquinas volume as follows: "I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on Saint Thomas...the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame."^[35]

• Chesterton's column in the Illustrated London News on September 18, 1909 had a profound effect on Mahatma Gandhi. P. N. Furbank asserts that Gandhi was "thunderstruck" when he read it,^[36] while Martin Green notes that "Gandhi was so delighted with this that he told Indian Opinion to reprint it."^[37]

• Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, author of seventy books, identified Chesterton as the stylist who had the greatest impact on his own writing, stating in his autobiography Treasure in Clay "The greatest influence in writing was G.K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite."^[38]

• Canadian Media Guru Marshall McLuhan was heavily influenced by Chesterton; McLuhan said the book What's Wrong with the World changed his life in terms of ideas and religion.^[39]
• The author Neil Gaiman has stated that The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on his own book Neverwhere, and used a quote from it as an epigraph to that novel. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton.^[40]
• Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges cited Chesterton as a major influence on his own fiction. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges said, "Chesterton knew how to make the most of a detective story."^[41]

List of major works[link]

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text CSE.dmu.ac.uk
• Heretics (1905) ISBN 978-0-7661-7476-4 (Available from Project Gutenberg)
• Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)
• The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) Manybooks.net
• Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991. ISBN 978-0-385-01536-3 (Available from Project Gutenberg)
• The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911)
• Manalive (1912)
• Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
• Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1923), Doubleday, 1987. ISBN 978-0-385-02900-1
• The Everlasting Man (1925)
• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), Doubleday, 1974. ISBN 978-0-385-09002-5

	Poetry portal
	Saints portal

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ahlquist, Dale. G. K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense (2003)
• Braybrooke, Patrick, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1922.
• Cooney, A., G.K. Chesterton, One Sword at Least, Third Way Publications, London, 1999. ISBN 0-9535077-1-8
• Coren, M., Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, Paragon House, New York, 1990.
• ffinch, M., G. K. Chesterton, 1986
• Kenner, H., Paradox in Chesterton, 1947.
• Ker, Ian (2011), G. K. Chesterton: A Biography, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-960128-3
• Ker, Ian. G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford University Press; 2011)
• Lauer, Quentin, G.K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio, Fordham University Press, New York City, New York, 1991 ISBN 0-8232-1199-1
• McLuhan, Marshall "G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" (Dalhousie Review 15 (4), 1936)
• McNichol, J., The Young Chesterton Chronicles, Book One: The Tripods Attack!", Sophia institute Press, Manchester, NH, 2008. ISBN 978-1-933184-26-5
• Paine, R., The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, Sherwood Sugden, 1999. ISBN 0-89385-511-1
• Pearce, J, Wisdom and Innocence – A Life of G.K.Chesterton, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. ISBN 0-340-67132-7
• Sullivan, John, "G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal", Paul Elek, London, 1974. ISBN 0-236-17628-5
• Ward, M., Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward, 1944.
• Williams, Donald T. Mere Humanity: G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (2006)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: G. K. Chesterton

Wikisource has original works written by or about: G. K. Chesterton

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: G. K. Chesterton

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Chesterton, Gilbert Keith.

• Portraits of G. K. Chesterton in the National Portrait Gallery (London). Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Archival material relating to G. K. Chesterton listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• The American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Gilbert Magazine, a Chesterton journal. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Parish Church in Beaconsfield where Chesterton is buried. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Iain Benson (ed), "The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton"
• G. K. Chesterton website, including etexts
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Project Gutenberg
• Works in audio format from LibriVox. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works at Internet Archive. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works by or about G. K. Chesterton in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by G. K. Chesterton at Wikilivres. Retrieved 2010-10-28
• Works at the Online Books Page. Retrieved 2010-10-28

Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow ca. 1922
Born	(1857-04-18)April 18, 1857 Kinsman Township, Trumbull County, Ohio
Died	March 13, 1938(1938-03-13) (aged 80) Chicago, Illinois
Cause of death	Pulmonary heart disease[1]
Alma mater	Allegheny College, University of Michigan Law School
Occupation	Lawyer

Clarence Seward Darrow (April 18, 1857 – March 13, 1938) was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924) and defending John T. Scopes in the Scopes "Monkey" Trial (1925), in which he opposed William Jennings Bryan (statesman, noted orator, and 3-time presidential candidate). Called a "sophisticated country lawyer",^[2] he remains notable for his wit and agnosticism, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians.^[3]

Biography[link]

Upbringing[link]

Clarence Darrow was born in rural northeastern Ohio on April 18, 1857.^[4] He was the son of Amirus Darrow and Emily (Eddy) Darrow. Both the Darrow and the Eddy farms had deep roots in colonial New England, and several of Darrow's ancestors served in the American Revolution. Clarence's father was an ardent abolitionist and a proud iconoclast and religious freethinker, known in town as the "village infidel." Emily Darrow was an early supporter of female suffrage and a women's rights advocate. Clarence attended Allegheny College and the University of Michigan Law School but did not graduate from either institution. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. The Clarence Darrow Octagon House, which was his childhood home in the small town of Kinsman, Ohio, contains a memorial to him.

From corporate lawyer to labor lawyer[link]

Darrow began his career reading law in Youngstown, Ohio, where he was first admitted to the profession by Judge Alfred W. Mackey. He opened his first practice in Andover, Ohio, and then moved to Ashtabula, where he became involved in Democratic Party politics and served as the town counsel. In 1880 he married Jessie Ohl, and seven years later he moved to Chicago with his wife and young son, Paul. There, he worked for the city government as a lawyer and made a mark for himself speaking at Democratic rallies and other speaking engagements. He was a close friend and protege of Illinois Gov. John Altgeld and helped secure a pardon from the governor for the anarchists who were imprisoned for the Haymarket Square bombing. With Altgeld's help, Darrow became a corporate lawyer for the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Company, a major Midwestern railroad.^[5] In 1894 Darrow represented Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who was prosecuted by the federal government for leading the Pullman Strike of 1894. Darrow severed his ties with the railroad to represent Debs, making a financial sacrifice. He saved Debs in one trial but could not keep the union leader from being jailed in another.

Also in 1894, Darrow took on the first murder case of his career, defending Patrick Eugene Prendergast, the "mentally deranged drifter" who had confessed to murdering Chicago mayor Carter H. Harrison, Sr.^[6] Darrow's "insanity defense" failed and Prendergast was executed that same year. Among fifty defenses in murder cases throughout the whole of Darrow's career, the Prendergast case would prove to be the only one resulting in an execution.^[6]

Darrow became one of America's leading labor attorneys. He helped organize the Populist Party in Illinois and then ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1896 but lost to Hugh R. Belknap. In 1897 his marriage ended in divorce. He represented the woodworkers of Wisconsin in a notable case in Oshkosh in 1898 and the United Mine Workers in Pennsylvania in the great anthracite coal strike of 1902. He flirted with the idea of running for mayor of Chicago in 1903 but ultimately decided against it. That year he married Ruby Hammerstrom, a young Chicago journalist.

From 1906 to 1908, Darrow represented the Western Federation of Miners leaders William "Big Bill" Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone when they were arrested and charged with the 1905 murder of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg. After a series of trials, Haywood and Pettibone were found not guilty and the charges were dropped against Moyer.

The American Federation of Labor then called on Darrow to defend the McNamara brothers, John and James, who were charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building during the bitter struggle over the open shop in Southern California (21 employees had died as a result of the explosion). Darrow came to realize that the McNamara brothers were guilty but worked hard to have them acquitted. With his help, they were portrayed by the AFL as heroes to American workers, who contributed their hard-earned money to a McNamara defense fund. In November 1911, an orchestrated plot was launched by the defense to bribe jurors in the McNamara case.^{[according to whom?]} Darrow was at the scene of one attempted bribery, as one of his investigators was arrested handing money to one of the prospective jurors.^{[according to whom?]} With the case collapsing around him, Darrow convinced the brothers to change their plea to guilty. The plea bargain he helped arrange got them lengthy prison sentences instead of the death penalty, but he was accused by many in organized labor of selling the movement out.

Two months later, Darrow was charged with two counts of attempting to bribe jurors in both cases. He faced two lengthy trials. In the first, defended by Earl Rogers, he was acquitted. Early during the second trial Rogers resigned after a disagreement with Darrow over defense strategy; Darrow served as his own attorney for the remainder of the trial, which ended with a hung jury. A deal was struck in which the D.A. agreed not to retry Darrow if he promised not to practice law again in California.^[7] Darrow's early biographers—Irving Stone and Arthur & Lila Weinberg—asserted that he was not involved in the bribery conspiracy; but more recently Geoffrey Cowan and John A. Farrell, with the help of new evidence, concluded that he almost certainly was.^[8]

From labor lawyer to criminal lawyer[link]

Darrow in 1913

As a consequence of the bribery charges, most labor unions dropped Darrow from their list of preferred attorneys. This effectively put Darrow out of business as a labor lawyer, and he switched to civil and, most notably, criminal cases. "He began taking criminal cases, because he had become convinced that what we are used to describing as 'the criminal-justice system' was a gigantic fraud that ruined real people's lives because they had no representation capable of defending them properly against it."^[4]

Throughout his career, Darrow devoted himself to opposing the death penalty, which he felt to be in conflict with humanitarian progress. In more than 100 cases, Darrow only lost one murder case in Chicago. He became renowned for moving juries and even judges to tears with his eloquence. Darrow had a keen intellect often hidden by his rumpled, unassuming appearance.

A July 23, 1915, article in the Chicago Tribune describes Darrow's effort on behalf of J.H. Fox, an Evanston, Illinois, landlord, to have Mary S. Brazelton committed to an insane asylum against the wishes of her family. Fox alleged that Brazelton owed him rent money, although other residents of Fox's boarding house testified to her sanity.

Leopold and Loeb[link]

In the summer of 1924, Darrow took on the case of Leopold and Loeb, the teenage sons of two wealthy Chicago families who were accused of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy from their stylish Kenwood neighborhood. Nathan Leopold was 19 and Richard Loeb was 18 when they were arrested. Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago about to transfer to Harvard Law School. Loeb was the youngest graduate ever from the University of Michigan. When asked why they committed the crime, Leopold told his captors: "The thing that prompted Dick to want to do this thing and prompted me to want to do this thing was a sort of pure love of excitement... the imaginary love of thrills, doing something different... the satisfaction and the ego of putting something over."

The Chicago newspapers labeled the case the "Trial of the Century"^[9] and Americans around the country wondered what could drive the two young men, blessed with everything their society could offer, to commit such a depraved act.

The killers were arrested after a passing workman spotted the victim's body in an isolated nature preserve near the Indiana border just half a day after it was hidden, before they could collect a $10,000 ransom. Nearby were Leopold's eyeglasses with their distinctive, traceable frames, which he had dropped at the scene.

Leopold and Loeb made full confessions and took police on a grim hunt around Chicago to collect the evidence that would be used against them. The state's attorney told the press that he had a "hanging case" for sure. Darrow stunned the prosecution when he had the killers plead guilty in order to avoid a vengeance-minded jury and place the case before a judge. The trial, then, was actually a long sentencing hearing in which Darrow contended, with the help of expert testimony, that Leopold and Loeb were mentally diseased.

Darrow's closing argument lasted 12 hours. He repeatedly stressed the ages of the "boys" (before the Vietnam War, the age of majority was 21) and noted that "never had there been a case in Chicago where on a plea of guilty a boy under 21 had been sentenced to death." His famous plea was designed to soften the heart of Judge John Caverly, but also to mold public opinion, so that Caverly could follow precedent without too huge an uproar. Darrow succeeded. Caverly sentenced the killers to life plus 99 years. Darrow's closing argument "was something of a popular bestseller, in various editions, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was reissued at the time of Darrow's death."^[4]

The Leopold and Loeb case raised, in a well-publicized trial, Darrow's lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior. The public got an education in psychology and medicine and, because Leopold was an admirer, the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

During the Leopold-Loeb trial, the newspapers claimed that Darrow was presenting a "million dollar defense" for the two wealthy families. Many ordinary Americans were angered at his apparent greed. He had the families issue a statement insisting that there would be no large legal fees and that his fees would be determined by a committee composed of officers from the Chicago Bar Association. After trial, Darrow suggested $200,000 would be reasonable. After lengthy negotiations with the defendants' families, he ended up getting some $70,000 in gross fees, which, after expenses and taxes, netted Darrow $30,000.^[10]

The Scopes Trial[link]

In 1925, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial. It has often been called the "Scopes Monkey Trial," a title popularized by author and journalist H.L. Mencken. The trial pitted Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in an American court case that tested the Butler Act, which had been passed on March 21, 1925. The act forbade the teaching of "the Evolution Theory" in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee. More broadly, the Butler Act outlawed in state-funded schools (including universities) the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." (The theory of evolution is a scientific explanation for the origin of all living organisms, including humans; it therefore conforms to the latter description.)

During the trial, Darrow requested that Bryan be called to the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Over the other prosecutor's objection, Bryan agreed. Popular media at the time portrayed the following exchange as the deciding factor that turned public opinion against Bryan in the trial:

Darrow: "You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven't you, Mr. Bryan?"

Bryan: "Yes, sir; I have tried to.... But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy."

Darrow: "Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?"

Bryan: "I believe that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: 'Ye are the salt of the earth.' I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people."

After about two hours, Judge John T. Raulston cut the questioning short and on the following morning ordered that the whole session (which in any case the jury had not witnessed) be expunged from the record, ruling that the testimony had no bearing on whether Scopes was guilty of teaching evolution. Scopes was found guilty and ordered to pay the minimum fine of $100.

A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Dayton court on a technicality—not on constitutional grounds, as Darrow had hoped. According to the court, the fine should have been set by the jury, not Raulston. Rather than send the case back for further action, however, the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed the case. The court commented, "Nothing is to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case."

This event led to a change in public sentiment, and an increased discourse on the subject of faith versus science that still exists in America. It also became popularized in a play based loosely on the trial, Inherit the Wind, which later became a film.

Ossian Sweet[link]

A white mob in Detroit attempted to drive a black family out of the home they had purchased in a white neighborhood. In the struggle, a white man was killed and the eleven blacks in the house were arrested and charged with murder. Dr. Ossian Sweet and three members of his family were brought to trial, and after an initial deadlock, Darrow argued to the all-white jury: "I insist that there is nothing but prejudice in this case; that if it was reversed and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted. They would have been given medals instead...." Following the mistrial of the 11, it was agreed that each of them would be tried individually. Darrow, alongside Thomas Chawke, would first defend Ossian's brother Henry, who had confessed to firing the shot on Garland Street. Henry was found not guilty on grounds of self defense, and the prosecution determined to drop the charges on the remaining 10. The trials were presided over by the Honorable Frank Murphy, who went on to become Governor of Michigan and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.^[11] Darrow's closing statement, which lasted over seven hours, is seen as a landmark in the Civil Rights movement and was included in the book 'Speeches that Changed the World' (given the name 'I Believe in the Law of Love'). Uniquely, the two closing arguments of Clarence Darrow, from the first and second trials, are available and these show how he learned from the first trial and reshaped his remarks.^[12]

Massie Trial[link]

Aged 68, Darrow had already announced his retirement before he volunteered to take part in the Scopes Trial, apart from the Sweet trial later that same year. After those final trials, Darrow retired from full-time practice, emerging only occasionally to undertake cases such as the 1932 Massie Trial in Hawaii.

In his last headline-making case, the Massie Trial, Darrow—devastated by the Great Depression—was hired to come to the defense of Grace Hubbard Fortescue, Edward J. Lord, Deacon Jones, and Thomas Massie, Fortescue's son-in-law, who were accused of murdering Joseph Kahahawai. Kahahawai had been accused, along with four other men, of raping and beating Thalia Massie, Thomas's wife and Fortescue's daughter; the resulting 1931 case ended in a hung jury (though the charges were later dropped and repeated investigation has shown them to be innocent). Enraged, Fortescue and Massie then orchestrated the murder of Kahahawai in order to extract a confession and were caught by police officers while transporting his dead body.

Darrow entered the racially charged atmosphere as the lawyer for the defendants. Darrow reconstructed the case as a justified honor killing. Considered by the New York Times to be one of Darrow's three most compelling trials (along with the Scopes Trial and the Leopold and Loeb case), the case captivated the nation and most of white America strongly supported the honor killing defense. In fact, the final defense arguments were transmitted to the mainland through a special radio hookup. In the end, the jury came back with a unanimous verdict of guilty, but on the lesser crime of manslaughter.^[13] As to Darrow's closing, one juror commented, "[h]e talked to us like a bunch of farmers. That stuff may go over big in the Middle West, but not here."^[14]

Mecca Temple Debate[link]

In January 1931 Darrow had a debate with English writer G. K. Chesterton during the latter's second trip to America. This was held at New York City's Mecca Temple. The topic was "Will the World Return to Religion?". At the end of the debate those in the hall were asked to vote for the man they thought had won the debate. Darrow received 1,022 votes while Chesterton received 2,359 votes. There is no known transcript of what was said except for third party accounts published later on. The earliest of these was that of February 4, 1931, issue of The Nation with an article written by Henry Hazlitt.

Books by Darrow[link]

A volume of Darrow's boyhood reminiscences, entitled "Farmington," was published in Chicago in 1903 by McClurg and Company.

Darrow shared offices with Edgar Lee Masters, who achieved more fame for his poetry, in particular the Spoon River Anthology, than for his advocacy.

The papers of Clarence Darrow are located at the Library of Congress. The Riesenfeld Rare Books Research Center of the University of Minnesota Law School has the largest collection of Clarence Darrow material including personal letters to and from Darrow. Many of these letters and other material are available on the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection website.

List of books[link]

• Crime: Its Cause and Treatment
• Persian Pearl
• The Story of My Life
• Farmington
• Resist Not Evil
• Marx vs Tolstoy

Legacy[link]

Today, Clarence Darrow is remembered for his reputation as a fierce litigator who, in many cases, championed the cause of the underdog; because of this, he is generally regarded, for better or worse, as one of the greatest criminal defense lawyers in American history.

Henry Drummond (left), a greatly fictionalized version of Clarence Darrow, as portrayed by Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.

Onscreen[link]

• Darrow, a film starring Kevin Spacey and released by American Playhouse in 1991.
• "ALLEGED", starring Brian Dennehy and Fred Thompson.

Onstage[link]

• Darrow, a full-length one-man play created after his death, featuring Darrow's reminiscences about his career. Originated by Henry Fonda, many actors, including Leslie Nielsen and David Canary, have since taken on the role of Darrow in this play.
• Inherit the Wind, a play (later adapted to the screen) which is a broadly fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial. Though the authors note that the 1925 trial was "clearly the genesis" of their play, they insist that the characters had "life and language of their own." They also mention that the issues raised in the play "have acquired new dimension and meaning", a possible reference to the political controversies of the 1950s. Still, they finish their foreword by inviting a more universal reading of the play: "It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow."^[15]
• Malice Aforethought: The Sweet Trials is a play written by Arthur Beer, based on the trials of Ossian and Henry Sweet, and derived from Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice.^[16]
• My Name is Ossian Sweet is a Docu-drama written by Gordon C. Bennett, based on the Sweet trials in which the black family was defended by Darrow against a charge of murder in Detroit 1925. Published (2011) at www.HeartlandPlays.com.

In publications[link]

• Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell was published by Doubleday in June, 2011, and includes a wealth of new material opened to the public in June 2010 by the University of Minnesota Law Library through the Clarence Darrow Digital Collection.
• The Angel of Darkness, Darrow is a main character in the fictional Caleb Carr novel.
• Arc of Justice (Owl Books, 2004), Kevin Boyle's book looks in-depth at the Ossian Sweet trial.
• Clarence Darrow for the Defense, a biography by historical novelist Irving Stone.
• Compulsion (1956), Darrow was the inspiration for the character of Jonathan Wilk in the novel, a thinly fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb case. In 1959, the novel was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Orson Welles as Wilk. Welles, whose closing monologue was the longest ever committed to film at that time, shared the Best Actor award with co-stars Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell at that year's Cannes Film Festival.
• The People v. Clarence Darrow (ISBN 978-0-8129-2179-3), Geoffrey Cowan's book is a penetrating analysis of Darrow, both as a lawyer and as a person.

Other[link]

• The Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge is located in Chicago, just south of the Museum of Science & Industry.

References and further reading[link]

Notes[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2009)

See also[link]

• Mildred Seydell

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Clarence Darrow

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Clarence Darrow

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Clarence Darrow

• An excerpt on the McNamara case from "Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned."
• leopoldandloeb.com
• Attorney for the Damned – or just Another Damned Attorney?
• The Trial of Bill Haywood – detailed account of the Bill Haywood murder trial.
• Leopold and Loeb trial, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch
• Ossian Haven Sweet American National Biography.
• Scopes trial, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch.
• The Sweet Trials home page, Famous American Trials, Trial Watch.
• Works by Clarence Darrow at Project Gutenberg
• FBI file on Clarence Darrow
• Darrow Family scrapbooks at the Newberry Library
• Mary Field Parton-Clarence Darrow Papers at the Newberry Library

James E. O'Keefe III (born June 28, 1984) is a conservative American activist who has produced audio and video recordings of staged encounters with public figures and workers in a variety of organizations, purportedly showing abusive or illegal behavior by representatives of those organizations. He gained national attention for his release of video recordings of workers at ACORN offices in 2009, his arrest in early 2010 at the office of Senator Mary Landrieu in a failed attempt to record staff conversations, and release of videos of NPR executives in 2011. Investigations by both legal authorities and journalists have found O'Keefe has "selectively", "heavily" or "deceptively" edited secretly recorded videos to leave a false impression and present the subjects in the worst possible light.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

After founding an independent conservative student paper in college, O'Keefe began to use available, inexpensive technology to make videos. His strategy has been to control distribution of his work to conservative media outlets for maximum impact. Some of O'Keefe's projects have influenced Congressional votes. Due to his videos of ACORN workers supposedly aiding a couple in criminal planning, the US Congress voted to freeze funds for the non-profit, which had aided low- and moderate-income people for 40 years. The non-profit also lost most private funding, and in March 2010 had to close most of its offices. Shortly after, the California State Attorney General's Office and the US Government Accountability Office released their related investigative reports. The Attorney General's Office found that O'Keefe had misrepresented the actions of ACORN workers and that the workers had not committed illegal actions. The GAO found that ACORN had managed its federal funds appropriately.

Because his work has become widely seen as deceptive, O'Keefe's initial success in gaining extensive media attention caused controversy and discussions of journalistic standards. By the summer of 2011, his claims to have uncovered widespread Medicaid fraud, purportedly documented on videos released in Maine and other locations, were treated with more skepticism by the media and governmental officials.^[8][9] For instance, the Maine governor Paul Lepage said that the video could help improve staff training, but it did not show evidence of a worker trying to defraud the welfare system.^[10]

O'Keefe has gained support from conservative media and interest groups. In 2009 Andrew Breitbart paid the activist, then 25, for the option to publish new videos exclusively on BigGovernment.com. In June 2010, O'Keefe formed a 501(c)(3) organization, Project Veritas, with the stated mission to "investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct." ^[11]

Early life and education[link]

O'Keefe is the elder of two children born to James E. O'Keefe Jr., a materials engineer, and Deborah O'Keefe, a physical therapist.^[2][12][13] His younger sister became a painter and sculptor.

O'Keefe grew up in Westwood in Bergen County, New Jersey. He is single and lives with his parents.^[14] His home was politically "conservative but not rigidly so," according to his father.^[12] He graduated from Westwood High School, where he showed an early interest in the arts, theater and journalism. He played the leading role in his high school's 2002 production of the musical Crazy for You. He attained the highest rank, Eagle Scout, in the Boy Scouts of America.

O'Keefe started at Rutgers University in 2002 and majored in philosophy. Beginning in his sophomore year, he wrote a bi-weekly opinion column for The Daily Targum, the university's student paper. He left the Targum and founded the Rutgers Centurion, a conservative student paper supported by a $500 "Balance in the Media" grant from the The Leadership Institute.

For his first video, O'Keefe and other Centurion writers met with Rutgers dining staff to demand the banning of the cereal Lucky Charms from dining halls because of its offense to Irish Americans. O'Keefe said the leprechaun mascot presented a stereotype. He intended to have officials lose either way: to appear insensitive to an ethnic group, or to look silly by agreeing to ban Lucky Charms.^[15] The students said they expected to be thrown out for the discussion,^[16] but the Rutgers official took notes, was courteous, and said their concerns would be considered. Rutgers staff say the cereal was never taken off the menu.^[12]

Career[link]

After graduating, O'Keefe worked for a year under Ben Wetmore, a media specialist, at the Leadership Institute (LI), a conservative-funded organization in Arlington, Virginia. The institute sent O'Keefe to colleges to train students to start independent newspapers. After a year, officials at the institute asked O'Keefe to leave. According to Morton Blackwell, the institute's president and founder, they had concern that O'Keefe's videos had threatened LI's tax exemption as a nonprofit by trying to influence legislation (a legal characterization of lobbyists, which do not have tax exempt status).^[2] Blackwell said O'Keefe "wanted to go out and catch leftists breaking the law."^[12]

O'Keefe uses inexpensive, available technology to produce and distribute secretly recorded videos and audio files made during staged encounters, some of which have been distributed on YouTube. Such secret recordings are illegal in California and Maryland. He has embarrassed organizations such as Planned Parenthood and ACORN by presenting their low-level workers in the worst light;^[17] his videos of ACORN caused a media storm that resulted in the Congress freezing funds, two executive agencies cancelling contracts, and ACORN workers being fired. The national organization lost so much private funding that it closed most of its offices in the six months following the videos. In other cases, O'Keefe used colleagues to interview and record executives, as at NPR shortly before its Congressional funding hearings. He selectively edited and manipulated the NPR material, distorting chronology and putting material together that happened at separate times. In the summer of 2011, he began releasing videos of colleagues' staged encounters with workers related to Medicaid applicability, but media and governmental officials took time to examine his work more carefully and responded more cautiously to their purported content.

O'Keefe and colleagues were arrested in New Orleans in January 2010 during an attempt to make recordings at the office of United States Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat. His three fellow activists, who were dressed as telephone repairmen when apprehended, included Robert Flanagan, the son of William Flanagan, acting U.S. Attorney of the Eastern District of Louisiana.^[18][19] The four men were charged with malicious intent to damage the phone system.^[20] O'Keefe said he entered Landrieu's office to investigate complaints that she was ignoring phone calls from constituents during the debate over President Barack Obama's health care bill.^[21] The charges in the case were reduced from a felony to a single misdemeanor count of entering a federal building under false pretenses.^[22][23] O'Keefe and the others pleaded guilty on May 26. O'Keefe was sentenced to three years' probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine. The other three men received lesser sentences.^[24]

Working with advice on media strategy from his mentors Ben Wetmore and Andrew Breitbart, O'Keefe has sought to maximize publicity by releasing the videos over several days or months, and often in relation to funding authorizations or other significant political actions related to the subject organization. His strategy has included releasing some projects only to conservative media outlets, such as Fox News Channel and the Big Government website; he has interviewed exclusively with the same media to control the story. In the NPR case in 2011, he released the video at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

As of January 2010, O'Keefe began a column on Andrew Breitbart's website, "BigGovernment.com". Breitbart said in an interview that he paid O'Keefe a salary for his "life rights", to gain release of his videos first on his website.^[25] In 2010 O'Keefe formed his own organization, Project Veritas (truth in Latin), whose stated mission is "to investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society."^[26]

Political and personal beliefs[link]

O'Keefe has described his politics as "progressive radical",^[27] though media coverage consistently describes him as a conservative.^[2][28][29] He refers to himself as a muckraker.^[30] He expresses admiration for the philosophy of the British writer G.K. Chesterton and for a free press.^[2][31][32]

Major works[link]

Planned Parenthood recordings (2008)[link]

In 2006, O'Keefe met Lila Rose, founder of an anti-abortion group on the UCLA campus.^[33] They secretly recorded encounters in Planned Parenthood clinics. Rose posed as a pregnant teenager seeking advice; they made two videos and released them on YouTube. In one, a clinic worker in Los Angeles tells Rose "that she could 'figure out a birth date that works' to avoid having PPLA notify police."^[34] By law, girls under a certain age who are pregnant have suffered statutory rape and some states require the reporting of such cases to the police. In some states, underage girls may not get abortions without parental permission. The videos received national attention.

In 2007 O'Keefe phoned several Planned Parenthood clinics and secretly recorded the conversations. He posed as a donor, asking if his donations would be applied to needs of minority women. When told they could be, he made "race-motivated" comments.^[35] By audio recordings, workers at clinics in six other states reportedly agreed to accept his donation under similar terms.^[36]

Planned Parenthood of California filed a "cease and desist" order against Lila Rose, charging that she was violating state laws against secret recordings. The order required her to remove the videos from YouTube and give all the recordings to the organization. She complied through her attorney.^[34]

After O'Keefe's four audio recordings were publicized in 2008, Planned Parenthood of Ohio issued a public response, saying the worker's words were "a violation of any policy, and it's very upsetting." The CEO said, "Planned Parenthood has a long history of social justice."^[35] Other offices noted the wide variety of services the organization offers to low income communities.^[36] African-American leaders called for withdrawal of public financing of the organization.^[33] No funding was withdrawn.

ACORN videos (2009)[link]

In September 2009, O'Keefe and his associate, Hannah Giles, published edited hidden camera recordings in which Giles posed as a prostitute and O'Keefe as her boyfriend, a law student, in an attempt to elicit damaging responses from employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an advocacy organization for 40 years for persons of low and moderate income.^[17] A Washington Post reporter wrote the activist "said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos to cast ballots against Republicans."^[37]

The videos were recorded during the summer of 2009^[38] and appeared to show low-level ACORN employees in six cities providing advice to Giles and O'Keefe on how to avoid detection by authorities of tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution.^[2] He framed the videos with a preface of him in what he called his "pimp" outfit, which he wore in TV media interviews, although he appeared at the ACORN offices in conservative street clothes.

Reception[link]

After the videos were released through the fall of 2009, the U.S. Congress voted to freeze federal funding to ACORN.^[39] The Census Bureau and the IRS terminated their contract relationships with ACORN.^[40][41]

By December 2009, an external investigation of ACORN was published that cleared it of any illegality, while noting that its poor management practices contributed to unprofessional actions by some low-level employees.^{[42][43][44][45]} In March 2010, ACORN announced it would dissolve due to loss of funding from government and especially private sources.^[46] On March 1, 2010, the district attorney for Brooklyn found that there was no criminal wrongdoing by the ACORN staff in New York.^[6][47] In late March 2010, Clark Hoyt, then public editor for The New York Times, reviewed the videos, the full transcripts and the full audio. Hoyt wrote, "The videos were heavily edited. The sequence of some conversations was changed. Some workers seemed concerned for Giles, one advising her to get legal help. In two cities, Acorn workers called the police. But the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context."^[48]

The California Attorney General's Office granted O’Keefe and Giles limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing the full, unedited videotapes related to ACORN offices in California.^[17] The AG's Report was released on April 1, 2010: it found the videos from ACORN offices in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino to have been "severely edited"; it found there was no evidence of criminal conduct on the part of ACORN employees, nor of any evidence that any employee intended to aid or abet criminal conduct. It found that three employees had tried to deflect the couple's plans, told them ACORN could not offer them help on the grounds they wanted, and otherwise dealt with them appropriately. Such context was not reflected in O'Keefe's edited tapes. The AG's Report noted that, because the Giles-O'Keefe criminal plans were a ruse, the ACORN workers could not be complicit in them. It found no evidence of intent by the employees to aid the couple.^[17]

The AG's report confirmed that one of the ACORN employees, shown in O'Keefe's video as apparently aiding a human smuggling proposal, had reported his encounter with the couple to a Mexican police detective at the time to thwart their plan. Following the AG's report, that employee, who had been fired by ACORN immediately after the video's release, sued O'Keefe and Giles in 2010. He alleged invasion of privacy, and cited a California law that prohibits recordings without consent of all parties involved.^[49]

On June 14, 2010, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published its report: it found no evidence that ACORN, or any of its related organizations, had mishandled any of the $40 million in federal money which they had received in recent years.^[50][51]

NPR video (Spring 2011)[link]

In March 2011, shortly before the US Congress was to vote on funding for NPR, O'Keefe released a video of a discussion with Ronald Schiller, National Public Radio's then-senior vice president for fundraising, and an associate. Raw content was secretly recorded by his partners Simon Templar (an alias) and Shaughn Adeleye.^[52] Due to questions at the time about the video's veracity, staff of The Blaze analyzed the released version, and compared it with the raw videotape. As the journalist Scott Baker wrote, analysis of the raw videos showed that O'Keefe's released video was edited to intentionally lie or mislead, that much of the context of the conversation was changed, and that elements were transposed and chronology shifted.^[3]

On the edited, released video, it appears that the NPR executives were led to believe they would be meeting with representatives of a self-described Muslim group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, that wished to donate money to NPR. In the video, Schiller says that he will speak personally, and not for NPR; then he appears to contrast the fiscally conservative Republican party of old that didn't get involved in people's personal and family lives with "the current Republican Party, and in particular the Tea Party, that is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move." Schiller said some highly-placed Republicans believed the Republican Party had been hijacked by this radical group, and the Republicans characterized them as "Islamophobic" and "seriously racist, racist people". This video was released March 8, 2011.

Later in the edited video, Schiller seems to say he believes NPR "would be better off in the long run without federal funding," explaining that removal of federal funding would allow NPR more independence, and remove the widely held misconception that NPR is significantly funded by the public. But, USA Today reports that the raw, unedited tape is substantially different. On the raw tape, Schiller says that withdrawing federal funding would cause local stations to go under and that NPR is doing "everything we can" to keep it.^[53]

In a statement released before analysis of the raw video, NPR said, "Schiller's comments are in direct conflict with NPR's official position." They also said, "The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept."

Reception[link]

Comparison of the raw video with the released one revealed editing that was characterized as "selective" and "deceptive" by Michael Gerson, opinion writer in the Washington Post, who wrote, "O’Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie."^[54] Time magazine noted that the video "transposed remarks from a different part of the meeting", was "manipulative" and "a partisan hit-job".^[55]

On March 17, Martha T. Moore of USA Today reported: "According to The Blaze analysis, Ron Schiller's most inflammatory remarks, that Tea Party members are "seriously racist," were made as he was recounting the views of Republicans he has spoken with — although he does not appear to disagree. It also shows Schiller appearing to laugh about the potential spread of Islamic sharia law, when the longer version shows he laughed in reaction to something completely different."^[53]

People who reviewed the raw video said that Schiller told the two men "that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage." On the longer tape, he says, "There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form."^[56] The broadcast journalist Al Tompkins, who now teaches at the Poynter Institute, noted that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom. He commented on the raw tape: "The message that he said most often — I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage," Tompkins said. "He says it over and over and over again.^[56]

Two days later, O'Keefe released a video in which Betsy Liley, the senior director of institutional giving at NPR, appeared to have checked with senior management and said MEAC was cleared to make donations anonymously and NPR could help shield donations from government audits, but added that, in order to proceed, additional background information would be required, including an IRS Form 990.^[57][58] Liley advised the caller that NPR executives would investigate them before accepting any large donation, examining tax records and checking out other organizations that have received donations from them.^[58] Liley raises the possibility of NPR's turning down substantial gifts and stresses the "firewall" between the revenue-generating part of NPR and its news operation.^[58]

NPR put Liley on administrative leave. In emails released following the publication of the Liley video, NPR showed that the official had consulted appropriately with top management and notified the purported donors of problems with their desired method of donation.^[59]

Results[link]

Schiller had submitted his resignation on January 24, and had announced in early March that he was leaving NPR for the Aspen Institute. After the video release, NPR put him on administrative leave.^{[60][61][62][63][64]} The next day NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) announced she was resigning, effective immediately.^[65] Ronald Schiller made his resignation from NPR effective immediately on the evening of the video's release; the next day he ceded his new position at the Aspen Institute.^[66]

Minor works[link]

Plan for Abbie Boudreau (2010)[link]

In August 2010, O'Keefe planned a staged encounter with the CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau, who was doing a documentary on the young conservative movement. He set up an appointment at his office in Maryland to discuss a video shoot.^[67][68] Izzy Santa, executive director of the Veritas Project, warned Boudreau that O'Keefe was planning to "punk" her on the boat by trying to seduce her—which he would film on hidden cameras.^[67][69] Boudreau did not board the boat and soon left the area.^[67][69]

CNN later published a 13–page plan written by O'Keefe's mentor Ben Wetmore.^[70] It listed props for the boat scheme, including pornography, sexual aids, condoms, a blindfold and "fuzzy" handcuffs.^[67][69][71] When questioned by CNN, O'Keefe denied that he was going to follow the Wetmore plan, as he found parts of it inappropriate.^[68][69] Boudreau commented "that does not appear to be true, according to a series of emails we obtained from Izzy Santa, who says the e-mails reveal James' true intentions."^[68]

Following the Boudreau incident, Project Veritas paid Izzy Santa a five-figure settlement which included a nondisclosure agreement.^[72] Funding decreased from conservative political organizations following this CNN incident.^[72]

New Jersey Teachers' Union video (2010)[link]

Starting October 25, 2010, O’Keefe posted a series of videos on the Internet entitled Teachers Unions Gone Wild. At the time, the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) was in negotiations with Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, over teacher pay benefits and tenure.^[73] O'Keefe derived one video from recordings made by “citizen journalists,” whom he recruited to attend the NJEA’s leadership conference. They secretly recorded meetings and conversations with teacher participants.^[73] It featured teachers discussing the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher. A second video featured a staged phone conversation by O'Keefe with Lawrence E. Everett, assistant superintendent of the Passaic City Schools, in which Everett refused to commit to firing a teacher based on the purported parent's saying the teacher used “n-word” with his child.^[73][74] The third video (October 26, 2010) featured audio of a voice, identified as NJEA Associate Director Wayne Dibofsky, who alleged voter fraud during the 1997 Jersey City mayoral election.^[73] The voice of Robert Byrne, Jersey City municipal clerk, was recorded on the same video; he noted that the election was monitored by lawyers for both candidates.^[73]

Reception[link]

Governor Christie said nothing on the videos surprised him.^[75] NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer called O'Keefe's videos a "complete fabrication" and "a calculated attack on [the NJEA] organization and its members". Wollmer called O'Keefe "flat-out sleazy".^[75]

Medicaid videos (Summer 2011)[link]

In the summer of 2011, O'Keefe released videos purportedly showing Medicaid fraud in offices in several states. Following his previous strategy, he parcelled out the releases through conservative outlets over a period of weeks. In July 2011, two conservative groups released a secretly recorded video of an encounter in Maine's Department of Health and Human Services. In the video, an actor attempts to apply for benefits while hinting that he is a drug smuggler. Americans for Prosperity and O'Keefe said that he had similar recorded videos from offices in Ohio, Virginia and South Carolina, and believed that there was a systemic problem.^[8][9]

A similar video posted on the Project Veritas web site purported to show workers at the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services assisting actors posing as drug dealers in applying for benefits. O'Keefe's fourth Medicaid video, apparently filmed in Richmond, Virginia, was released in July 2011.

Reception[link]

The videos received less national attention than earlier O'Keefe efforts. Generally, the state officials and representatives acknowledged potential problems but also took a measured tone in response, to allow time to fully investigate and evaluate the incidents. After viewing the video, the Maine governor Paul Lepage noted it could help in improving staff training and customer service, but he did not believe that it showed a worker trying to help defraud the welfare system.^[10] Lepage directed his agency director to work on correcting the problem.^[10]

Ohio media initially reported that "a Franklin County Jobs and Family Service worker was placed on administrative leave and at least one other person was out of work" as a result of the video's release.^[76] Ben Johnson of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services noted that benefits were never granted in the case, and that the made-up story would have been caught if the application process had proceeded. He said his office would use the video to strengthen staff training. Mike DeWine, Attorney General of Ohio, described the Ohio video as "outrageous" and said that he had instructed his state's Medicaid fraud unit to look into the incident.^[76]

As another example, a spokesman for Virginia governor Bob McDonnell said that he had asked state police to review the video and take appropriate actions.^[77]

New Hampshire Primary video (2012)[link]

In January of 2012, O’Keefe released a video of associates obtaining a number of ballots for the New Hampshire Primary by using the names of recently deceased voters. O’Keefe said the video showed that "the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised."^[78][79] His team culled names from published obituaries, which were checked against public voter roll information. O’Keefe said his team broke no laws, as they did not pretend to be the deceased persons when they asked for the ballots, and they did not cast votes after receiving ballots.^[78] One of his associates was exposed when the voting supervisor at the polling station recognized that the name he gave was of someone who had died.^[80]

Reception[link]

Sarah Parnass of ABC News wrote, the video "either exposes why voting laws are too lax or comes close to itself being voter fraud (or both)..."^[79] One media account referred to it as a stunt.^[81] Governor John Lynch said, "I think it is outrageous that we have out-of-staters coming into New Hampshire, coming into our polling places and misrepresenting themselves to the election officials, and I hope that they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they're found guilty of some criminal act."^[82] The New Hampshire Attorney General and the US Attorney’s Office are investigating the video.^[82]

New Hampshire Associate Attorney General Richard Head said he would investigate the possible weaknesses in the voting system,^[83] and noted the state has not had a history of known fraud related to a person seeking a ballot in the name of a dead person.^[79] He also will be investigating the possibility that the filmmakers may have committed crimes while producing the video.^[83] New Hampshire state law prohibits recording another person without their consent, and subjects on the video did not appear to be aware they were being recorded.^[79] Hamline University law professor David Schultz said, "If they [O'Keefe's group] were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law," referring to Title 42, which prohibits procuring ballots fraudulently.^[81]

Praise and criticism[link]

O'Keefe's actions have stirred a public debate on what it means to be a journalist and on what constitutes good journalistic practice when false pretenses are used.^[84] Andrew Breitbart and other supporters say that O'Keefe is the right wing's answer to a long line of left-leaning "hybrid troublemakers who get put on the cover of Rolling Stone, like Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman."^[85]

In the same March 2011 article by Tim Kenneally and Daniel Frankel, Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, said,

"What [O'Keefe] does isn't journalism. It's agitpop, politi-punking, entrapment-entertainment. There is no responsible definition of journalism that includes what he does or how he does it. His success at luring his prey into harming themselves is a measure of how fallible and foolish anyone, including good people, can sometimes be."^[85]

In reporting on O'Keefe's attempt in 2010 to hack into Senator Landrieu's office phone system, Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Roberston of the New York Times wrote that O'Keefe practiced a kind of "gonzo journalism" and his tactic is to "caricature the political and social values of his enemies by carrying them to outlandish extremes."^[86]

Jonathan Seidl of The Blaze, in writing about the first NPR video, said, "The video, in the end, not only raises questions about NPR, but it also raises questions about undercover, gotcha journalism that can sometimes border on entrapment."^[87] Scott Baker of The Blaze wrote in March 2011 about the NPR videos that O'Keefe was "unethical" because he calls himself an "investigative journalist" but "uses editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented."^[3] Later in March 2011 some notable journalists wrote that they regretted having given O'Keefe's NPR videos "wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that The Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate."^[56] The journalist Chris Rovzar of New York Magazine, in reporting on the NPR video, wrote that O'Keefe's videos are "edited in a highly misleading way."^[88]

In a March 2011 interview with O'Keefe, the journalist Bob Garfield of NPR said, describing the ACORN scam:

"So let's just recap for a moment the ACORN scenario. You lie to get into – the offices. You lie, subsequently, about the lie you told to get into the offices. You edit the pimp shot into the trailer to create the illusion that you were somehow wearing it during your sting. You go on television wearing the same pimp outfit and let interviewers observe, uncorrected, that that’s what you were wearing when you confronted the ACORN employees. If your journalistic technique is the lie, why should we believe anything you have to say?"^[89]

O'Keefe responded:

Investigative reporters have used, you know, quote, unquote, "false pretenses" like To Catch a Predator, ABC’s Primetime Live. Even Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes went undercover. You go undercover in order to get to the truth. Now, is it lying? It’s a form of guerrilla theater. You’re posing as something you’re not, in order to capture candid conversations from your subject. But I wouldn't characterize it as, as lying.^[89]

In July 2011, the New York Times Magazine published, "Stinger: James O'Keefe's Greatest Hits," a profile by Zev Chafets, the author of "Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One". Chafets interviewed the dean of the University of Missouri’s school of journalism, who said,

"I put James O’Keefe in the same category as Michael Moore. Some ethicists say it is never right for a journalist to deceive for any reason, but there are wrongs in the world that will never be exposed without some kind of subterfuge."^[14]

The NYT Magazine profile of O'Keefe was sharply criticized in The Atlantic as "woefully incomplete, leaving readers unaware of the most damning critiques of O'Keefe's work and unable to render an informed judgment ... Through the quote he chooses, Chafets leads the reader to conclude that the core controversy is whether it's ever okay for a journalist to mislead his subject. But the mortal sin that O'Keefe commits in the ACORN videos is misleading the audience. His videos are presented to the public in less than honest ways that go far beyond normal "selectivity." "^[90]

The media response to O'Keefe's videos released in August 2011, purportedly showing local workers aiding Medicaid fraud, has been more cautious. Some reporters have scrutinized the staged encounters and labeled his work as another "sting".^[8][9] Similarly, there has been little response to his projects about alleged media bias and about the people involved in Occupy Wall Street.^[72]

References[link]