Before you gentlemen of the jury allow yourselves to be scared into condemning my clients, and I mean by that, scared with bug a boo words like "communism" and "anarchy", let me ask you to consider the substance of those words.
My clients didn't invent communism. Nor did Vladimir Lenin or Karl Marx. For communism is not a word but a spirit on the wind that has been with humanity ever since the first laborer was forced to toil in misery and oppression for a landlord or a king or some other idle drone. Communism is the common spirit of humanity, of the understanding born into every human heart that the world belongs to all of the people and not to those who have murdered or stolen their way into riches and into power over others. And as something from our hearts its symbol is the color of our blood, the common red blood that courses through every living man and woman.
My clients stand charged with hoisting a red flag and proclaiming the brotherhood of workers across the world. And what is wrong with that? Did not the same spirit of equality inflame our patriots of 1776 and give birth to our Republic? Was not the same vision of justice in the hearts of our Founding Fathers when they declared that all men are created equal? And yet this red flag outrages the rich men and their paid reporters and politicians, as well it should, for it symbolizes the ending of their tyranny over mankind. For the red flag flew at Bunker Hill as well as in Russia during their own revolution, and it has been present wherever honest men fight for their liberties. It is the common flag of rebels everywhere.
You men of the jury are mostly working men yourselves, and you should give thanks for rebels like my clients. For none of the rights and benefits you enjoy today would exist if it were not for rebels like these. Every right ever won from the rulers has been achieved through the suffering and the blood of those rebels who have proclaimed that there are but two nations in this world: those who work and those who live off that work. For you the workers are the majority. Not a wheel would turn without your labor. And yet how easily down the centuries have the parasites who live off of your labor set you against each other, one worker fighting another, putting guns in your hands to kill each other in wars or placing you in juries to try and condemn the honest rebels who will not rest comfortably alongside lies and wrong. But beneath those barriers that divide and kill you working people you remain united by the common red blood of humanity, and one day it will break free as a single irresistible flood and return the world and its wealth to all of you, the people, who nowadays fight and die for the scraps tossed to you from the tables of the rich; tables that are crammed with the bounty of the earth stolen from all of you.
And so I say to you good gentlemen that if you condemn my clients for trying to create a new world of equality and freedom, if you give way to the fear and hysteria generated by the wealthy to divide and conquer we the people, then you will be cutting your own throats.
- Clarence Darrow, 1921, Communist Labor Party trial for "sedition"
Also see this brilliant portrayal of Darrow by Henry Fonda in his one act play "Clarence Darrow for the Defense" (London, 1974)
