Monday, June 23, 2008

Clarence Darrow... schlub?!


Over the weekend I was reading Erik Larson's book The Devil in the White City (which is pretty good, I should add) about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and this little gem jumped out at me.
Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, "interspersed," as one visitor put it, "with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically." Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.
Whoa! Sounds schlubby to me...