Carl Sandburg left school at thirteen and worked as a laborer, a soldier, and a journalist before becoming a poet. That working-class background gives “The Lawyers Know Too Much,” published in his 1920 collection Smoke and Steel, its plain-spoken, mischievous edge. Written at a moment when American law and business were growing increasingly professionalized, the poem turns a friend named Bob into an audience for a working man’s case against the legal trade. The grievance is not that lawyers are ignorant, but that they know the wrong things: they are “chums of the books of old John Marshall”—the long-dead Chief Justice whose name still hung over American law—too cozy with dead precedents and yellowed pages. The poem’s central idea is that the law, for all its authority, is a kind of death, while bricklaying, plastering, farming, singing, and dreaming create life that endures.
Sandburg shapes that argument through contrast rather than formal meter or rhyme. The verse moves in loose, conversational free lines, and the repeated “Bob” gives it the feel of a neighbor leaning on a fence rail. The early images are grimly static: “a dead hand wrote,” “stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,” “bones of the fingers a thin white ash.” The lawyers’ sacred texts are not living words; they are residue, dust. Sandburg then piles up the jargon of the trade—“too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers, / too much hereinbefore provided whereas”—so that legal language itself sounds like something to be waded through, full of “too many doors to go in and out of.” The speaker asks what is left after such work and lands on a comically sharp image: “Can a mouse nibble at it / And find enough to fasten a tooth in?” The answer, implied, is no. Legal labor leaves no crumb, no substance worth biting.
That deathliness is then made literal through the poem’s dark joke. The speaker twice asks why there is a “secret singing” when a lawyer dies and why a “hearse horse snickers” hauling a lawyer away. The snickering horse is not just a jab; it is the world’s animal wisdom mocking a profession that has lost contact with soil, walls, crops, and song. Against the lawyers’ empty endings, Sandburg offers a quick, rhythmic catalog of useful people. A bricklayer’s work “goes to the blue,” as if it rises into open air. A mason’s “knack” outlasts a moon. A plasterer’s hands “hold a room together,” and the land itself “wishes” a farmer back. Singers and playwrights, in the most expansive claim, “build a house no wind blows over.” These lines are not weighed down by legal jargon; they are clean and tactile. The repeated “of a” phrasing creates a kind of litany, part praise song and part common sense.
The significance of the poem lies in that value claim. Sandburg is not simply ridiculing lawyers, though the satire is broad enough to make a classroom laugh. He is asking what it means to produce something real. In a society that tends to reward paperwork, contracts, and courtroom argument, the poem insists that true work leaves a mark that the living can touch, inhabit, or remember. The lawyers know a dead man’s thoughts “too well,” but the poet sides with those whose hands and imaginations build outward into the world. The final question about the hearse horse remains unanswered because, in the speaker’s logic, no defense from the lawyers is necessary—the horse, like the reader, already understands.