by Bill James
a) that the crime was committed,
b) that it was committed by Darrow’s employee,
c) that it was committed on behalf of Darrow’s client,
d) that it was committed in Darrow’s presence, and
e) that it arose from a pattern of activity commenced and directed by Clarence Darrow, that being the extensive “research” on the jury pool.
Arguing against Darrow’s guilt is, in essence, only one thing: the sheer inconceivability of Clarence Darrow resorting to jury bribery.
This wall of doubt is perhaps less steep than one might imagine. The legal practices of 1911 were far more aggressive than those of today. Attorneys in important cases would often try to influence potential witnesses, and many times the arrangements that were made with those witnesses were not clearly distinguishable from bribery. Coercion and intimidation of witnesses, up to and including what would now be considered kidnapping, was not terribly uncommon.
Darrow came from a place—Chicago—where these practices were more advanced than they were in Los Angeles. The courts of Chicago at that time were as corrupt as any courts this country has ever had. Another of the most prominent attorneys in Chicago was found guilty of jury tampering in a trial that ran concurrently with Darrow’s. In 1903 Darrow quarreled bitterly with his law partner, the poet Edgar Lee Masters, because Darrow wanted to admit to the firm as a full partner another lawyer who had recently been convicted of bribing a jury. Masters wasn’t opposed to hiring the other attorney; he just thought it looked bad to start him out as a full partner, a few months after the scandal. Darrow didn’t see that as a problem.
Darrow was engaged in a Great Cause, the kind of cause in which “right” is defined as “whatever is done by those on the side of good,” and “wrong” is defined as “that which is done by the forces of evil.” Victor Yarros, a junior associate of Darrow’s, reported that Darrow said to him, years later, “Do not the rich and powerful bribe juries, intimidate and coerce judges as well as juries? Do they shrink from any weapon? Why this theatrical indignation against alleged or actual jury tampering in behalf of ‘lawless’ strikers or other unfortunate victims of ruthless Capitalism?” Clarence, your soup is getting cold.
The LA Times bombing and the McNamara trial were to the radicals of that era what the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial of the Chicago Seven were to the sixties radicals. In 1968 a group of radical leaders conspired to foment made-for-TV violence at the Democratic Convention. Put on trial for this a year later, the radicals made such complete asses of themselves that the people who had supported them in the past said “Oh, my God,” and went off to do other things. The radical movement floundered and drowned, the counterculture disappeared, but the energy that had been bound up in The Movement carried on in other forms, leading to the environmental movement, the gay pride movement, a resurgence of the women’s movement, shock troops for consumer-rights activists, and many other causes.
Something vaguely similar happened here. The McNamara trial caused the common people who had supported the radical labor leaders to say “Oh, my God.” Before the Times bombing the labor movement and the radical left worked so closely together as to be indistinguishable. From the middle of the McNamara prosecution onward they were drifting apart. The labor unions fell under the control of professional labor leaders. Some of the radicals, like John Reed and Big Bill Haywood, wound up in the Soviet Union, trying to prove that socialism would work. Many more of them became reformers—prison reformers and school reformers and the first generation of consumer reformers, putting an end to the sale of rotten meat by unscrupulous butchers and comic-book cancer cures by self-proclaimed doctors.
Clarence Darrow rebounded from professional catastrophe, and even made it work to his advantage. He was famous anyway; his own trial made him more famous. Cut off from organized labor, he was free to pick and choose his cases. Since he was no longer partisan, writers from across the political spectrum were free to admire his passion and oratory without endorsing labor (or worse yet, labor violence). In his mid-fifties at the time of the trial, he would practice law another twenty-five years, becoming a world-renowned figure in the 1920s as a consequence of two cases: the Scopes trial, and his defense of the Thrill Killers, Loeb and Leopold. He defended schoolteachers, crooked judges and vicious psychopaths, in cases that were tragic and silly. With the possible exception of F. Lee Bailey, no one else in the 20th century was involved in so many cases that had so much impact on the public imagination.
VIII
Do you remember Erich Muenter, the Harvard lecturer who poisoned his wife, Leone, and fled to Mexico in 1906? By 1908 he had grown a beard and re-entered the United States. Calling himself Frank Holt, he emerged first as a student and then an instructor at Polytechnic Institute in Fort Worth, Texas, where he met another Leone—Leone Sensabaugh, the daughter of a prominent Dallas minister. From there he moved to what is now called Oklahoma State University, from there to Vanderbilt, and then to Emory and Henry College in Virginia. By 1912 he had a new wife Leone and was back in the Ivy League, lecturing at Cornell.
Later on he would tell people that he was a professor at Cornell, which was not quite true. Unknown to Holt, he had been “made” as Muenter. A colleague at Cornell, who had brushed past Muenter briefly at Harvard, was certain that Holt was Muenter. When he applied for a full-time position at Cornell the colleague whispered his secret to the department head, who said, “Well, he’s kind of a nut, anyway … why don’t we wait awhile before we make him a professor?” I am making up this conversation, but in a general way that is how it went down. (Numerous sources say that Muenter in fact was a professor at Cornell, but I think the better evidence is that he was not. In that era anyone who taught at a college was said in common usage to be a professor, making it somewhat difficult to tell whether he was actually a professor as opposed to a lecturer, an instructor or some other kind of pedantic peon.)
Anyway, by the fall of 1914 Germany was at war. Muenter/Holt, who spoke and wrote French, Italian and Spanish as well as German, spoke in English with a German accent, although he always insisted that he had been born in America. Holt favored the Germans in the war, and, being a pathological liar among his other faults, pretended to be not a German sympathizer but a pacifist. America was neutral in the war, but Americans were not. J. P. Morgan had loaned about $12 million to the Russians and some unknown ungodly amount of money to the British, and many other Americans were also taking sides in the war. Holt thought this was terrible. He wrote letters to newspapers proclaiming his passionate pacifism. He wrote a letter to the Kaiser. He also posed as a socialist … or perhaps he was a socialist; it is so hard to be sure with these people, but in any case he was pretty upset about the fact that J. P. Morgan even had hundreds of millions of dollars, let alone that he was using it to fight the Germans or investing in the war or whatever it was that he was doing.
On May 7, 1915, the British luxury steamship Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German warship, killing 1200 people including 137 Americans. This created pressure to push America into the war. Holt had accepted a position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and his wife had returned to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to set up housekeeping. Holt went to New York City, where he rented a bungalow under the name “Patton” and purchased (under the name “Hendricks”) as much dynamite as he could get his hands on—120 pounds, at least. He began fashioning it into bombs. On July 2 he traveled to Washington, DC, where he entered the United States Capitol building, at that time open to the public without security checks. The Senate was not in session. Unable to get into the Senate chamber, Holt left his package in the Senate reception room, and shuffled off to Union Station, where he bought a ticket on the midnight train to New York.
The bomb went off at 11:23 PM. It didn’t kill anyone, and failed to bring down the Capitol building, but it destroyed the Senate reception room, blowing open a door to the Vice President’s office which had been barred for 40 years. Holt m
ailed some letters to the Washington newspapers, which were signed “R. Pearce,” taking credit for the bombing and imploring the United States to prohibit Americans from providing munitions for the war in Europe. Should we not “stop and consider what we are doing”? Pearce implored. “I, too, have had to use explosives (for the last time I trust). It is the export kind, and ought to make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war and blood money. This explosion is the exclamation point to my appeal for peace.”
Carrying two handguns and three sticks of dynamite, the disheveled pacifist disembarked in New York in the wee hours of July 3, and made his way to Glen Cove, where J. P. Morgan lived. He had been past the house before, checking the place out. About 9:30 AM—ten hours after he bombed the nation’s Capitol building—he knocked on the door of the wealthiest man in America, and introduced himself to the butler as Thomas P. Lester. He had a business card with that name on it. He asked to see Morgan. The butler refused. Holt pulled a .38 from his left pocket and a .32 from his right, and forced his way into the house.
The butler, a courageous man named Stanley Physick, now told Holt that Morgan was in the library, which was on the west side of the house. In fact, Morgan was on the east side of the house, eating breakfast with his wife and kids and the British ambassador. When Holt realized that the library was empty Physick yelled to Morgan to take cover. Morgan, his wife and kids scrambled for the staircase, but Holt chased them down and began firing. J. P. Morgan rushed directly at the man, who fired four shots, hitting Morgan once in the leg and once in the abdomen before the much larger Morgan overpowered the consumptive Holt and pushed him to the ground. The butler hit him over the head with a lump of coal.
They took his guns away and tied him up until the police came. One of the other servants spotted dynamite sticking out of his pocket, grabbed that and placed it in a bucket of water. In custody the man said that he was Frank Holt, a professor at Cornell, and gave a “free and voluntary” statement admitting to the shooting of J. P. Morgan. He had gone to the house, he said, in an effort to force Morgan to use his influence to create a U.S. embargo against weapons sales to Europe.
It was the practice of the day for confessions given to police in serious crimes to wind up in the newspapers, verbatim, usually within a few hours. Holt insisted that he had been in New York for weeks, but as soon as his confession was in the newspapers authorities in Washington recognized the rambling, lunatic pacifism of the “R. Pearce” letters, and began to suspect that Holt, arrested with dynamite in his possession, had left some in Washington as well.
Holt would spend the last three days of his life being questioned by the police from numerous jurisdictions, by psychiatrists (alienists, as they were then called) and by reporters, who at the time were often allowed to question prisoners. He never exactly acknowledged responsibility for the bombing, but he acknowledged that he had been in Washington and that he had written the “R. Pearce” letters. He gave diverse reasons for going to Morgan’s house, saying at various times that he had intended to kill him, that he had merely wanted to talk with him, and that he had intended to take Morgan’s wife and children hostage to force the man to stop financing Germany’s enemies. “How terrible it all looks now,” he wrote in a last letter to his father-in-law, “and how different from my plans!”
Police, meanwhile, were trying to piece together Holt’s history. They learned three things that most interested them. First, they learned that he had purchased quite a bit more dynamite than they were able to account for. Second, they had figured out within a few hours that Holt bore a strong resemblance to Erich Muenter, the missing Harvard professor who had poisoned his wife back in 1906. And third, they got a wire from the governor of Texas, who had been informed by local police that Holt had sent a letter to his wife in Dallas, claiming that he had placed bombs on board a number of ships headed for Europe. The bombs, he claimed, were due to blow up on July 7.
In fact, there was an explosion and fire on a ship, the Atlantic transport liner Minnehaha, not on July 7 but on July 9. This was not one of the ships Holt had named in the letter, and no one was clear whether the Minnehaha explosion was actually from one of Holt/Muenter’s bombs or something else. There had been a series of bombs placed on ocean-going vessels, apparently the work of German sympathizers, and police now determined to learn whether Holt was a member of the gang.
Meanwhile, the press pursued the possibility that Holt and Muenter were one and the same. His picture was shown to his sister in Chicago, who hadn’t seen him in decades and said that she couldn’t be sure whether it was him or wasn’t, and to his former in-laws in the same windy city, who were pretty sure that it was. People in New York who had known Muenter at Harvard were located and brought in to look at him. Mostly they thought it was him. His Minister from Massachusetts, based on a photograph, said absolutely that it was. Authorities from Harvard stopped just short of refusing to admit that they had ever heard of Erich Muenter.
The man did not exactly deny that he may have placed bombs here and there in the cause of peace and justice, but he fervently denied that he was Erich Muenter or that he had ever done any wife killin’. There was no record of Frank Holt anywhere before 1908, however, and his wife reported that he had always claimed he had no living relatives. Muenter attempted to slash his wrists with a broken pencil, and was placed on suicide watch. On the night of July 6 a guard, thinking Muenter was asleep, neglected to lock his cell. Muenter slipped out of the cell, climbed to a second-story railing about fifteen feet above the ground, and dived headfirst onto the concrete floor, killing himself instantly.
Police, deprived of their best source of information, now scrambled frantically to identify all of the places Holt/Muenter might have sent a bomb. A search of his bungalow turned up more than a hundred sticks of dynamite and various homemade bombs, but there were still at least 50 sticks unaccounted for. Ships were recalled to harbor. Mailrooms were searched on both continents and on the seas between. No more bombs were ever found, and the rest of the dynamite was never accounted for.
The ring which had been placing bombs on ships was busted up in the spring of 1916, and appears to have had no connection to Holt/Muenter, who probably acted alone. Morgan recovered quickly from his wounds, and lived another 28 years.
In the story of Muenter and Morgan, what most strikes me is the astonishing openness of American society at that time. Muenter, suspected in the murder of his wife, was nonetheless able to board a train and leave town, which enabled him to disappear. Re-entering the country with no passport and no legitimate résumé, he was nonetheless able to work his way back into a position at an Ivy League university in a matter of a few years. He was able to buy guns and dynamite with no questions asked, and to board public transportation while armed and loaded. He was able to walk around the nation’s Capitol building unescorted after hours. He was able to walk up to the door of the wealthiest man in the country and demand to see him, although Morgan knew very well that his support for Germany’s enemies had made him a target. In modern America you couldn’t do any of those things.
People will say “Oh, well, they didn’t have the security we have now because they didn’t have the crime problems we have now,” but that’s just not true. America then was ramping up to our first big foreign war in a hundred years. Terrorism, as a practical matter, was a far more real threat then than it is now, and there was a great deal of paranoia about terrorism. Although there were no national crime statistics, the national murder rate was certainly much higher than it is now, probably several times higher.
People simply did not choose to protect themselves in the way that we do now. Were people of that era blind to the risks of daily life, or did they consciously choose to live in a more open society?
I think the best answer is that we have more security now because we can afford it. You have to remember: a high percentage of the population was still on the farm in 1915, and a high percentage of the people were still on the fa
rm because they had to be in order to produce enough food. When you have 60% of the workforce devoted to agriculture, there is no way you can have 5% devoted to security. You can’t afford it.
What we are doing, in a sense, is making ourselves constantly more aware of the threats and dangers around us, and then erecting security walls as if these threats were closing in on us, when in reality we are pushing them further and further away. Crime stories have the function of making us constantly more aware of crime. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, but neither am I entirely convinced that it is a good thing. Security is a very good thing. Crimes devastate people’s lives. On the other hand, openness is also a good thing, and paranoia is not. Is there an endpoint to this game? Or in 50 years, when the real crime rate will be a third of what it is now, will we be passing through magnetic screening devices designed to make sure we are not carrying scissors into the grocery store or little vials of nitroglycerin onto the subway? At some point can we vote on this?
IX
A 2003 study by the National Center for Health Statistics reports that the murder rate in the United States was 1.1 per 100,000 population in 1903, increasing to 4.9 per 100,000 in 1907, then to 6.2 by 1914. This, if true, would make the homicide rate in 1914 essentially the same as it is now, and the rate pre-1905 dramatically lower than it is now. I stand by my statement that the murder rate in fact was many times higher in 1915 than it is now.
There were no national crime statistics compiled early in the 20th century, and the rates reported now are based on those homicides which later researchers have happened to catalogue. A 300 percent increase in homicides between 1903 and 1907, had such a thing actually taken place, would certainly have been a phenomenal occurrence.
In fact, it is remarkably difficult to make an estimate of what the actual murder rates were then, in the modern meaning of the term “murder.” Over the last hundred years a large number of events have been re-classified as murder. A hundred years ago, “justifiable homicide” was a term that had very, very wide latitude. A hundred years ago if somebody broke into your apartment and you shot him, nobody was going to give you a hard time about that. Until about 1970 when parents beat their children to death they very often escaped punishment. They would be prosecuted if it was clear and deliberate murder, but if a parent slapped or shook a child and the child died and the parent said the kid fell down the steps, the police virtually never followed up.