Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Judge Joseph Gary, conducting the trial as a public spectacle (he saved seats behind his bench for stylish young ladies who giggled and ate candy), gave wide latitude to the prosecution and, with his closing instructions to the jury, ushered the anarchists to their deaths. If the defendants “by print or speech” had encouraged a murderous act, Gary told the jurors, “then all such conspirators are guilty of such murder, whether the person who perpetrated such murder can be identified or not.”5

  Darrow was outraged. He had arrived in Chicago in the period between the trial and the executions, and joined a group of prominent citizens urging clemency for the defendants. Those who did so paid a price. Lloyd, a leader in the movement, was disinherited by his wife’s wealthy family. William Black, the anarchists’ attorney, had earned the Medal of Honor in the Civil War but now was shunned. The trial “left me in debt, without a business and without a clientage, and in a community all of whose wealthy citizens were in active hostility to me,” he wrote.6 Nevertheless, Darrow enlisted. In August 1887, he wrote a letter to his friends at the Democratic Standard in Ashtabula, recounting a visit with the anarchists in jail.

  “They are a good looking intelligent lot of men. At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that I was something of a crank myself … they entered freely into conversation,” Darrow reported. “They imagine that wealth is so strong that it controls legislation and elections and that we can only abolish present evils by wiping out capital and starting over new.

  “It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system, to understand how intelligent men can believe that the repeal of all laws can better the world; but this is their doctrine.”

  The real issue at stake in the Haymarket case, Darrow told the folks back in Ohio, was free speech: “Whether one who advocates doctrines that the world believes to be wild and revolutionary, who wildly and generally advises killing and destroying, without however counseling the doing of a particular act against any particular person, can be held guilty of murder.

  “I believe the establishment of such a doctrine would be a vital blow at freedom of speech and of the press,” Darrow wrote.

  He added, as an afterthought: “You will see by this that I still retain my unfortunate habit of looking at main questions in a different light from the majority.”

  “I hope you will not conclude that I am an Anarchist,” he wrote. “I think their doctrines are wild if their eyes are not.”7

  At the time, Darrow was a member of a single-tax group inspired by author Henry George, who had initially supported the Haymarket defendants but now was running for political office in New York, and modulating his beliefs. He infuriated Darrow and the others by declining to publish the club’s resolution asking for clemency in his organization’s newspaper.8 Darrow wrote a stinging letter to The Solidarity, a labor publication in New York, accusing George of cowardice.

  “Think what dangers hang around free speech if a thoughtless word, a foolish sentence or an unguarded utterance may, after months or years, be said to cause another’s death,” Darrow said. He dissected the case, criticized Gary’s conduct of the trial, and finished with a flourish.

  “I have my dreams of a future time when injustice and oppression will be banished from the earth; when hunger, cold and want with tattered rags, and hollow eyes, shall keep pace no more with luxury and wealth,” Darrow said. He compared the anarchists to the abolitionists, and especially John Brown: “The image of a brave heroic man, standing calmly on the scaffold waiting for the cause he loved so well.”

  “It has been ever thus,” Darrow wrote. “Sometime, when the bitter feelings of the hour are gone, justice touched with pity and regret will look down on Chicago’s barbarous feast of blood … and deal fairly by the memory of the death.”9

  The clash with George soured Darrow to the single-tax cause. When George came to Chicago in 1889 to speak at a gathering of the American Tariff Reform League, Darrow joined those who foiled his efforts to dominate the proceedings. In his turn at the rostrum, Darrow assailed his former hero. The solution to the country’s economic inequities was not the single tax but free trade, Darrow said, and his ringing denunciation of Republican economic policy won him wide notice, even if the next day’s Tribune did refer to him as “Charles” Darrow.

  He was, he later conceded, “oratorical” in those days. “Commerce has been the greatest civilizer of the earth; it has called into existence the ship with her white wings and throbbing heart, and sent her laden with her freight of human souls to penetrate the mists and darkness hanging over unknown lands; it has made a chart of the trackless seas and over them its pioneers have traveled to the darkest corners of the globe with the first glad tiding of the coming morn,” he said. “It has carried the civilization, literature, art and religion of one land and showered these like the dews of heaven to coax forth the flowers of light and life from the moldy and decaying superstitions of the past.”

  The Republican Party’s support for a protectionist tariff was blocking that white-winged ship of throbbing heart, Darrow said. And it enriched the master at the expense of the workingman. “What force during these years of plenty has been tearing the wife from the workman’s home and his children from school? It is the greed of those whom your unjust laws have made rich and great that is sending fathers, husbands and brothers to the street and filling up the factories with the mother and the tender child,” he said. “In the name of humanity, has not property been protected quite enough? Shall we not do something for the poor and the weak?”

  Years later, Darrow acknowledged that he had drowned “such ideas as I had” in “a cloud of sounding metrical phrases.” But to his immense satisfaction, the reaction to his speech equaled that given George. The Herald was among the papers that praised him. “Darrow has a strong, clear voice, a good presence, and will take front rank among the orators of Chicago,” it declared. The speech marked him as a comer, and journalists started paying attention to the “scholarly young lawyer.”

  “Never again have I felt that exquisite thrill of triumph,” Darrow recalled. But he was not content; he yearned to convert ideas to action. He and Lloyd explored a scheme to buy the Chicago Times and provide the city with a radical labor voice. And he had been in Chicago for but a short while when he told his socialist friend Schilling: “What ought to be done now is to take a man like Judge Altgeld; first elect him mayor of Chicago, then governor of Illinois.”10

  OF DARROW’S MENTORS, John Peter Altgeld had the most vivid personality and the most lasting impact. “He was the first man to know there was a Clarence Darrow,” Darrow said.

  Altgeld was the son of German immigrants who had settled in Ohio. At the age of sixteen he enlisted in the Union Army and after the war worked as a laborer and schoolteacher while studying law at night. He came to Chicago in 1875, made his fortune in real estate, and was elected judge. Altgeld was shy and diffident, but well read, ambitious, and intense. “His character was that of the philosopher, of the seer, of the dreamer, of the idealist” yet “there was mixed with that … the practical touch of the politician,” said Darrow. “He knew how to play to those cheap feelings which the politician uses to inspire the vulgar mob.”

  Altgeld’s political success was all the more notable for his alien disposition. He had a German accent, short-cropped nappy hair, and a bit of a harelip hidden beneath his beard. He was a congenital outsider, attuned to the difficulties faced by the workingmen hauled into his court. He developed a following in the immigrant wards and trade unions and, after publishing his judicial philosophy in the book that had caught Darrow’s attention in Ashtabula, was embraced by liberals too. But Altgeld was no dreamy socialist; in practice he could be ruthless. “I want power, to get hold of the handle that controls things,” he told Schilling. “When I do, I will give it a twist.” On the mantel in his library was a bust of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. But there
was also a bust of Augustus Caesar.

  Darrow had called on Altgeld soon after arriving in Chicago. They were compatible politically and shared a contempt for political leaders who, as Altgeld put it, were “moral cowards, following the music wagon of their times.” Here was an Amirus, but with courage, steel, and the knack of making money. “It will always be a source of pride to me that I knew him … that there never was a time that I did not love and follow him,” Darrow recalled. He adopted Altgeld’s blend of passion and calculation. The judge was “absolutely honest in his ends and equally as unscrupulous in the means he used to attain them,” Darrow said, admiringly. “He would do whatever would serve his purpose when he was right. He’d use all the tools of the other side—stop at nothing.”

  One of Altgeld’s enemies was Judge Gary, the man who hanged the Haymarket anarchists, and their feud had long-lasting consequences for Darrow. The hard feelings stemmed from their political differences, but also from Altgeld’s investments in real estate. He had purchased a building along the Chicago River, only to have its value damaged by the city’s construction of a bridge. After consulting with the city attorney, Altgeld agreed to have experts testify and abide by a jury’s verdict.

  Mayor John Roche, however, was a political foe of the city attorney. Two mischievous members of the mayor’s staff—John Green and Clarence Knight—arrived at the courtroom, where they suggested that Judge Altgeld was using improper influence. Altgeld lost his temper, jumped to his feet, and, in a confrontation that made headlines as far away as New York, waved his fist and called Green “a damned liar!” Altgeld won the case, but was fined $100 and publicly humiliated for his outburst. And when an appellate panel reversed his victory he sent a seething letter to the judges, one of whom was Gary.

  Altgeld first took revenge on Roche, a Republican who ran for reelection against Democrat DeWitt Cregier in 1889. Altgeld spent some $5,000 to distribute a campaign leaflet, topped by Cregier’s name, that listed Democratic and Republican candidates and identified them as an “anti-machine” ticket. Enough Republicans were fooled into voting for the slate to cost Roche his job.11

  Knight was Altgeld’s next victim. In June, Cregier fired the ten-year veteran of the city legal staff. “Judge Altgeld was after my scalp,” Knight told reporters. The new assistant counsel was the unknown C. S. Darrow, who had campaigned for Cregier and been rewarded with an obscure position—special assessment attorney—at City Hall. His promotion to a $5,000-a-year job caught the press by surprise. “Mr. Darrow is of too recent establishment in Chicago to be widely known, but in so far as he has made a record here it all seems to be creditable,” the Daily News reported. “Almost from the time of his arrival he has signalized himself … in the sessions of all societies and bodies convened for the discussion of social and political doctrine … He sealed his great serviceability to the Democratic Party by some excellent work on the stump.”12

  Darrow profited from his time at City Hall, learning municipal law, advising Mayor Cregier, and obtaining a first-rate education in the wild and blighted habitudes of the city’s politics. “A rare conglomeration of city fathers ruled Chicago in the Nineties,” Carter Harrison Jr., a five-term mayor, would recall. They were “a low-browed, dull-witted, base-minded gang of plug-uglies, with no outstanding characteristic beyond an unquenchable lust for money.”13

  Altgeld and Darrow were joined in Cregier’s camp—at least for a time, since things were always shifting as the boys chased the better deal—by the city’s gambling kingpin, Michael Cassius “King Mike” McDonald, corrupter of cops and public officials, and the boss of the city’s vice district, Joseph “Chesterfield Joe” Mackin, fresh from Joliet Prison. With them were aspiring scoundrels like Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and John “Bathhouse” Coughlin, a Laurel-and-Hardy pair destined for fame as the “lords of the Levee,” the downtown sin sector. Kenna, a spry, poker-faced little wizard, ran the Workingman’s Exchange, a saloon and gambling den that became the headquarters of the First Ward political organization. In return for a cut of the action, he arranged police protection for the pimps and barkeeps, and in return for votes on Election Day found tramps a place to flop. Coughlin was “a rubber”—a masseur at the Turkish baths—who graduated to the exalted status of alderman. He was known for his elocution and unique dishabille—he wore Prince Albert coats of billiard-cloth green, plaid and mauve vests, lavender trousers, pink kid gloves, and gleaming yellow pumps. Kenna and Coughlin were a team, and they followed the advice of Senator Billy Mason, who told Bathhouse, “You and Mike stick to th’ small stuff. There’s little risk and in the long run it pays a damned sight more.” For many years they hosted the annual First Ward balls, garish events at which gamblers, pols, saloon-keepers, cops, and prostitutes joined in a nightlong carousal of dance, drink, and rapine.

  Making his way in this Gomorrah, Darrow steered clear of the worst offenses. He drew up ordinances, crafted legal opinions that upheld the city’s power to regulate guns and public utilities, and advanced Chicago’s right to condemn private property and annex land for civic improvements, such as the Columbian Exposition, the upcoming world’s fair. He prevailed in a weeklong trial defending the city in a $200,000 lawsuit filed by Warren Springer, a landowner whose property was devalued by municipal street work. He helped settle a carpenters’ strike. And when a politically connected German American police captain named Herman Schluetter gunned down an organizer of the secret Celtic society Clan Na Gael in early 1890, raising ethnic tensions to dangerous levels, the mayor and the officer turned to Darrow for advice. Darrow counseled Cregier, as well, when the mayor was charged with selling police protection to downtown bookies. And the public was appreciative when Darrow hauled the venal streetcar baron Yerkes into court for failing to keep his conveyances heated in Chicago’s frigid winter.

  Amid the general mediocrity of the Cregier administration, Darrow won good reviews. “The appointment of CS Darrow to his present position by Mayor Cregier covers a multitude of sins of other appointments,” one journalist reported. “Darrow is able, fearless, independent with a fine sense of political honor and integrity, and with all his merit possesses a modesty that overshadows the whole.”

  Darrow was lucky, as well. His boss, the corporation counsel, became ill and took an extended leave, and Darrow was placed in charge of all the city’s legal affairs. By the spring of 1890—three years after his arrival in Chicago—he was a star, mentioned as a candidate for high office, and hosting strategy meetings of Cregier’s political organization. His rise, said the Inter Ocean, was “almost phenomenal.” In the summer of 1890, his friends launched a “boom” for Darrow in the Second District race for Congress. It was snuffed by the need to name an Irishman and give ethnic balance to the ticket. The Tribune got his name wrong again (“Charles Sumner Darrow”), but mourned his defeat.14

  Darrow earned his first unfavorable bout of publicity after undertaking a clandestine assignment on Altgeld’s behalf in 1891. U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures in that era, and the voters had sent 101 Democrats, 100 Republicans, and three independent populists to Springfield. Most expected that the populists would ultimately give Democrat John Palmer the required absolute majority. But the balloting dragged on for weeks, with Democratic newspapers exhorting the “Immortal 101” to stand by Palmer “until the last ballot.”

  In February, Darrow took the train to Springfield, where he quietly urged Palmer to withdraw and tried to persuade the populists to anoint Altgeld. “C. S. Darrow … has made himself famous,” the Chicago Post announced, after news of the mission leaked. His attempt “to break the solid Democratic front and to defeat Palmer” was seen as “treachery” and “despicable conduct.” In an editorial, the Herald called on Cregier to fire the upstart.

  The storm passed and, on the 154th ballot, Palmer was elected. But the episode did not dim Altgeld’s resolve, and he set out to be governor. He barnstormed the state and impressed the Democracy with his willingness to spend his own
money to get elected, while Darrow, Schilling, and other lieutenants assembled a coalition of immigrant laborers, silk-stocking liberals, bucket-house gamblers, and socialist dreamers. Speaking for the good people, the Tribune publisher Joseph Medill labeled Altgeld a “jesuitical little socialistic demagogue,” but in 1892 he defeated a Republican incumbent and became the state’s first Democratic governor since before the Civil War.15

  AS DARROW ROCKETED through Chicago’s legal and political ranks, his social and intellectual appetites soared. He settled Jessie and Paul in a new home on Vincennes Avenue but roamed the city without her. “When he became a big figure in a big city, their interests became different,” his son Paul recalled. Jessie was loyal; she skimped on her own clothes and jewelry so that Darrow could dress well. While she stayed home, Darrow doffed his coat and danced to “Annie Rooney” at the annual picnic of the Cook County Democracy; partied with the University of Michigan alumni society; led the city law department’s baseball team in a contest against the county clerks; and judged the sailing races at the Fox Lake Yacht Club regatta. He began, as well, a dangerous flirtation with a young stenographer in the city law office, Katherine Leckie.

  When Mayor Cregier lost his bid for reelection, Altgeld called on William Goudy, an old friend and business associate, and got Darrow his position in the legal office of the Chicago & North Western Railway Company. As a member of the Iroquois Club, an organization of upscale Democrats, Darrow joined Goudy, Altgeld, and others at swank dinners and receptions, making friends with fellow strivers like lawyer Stephen Gregory, Judge Edward Dunne, a young banker named W. W. Catlin, and Judge William Barnum, whose daughter Gertrude would become a lifelong adorer. The “Iroquois club never does anything by halves,” the Tribune reported. For its tenth-anniversary dinner, in 1891, the club imported thousands of American Beauty and La France roses, filled two stupendous punch bowls with liquor, ice, and fruit, and decorated its dining room with relics from the Custer massacre. The club’s leaders, dressed in buckskin and feather headdresses, welcomed guests to a dinner of oysters, caviar, lobster salad, “pate of prairie chicken aux truffles,” partridge, salmon, and boar. Many of the “Iroquois braves” were also members of the Sunset Club, an organization of “genial and tolerant fellows” that met each fortnight for debates on social and political issues. Catlin drew up a “declaration of principles” that included “No By-Laws … No Bores … No Preaching … No Dead Beats.”