Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Darrow had found success. Like many in his generation in those days of periodic panics, when banks and businesses failed, he feared the snares of poverty and recognized the benefit of working for a wealthy corporation. His avidity disturbed some of his compatriots in progressive politics. Jane Addams had opened the Hull House social settlement in the West Side slums of Chicago in 1889. She and the other refined young ladies who came to do good works in the ghetto joined Darrow on many liberal causes—most notably the landmark bill that limited child labor, established an eight-hour day for women working in factories, and banned the harmful sweatshops that exploited immigrants. Darrow was the bill’s advocate in Springfield, and his lobbying helped get it passed over the opposition of the state’s manufacturing interests. He was also the lawyer whom the settlements turned to when a young man from the ghetto got in trouble with the law. But Addams recalled that Darrow was also “interested very much in advancing his own career in his profession—and in the financial side” during their early years in Chicago. She remembered “having to go among my friends and acquaintances, with my hand out, helping to raise funds to pay some of the big fees that Mr. Darrow demanded.”16

  That was Chicago. The dollar ruled. The wealthiest citizens set the city’s standards from quiet offices high above the factory floor, or in their splendid drawing rooms. The great newspapers, and their editors, were fiercely conservative. The “good people” sang psalms on Sundays, equipped the local militia with ten-barreled Gatling guns to mow down striking workers, and launched crusades to close down the saloons. “These were church people who had grown rich on running grist mills, plumbing factories, piano factories; they were managers of dry-goods stores, and proprietors of elevators and wholesale candy houses,” said Edgar Lee Masters, another young lawyer drawn to the city. “These were the specimens of odious respectability and … hypocrisy.”

  But if avarice ranked among Darrow’s attributes, it did not supplant compassion. When he was confronted by a hard-luck case, it tortured him to think he might help and had not. It took nerve to cross the social divide, yet Darrow did. There was little to be gained by striving to ease the dreary lives of the working class, yet Darrow did. Respectable folks frowned at those who spoke on behalf of anarchists, Irish and Russian revolutionaries, and foreign-born workers, yet Darrow did. Trouble found the man who pleaded for trade unions and women’s suffrage, yet Darrow did. He seemed to go out of his way to vex the people and institutions that bestowed wealth. While employed at the railroad he joined the crusade to regulate the sweatshops, and another to give the public control of gas and electric utilities. He electrified a crowd of radicals at the Central Music Hall with his call for a revolution in Russia. And at the Sunset Club, Darrow spoke out against capital punishment, scolding his wealthy colleagues for their indifference when a young African American lad was executed.

  “The State of Illinois erected a scaffold in the City of Chicago, and they led up its steps a poor, weak, ignorant boy, a child of African descent; of that race which has in all ages received persecution and cruelty … a young boy who … had never known the pressure of a kindly hand, or the tones of a gentle voice,” Darrow said. “The State of Illinois laid its hands upon this boy but once, and then it strangled him to death.”17

  Darrow spoke out for reform of marriage laws and shocked respectable Chicago by taking the case of Sarah Higgins, who was sued for infidelity by her wealthy husband. Walter Higgins had hired detectives to trail his wife, and they collected irrefutable evidence. But Darrow mounted a dogged defense of her right to happiness, charging Walter with adultery and cruelty.

  “What wonder if this woman’s feet had gone astray, if she had wandered into the broad road leading to destruction! What wonder if she, heart sore and weary, had fallen by the wayside! She, a loving little woman … neglected by her husband and left alone when her baby was born while he was drinking wine with an actress,” Darrow said. “Can the court blame her, can any one condemn her if she sought for sympathy or yearned for the glance of affection her husband denied her? Who shall say that her act of sin, her first fall, was totally without excuse?”

  Tears streamed down Darrow’s cheeks. Sarah sobbed. Every woman in the courtroom wept. “The male portion of the audience could not but be affected and even Judge Tuley turned his head away and shaded his face with his hand,” the Times reported. Walter Higgins’s attorney saw where things were going and took his client aside. They stopped the trial and negotiated a settlement. Walter admitted to desertion and promised to pay alimony. And Sarah Higgins was granted the divorce.18

  GOUDY’S SUDDEN DEATH, in the spring of 1893, propelled Darrow in even more radical directions. That week he wrote his friends, urging them to attend the upcoming meeting of the Chicago Law Club. Before the assembled lawyers and judges of Chicago, he was going to confront Judge Gary.

  When Altgeld was elected, hopes had soared in liberal circles that the governor would pardon the three remaining imprisoned anarchists. Many of those who had argued for clemency—Lloyd and Darrow and Schilling among them—were Altgeld’s allies. Darrow pushed Altgeld and was surprised by the cool response. “I am going over the record carefully and if I conclude these Anarchists ought to be freed I will free them,” the governor told his protégé. “But make no mistake—if I do it I will be a dead man politically.”19

  “I expected that Altgeld would do something about the Anarchists right away,” Darrow recalled. “But six months went by and he had not done a thing. I was pretty much disgusted.”

  Then fortune gave the anarchists a gift: Gary chose to publish a long defense of his conduct in the Century magazine. He had grown prickly over the years, as critics skewered his performance. The anarchists had been “rightly punished, not for opinions, but for horrid deeds,” Gary wrote. The dead men were motivated by base “envy” of “people whose condition in life was better than their own.”

  Darrow knew that Gary’s brief would fan Altgeld’s anger. With all his other striking qualities, Altgeld was a hater, and “the truth was, he hated Gary,” Darrow said. And so Darrow drafted a counterargument that would serve as a prospectus for a pardon and got himself on an upcoming Law Club program. “My Dear Lloyd … I am to read a paper to the law club on Judge Gary’s article,” Darrow wrote his friend. “Judge Gary (high executioner) will be there and the debate will perhaps be lively.”20

  Lively, yes. “The venerable judge himself sat upon Mr. Darrow’s left and listened to … the outspoken criticisms,” the Tribune reported.

  “One day, when the fierce heat is dead and the public mind regains its poise, we will calmly look back upon the tragedy and wish it might be blotted out,” Darrow said. “Sometime, while we will deplore the methods of these men, we will recognize that not one of them would have inflicted pain on any one who lives, except they thought that they were lessening the sum of human sorrow by their act.”

  “One day, let us hope ere long, we will call back to liberty” the three imprisoned anarchists, he said, “and wish that we might call the dead back from their graves as well.”

  Gary was unrelenting. Darrow was “a young man of generous feeling,” but obviously “the victim of a dangerous sentimentalism,” the Journal reported. The “venerable judge … stood firm as a rock against the enemies of social order.”21

  DARROW NOW RETURNED to work at City Hall for Mayor Carter Harrison, who had just won another term (his fifth) as mayor and needed a skilled litigant in the counsel’s office. Harrison had been lured from retirement by the opportunity to serve as the “World’s Fair Mayor” and preside over the Columbian Exposition and the lovely White City that had been built on the lakeshore. President Cleveland came to the May 1 dedication, among the first of the 27 million visitors who would walk the Court of Honor; visit the mammoth, electrically lit exhibition halls; ride the stunning new amusement—the Ferris wheel—on the Midway Plaisance; and enjoy performers like Harry Houdini, Buffalo Bill, and Scott Joplin. One of Darrow’s first assig
nments was to open the fair on Sundays. Darrow was a foe of Sabbath closing laws, and there were political considerations as well: laborers and factory hands worked a six-day week and would miss the fun if the fair were closed on their day off.

  Darrow took part in the celebration, strolled the grounds, and spoke at a lakefront park during the “Labor Congress”—one of many thematic gatherings held at the exposition. He especially loved the circuslike atmosphere of the Midway. The Vincennes Avenue house was close by, and the Darrows often opened their home to out-of-town guests. He was busy that summer, finishing up some legal work for the railroad and working on the Sunday closings issue when Altgeld, without warning, pardoned the anarchists, igniting a volcanic reaction.22

  On the evening of June 26, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab emerged from the stone portal of the penitentiary at Joliet, free men. Altgeld’s pardon message was no lofty treatise on justice: it was a scathing, eighteen-thousand-word attack on Judge Gary. “If he had done it differently, he might have gotten away with it better,” Darrow would recall. “But that bitter hatred of his got mixed up in it … He played right into their hands.”23

  Gary, said Altgeld, had appointed a biased bailiff—a man determined that the anarchists should hang—to supervise the selection of a jury. Gary had approved the seating of tainted jurors, including a relative of one of the dead policemen. Gary had frustrated the defense with unfair rulings. Gary had condemned the defendants without evidence of ties to the bomb thrower. “There was no case against them,” Altgeld wrote. The men had been convicted, imprisoned, and executed by “a jury prejudiced to start with [and] a judge pressing for conviction … amid the almost irresistible fury.”24

  It was a profile in rancor, but also in courage. In pardoning the three defendants, “Governor Altgeld has committed political suicide,” said the New York Times. “It reveals him either as an enemy to the safeguards of society, or as a reckless demagogue.”25 So it went, and went for weeks, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities. “I was … bred to fear him,” Henry L. Mencken, twelve years old that summer, would recall. “What I gathered from my elders … was that Altgeld was a shameless advocate of rapine and assassination, an enemy alike to the Constitution and the Ten Commandments—a bloody and insatiable Anarchist.”26

  Darrow, Lloyd, and Schilling tried to battle back. They published a pamphlet on Altgeld’s behalf, and Darrow scolded his colleagues at the Sunset Club.

  “When you gentlemen want something, it is liberty,” he told an audience of two hundred lawyers, ministers, and businessmen. “When some man tells you you’re wrong, that some other way is better, that is license. And you immediately apply a dose of hemp.”27

  Mayor Harrison was in a bind, for Gary was his friend. In September, Altgeld met with the mayor in an attempt to resolve their differences. But Harrison was immovable and before the day was out Darrow had announced his resignation, effective immediately. He joined three former judges—Lorin Collins, Adams Goodrich, and William Vincent—in a new law firm, with offices in the splendid Rookery building, one of the new “skyscrapers” made possible by the development of the elevator.

  Altgeld didn’t flinch. He set out to defeat Gary in the fall election, with Darrow as his instrument. “Altgeld has picked out his candidate to oppose Judge Gary; his nominee is C. S. Darrow,” the Tribune reported. “It was he who prepared the brief on which Gov. Altgeld’s attack on the courts and on Judge Gary was based. He entertains strong socialistic views and is altogether a man after Altgeld’s own heart.”

  The Journal portrayed Darrow as “an able and a dangerous young man” and noted the alacrity with which Darrow had accepted work for the Chicago & North Western, “one of the monopolies he had inveighed against when younger.” Chicago was familiar with that kind of opportunism; what puzzled the Journal editors was why Darrow, having landed a cushy position with the railroad, had not stayed there. Most men who “pose as Socialists” abandon such views when “they work their way into a lucrative connection with the established order,” the paper noted. Darrow had not.

  Hard times were at hand that fall. Railroads failed, the stock market crashed, and the Panic of 1893 gripped the country; in Chicago, it busted banks and trading firms and threw 100,000 men out of work. The corridors of City Hall were filled with the homeless, who sought warmth and a dry floor on which to sleep. Darrow served on a civic committee to find jobs and food for the armies of unemployed and represented Austin W. Wright, whose commodity trading firm was one of those that went bust. He worked as Altgeld’s lieutenant and helped craft a Democratic “unity” slate for that fall’s elections. But Gary coasted to reelection in a year when security was a top concern. When asked why they lost, Democratic leaders replied, “Altgeld and Gary.”

  It was a bad year in which to defend anarchists; especially after Patrick Prendergast rang the mayor’s doorbell, and shot Carter Harrison dead.28

  Chapter 3

  PRENDERGAST

  The hand of Him who made him shook.

  Carter Harrison was murdered on the final weekend of the great Exposition. More than 100,000 citizens filed by the glass-topped coffin at City Hall, and a half million lined the mayor’s funeral route on All Saints’ Day. Dirge-playing bands, militia units, and tens of thousands of official mourners—Darrow among them—conveyed the dead chieftain to his resting place. On the back of the hearse was a wreath from Annie Howard, the twenty-five-year-old fiancée of the sixty-eight-year-old mayor; they had planned to marry that month.

  Harrison had spoken at a closing ceremony for the fair that Saturday. He was home in his Italianate mansion, dozing in a chair, when Prendergast came to the door. A maid summoned the mayor, and as he entered the foyer his assassin raised a revolver and opened fire. Harrison staggered back, his hand over his heart, and fell to the floor. “This is death,” he murmured. Prendergast exchanged gunshots with a coachman, then took the streetcar to the Des Plaines Street police station, and surrendered to the astonished desk sergeant.

  The economic hard times, the furor over the anarchists, and the mayor’s assassination seemed to join together in one awful, portentous hour, spoiling the glow of the fair. The newspapers insisted that Prendergast be hanged. So, even, did the prisoners in the Cook County jail, who shouted “Lynch the killer!” as the mayor’s cortege passed by.1 But on November 18, the Herald published a letter from Darrow, resisting the rush to judgment.

  “If any further evidence were needed to show that man had his origin in the brute creation, the conduct and utterances of the public in reference to the shooting of our mayor has furnished that proof,” Darrow wrote. “It seems as if the whole community has gone mad at the sign of blood.

  “Most men admit that the prisoner was insane and yet lawyers, doctors, merchants and men of all classes are almost unanimous in saying that, whether sane or insane, the wretched being ought to hang,” said Darrow.

  “It may not matter much to the unfortunate prisoner or even to his mother and brother whether he shall live or die; but the spectacle of a civilized community pitilessly killing a crazy man will furnish an example of cruelty and fury that in some way must bear evil fruit,” he warned. “We cannot sow the wind without reaping the whirlwind.”2

  William Seward could not have said it better. Prendergast was a slight twenty-five-year-old newspaper deliveryman with red hair, crossed eyes, and many delusions. He told the police that he shot the mayor because Harrison had reneged on a promise to name him his counsel. He was known to Darrow and others as a crank who showed up at single-tax-club meetings and sent incoherent postcards to public officials. He had been spotted banging his head against the trees in Humboldt Park, roaming Wisconsin in a blanket, telling farmers about his correspondence with the pope, and sitting in church, mouth agape, head lolling back and eyes rolling. “Insanity was written all over the man,” the Harrison family’s newspaper, the Chicago Times, reported. It cited a police superintendent, who said the killer was “mad a
s a March hare.”3

  Nevertheless, the state moved swiftly to trial, seeking the death penalty. The prosecution was led by A. S. Trude, one of the city’s foremost criminal lawyers, who was appointed as a special counsel in a deal quietly brokered by the Tribune company. Darrow closely followed the proceedings, seeking out and talking to the medical witnesses, and tracking the testimony. Two expert doctors who had been hired by the state to declare that Prendergast was competent to stand trial instead declared him insane. “That poor devil is crazy,” said Dr. Archibald Church, a specialist in mental illness at the Illinois State Hospital. But Trude earned his pay. The jury took but an hour to reach a verdict. Prendergast was condemned to death.4

  Darrow took Jessie and Paul to southern California during the holidays, where they visited friends and took in the Tournament of Roses. And he continued to act as Altgeld’s man in the Democratic Party’s labyrinthine councils. The well-loved Mayor Harrison had imposed a kind of order on the city’s politics, and the process of replacing him commenced, one week after his death, with a riot in the crepe-draped council chambers. The police were called to break up the “demonical” clerks and aldermen, who wrestled one another to the floor and swung chairs, canes, and spittoons.5