Darrow’s last few words were barely audible. He seemed to stagger to his chair. Haywood and his other lawyers surrounded Darrow, and even Borah elbowed his way in to offer his compliments. It had been a golden moment, and Darrow had done it justice.
NOW IT WAS Borah’s turn. That night a thousand people, dressed in their finery, crowded the courthouse and the lawn outside to hear Idaho’s young lion. To Darrow, the scene evoked Lord Byron’s lines on the ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo:
There was a sound of revelry by night,
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.
Borah attacked like Wellington’s cavalry, swinging a saber. Darrow was his target.
“If I were fighting for the cause of labor, I would not seek to engender hatred and ill-will, faction against faction, or class against class. I would not inveigh against law; I would not inveigh against society; I would not inveigh against every man who owns his home or his farm; I would not inveigh against Christianity,” Borah said. “Without such things the laboring man goes down into slavery and dirt.”
And there was something the jurors should remember about Orchard, said Borah. Repugnant and vicious—yes, but.…
“There is another peculiarity about this homicidal maniac. As the greatest reader of the human heart once said, ‘There must be method in his madness.’ In all his scurrying here and there, killing where he would and where he could, he always lit upon the enemies of the Western Federation of Miners,” the prosecutor said. “Maniac? A very necessary maniac.”
After an hour Thursday night, Borah resumed the next morning, and finished his summation that evening. Haywood’s mother and Steunenberg’s widow, overcome by emotion, needed to be helped from the courtroom.
“You have no doubt often in this case been moved by the eloquence of counsel for the defense,” Borah said. “But as I listened to the voice of counsel and felt for a time their great influence, there came to me, after the spell was broken, another scene … I remembered again the awful thing of December 30, 1905 … I felt again its cold and icy chill, faced the drifting snow and peered at last into the darkness for the sacred spot where last lay the body of my dead friend and saw true, only too true, the stain of his life’s blood upon the whitened earth.
“I saw Idaho dishonored and disgraced. I saw murder—no, not murder, a thousand times worse than murder—I saw anarchy wave its first bloody triumph in Idaho.”
Borah’s peroration did not match Darrow’s (the senator wrote a more dramatic finish for a published version), but he had linked the bits of circumstantial evidence into a chain that enveloped Haywood—or at least observers thought so. In the shorthand and immediacy of the newspapers, all that came before was forgotten, and Haywood’s fate now rested upon this final face-off: Darrow versus Borah. And Borah had won.
Borah had shown “wonderful lucidity” and “deadly precision,” Davis wrote. “It was a display of intellectual power that amounted almost to revelation … The dingy courtroom was lighted up by a flame of living fire as this man stood there pleading the case of outraged law.”15
When the senator ended his speech that Friday night, a consensus had formed. The best the defense could hope for was a hung jury, or a compromise verdict of second-degree murder.16
DARROW HAD, TYPICALLY, soared high and low throughout the trial. He “was a man of moods,” said his friend, the Chicago labor leader Anton Johannsen. “He would have faith in the morning and be despairing in the evening.” At one point Darrow strode into the jail grinning, and shouted to his clients: “We’ve got the sons of bitches!” At another he was so downcast that the irreverent Pettibone ordered him to cheer up because “You know it’s us fellows that have to be hanged.”17
The jury began to deliberate late Saturday morning, and Darrow remained at the courthouse, fearing and expecting, like most, a quick guilty verdict. As the hours went on, he remained anxious, and appeared to be hoping for a hung jury. “It takes only one,” he told a reporter. The press and the lawyers settled in, drawing chairs together as makeshift beds. According to the courthouse scuttlebutt, the jury had taken a quick vote, and gone 10 to 2 for conviction. The Associated Press carried the story to the waiting nation; it seemed but a matter of time before the two holdouts were converted.
Just before ten p.m., the judge went home. The courtroom was swept of the newspapers and sandwich wrappings and cigar butts, and locked up for the night. Darrow could not sleep; he roamed the streets with friends and reporters, finally settling in a house across the street from the courthouse. At midnight the rumors were again specific. One of the holdouts had caved; it was now 11 to 1, and Haywood would surely hang.
On Sunday morning, before seven a.m., telephones started ringing in Boise. The jury had reached its verdict. No audience gathered at this early hour, just reporters and lawyers. Darrow was among the first to arrive, his eyes red and his skin ashen. Haywood was brought up from the jail, still dressed in yesterday’s clothing, testament to a sleepless night. Borah was missing, but Governor Gooding stood in the doorway.
The morning sun streamed through the courtroom windows, heralding another hellish day. Darrow put his arm around his client and said quietly, “Brace up there, now, Bill.”
Haywood sat erect, red-faced, his arm hooked upon the high back of his chair. The jury was brought in, looking grim.
“Have you agreed upon a verdict?” Wood asked.
“We have,” said the foreman. There was fumbling with the envelope. The judge looked at the verdict and handed it to his clerk to be read. Darrow covered his face with his hands.
“State of Idaho against William D. Haywood,” the clerk intoned. “We the jury in the above entitled cause find the defendant, William D. Haywood, not guilty.”
An instant of shock; then pandemonium.
“Bill, you’re free, you’re free, do you know it?” Darrow told him, grasping Haywood by the hands. Richardson rose to make a motion, but couldn’t get the words out. “The defendant will be discharged,” Wood declared, “and the jury dismissed.” Hawley departed; Gooding disappeared.
Haywood gleefully shook hands with the jurors, who crowded around the labor leader and his lawyers.
“I want to say, Mr. Darrow, that I like you. I liked the way you handled this case,” said juror Russell. “I believe you are honest and what you said went a long way with me.”
“And you, too, Mr. Robertson, were with us,” Darrow told the aged Scot. “I was afraid of you. I was afraid you could not forget that Gov. Steunenberg was your friend.”
“So he was, Mr. Darrow,” Robertson replied. “But do you suppose that after Harry Orchard, that wretch, killed him that I could sit and see him try to throw it off on Mr. Haywood? No, sir.” He walked off chuckling at the way he had fooled the lawyers.
“Mr. McBean,” said Darrow, reaching to pull the juror into the circle. “We never could figure just where you stood.”
“Mr. Darrow, I didn’t know myself,” he replied. “When the state got through I was in doubt. And when you finished I was in doubt. The judge said if any of us had doubts we must acquit. I said that is good enough for me.”
And Darrow told Foreman Gess, “I didn’t know as you liked my attack on Mr. Hawley, as I believe he and you are old friends.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Gess replied. “I know how lawyers are.”
Ruby was searching for Darrow, squeezing her way through “a solid jam of humanity on every street … trying to get to the winners, shouting, surging, waving, smiling, crying aloud their joy over the victory.” As she made her way down Main Street she saw Borah, “in the doorway at the foot of the stairway that led up to his office … one shoulder leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, feet crossed, hat tilted to one side, the picture of abject despair.”
Haywood, grabbing Darrow’s hat instead of his own in his excitement, rushed f
rom the courtroom. He went first down the stairs, to greet his codefendants.
“That’s good,” said Moyer, who never stopped shaving as he heard the news.
“Give my regards to Broadway,” said Pettibone.
Then Haywood went to the hospital, where his mother was being treated for exhaustion and a Federation lawyer, John Murphy, was dying of tuberculosis. Murphy’s two withered arms reached up. He knew his friend well. He placed his hands on Haywood’s cheeks and said, “Bill, you are a great big-hearted fellow. In your hour of triumph be humble.” In a walk through Boise the next day, Darrow told Haywood much the same thing—to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile—but his client rejected the advice. “His arguments had no weight with me,” he said. “Darrow had been employed as a lawyer and not as a mentor.”18
McParland railed at Darrow, and undoubtedly was the source for reporters who variously assigned the verdict to bribery, corrupt bailiffs, or cowardly jurors. Davis blamed the verdict on the judge’s instructions, and Roosevelt on the jurors’ fear of union retaliation. But Cobb set blame on the president. The Idaho authorities had foolishly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a fair trial, the publisher griped, and “spoiled a good hanging.”19
Chapter 10
FRAILTIES
He was always … the lone wolf.
Darrow was back in Idaho in early September, preparing to defend Steve Adams in a retrial of the north woods murder case. The exaltation he felt at the Haywood verdict had faded amid a series of troubles. “Your letter came today just when I needed it. For I was blue as the devil,” Darrow wrote Brand Whitlock. “The enemy, stung by my victories, have been firing hot shot into me—and some of my associates, jealous … have been helping them.”
Darrow had been snubbed by Haywood when Big Bill’s victory tour roared through Chicago, and lost a public spat with the press over whether he excused violence at the trial. (Darrow denied it; the transcript clearly showed he had.) “This is the mad brawling of an anarchist,” the Tribune told its readers. “The Idaho jury heard the most unseemly, abusive, inflammatory speech ever delivered in an American courtroom … It was a long tirade against religion, morality and law [for which] Mr. Darrow has only scoffs and sneers.”
Darrow was “an infidel, a misanthrope, a revolutionist, a hater of the rich, a condemner of the educated and the polite, a hopeless cynic,” said the New York Sun. He had “grown gray and rich … in the service of labor, and no man living has been able to coin more money out of popularity with workingmen.” The harsh opinions offered in the press were abetted by Richardson, whose feud with Darrow had erupted again in the last weeks of the trial. “I will try no more cases with Clarence S. Darrow,” said Richardson. He called Darrow “a most persistent and disgusting newspaper advertiser.”
“Mr. Richardson was … very egotistical, arrogant and exceedingly jealous,” Darrow, in turn, told reporters. In the end, Pettibone and Moyer stuck by him, and Richardson left the defense. But Darrow was feeling the searing caress of fame. It was one thing to be the hometown bad boy, another to be a national symbol for godlessness and anarchy. When he failed to stand at a Spokane restaurant as the band played “America,” Darrow was hissed by the crowd. He wrapped himself, as best he could, in the comfort of martyrdom. “I don’t know as either of us are entitled to any sympathy for what we have lost for our convictions,” he wrote Debs. “We have likewise gained much.”1
Then, on the eve of the Adams trial, Darrow became suddenly, gravely ill. He was in Boise when he was struck by flulike symptoms and terrible pain. The city’s only specialist lanced his ear, hoping to drain an abscess, and the worry displayed by Ruby to friends back in Chicago made its way into print. C. S. DARROW IS ILL; TUMOR ON BRAIN, the Tribune announced, erroneously. THE MAN WHO DEFENDED HAYWOOD MAY SOON FACE THE OMNIPOTENT JUDGE, said the Washington Post. The press linked his physical and spiritual ailments. “That the illness … was aggravated by events subsequent to the Haywood trial is little doubted,” the Tribune reported. “Where he had enemies he had made them more bitter … He found himself unable to disregard criticism … with the serenity which was characteristic. It never had worried Darrow before that his views, beliefs and statements condemned him in the minds of the great majority of his fellow citizens. This time it did.”
Darrow was warned that the infection might spread to the mastoid bone and then to the brain, with a risk of meningitis. The doctor left the wound open, for irrigation and drainage, and told Darrow to watch for swelling. It was a potentially fatal condition. The physicians of 1907 did not have X-ray machines to assess such an illness or antibiotics and sulfa drugs to cure it. He left the hospital on October 6, but only for a day. Four days later he appeared in court for a hearing on the Pettibone case, bundled in a heavy overcoat. He returned to the hospital immediately and did not depart before mid-October, when he went to San Francisco seeking the advice of a specialist. Ruby was put in charge of irrigating the ear, boiling water to sterilize the instruments, sharpening the points of the hypodermic needles, and giving Darrow injections of codeine to help him sleep at night.
Darrow had tried to keep the second Adams trial in the mining country around Wallace, but the judge approved the prosecution’s motion for a change of venue to rural Rathdrum. On October 30, against the advice of his doctors, Darrow arrived to take charge of jury selection. He would remember this time as “one continuous orgy of pain.” They boarded with a local family, in a cottage near the courthouse. “I was becoming used to the hypodermic,” he recalled. “It took more and more to put me to sleep.”
The prosecution launched its case on November 5. It had difficulty getting witnesses to testify after a bomb at his own gate tore former sheriff Harvey Brown apart, so the jury listened as the lawyers recited testimony from the transcript of the first trial. On two days in mid-November, Darrow cross-examined McParland before a standing-room-only crowd. He had the detective tell of his exploits as a spy for hire to illustrate how McParland trafficked in deception. And he pressed McParland on the promises the detective made to induce Adams to testify.
The showdown was cut short, however, so that Darrow could be taken to Spokane for treatment. The doctor there prescribed rest, but rest was not an option. “There was scarcely a moment in court when I was not in pain,” he recalled. “When the pain was unbearable, as it often was, we had to resort to the hypodermic.”
As in the first trial, Darrow set the claim jumper’s death in the context of frontier justice. The pioneers had “subdued” the forest, Darrow said, and then “the coming of the jumpers led the older settlers to indulge in the carrying of firearms and to hold meetings at which jumpers were discussed and the best means of getting rid of them. It was almost open warfare.” Anyone might have killed Tyler. Hawley sprung a surprise toward the end, introducing letters written by Adams that had not been offered as evidence at the first trial. “I was glad to hear of your belief in my innocence,” Adams had told his family. “I wish to God that I was, but I fell in with bad company and was led to commit a number of most vile sins.”
Darrow gave his closing address on November 23. “If there ever was a cause or justification for poor men standing together, this is such justification,” he told the jury. “These powerful interests that are back of this case are not interested in Steve Adams … The pretense is made that a man is being prosecuted for one crime when the whole civilized world knows it is a delusion and a lie … He is being tried because he went back on McParland and repudiated his statements.” Back in Boise, the Statesman told its readers that the state’s case was “100 percent stronger than at the first trial.” But the jury declared itself hopelessly deadlocked. The eight members who voted for acquittal had not been able to budge four jurors who believed Adams was guilty. Another good hanging spoiled. Calvin Cobb aimed his fury at Darrow, the “blood-stained figure of anarchy” who “stalks into our courts and brazenly justifies murder.”2
THREE DAYS AFTER the Adams verdict, Judge Wood called Pe
ttibone to trial. There was a good reason to rush: the defendant was fatally ill. The prosecutors wanted to hang him, and his lawyers wanted to win him a few months of liberty before he died.
As in Rathdrum, things moved quickly. Hawley led off for the state, telling the story of Steunenberg’s death. He characterized Pettibone as the counselor, paymaster, and armorer for the federation’s campaign of terror. Once more, Harry Orchard took the stand. He had “remembered” further details in the intervening months, including the sensational claim that Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone had bragged about belonging to a secret “inner circle,” in which killing was a prerequisite of membership.
There was speculation before the trial about how Darrow would cross-examine Orchard. Richardson’s attacks had failed to shake the witness, but surely Darrow could not forgo some attempt to shatter Orchard’s poise? Darrow treated Orchard differently. He did not pick at Orchard’s story, looking for inconsistencies. The best thing to do was let Harry Orchard show his detestable self. After Orchard would admit to burning down a business for the insurance money or shortchanging farmers for their milk, or stealing another man’s wife, or blowing up a mine, Darrow would ask:
“You didn’t know Pettibone then?”
“No,” Orchard would reply.
“Nor Moyer or Haywood?”
“No.”
Darrow’s “cross examination was rigid and effective,” the Associated Press reported, “in that the witness was pictured as an inhuman monster, a murderer, bigamist, perjurer, gambler, thief and incendiary.” Darrow closed his cross-examination on a Saturday evening by describing each of Orchard’s confessed crimes in minute detail and asking, “You did that, did you not?”
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 23