Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Orchard replied. The witness looked miserable, perhaps realizing that without Oscar Davis to tell it otherwise, the world would lose its sympathy for the merry-eyed murder machine. Indeed, the humbled press corps had dropped their lavish testaments to McParland’s skills and the “miracle” of Orchard’s religious conversion. “Mr. Darrow with dextrous hand drew for the jury not the picture of a repentant murderer aiding justice, but invested Orchard with the crimson-stained robes of a craven assassin,” said the Globe. He had compelled Orchard “to depict himself as a despicable slayer of men … an inhuman fiend … and a wretch who lay in wait for his victims and shot them in the back.”

  But when court reconvened on Monday, Darrow was not there. Nor on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It was almost time to open the defense, and the lead attorney was in agony, confined to bed. Darrow made it to Friday’s session of the trial, looking far from well. He questioned a witness that day and Saturday, with short, raspy inquiries and ill-tempered insinuations. He got a brief reprieve for the Christmas holiday but was required to return to court on December 26 to make the opening argument for the defense. He did not have the strength to stand on his feet. Nor to raise his voice. He got permission to sit as he made his remarks.

  A chair was set in front of the jurors. As a hushed courtroom strained to hear him, for two hours, Darrow spoke slowly, and at times with obvious effort. He apologized for his infirmity, and announced that this would be his final appearance at the trial.

  DARROW HAD WIRED his friend C. E. S. Wood in Oregon, asking him to “answer quick” if there was a “first class ear expert” in Portland. But instead of traveling to the cold and wet Northwest, Darrow and Ruby left for Los Angeles on December 27. An old pal, the writer James Griffes, had made arrangements for the couple. Darrow was admitted to the California Hospital, to be treated by Dr. John Haynes, and Griffes found a bungalow for them near the Church of the Angels. They were accompanied by Billy Cavanaugh, a stonecutter from Chicago who had met Darrow in Boise and acted as a bodyguard and companion.

  In California, Darrow received good news. On January 4, the jury acquitted Pettibone, and Hawley announced that the state would drop the charges against Moyer. Having heard the evidence twice, said Judge Wood, it was clear there was “nothing” beyond Orchard’s testimony to connect Moyer to Steunenberg’s murder. Pettibone left the courthouse clinging to the arm of his wife; he would die from cancer the following summer. Haywood missed the funeral.

  To the surprise of no one, Orchard pleaded guilty to the murder of Frank Steunenberg and was sentenced to hang. But Harry did not swing. Pinkerton detective Chris Thiele reported to his superiors how Hawley used “his influence” to “have the Pardon Board commute Orchard’s sentence.” The bargain was kept. Yet despite the efforts of his promoters—Detective McParland, Prosecutor Hawley, and Governor Gooding—Orchard never did walk free. He was a “human demon,” and “I do not believe there is a Governor in the world who would dare liberate a murdering scoundrel like this,” William Pinkerton wrote McParland. The assassin died in prison at the age of eighty-eight. Steve Adams was tried one last time, in Colorado, for the murder of a mining company official, and acquitted.

  “While the thinking world has taken one view of these cases, the juries have taken another,” the Statesman concluded. Fair enough. But the states of Idaho and Colorado had staged five trials in their efforts to sustain the tale of a murderous “inner circle.” Two of the three Adams trials ended with hung juries, the other in an acquittal. The trials of Haywood and Pettibone—the two instances where jurors had an opportunity to watch Orchard testify and judge him—ended in verdicts of not guilty. Despite its home court advantage and star witness, the finest prosecutors and a compliant press, the mine owners’ money, the Pinkerton spies, a permissive Supreme Court, and the unconscionable meddling of Theodore Roosevelt, the state had failed to prove that the union killed Frank Steunenberg.

  MEANWHILE, DARROW WAS suffering through another month—his fourth—of grueling pain. The usual procedure for mastoiditis was to remove a portion of the affected area, drain the wound, and keep the infection from spreading. But the doctors were stumped by the absence of characteristic swelling or fever, and balked at subjecting him to the hazards of an operation. On January 2, the newspapers in Los Angeles reported that Darrow’s condition was critical, and that he had resolved to return to Chicago. Then, on the day that he and Ruby were preparing to leave, Darrow felt a lump behind his ear. The surgeons operated the next day.

  Darrow recovered, though he lost his hearing in that ear. But his troubles were not over. A panic had swept Wall Street in October. Banks failed, speculators hoarded gold, and desperate investors killed themselves. The resultant depression lingered for months, crushing businesses and throwing millions out of work. Darrow lost his investments in bank stocks, and Ruby received urgent cables from an Illinois associate who had helped persuade him to invest in a Mexican gold mine. Darrow had sunk much of his savings in the Black Mountain mine and should withdraw his money immediately, the man said. But the doctors in California told Ruby that Darrow should not be subjected to such a shock. She shoved the telegrams under a cushion, and more money was lost. When she finally informed him, he stood up “like a rocket and paced back and forth, jerking himself from the arms of those strong men trying to subdue his emotions,” Ruby remembered. “Toward me he turned an unforgettable look, charged with … accusation.”

  Darrow demanded to know if she realized that “I had thrown away his life savings, his dream of retiring,” Ruby said. “Now he would have to begin all over and be a slave to the irksome law work.” He had nursed hopes of moving to New York or London to be a man of letters. He sank back onto the bed and told her: “I will never forgive you for this. We’re wiped out. We’re broke.”3

  BACK IN CHICAGO, Edgar Lee Masters was feeling the effects of the market crash as well. He had developed a fine opinion of himself and his talents, convinced that the acts of lesser men—“the cords of the Lilliputians,” as Masters put it—kept him from fulfilling his great promise.

  Darrow, Masters & Wilson had done well. “Business had poured into our office, and we could have become rich on it,” Masters recalled. Yet his rambunctious sex life cost him money, and his wife Helen was pressing him to buy a home commensurate with their social status. And though the Haywood case carried a supposed fee of $50,000, the Federation was strapped for funds. By June 1907, the law firm had received just $14,500. His defense of the union took Darrow away from the office for much of two years. “He neglected the most important cases,” Masters griped, “and the result was that they ceased to come.” Hearst was behind on his payments to the firm, the American economy was crumbling, and according to Ruby’s frantic messages, the rainmaker was on the brink of death.

  In November, Masters had written Darrow, alerting him to the firm’s troubled finances and demanding money. The partners had an agreement, Masters reminded him, to divide the fees. Darrow was to get 55 percent, Masters to get 25 percent, and Cy Symon and Frank Wilson 10 percent each. But Darrow and his son Paul were overdrawing money from the firm’s account to cover their losses and pay Jessie’s expenses. According to Masters, Darrow owed him $1,725, plus a share of the balance due from the union. More important, the firm needed its marquee name back in Chicago, generating business.

  Darrow answered the letter from Boise. He expressed his “regret” that the firm was “hard up” and that his absence “hurts the business,” but was wounded by his partner’s demands and defended his decision to stay and save Adams and Pettibone. “I could see no way to stop; there was none,” Darrow wrote. He told Masters that “if you look the books over you will find that the amount of money I have put in from business I got … has more than paid what I took out.” His partners should be grateful, Darrow wrote. Money was “scarce,” he was getting old, and he and Paul “have been pressed” by their investments. He threatened to quit the firm if Masters continued to
badger him.

  “I would not give up our association in the office for money,” Darrow wrote. But “I cannot at my time of my life afford to lose what I have … I would feel very badly if it was necessary to quit … but I am absolutely obliged to hold what I get here until the pinch is over.”

  Masters seethed over the holidays, and in January, with Darrow in the hospital, took a different tack. He wrote the Federation, asking for a full accounting of the money paid and owed. It was merely a matter of year-end bookkeeping, Masters assured the union, regrettable but necessary because his partner’s illness had made “any business conferences with him impracticable.” The WFM declined to comply. It would deal only with Darrow, the union said: “He is the only party we recognize.” The response infuriated Masters, and fed his suspicion that Darrow was cheating him.

  Darrow limped back to Chicago in February, his head swathed in bandages, with one eye peering out. By his account, the partners settled their dispute, after accepting a payment from the union “for much less than my contract entitled me to.” Masters recalled it differently. “He was gone from Chicago for 26 months. He returned at last a sick man,” Masters recalled. “The first thing he did on arriving was to beg off on the payment he owed the firm. My share was $9,000. I told him that I would not press it, but that he would have to pay it sometime.”

  Masters gnawed on the grievance. The two partners were much alike, and no more so than when it came to money. Both made it handily, spent it lavishly, professed its unimportance, and fought like wolverines over every dollar when their comfort was at stake. The Haywood case was the beginning of the end for their law firm, and their friendship. “What a rotter Masters was,” Ruby recalled. Knowing Darrow was ill, Masters “ignominiously and brutally accused” him “of having extracted from the firm’s earnings.” And all that time, she said, Masters was roosting in his corner office, writing poems and plays on the firm’s time.4

  A YEAR AND MORE passed before Darrow paid off some $10,000 to $15,000 in personal debts. Paul married a Vassar graduate who worked as a telephone operator in his father’s office and headed west to Greeley, Colorado, to run a coal gas plant. It would eventually be a fine investment, but Darrow’s piece of the deal required that he help fund construction of gas lines and other works. Darrow and Ruby moved into an apartment by the University of Chicago, and for a year purchased nothing but food and essentials. “We both slaved, yes slaved,” she recalled.

  Darrow thought to move his practice to New York, perhaps as a stop on his way to London. “I have been in a hard struggle for two or three years on account of some very heavy losses, and am paying up debts to hold my gas plant in Colorado,” he wrote, turning down a solicitation from a liberal cause. “As soon as I am out of the woods, I intend moving to New York, but I have been obliged to refuse to make contributions for some time.”

  Darrow had sworn off politics, and seemed more cynical than ever. “It is not possible to accomplish anything,” he wrote Whitlock. “The people are not ready and after you are done they will return to their vomit.

  “The only thing worthwhile is to develop your own individuality and leave something that will do a little to liberalize the few who knew and cared because you lived,” said Darrow. “I am strongly thinking of leaving [Chicago] before very long and … would have done it before if I had not lost all my money.”

  To supplement his law practice, Darrow struck out on the lecture circuit, most lucratively for the beer and liquor industry, for whom he argued the case against Prohibition. America had always been a hard-drinking country. But the deleterious effect of alcohol on the poor and working classes inspired a middle-class constituency for reform, led by groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League. As a libertarian, Darrow had fought such concerns since his early days in Chicago, and he barnstormed Illinois that spring, speaking against a statewide referendum that would let counties and townships ban alcohol. That Chicago would stay “wet” was never in doubt, but in a notable defeat for the saloon-keepers, hundreds of small jurisdictions declared themselves “dry” on Election Day. The growing alliance between suffragists and Prohibitionists alarmed Darrow and soured him on the feminist cause.

  His public speaking caused more tension at the firm. “Darrow took to the lecture platform, speaking for the liquor interests,” Masters recalled. “He was much away and naturally did not turn his fees as a lecturer into the law office treasury … My own burdens were heavier in consequence. I remonstrated with him repeatedly, but to no avail. He was the business producer and therefore he was in a position of authority.”5

  FOR ALL HIS muttering, Darrow’s troubles did not quell his sense of idealism. He was back in Chicago for just a few months when horrific events in Springfield, Illinois, brought him into the newborn civil rights movement, and a role as a founding director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  It was no easy time for African Americans, or their white allies. The Supreme Court had given a legal imprimatur to segregation in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson. When Roosevelt had invited the Negro leader Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House in 1901, South Carolina senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman captured the sentiments of many of his fellow Americans. “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again,” Tillman complained.

  But Darrow was a friend to Chicago’s small black community. He attended a Negro church on New Year’s Eve, consulted a black physician, and occasionally went bicycle riding with an African American man whom he knew. In 1899, Darrow had advised the “Chicago Colored Citizens,” a group that hired a private investigator to travel to the South and investigate reports of lynchings. The crusading black journalist Ida Wells-Barnett took the information and composed “Lynch Law in Georgia,” a pamphlet that described how Samuel Hose was tied to a stake, tortured, disemboweled, and burned alive, and a friend, the aged preacher Elijah Strickland, hanged—and how the residents of Newman, Georgia, fought one another for blackened scraps of flesh and bones, as souvenirs.

  In 1901, Darrow had created a stir in Chicago by asking: “Is there any reason why a white girl should not marry a man with African blood in his veins?” He urged blacks to assert their rights. “These lynchings in the South and these burnings in the South are not for the protection of the home and the fireside; they are to keep the Negroes in their place,” Darrow said. “The South never means to recognize any such thing as social equality.…

  “You must respect yourselves or nobody will respect you,” he told the members of a black men’s club. It would be a long, hard struggle, and “many of you must suffer, and many must die before the victory will be won.” There was a split in the black community, between accommodating leaders like Booker T. Washington and militants like W. E. B. Du Bois. Darrow came down on the side of the militants, urging them to demand full equality.6

  Northerners clung to the notion that race was a Southern problem. Then, on the night of August 13, 1908, twenty-one-year-old Mabel Hallam, the white wife of a Springfield streetcar operator, claimed that she had been raped by a black construction worker. It was a lie, but a mob of between five thousand and ten thousand people stormed the jail, and rioted when they learned the sheriff had spirited the prisoner away. The militia was deployed, but it could not stop the razing, looting, and burning of the Levee and the Badlands, the city’s black neighborhoods. Two African Americans were seized by mobs, tortured, and hanged. Most of the black population fled; a few took up arms and shot from rooftops and upper stories, killing four white men.

  The riot commanded national attention, for the city was the site of Abraham Lincoln’s home and tomb. Darrow was among the first to express outrage. “Today, within the shadow of the monument raised to the great Liberator’s name, defenseless Negroes are murdered, families are driven from their homes … and the ruthless hand of vengeance and destructio
n is raised against every man, woman and child whose face is black,” Darrow wrote in the American. It would be easy to blame the riot on “hoodlums” and “drunkards,” Darrow wrote, but to do so would be a mistake. The Springfield riot was a sign that a “dark stain” of racism gripped all American society. “North and South—men of place and influence—have freely parroted words of venom and hate against a poor and helpless race, until in churches, clubs, factories, shops and on the streets the word is passed from mouth to mouth that life is not safe unless the black is hanged or burned by the righteous mob.

  “Time was when these lynchings in the South awoke the righteous indignation of the North. But those days have passed. The friends of the Negro have gone to their last long sleep and on this question of color the North and South are one.”

  Two weeks later, William E. Walling, a wealthy socialist who had rushed to Springfield for a firsthand look at the scene, published an appeal for a “large and powerful body of citizens” to come to the aid of American blacks. He asked Darrow for his help, and liberals like Jane Addams, John Dewey, Florence Kelley, Lincoln Steffens, William Dean Howells, and Oswald Villard enlisted in the cause. Darrow was on the program when, at a conference in New York in May 1910, the NAACP was founded. He spoke in the evening at Cooper Union—the site of Lincoln’s landmark speech against slavery. The abolitionist Theodore Parker had said, in the years before the Civil War, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr. would like the image; so did Amirus Darrow’s son. “God’s and nature’s laws are working, and working toward equality, and broadly and slowly and imperceptibly, perhaps, toward justice,” Darrow said.7