Gompers responded. He pressed union leaders to raise money, and put his own prestige on the line. In the fall, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet and have his photograph taken with the brothers. James was a “jovial and yet deep-thinking, studious fellow,” Gompers told reporters, and John was “bright, intelligent … firm in his convictions, and yet as gentle as the gentlest woman.”
When he met the boys in jail, Gompers said, John had taken his hand and assured the AFL chief: “Sam, tell the boys I am innocent.”12
AS IN BOISE, Darrow’s foes in California included the press, the local establishment, and the president of the United States. And as in Idaho, the local elites were neck deep in corrupt schemes to rob Americans of their natural resources. In Idaho the game was timber; in L.A. it was water. The dreamers of the golden dream were building harbors and stretching roads and streetcar lines in every direction, but their great aspirations were seemingly capped by the meager local water supply.
William Mulholland, the city’s water superintendent, looked to the Owens River valley, a land of family farms and ranches on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than two hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles, as the solution. One of Roosevelt’s legislative accomplishments, the Federal Reclamation Act, was the vehicle. The law was designed to water the arid lands of the West, largely through power and irrigation projects, and the Owens Valley was originally seen as a superb prospect for an agricultural reservoir and canals. But Fred Eaton, a former Los Angeles mayor, hatched an elaborate scheme to corner the valley’s water rights and build an aqueduct to the coast. As an intimate pal of both Mulholland and Joseph Lippincott, the regional chief of the new Reclamation Service, the piratical Eaton was well suited for the job. He and Mulholland launched a clandestine campaign (Eaton liked to brag of his “curves” and “Italian work”) to buy up land and water rights, and many landowners were deceived into thinking they were dealing with a federal irrigation project. Eaton then made a fortune selling the water to Los Angeles. Lippincott received a plump consulting contract from the city. Shrugging off the objections made by colleagues over his “illegal, vicious” and “repugnant” actions, Lippincott assured his superiors that “the greatest public necessity” required the divergence of the valley’s water to Los Angeles. The project was approved.
“I got away with it,” Mulholland said.
Not yet. The need to raise funds to build the aqueduct brought the plot to light in 1905. With the enthusiastic support of the Times, which had spread Mulholland’s alarms about a city-killing “drought,” the public approved municipal bond sales in the 1905 and 1907 elections. The Times forgot its former opposition to municipal ownership of public utilities, and skewered critics of the aqueduct as “freaks and pests.” The rival Express revealed why: Otis was an investor in the San Fernando Mission Land Company, a syndicate of the region’s most powerful men, including bankers, utility chiefs, publishers, and the railroad magnates Henry Huntington and E. H. Harriman, that was buying up land in the San Fernando Valley. It would soar in value when the aqueduct passed through on the way to Los Angeles.
In the next six years, a group including Otis, his son-in-law Harry Chandler, water board member Moses Sherman, and banker Otto Brant took over the leadership of the syndicate, buying more and more land in the San Fernando Valley.13 The state’s Progressives—who had just elected Hiram Johnson governor—were seduced as well. With the aqueduct, “we have the assurance of a growth in population, commerce and consequently in land values that will be the wonder of the world,” wrote Meyer Lissner, the governor’s political lieutenant in Los Angeles. “The man who invests $100,000 here right now with any sort of judgment can take out a million within a few years.” He plotted, with Johnson, to craft a new congressional district that would be dominated by Los Angeles and protect “our aqueduct.”
Only the radicals stood in the way. The aqueduct was a major issue in Job Harriman’s campaign when he declared his candidacy for mayor that spring. He and his socialist allies vowed to halt the distribution of the Owens Valley water to the Otis-Chandler syndicate and other land speculators. Harriman had to be stopped, and his clients, the McNamaras, discredited and convicted.14
Oscar Lawler, a lawyer working for the M&M in Los Angeles, joined Walter Drew, the steel industry’s point man on the case, in orchestrating an approach to Washington. Drew was underwriting the costs of the McNamara case and loaning detectives to the prosecutors in Los Angeles and Indiana. His men burglarized the union offices in Indianapolis and installed a dictograph—a crude listening device—to eavesdrop on its president. They illegally acquired John McNamara’s phone and bank records, tailed his former secretary, covertly photographed union correspondence, brawled with union officers, and shadowed newspapermen. He and Lawler feared that Indiana officials would cave to local political pressure and surrender the evidence seized from McNamara’s office. “Strenuous efforts are being made, by bribery and every other means known to guilty persons and corrupt associations, to spirit away witnesses and destroy evidence,” Lawler wrote in an encrypted message that Drew hand-delivered to Attorney General George Wickersham.
When the Justice Department balked, reluctant to act like an industry tool, Lawler urged Drew to tap “every possible influence among senators and various large business interests.” Otis was assigned to write the White House. “The explosion of the Times building was only an incident in the carrying out of the general purpose to establish a reign of wholesale terrorism and intimidation,” Otis told his friend, President William Howard Taft. On October 17, the president met with Lawler and Otis in Los Angeles. Lawler, who had worked with Taft in Washington, laid out the arguments. Taft ordered the federal prosecutors in Indianapolis into action, and they began an investigation and secured the evidence that had been seized in the ironworkers’ offices.15
WORD OF THE Taft administration’s decision to intervene reached Darrow within days, adding to his gloom.16 For despite all his efforts, he was losing the battle to select a jury.
The lawyers had begun the arduous task on October 11 in a newly constructed courtroom on the eighth floor of the Hall of Records. It smelled of fresh paint, and workmen still labored outside. In the audience were “a motley crowd” of Wobblies, trade unionists, and socialists. Darrow had requested that the brothers be tried separately, and the state elected to try James McNamara first.
“Darrow … searches the hidden motive in a marvelous way,” Mary’s sister Sara, who had joined her in Los Angeles, told Wood. “Questions which the prosecution object to he puts aside and then asks after a while in another way and in juxtaposition to something else, so that dressed in new words and out of its environment … the prosecution does not recognize it.…
“He gains the confidence of the man he is examining and draws him out by subtle as well as apparent methods that are remarkable to watch. He finds out his religious persuasion … he goes into his heredity and environment,” Sara wrote. “Whatever he is or is not, he is sure good at this work.”
And yet Darrow was frustrated by Judge Bordwell, who consistently declined to recognize bias in potential jurors. He compelled Darrow to use peremptory challenges and threatened him with contempt when he complained. Fredericks, meanwhile, quietly paraded his cast of witnesses through the courtroom, where they could identify James McNamara—and he could see them. It unnerved the defendant, and his lawyers. “They’ve brought that fellow here to identify me,” James would tell Darrow. Then news arrived that Frank Eckhoff, a friend of the McNamaras who could corroborate key parts of McManigal’s confession, would testify for the state. Darrow “expects to lose and this fact is nearly crushing him. He is very blue all the time now and really looks ill,” Sara wrote. “Waving all his mistakes and failings aside it is a sad thing for an old fighter to lose his greatest, and possibly his last case.” They had, Darrow told Sara, “not a ghost of a chance” of winning.
Sara was on the scene because Wood had persuaded the editors of two Oregon
publications to carry her dispatches from the trial, in part so he and his “hungry little mistress,” as she called herself, could enjoy a tryst. She had no training as a journalist and had never been in a courtroom, but in early October she arrived in Los Angeles, where Mary had rented a typewriter and an apartment on Ingraham Street, about a mile from the courthouse, for $35 a month. It had nice furnishings and fresh linens twice a week, but it was tiny: a single space served as living and dining room and bedroom, with a Murphy bed that folded down from the wall.
Sara was shocked when she learned, on her first evening in town, that Darrow and Mary had resumed their affair.
“You know how CD laid it on thick about how he would be watched … Yet the first thing he does is invite us to a public dinner in a fashionable place and walk way home to our apartment with his arms around us most of the way,” Sara wrote Wood. “I don’t enjoy his familiarity at all.”
Darrow angered Sara for the way he played with Mary’s feelings. She grew angrier yet when, after Mary left them alone in the apartment one day, Darrow grabbed Sara in a lecherous embrace. The scene was repeated a few days later when Sara turned up at the Higgins Building to interview a member of the defense team. Darrow lured her into his private office, locked the door, and once more tried to seduce her. In each case, flustered, she managed to extricate herself.
“His attitude toward women,” she told Wood, “is disgusting in the extreme.” Sara had a way of tweaking her lover’s jealousy with tales about men who sought to bed her and it is possible that she embellished her encounters with Darrow. But Wood responded with ire.
“Darrow is above all things selfish, with a not necessary adjunct to selfishness, vanity, and a side development, avarice,” Wood wrote.
When Mary first proposed to cover the trial, Wood explained, Darrow “did not need Mary to feed his vanity, for he is a general at the head of an admiring swarm. He feels amply idolized in the centre of a great stage. He feared she would compromise him with the world and he is in such a matter a coward.”
But then “Mary arrives, he finds she is discreet … He is glad she has come, has a spasmodic return of physical passion which makes him even gay and adoring,” Wood wrote. “She is delighted, forgets all and idolizes.”
“Now for prediction,” Wood concluded. “When he is sated he will treat her like a sucked orange.”
“A woman’s body is nothing more to Darrow than to the Sultan—a delicious morsel to be taken everywhere, found and forgotten,” Wood wrote. “A woman’s mind is nothing to him except that the adoration of a brainy woman is more subtle flattery. But he’d take flattery from a chorus girl.”
Darrow was displaying the manic behavior he’d shown in the Haywood trial. He would arrive at Mary’s flat, alive with great plans for the day, and take the sisters on delightful excursions. On other days he would mope, bark rudely, and curse. “Due to his age and to the fact that he places his heart and his soul in the interest of his defendants,” Darrow was “unable to stand the terrible responsibility … and he lost faith and hope and became discouraged,” Johannsen recalled. He “seemed to be in constant fear that his clients would be … sent to the gallows.”
At some point Ruby discovered her husband’s California philandering, adding to Darrow’s anxiety. She blamed Mary and other camp lovelies for throwing themselves at him and dismissed his affairs as meaningless rutting. His old Sunset Club friend W. W. Catlin found Darrow “far more cynical and callous” than when he knew him in Chicago. “The idea of loyalty to a principle seems rather to amuse than inspire him now,” Catlin told Wood. And “as to woman, especially, he is now rather gross where he formerly was fine.”17
DURING THE SUMMER and fall, as Darrow fenced with the prosecutors, he had tried, through various intermediaries, to see if Fredericks was open to a deal.
“It was borne in on me day by day that this man I knew who trusted everything to me could not be saved,” Darrow recalled. As he grew to know the McNamaras, “I heard these men talk of their brothers, of their mother, of the dead; I saw their human side,” said Darrow. “I wanted to save them.”18
Then, in mid-November, Lincoln Steffens came to town. The dapper little muckraker had just returned from Europe, where he had dined with Burns in Paris and been persuaded that the McNamaras were guilty. In London, an English labor leader had challenged Steffens to write about not whether union leaders turned to violence, but why. Steffens liked the idea. He lined up the necessary newspaper clients and headed for Los Angeles. “Dear Dad,” he told his father, “I am to write for my newspapers the situation back of the McNamara trial; not the trial itself, but the cause, consequences, and the significance thereof.
“It’s a delicate job, somewhat like handling dynamite, but somebody has to tackle it hard,” he joked. “Why shouldn’t I be the McNamara of my profession?”19
On November 19, Steffens joined Darrow on a trip to Miramar, the sprawling La Jolla estate of the wealthy press lord E. W. Scripps. Despite his great fortune, the self-described “old crank” was something of a radical who sympathized with the workingman. Scripps had plans to publish a newspaper called the Day Book in Chicago and wanted Darrow’s help promoting the journal among working-class audiences. He believed Darrow was a realist, a man like himself, guided not by weakly “altruistic sentiment” but by “contempt and hatred for … the sins of our class.” He thought Darrow had great “physical and moral courage” and concluded that the lawyer’s famous cynicism was a mask.
Scripps gave his visitors a tour of the private auto speedway he had built on his property and introduced them to Berkeley zoologist William Ritter, the founding scientist at the new oceanographic institute that the Scripps family was financing. Later the three men retired to the great study, where the publisher considered his visitors and thought them an odd pair: Steffens the “little litterateur” and Darrow “a great big brute of a man, with every fiber coarse, but sturdy.” Scripps read aloud from a “disquisition” he had written, defending “belligerent rights” in industrial warfare. They spoke of Harriman’s mayoral campaign, which had stunned the city by triumphing in the October 31 primary and was now in a runoff with Mayor Alexander. Darrow sketched a pessimistic outline of where things stood in the trial. The case against James McNamara, Darrow said sorrowfully, was a “dead cinch.”
Steffens was moved, and inspired to act. He would not merely write about the case, he would help Darrow settle it. Over breakfast the next morning, Steffens outlined his idea to Darrow. He proposed to call on “the big men” in town and let them know that a deal could be had. He would try to persuade them, he said, that it was in their interest to end their costly war with the unions. Darrow consented. “I hate to have a man hang that I undertake to defend,” he said, “and I cannot bear to think of this boy being killed.” But he was not without skepticism. The fate of James McNamara, he suspected, would not be an issue. If McNamara pled guilty before the December 5 election, it would discredit Harriman. And the men with the greatest motive for vengeance—the Otis-Chandler crew—so feared the effects of a socialist victory on their plans for the aqueduct and other business schemes that they would trade blood for money.
The hitch, Darrow told Steffens, was John McNamara. Labor might deliver an itinerant printer like James to San Quentin, but not John, a national leader. His confession would humiliate Gompers and disgrace the unions. Drew and the steel industry, who were bankrolling the prosecution, would insist that John plead guilty too. But off Steffens went with a promise to be discreet, and an understanding that Darrow would deny the whole endeavor if Fredericks exposed the negotiations.
The first call that Steffens made on Darrow’s behalf showed their appreciation for the leverage offered by the political situation: it was Lissner, the governor’s savvy operative, whom the state’s frantic elite had named to rescue the campaign against Harriman. Lissner immediately recognized the opportunity and, with the help of a friendly go-between, persuaded Chandler to sign off on a deal
that would imprison James for life and set John free. Chandler and Otto Brant—another of the partners in the aqueduct scheme—brought the proposal to Fredericks, who insisted on hearing it from Darrow. They spoke the next day in court.
“What is this gink Steffens trying to do?” Fredericks asked.
“This fellow would plead guilty,” Darrow told him, nodding at James, “if the other fellow could be turned loose.”
Fredericks rejected the offer. John McNamara would have to plead guilty too, the district attorney said, or “We will hang them both.” But the talks went on, and a greater number of interested parties were called into the circle. Drew was notified and told Fredericks that the steel industry didn’t care about the fate of the McNamaras, as long as they made full confessions. He was most concerned about public opinion and saw no need to give labor a martyr. “The important thing is the effect upon the public mind,” Drew told Fredericks. “I hardly believe JJ intended to kill twenty-one people and would personally be willing to see the murder case dismissed on condition of a full confession.” But he was insistent on guilty pleas from both brothers. Otherwise, “it will always be said that JB … sacrificed himself for his older brother and that both were innocent.”20
Darrow summoned Older to Los Angeles for advice. They had lunch with Steffens, and Darrow told the editor that the case for James was “utterly hopeless” and that, in the end, they would probably have to, as Older put it, “throw John J. to the wolves” as well. Older told Darrow what he already knew: that his career as a labor lawyer would be over if he pled the brothers guilty. Labor was paying the bills, Darrow conceded, but he had been employed “to save these men’s lives.” Darrow sent a wire to Gompers, asking that he send a representative like Tvietmoe or Nockels to California from Atlanta, where the national labor chiefs were gathered at the AFL convention. And that weekend he sat down with his clients.
Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Page 28