Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  C. P. Connolly of Collier’s magazine listed a dozen “peculiar features” of the trial, suggesting that Judge Wood, his bailiffs, or the jurors were corrupted. In his own memoir, Oscar Davis wrote that “there was talk at Boise after Haywood had been set free that the jury had been bought. Whether there was any foundation for any such talk or not, I never knew.” Both reporters, however, were Roosevelt and Borah partisans.

  It took twenty years, but the prosecution did finally admit the weakness of its case. In 1927, Hawley spoke at the dedication of a statue of Steunenberg in Idaho. The “overwhelming confirmation of Orchard’s testimony in regard to other crimes,” he conceded, had lessened the convincing quality “of the small amount of corroborating proof connecting Haywood with the Steunenberg murder.”

  What did Darrow believe? We can’t be sure. “Darrow clearly intimated to me that the Moyer people were guilty,” Erskine Wood recalled. But it was probably just Darrow’s “inordinate vanity” that caused him to say so. “I think he might say it, [even] if they were not,” Wood said. Darrow rarely spoke about his trials when they were over. But years later, he almost blurted something to George Francis, a young lawyer who asked him about Idaho. “Haywood didn’t kill Steunenberg. I’ll tell you who did,” he said, before catching himself and saying, “No, I won’t either.”

  Stone interview with Francis and Hawley remarks, CD-LOC; Sullivan, Our Times; C. P. Connolly, “Pettibone and Sheriff Brown,” Collier’s, Jan. 25, 1908; Oscar Davis, Released for Publication (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925); Roosevelt to Whitelaw Reid, July 29, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt papers, Library of Congress; Cobb to Alford Cooley, Oct. 3, 1907, quoted in Lukas, Big Trouble; Haywood, Autobiography.

  CHAPTER 10: FRAILTIES

  1. Darrow had to defend his remarks for years. He had never “urged cruelty or that the working man should be exempt from the law,” he wrote journalist Mark Sullivan in 1930. What he said was “that regardless of how many wrongs they commit, or how many brutalities they are guilty of, their cause is just.” Letter to Sullivan, quoted in Our Times; Darrow to Whitlock, Nov. 29, 1907, BW; Darrow to Debs, Oct. 1907, ALW; Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1907; New York Sun, July 27, 1907; New York Times, Aug. 7, 1907; Idaho Daily Statesman, Aug. 2, 1907.

  2. Adams was tried one last time in the summer of 1908 for the 1902 murder of a mine manager in Telluride and found innocent. Darrow, Story of My Life; Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Adams trial transcript, CD-UML; Darrow to Wood, Dec. 26, 1907, CESW-HL; Idaho Daily Statesman, Oct. 11, Nov. 8–27, 1907; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 14, 1907; Chicago Tribune, Oct. 5, 6, Nov. 14, 25, 1907; San Francisco Call, Oct. 20, 1907; Washington Post, Oct. 27, 1907; Spokane Evening Chronicle, Nov. 24, 1907; New York Times, Nov. 25, 1907, July 16, 1908.

  3. Idaho Daily Statesman, Nov. 27–Dec. 31, 1907, Jan. 1–7, 1908; Los Angeles Times, Dec. 14, 27, 1907; San Francisco Call, Dec. 15, 29, 1907; Salt Lake Herald, Dec. 27, 1907, Jan. 5, 1908; Boston Globe, Dec. 28, 1907, Jan. 5, 1908; Los Angeles Herald, Dec. 29, 31, 1907; Los Angeles Examiner, Jan. 5, 1908; New York Times, Jan. 2, 5, Aug. 2, 4, 1908; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 21, Feb. 11, 1908; McClure’s, June 1908; Noah D. Fabricant, MD, “When Clarence Darrow Had an Earache,” The Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Monthly, Dec. 1958; Jean Strouse, Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999) and Walter Lord, The Good Years (New York: Harper, 1960).

  4. Masters, unpublished autobiography, ELM; Darrow to Edgar Lee Masters, Nov. 29, 1907, Masters to WFM, Jan. 4, 1908, Jan. 22, 1908, Jan. 28, 1908, and WFM to Masters, Jan. 6, 1908, Jan. 24, 1908, Masters to Carter Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, ELM; Ruby Darrow letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Masters, Across Spoon River; Darrow, Story of My Life.

  5. Masters, unpublished autobiography, ELM; Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Darrow to Brand Whitlock, Dec. 13, 1910, BW; Darrow to William Walling, July 14, 1910, NAACP; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 7, 1908.

  6. New York Sun, May 30, 1909; Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1899; Mark Sullivan, Our Times; Stone notes, CD-LOC; Carole Merritt, Something So Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908 (Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008); Ida Wells-Barnett, Lynch Law in Georgia (Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899); Darrow, “The Problem of the Negro,” transcription of remarks in the International Socialist Review, Nov. 1, 1901.

  7. Darrow’s talks on race earned him public censure. At one point in his Cooper Union speech he predicted that just as time and intermarriage had eroded the enmity among European immigrant groups, the problem of race relations “will undoubtedly some time far in the future be worked out by race amalgamation.” Darrow “Advises Negroes to Marry Whites,” read the headlines across the country, and for several days he was the target of anger and ridicule in white America. He caused another stir, and was booed and jeered, when he addressed fifty thousand union sympathizers in San Francisco on Labor Day in 1909—and urged them to move past racial prejudice and ease restrictions against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Evening American, Aug. 19, 1908; Chicago Tribune, May 13, 17, 19, 20, 1910; Proceedings of the National Negro Conference, May 1910, NAAC; New York Times, May 13, 1910; Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

  8. Darrow’s failure in another case had long-lasting repercussions. In 1907, Fred Warren—the editor of the Appeal to Reason—had been incensed by the Haywood trial. No prominent capitalist would be kidnapped like the Federation leaders, Warren claimed—and to illustrate his point he offered $1,000 to anyone who would abduct William Taylor, a former Kentucky governor, and return him to the state for trial on an outstanding murder charge.

  Federal prosecutors indicted Warren for misusing the mails, and Darrow was among the lawyers who defended the editor. “The government offered to take a fine of $25, in case of a plea of guilty,” Darrow recalled. But Warren wanted “not an easy way out, but advertising notoriety for the paper and himself. I soon found out I was employed to sell newspapers … a disagreeable job.” They lost the case; Warren blamed Darrow and began to collect and distribute derogatory information about him. Debs warned Darrow that “many of your former friends have lost confidence in you” because he had “gone over to the other side purely for money.” When Darrow needed the support of the leading socialist journal, it would not be there. See U.S. Justice Department files, brief and correspondence on the Warren case, May 1909, National Archives, and also Debs to Darrow, Feb. 19, 1912, Warren to L. C. Boyle, Dec. 12, 1910, Eugene Debs collection, Indiana State University; Darrow to Caro Lloyd, Dec. 8, 1910, and Feb. 8, 1911, HDL. Myeroff v. Tinslar, 175 Ill. App. 29; Geoffrey Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow (New York: Times Books, 1993); Chicago Tribune, Nov. 3, 6, 12, 13, 1908, Sept. 25, Oct. 26, 1909, Feb. 10, 24, 25, 26, Mar. 4, May 9, 11, Aug. 4, 1910.

  9. Edwin Maxey, “The Rudowitz Extradition Case,” The Green Bag: An Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, Vol. 21, 1909; Frederick Giffin, “The Rudowitz Extradition Case,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Spring 1982; New York Times, Jan. 27, 1909; Chicago Evening Post, Dec. 6, 1908; Chicago Daily News, Dec. 5, 7, 1908, and Jan. 27, 1909; Chicago Tribune, Nov. 6, 14, 24–29, Dec. 1, 6, 10, 13, 24, 25, 27, 1908, and Jan. 4, 13, 14, 15, 27, Feb. 14, 15, June 17, 1909.

  10. George Field was a man of old-fashioned values who saw moral decay everywhere, even in the celebration of Christmas. “Whipping, prayers, religion, dyspepsia part and parcel of memory,” Mary recalled. “Bible soaked into us.” When she got to college, “I knew nothing” about men, she said. She had been taught at home that “there was something nasty about sex.” Mary Field Parton journal and oral histories, MFP; Sara Bard Field oral history, University of California, Berkeley; Chicago Tribune, Mar. 28, May 1, 7, 1909; Randolph Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, quoted in Christine Stansell, American Moderns (New York: Macmillan, 2001); Michigan Alumnus, University of Michigan Alumni Association, 1913.

  11. Darrow was asked to join the cause, looked into the shooting, and decided that Chief Shippy was telling the truth. But he didn’t like the way that the newspapers and
the police were whipping up fears about “anarchists” and worked to secure a platform for Emma Goldman when the police blocked her from speaking on Averbuch’s behalf. The Averbuch incident is covered in Mary Field’s taped oral histories and in Margaret Parton’s unpublished biography of her mother, Mary Field, along with the letter to Graham Taylor, MFP; see also Sara Bard Field oral history, University of California, Berkeley. See also Walter Roth and Joe Kraus, An Accidental Anarchist (San Francisco: Rudi Publishing, 1998).

  12. The ritual was repeated on another occasion when Darrow asked Mary to buy Mother Jones a warm winter coat. “Let me see how much I have on me,” he said, hauling out a wad of bills. “Well, it is kind of messy, isn’t it? But it will buy something.” See Mary Field Parton oral histories and Margaret Parton unpublished biography of her mother, MFP.

  13. Mary Field, taped oral histories, diaries, and letters and Margaret Parton, unpublished biography of her mother, MFP; Mary to Sara, correspondence, July 1909, June 1910, and August, 1910, CESW-HL; Sara Bard Field oral history, University of California, Berkeley; Darrow to Mary, Mar. 15, July 1910, CDMFP-NL; Karl Darrow diaries, KD; Henry Coit to Wood, June 14, 1910, CESW-UC; Darrow to Fremont Older, Sept. 21, 1910, ALW; Chicago Tribune, Jan. 4, Mar. 13, 14, 31, May 9, 1908, Sept. 11, Nov. 15, 1909, Sept. 4, 1910; Schretter, “I Remember Darrow”; Roger Bruns, The Damndest Radical (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

  CHAPTER 11: LOS ANGELES

  1. People v. Caplan, LAL; Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big (New York: Putnam, 1977).

  2. People v. Caplan, People v. Schmidt, LAL; The Fireman’s Grapevine, Sept. and Nov. issues, 1960; New York Times, Oct. 3, 1910; E. W. Scripps, I Protest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); grand jury testimony of John Beckwith, William Mulholland, Harry Chandler, Olav Tvietmoe, Earl Rogers, Anton Johannsen, and Lindsay Jewell, WD.

  3. The ironworkers’ union considered Otis “the most unfair, unscrupulous and malignant enemy of organized labor in America.” Theodore Roosevelt thought him a “scurrilous blackguard.” See Roosevelt to Gompers, June 7, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt papers, Library of Congress; “General Otis, the Storm-Center of the Unpacific Coast” (no author listed by the magazine), Current Literature, Jan. 1912; Los Angeles Times, Oct. 1, 1933. The first-day headline in the Times got it wrong; the accepted number for lives lost in the bombing is twenty.

  4. As part of the city’s investigation, a committee of engineers, including its renowned water czar, William Mulholland, re-created the explosion. They took an identical charge of dynamite, placing it among barrels of ink, and set it off in an isolated shelter on city parkland. The bomb vaporized and ignited the ink, and spread it so far throughout the site that the engineers had to scurry to contain the subsequent fire. A “general ignition of combustibles, scattered about in the building,” Mulholland said, was “hastened and rendered more universal instantly … by reason of the breaking of the gas pipes.” People v. Caplan, People v. Schmidt, LAL.

  5. The firm didn’t routinely stock such powerful dynamite, but produced it as a special order, which the three men picked up from the company dock in Oakland with a motor-boat. The load was so heavy that the boat listed precipitously, handled poorly, and made a lasting impression on those who saw it lurching across the bay. People v. Caplan, People v. Schmidt, LAL.

  6. Burns was shrewd at manipulating the press, but those who worked with him on the McNamara case thought him a greedy and self-aggrandizing fraud. “Burns has misled and deceived his own clients,” wrote Walter Drew, leader of the National Erectors Association, in a letter detailing the Burns agency’s failures. “All that Burns accomplished was through one of the members of our association.” It was a sentiment with which Oscar Lawler, a federal prosecutor in the case, agreed. Burns “never did and never will know any other purpose to serve than his own selfish ends,” Lawler told Drew. People v. Caplan, People v. Schmidt, LAL; AFL circular, Dec. 5, 1910, Samuel Gompers papers, Library of Congress; Los Angeles Times, Apr. 23, 24, 25, 1911, and Boston Globe, Apr. 23, 24, 25, 1911; “Statement of Anton Johannsen,” CD-CHI; “General Otis,” Current Literature, Jan. 1912; Drew to Emery, Jan. 29, 1913, Lawler to Drew, Feb. 3, 1913, Drew to Burns, June 20, 1914, WD; J. B. McNamara to Robert McNamara, Sept. 12, 1931, and J. B. McNamara to Jock Rantz, Apr. 13, 1930, James and John McNamara papers, University of Cincinnati; Cowan, The People v. Clarence Darrow; Gottlieb and Wolt, Thinking Big.

  7. In Chicago’s recent garment workers’ strike, labor’s enforcers had made a practice of waylaying nonunion tailors and breaking their needle fingers. It was during that strike that Darrow forged what was to be a lifelong friendship with a young organizer, Sidney Hillman, soon to be founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Darrow to Lloyd, May 13, 1911, HDL; Darrow to Older, July 26, 1911, ALW; Howard to Porterfield, Apr. 27, 1911, E. W. Scripps to N. D. Cochran, Nov. 20, 1911, E. W. Scripps papers, Ohio University; Wilson to Stone, CD-LOC; trial transcript, People v. Darrow, LAL; Darrow to Paul, May 14, Aug. 11, and Oct. 27, 1911, and Ruby to Jennie Moore, Nov. 25, 1911, CD-UML; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 13, 1911; Los Angeles Times, Apr. 27, 1911; Outlook, Feb. 17, 1912.

  8. The AFL records place Darrow’s meeting with Gompers on May 1 in Kankakee, where Darrow was trying the Kankakee Manufacturing case. According to the Chicago newspapers, Gompers made the public announcement about Darrow the next morning, May 2. Stone, relying on Ruby’s memory, says Gompers and Ed Nockels convinced Darrow at his apartment in Chicago the following weekend, after gradually wearing him down. “After many hours D came to me in the back, wearily, sadly taking my hand or arm and conducting me to a seat beside him, to break to me the news that he was asking me to break my pledge, made to him when we returned from Idaho, that if ever again he should be tempted, or urged, to go into another such terrific fight, I’d refuse to go along,” she wrote. “He proceeded to explain that the men in the front room were saying that if he refused to take charge of the McNamara cases … that he would go down in history as a traitor to the great cause.” Ruby said this took place on a Sunday, probably May 7. Union officials were indeed in lengthy consultation with Darrow at his apartment that day, but Gompers was not among them. See telegram from Frank Mulholland in Chicago to Gompers in Washington, May 7, 1911, Gompers to Tvietmoe, May 19, 1911, Gompers papers, Library of Congress; Darrow to Whitlock, Apr. 26, 1911, BW; “Gompers and Burns on Unionism and Dynamite,” McClure’s, Feb. 1912.

  9. Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission report, 2007; Los Angeles Express, May 25, 1911; Hamlin Garland’s Diaries (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1968), entry of Mar. 19, 1911; Hugh Baillie, High Tension (New York: Harper, 1959); Ruby Darrow letters, LeCompte Davis papers, UCLA and CD-LOC; Darrow to Paul, July 25, 1911, CD-UML.

  10. Sara Field, oral history, University of California, Berkeley; Sara Field to William Rose Benet, Nov. 30, 1949, Sara to Wood, mid-Oct. and Wood to Sara, Oct. 16, 1911, CESW-HL; Darrow to Wood, June 28, 1910, Louise Bryant to Wood, Jan. 19, 1915, CESW-UC; Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense; Robert Hamburger, Two Rooms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

  11. Los Angeles Times, June 28, 29, July 6, 1911; Drew to Noel, Jan. 17, 1917, WD.

  12. Transcript, People v. Darrow; New York Times, Sept. 12, Dec. 2, 1911; Los Angeles Times, Dec. 3, 1911, Jan. 31, 1912; William Hunt, Front-Page Detective: William J. Burns and the Detective Profession 1880–1930 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990); Darrow to Gompers, July 15, 1911, Darrow to Tvietmoe, summer 1911, Tvietmoe to Gompers, summer 1911, Samuel Gompers papers, Library of Congress.

  13. William Kahrl, Water and Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). In March 1911 alone they filed a plan to subdivide 47,500 acres—the largest development in southern California.

  14. Kahrl notes that the one-tenth interest in the San Fernando Mission Land Company that Huntington purchased for $15,000 in 1905 sold for $115,000 seven years later. The profits were far higher for thos
e, like Otis and Chandler, who retained their property and purchased more for residential development in the boom years to come. Lissner to Julius Rosenwald, Oct. 12, 1911, Lissner to Hiram Johnson, Nov. 25, 1911, Meyer Lissner papers, Stanford University; Alexander Irvine, Revolution in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Citizen Print Shop, 1912); Joseph Lippincott personnel file, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis.

  15. Otis to Taft, Oct. 12, 1911, Otis to Charles Hilles, Oct. 16, 1911, William Howard Taft papers, Library of Congress; Lawler to Wickersham, Sept. 21, 1911, J. E. Munson to Drew, Oct. 11, 1911, Lawler to Wickersham, Oct. 23, 1911, Lawler to Badorf, Mar. 5, 1913, Foster autobiography, list of union “deprivations,” WD.

  16. Taft may have had a personal interest in the case. After midnight on the sixteenth, just before the president’s train crossed a railroad bridge near Santa Barbara, a watchman had frightened away unknown saboteurs as they prepared to set off thirty-nine sticks of dynamite. See Drew “deprivations” and correspondence, WD and Justice Department files, National Archives.

  17. It wasn’t just the jury. Darrow thought Bordwell was a biased judge. Bordwell had okayed Fredericks’s use of the grand jury to intimidate the defense and Darrow had, unsuccessfully, tried to have the judge removed from the case. Indeed, Bordwell corresponded with Borah and Hawley in Idaho, and they covertly sent him the transcript of the Haywood case so he could study Darrow’s techniques. See Bordwell to Borah and Hawley, summer 1911, Walter Bordwell papers, Stanford University; Los Angeles Herald, Nov. 22, 1911; New York Times, Oct. 14, 18, 1911; Anton Johannsen, “The Darrow Case,” The Carpenter, Dec. 1912; Sara to Wood, fall 1911, Sara to Wood, Oct. 21, 26, 1911, Wood to Sara, Oct. 16, 1911, Sara to Albert Ehrgott, Oct. 14, 1911, CESW-HL; Catlin to Wood, June 3, 1911, CESW-UC.