American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Rogers was the enemy. After the bombing at the Times, Otis and the M&M had chosen him to represent their interests in the investigation. And following the arrests, he was appointed special prosecutor. It was Rogers who had crafted and presented to the grand jury the fierce twenty-one-count indictment demanding the execution of the two brothers.

  Rogers was also a very different sort of man and lawyer from his client. In the courtroom Rogers was a preening, bombastic, and archly clever showman. Marching up to prosecution witnesses in his cutaway coats with their braided edges, his spats and gaudy waistcoats, bristling with a self-satisfied intelligence, Rogers would humiliate and destroy. Lofty causes, courtroom ethics, the guilt or innocence of his many gangster and pimp clients—all were extraneous concerns in his narrow world. He had little philosophy, and his only loyalty was to his own ambition. Another complication: Alcohol had a relentless grip on his life. When the cravings took hold, he had no choice but to surrender; and as a consequence he was a man of racing and unpredictable moods.

  None of this was lost on the homespun yet certainly no less shrewd Darrow. He could not help but find Rogers’s lack of idealism, his routine advocacy of detestable clients, to be proof of the man’s soiled character. Rogers would never be solid enough to be his friend. Yet Darrow also appreciated how far his own life had fallen; and it was an understanding that tempered his judgmental strain and made accommodation possible. There was also Rogers’s achievement to consider: He was a remarkably effective criminal lawyer. When Darrow, accompanied by Ruby, went to Hanford, California, to watch Rogers try a case, he found the performance mesmerizing. Rogers strutted, barked, charged, obfuscated—all the time working, Darrow recognized, from a carefully prepared strategy. It wasn’t lawyerly or tasteful, but the performance shook up the courtroom and took the focus off a flawed client. Rogers, Darrow conceded to himself with a shudder of regret, was just the man he needed.

  And, Darrow mischievously predicted, Rogers’s feud with Burns could work to his benefit, too. It was well known that the detective and Rogers detested each other with the long-standing ill will that only the self-absorbed can find the patience to sustain. The bitterness had its roots in the cutthroat San Francisco corruption investigation where Rogers had represented the men Billy believed were trying to assassinate him. It was given another mean twist after Mayor Alexander had granted the detective independent authority to conduct the Times case, but then quickly bowed to Otis’s volcanic will and announced that Rogers was coming on board, too. Things turned even nastier when the investigation dragged on and Rogers, out for fresh blood, urged the city to stop paying the apparently unproductive detective. And more recently the dispute had heated up to a boil again when Rogers, with giddy malevolence, announced that in his view as special prosecutor, Burns was not entitled to the reward Los Angeles had promised to pay for the arrest and conviction of the men responsible for the Times explosion.

  Darrow knew a large part of his case would be to convince the jury that the manipulative Burns had masterminded the circumstances leading to the bribery indictment. The spectacle of the arrogant detective in the witness stand going head to head with the flamboyant Rogers was sure to be combustible. It would give the jury plenty to think and talk about. And caught up in the diversion, they wouldn’t bother to spend much time wondering why Darrow had also been at the scene of the crime. Or so he hoped.

  The case was officially The People vs. Clarence Darrow, but it was Rogers who did most of the attacking. He went after George Lockwood.

  “You deliberately tried to trap Darrow, didn’t you?” Rogers challenged. The attorney bellowed that Lockwood’s meeting with Captain White was “a performance,” a “frame-up.”

  He went after John Harrington, after Darrow’s chief investigator decided to work with the district attorney.

  “You mean to say Mr. Darrow showed you a roll of bills and told you he was going to bribe jurors with it?” Rogers, sneering with a theatrical incredulity, asked during his cross-examination.

  “He didn’t use the word ‘bribe,’ he used the word ‘reach,’ ” Harrington shot back unflustered.

  He went after Bert Franklin, who had already pleaded guilty to the charge of bribing a juror and testified, with the hope of having his sentence reduced.

  “You told Mr. Darrow that if he had not showed up on the scene at that unfortunate moment that you would have pulled off your stunt of turning Lockwood over to the police and charging him with extortion, did you not?” Rogers tried.

  “I did not say that,” Franklin answered firmly.

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything about a stunt.”

  Rogers kept on tearing into the prosecution’s witnesses, hoping to throw out a provocative word or a loaded phrase that would lodge in a juror’s mind. It was busy, promiscuous work. But for all Rogers’s tricks, evasions, and distractions, it was apparent to everyone in the courtroom that the defense was stymied. Despite the audacious self-confidence in his performance, Rogers kept running into an unyielding wall of irrefutable facts.

  And so Darrow’s case seemed already lost when Billy took the stand.

  “I’ve waited a long time for Mr. Burns to walk into my parlor,” Rogers boasted to the press the day before the detective took the stand. Billy felt vengeful, too. They had scores to settle. And within moments of Billy’s stepping into the witness box, the people in the courtroom could only watch with fascination as the case against Darrow became irrelevant and the two adversaries went to war.

  Rogers came out swinging—literally. He wore a lorgnette on a long black ribbon, and he used it to jab at Billy. He shot out his questions in a rapid, staccato rhythm, and at the same time he kept flicking the lorgnette closer and closer to Billy’s face.

  The attack seemed small and ludicrous to a man who had known real menace. Billy smirked. And playing to the jury, the old actor raised his hands in mock horror. It was a facetious performance—and very effective. The jury applauded with their laughter.

  Rogers seethed. He had been demeaned, and that was unforgivable. He tried to recover, insisting that it was Billy who was more likely to assault someone; after all, it was the detective who was armed with a revolver and a cane that turned into a sword. But the testimony about the weapons only inflated Billy’s presence. The detective was a man who lived a dangerous life.

  So Rogers went looking elsewhere. Abruptly, he turned the questioning to the reward money. Poke this raw wound, and he was confident the detective would cry out.

  “There is a reward in the McNamara case, I believe?” Rogers began. “You intend to claim this money?”

  “I do.”

  “You think that you alone caught the McNamaras . . . ?”

  Billy was taken aback. His great accomplishment was being publicly impugned. A further rub, Billy needed the reward to repay the money he had borrowed to finance the investigation. At last he exploded. The roar that he let out was ferocious.

  “Rogers, you’ve been getting off a lot of bunk. I’ve heard something of your claim. It’s a lot of rot.”

  The prosecution objected. Darrow shuddered. Rogers was out of control. It served no tactical purpose to raise the issue of the McNamara reward money. And Rogers and Billy kept up their venomous exchange until the frustrated judge fined each of them twenty-five dollars and ordered a recess.

  In the corridor outside the courtroom, the press flocked to Billy. A reporter asked if he felt Rogers had been trying to “bully” him. Billy, as always, enjoyed the attention. With an impish smile on his face, he called Rogers “a well-bred hoodlum.”

  The reporters laughed as they wrote it down.

  And the sounds of their amusement, derisive and humiliating, reached down the hallway to where Rogers was standing. He charged toward Billy.

  “Did you call me a son of a bitch, Mr. Burns?” he barked. He loomed over the short, squat detective.

  But Billy was in a reckless mood. And he never backed down f
rom a fight. He did not answer. He simply stared back in challenge, a man fortified by a decisive patience.

  Rogers did not possess the detective’s discipline. He threw a furious punch at Billy.

  Billy managed to take a small step to the side, so the blow landed with a thud against his shoulder. Then, responding both with instinct and a methodical anger, Billy went at him. He wanted to do harm. He threw one punch, and another, his short arms shooting out like pistons. Both blows landed with firm accuracy on the attorney’s chin. Rogers went down. He lay on his back, the tails of his dark cutaway coat splayed out against the white marble floor like a fan.

  Billy looked down at Rogers: a beaten man. At that moment Billy knew that his work was finally completed. He had solved the crime of the century. He had put an end to the national campaign of terror. It was time for him—and the nation—to move on. Without a further word, he turned his back on Rogers and the reporters, walked down the long flight of stairs, and out of the courthouse.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ____________________

  RUBY SURRENDERED.

  It was apparent to her that the case was lost. Rogers’s crude theatrics and his rude interrogations were only an embarrassment. He brought no honor to her husband’s defense. In the courtroom she looked pale and fragile, busily cooling herself with her fan in the futile hope that it would bring a measure of relief. At night she relived the day and worried about the future. Sleep was impossible. It all weighed on her until she could not bear it anymore. She grew more and more unsettled. And then she fell apart. The doctor diagnosed it as a nervous breakdown. He ordered her to bed. As the trial dragged on, she remained at home for lonely week after week, stranded in her own hopeless world.

  Rogers fell apart, too. He disappeared from the case. Sometimes for a day, sometimes longer. Darrow had no choice but to find him, and he went to Rogers’s home.

  “Where is your father?” Darrow demanded of Adela, Rogers’s eighteen-year-old daughter.

  “He’s taking a rest,” she tried. “He hasn’t had much sleep lately.”

  Darrow was not fooled. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I always know where he is.”

  “Is he drunk?”

  Adela had answered enough questions, and she was worried, too. “If he is, you’re enough to drive anyone to it.”

  That night she went searching the city for her father. She visited the bars, and when they failed to yield a clue, she tried the houses of pleasure. Her father’s favorite was Pearl Morton’s; Dolly, the piano player, was his longtime friend and companion. But he was not there. So Adela continued on.

  Later that night Adela found him. He had taken refuge in another house of pleasure. The sight was startling. Her father, she would write, was “sitting in a stately teakwood chair, shrunk into the rich embroidered silk. He seemed small, and his face was gray white.”

  And for a while, he had escaped the case.

  It was all becoming too much for Darrow. After a day in court when Rogers once again couldn’t keep his footing against the advancing waves of incriminating evidence, Darrow lashed out.

  “A fine fool you made me look,” Darrow moaned. “I cannot sit there day after day and hear you make a fool of me.”

  “Nuts,” Rogers answered finally. “We must insist that if you, Clarence Darrow, had taken to a life of crime, you would have been as good as Caesar, Borgia, or Moriarty. You couldn’t have left such a trail.”

  But Darrow knew he had. Worse, the jury was now following it.

  And so Darrow came to understand that he had to make a choice. Either he must surrender, or he must try to rally his cause by enlisting a powerful yet untapped force.

  Darrow had measured out his life in a steady allegiance to losing causes, and now he decided to champion another. He took control of his own defense. He ignored Rogers’s wounded protests and diligently went to work.

  Darrow wrote to his old law partner, Edgar Lee Masters, and asked him to obtain depositions from all their Chicago friends—judges, lawyers, city officials—that would be testimonials to his character. They arrived within weeks. When they were read into the record, the jury felt as if they could have been listening to a canonization.

  Quickly rediscovering his old relish and instincts, Darrow took over the cross-examinations. Bert Franklin was his chief accuser, and Darrow decided there was value in confronting him directly.

  The attorney stared into the witness box with a dismissive authority at the dapper little man, a giant taking the measure of a gnat. He let the moment stretch on in a hostile silence so that the entire courtroom could appreciate it. And when Darrow finally spoke, his words were not so much questions for Franklin as they were a public appeal.

  “You say that on October fifth I suggested to you that we had better take care of the jury and the next day said it was time to work on Bain and gave you a check for a thousand dollars for this purpose . . .

  “If I was sending you out to bribe a prospective juror would I give you a check that could be traced back or would I give you cash?

  “If I wanted a prospective juror bribed would I send you out, my chief investigator whose every move was being watched by Burns operatives, or would I have imported a stranger for the dirty work? . . .

  “If I knew you were passing a bribe there would I let myself be seen in the vicinity?

  “Would I have crossed the street to talk to you, after the bribe had been passed, when I saw Detective Browne walking right behind you? . . .

  “Would I have so blithely and callously betrayed the cause for which I have given my heart’s blood for twenty-five years, put my hands in the fate of a private detective whom I had known for only three months? . . .

  “Or is your entire testimony against me the price the district attorney made you pay to keep yourself out of prison?”

  Dozens and dozens of questions. Each was hurled like a sharp spear: an armory of doubts. But Franklin was never the real target. Darrow’s only hope was to pierce the jury’s certainty.

  Still, as Darrow kept doggedly at it, it must have been hard going. For he knew Franklin had been telling the truth. And that he was guilty.

  And then it was August 14 and time for the closing arguments. Inside the courtroom every chair was filled, and in the rear people stood shoulder to shoulder. Another thousand spectators jammed the corridor outside, pushing and shoving in the sweaty heat to get in. The bailiffs closed the doors, but that only incited the crowd. They surged forward. A woman fainted. People were having difficulty breathing; there was a solid mass of bodies with little space for any air. But the crowd was determined. They pushed, shoulders banging and banging against the locked but quivering courtroom doors. So the bailiffs raised their truncheons and waded into the turmoil. It was madness and confusion, but still the crowd wouldn’t disperse. They wanted to hear Darrow, and only when he rose and walked slowly toward the jury box did they fall into a sudden and absolute silence.

  The old warrior began with his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his voice as low and weak as a small child’s moan. He seemed uninterested in arguing the facts of the case. Instead, his words were a valedictory. He summed up the life he had lived and the causes he had believed in. He wanted people to know the choices he had made, and the deep pride these decisions still gave him. He was addressing the jury, but he might just as well have been explaining to himself why he had done what he had. His was a confident, defiant tautology.

  Darrow started at 2:22 P.M. and continued without stop until the judge recessed for the evening. The next morning he resumed as if he had simply paused in midsentence. And with this heartfelt fluency he continued until the bells at St. Vincent’s Cathedral a block away tolled noon and he had had his final say.

  It was a masterwork, a song of constant passion. His own intimate tribute to his life.

  He argued:

  “What am I on trial for, gentlemen of the jury? You have been listening here for three months. If you don’t kn
ow, then you are not as intelligent as I believe. I am not on trial for having sought to bribe a man named Lockwood. There may be and doubtless are many people who think I did seek to bribe him, but I am not on trial for that. I am on trial because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I have stood by labor all these years, and have brought down on my head the wrath of the criminal interests in the country.”

  He cajoled:

  “Do you suppose they care what laws I might have broken? I have committed one crime, one crime which is like that against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. I have stood for the weak and the poor. I have stood for the men who toil. And therefore I have stood against them.”

  He apologized:

  “Now gentlemen, I am going to be honest with you in this matter. The McNamara case was a hard fight. Here was the district attorney with his sleuths. Here was Burns with his hounds. Here was the Erectors’ Association with its gold. A man could not stir in his house or go to his office without being attacked by these men ready to commit all sorts of deeds . . . We had to work the best we could.”

  _____

  He offered dignity to the McNamaras:

  “I would have walked from Chicago across the Rocky Mountains and over the long dreary desert to lay my hand upon the shoulder of J.B. McNamara and tell him not to place dynamite in the Times Building . . .

  “Lincoln Steffens was right in saying this was a social crime. That does not mean it should have been committed. But it does mean this: It grew out of a condition of society for which McNamara was in no wise responsible. There was a fierce conflict in this city exciting the minds of thousands of people, some poor, some weak, some irresponsible, some doing wrong on the side of the powerful as well as the side of the poor. It inflamed their minds—and this thing happened.

  “Let me tell you, gentlemen, and I will tell you the truth. You may hang these men to the highest tree; you may hang everybody suspected; you may send me to the penitentiary if you will; you may convict the fifty-four men indicted in Indianapolis; but until you go down to fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again. They will come as the earthquake comes. They will come as the hurricane uproots the trees. They will come as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air. We are a people responsible for these conditions, and we must look results squarely in the face.”