Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Then, in February, Chicago was startled by news that two of the city’s rising legal stars—Darrow and Stephen S. Gregory—had taken command of the Prendergast case and would ask the courts for a new trial. Gregory was a brilliant lawyer who would one day be elected president of the American Bar Association. He was prematurely balding, hailed from Wisconsin, and called himself a reformer. Had Darrow more respect for convention, his career may well have mirrored Gregory’s. “He was emotional and sympathetic, he was devoted to the principles of liberty and always fought for the poor and oppressed,” Darrow recalled. “In spite of all this, he had a fine practice.”6

  They meshed well: the solemn, precise Gregory an expert in case work and tactics, and Darrow the master of stirring arguments. They began by alleging that Trude had used unqualified witnesses during the first trial. Meanwhile, Prendergast roamed the courtroom, interrupted his lawyers, and mumbled and muttered and growled. At one point he sat down beside Trude and asked, “You have no personal feeling against me, have you?” When the man who sought to have him hanged said no, Prendergast looked pleased and said, “Well, I have no enmity against you, either.” In his closing remarks, Trude accused Prendergast of feigning mental illness. “What we need here is less mercy and more justice,” the prosecutor told the judge.

  On the afternoon of February 19, Darrow began the final argument. He spoke for three hours that day, and two hours the next morning. “Human life is cheap in Cook County, but the price has not been set by the criminals. It has been set by men in high places. From doctors, from lawyers, from preachers goes up the cry ‘Hang him! Hang him!’ ” Darrow said.

  It was Darrow’s first summation in a major criminal case. As he would throughout his career, he mixed doses of philosophy and poetry with the law. Not for the last time, he argued that men’s actions are determined not by choice, but by the unshakable influences of heredity and environment.

  “The only reason why we have a right to punish any individual is because that individual has willfully and conscientiously done wrong,” he said. “Unless this boy is sane he did not do this act. It was done by Him who made the boy.”

  Darrow cherished the fatalistic sentiments of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, a collection of archaic verse translated by Edward FitzGerald that was popular in the Gilded Age. From it he took the analogy with which he closed his remarks.

  The killer was only God’s flawed crockery, Darrow told the judge. “The hand of Him who made him shook.”7

  It was a plea, said the Post, “so masterful, so feelingly made and so pathetic that during the delivery the courtroom did not echo a sound save that of the pleader’s voice.” Masterful, maybe, but not persuasive. On February 23, Judge Theodore Brentano rejected the motion for a new trial and set March 23 as the day for the hanging.8

  Darrow and Gregory asked the state supreme court for a stay of execution. Two days before Prendergast was scheduled to die, the Supreme Court turned them down. Darrow gathered signatures on a petition from a half dozen liberal judges, and took a train to Springfield. Altgeld was out of the state and not likely to invite another roasting by pardoning Prendergast, but Darrow hoped to persuade Lieutenant Governor John Gill to grant a reprieve. Stretching the truth, Darrow told Gill that “Mr. Trude, the prosecutor, has told me repeatedly that this man ought not to be hanged and that he, himself, would interfere before the execution could take place.” Now Trude was traveling, Darrow told Gill, and could not be reached.

  Later, Trude complained that “Darrow has perverted, to my injury, private talks we had in the judge’s room.” It was an early demonstration of Darrow’s willingness to dispose of the customary ethical standards—like accuracy or confidentiality—when a client was facing unjust punishment, especially in a capital case. This time, it was counterproductive. Even if Darrow had not misrepresented Trude’s remarks, he had cast the prosecutor in an embarrassing light and snuffed out any hope that the state might accept a deal. When he returned from his travels, Trude worked with renewed vigor to ensure that Prendergast was executed.

  Gill declined to grant the reprieve. Brand Whitlock, an aide to Altgeld who had taken Prendergast’s side, remembered meeting Darrow that day. The lawyer’s face showed fatigue and “world-weariness,” Whitlock said. But on learning that Whitlock was an ally, “there suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s” and a greeting with “the timber of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar drawl.”

  “Well, you’re all right then,” Darrow said. As he waited for the train back to Chicago, they discovered a mutual passion for literature, and Whitlock gave Darrow one of his unpublished short stories to read.

  Gregory was more successful. He went to the North Side criminal court of his college classmate and former partner Judge Arthur Chetlain and argued that Prendergast had become insane since his trial and so, under a little-noted Illinois statute, was entitled to have his sentence reviewed, yet again, by a jury. Just before midnight on Good Friday, less than twelve hours before Prendergast was to hang, Chetlain granted a reprieve.9

  Harrison’s sons—Preston and Carter Jr.—had taken over their father’s newspaper. Mindful of the family’s feelings, Darrow had made a courtesy call on young Carter before entering the case. The Times had given extensive coverage to the trial, much of it fair, as long as Prendergast was making a steady march toward the gallows. Now the brothers erupted. The Times slighted Gregory as a common bankruptcy lawyer who used methods “unworthy of a shyster.” And Darrow was a hypocrite, “a regular Don Quixote, always chasing windmills and ever ready to remove imaginary wrongs, without being able to remove the beam out of his own eye.” He was a “yellow bilious-looking man with a rugged homely face and hair as straight as an Indian,” the Times reported, “sanguine, fond of notoriety, having about as much regard for the conventionalities as a heathen.” Not for the last time, a reporter noted Darrow’s sartorial defects. “He wears his clothes as if they had been thrown on him, and they always look as if they had known him a long time.”

  The Harrisons saved the worst for Judge Chetlain. They began publishing “toothsome … news morsels” alleging that the judge, who lived downtown in a bachelor apartment, had fathered two children with a young Swedish servant girl, whom he had married in secret and stashed in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. “It was an out-of-town wedding,” the paper said dryly, after doing the math in a front-page story and suggesting that “blonde … pretty buxom Lottie” was pregnant on her nuptial day. The rest of the city’s newspapers picked up the story, and Chetlain had to be restrained from assaulting an editor. It no doubt came as a relief to the judge when Trude asked the courts to postpone the matter until Chetlain’s term on the criminal branch of the county courts was over.10

  Judge John B. Payne took over in June and put the “insanity trial” on a fast track. On June 20, they began. Prendergast sent a note up to the judge, claiming to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president. Payne put it aside and told the lawyers, “Daylight is burning, gentlemen.”

  Trude urged the jurors to rein in their sympathy. The assassin had a fine team of defense attorneys, blessed with “intelligence and cunning” and motivated by a thirst for notoriety, he said. “The more guilty of murder, the more foul and cruel that the murder is in its nature, the more green would be the laurels which would entwine themselves around the brows of these gentlemen who appear here.”11

  The defense called its doctors, who offered their opinions and read excerpts from the defendant’s mad scribbling. On the trial’s second day, Prendergast took the stand and, at the invitation of the defense, was examined by Judge Payne. At times the defendant was cheerful and helpful, at other times petulant.

  “Where did you get the pistol?” the judge asked him.

  “I can’t answer that question. I do not consider it my duty,” Prendergast replied.

  “You killed Harrison. What more right have you to live than Mr. Harrison had?” the judge asked.


  “I have a certain divine right,” said Prendergast. It had been granted him, he told the judge, by St. Peter.12

  The two sides ended a parade of forty-two witnesses and began final arguments on July 2. Darrow, again, closed for the defense. Spectators took every seat, jammed the aisles, and surrounded the judge’s bench.

  “I was one of those … following him to his last resting place,” Darrow said of Mayor Harrison. “Could he speak to you today from his great heart and his charitable mind he would ask you to save the city that he loved … from the infamous disgrace of sending a lunatic to the scaffold.”

  Darrow’s tribute to the mayor was received in “profound silence,” the Times reported. “Tears stood in the eyes of many as he paused at its close, overcome by deep feeling.”

  At the end of the allotted hour, Darrow brought his remarks to an end. “To lead this poor lunatic to the scaffold … would wreak infinite injury,” he said. “There is no power on earth to tell how many hearts would be calloused, how many souls would be wrecked, how many blood stains would come upon the conscience of men.”

  Now, as in March, he blamed the Maker, not the vessel. “Here is Prendergast, the product of the infinite God, not of his own making,” Darrow said. “He comes here for some inscrutable reason, the same as you and I, without his will, without his knowledge, because the infinite God of the infinite universe saw fit to make him as He willed. His fault is not the fault of Prendergast. It is the fault of the infinite power that made him the object you find today.

  “I beseech of you, gentlemen, do not visit upon this poor boy the afflictions which God Almighty placed upon him for some inscrutable reason unknown to us.

  “This poor, weak, misshapen vessel, I place in your protection and your hands,” Darrow said. “I beg of you gentlemen take it gently, tenderly, carefully. Do not, I beseech you, do not break the clay, for though weak and cracked and useless it is the handiwork of the infinite God.”13

  The following morning, Judge Payne read his instructions to the jury. In less than two hours, it reached a verdict. Prendergast would die.

  “Mr. Darrow’s closing argument would have swept us all off our feet,” said juror William Steinke, who admitted that some of his colleagues had been moved to tears. But the jury felt a duty to avenge the murdered mayor. “We felt that we could not be honest and still allow such an appeal to influence our decision.”

  Now began the grim last dance of lawyers in a capital case. Darrow and Gregory offered a motion for a new trial; it was denied. On July 11, Darrow took the train to Springfield, accompanied by attorney James Harlan, to see Altgeld. All three men knew the visit was useless, but the governor welcomed the two lawyers, joined them at dinner, and rode with them in a carriage around town. There was no changing his mind.

  Darrow and Gregory tried federal court, but the judge declined to intervene. “Yes, it is all over,” Darrow told the reporters as the courthouse emptied. “The country seems determined to hang an insane man and I guess we will have to allow it to do so.” Prendergast went meekly to his death on Friday, July 13. Gregory was there to offer what comfort he could to the condemned man, but Darrow was not. It was all too horrid, and disheartening, and sad.14

  The editors at the Tribune should have been pleased. Yet something marred their joy. The Harrisons had taken the side of striking workers in that year’s industrial unrest and scored great circulation gains. The Tribune’s editor, Joseph Medill, viewed the mayor’s sons as ingrates.

  “It was the Tribune that prevented the insanity inquiry from being tried before a judge selected by the murderer’s lawyers, and resulted in having the trial before a sterner and less sympathetic jurist. And it was the Tribune’s powerful special attorney who successfully prosecuted your father’s murderer to the gallows,” Medill wrote Carter Harrison Jr. “The assassin would never have been hung but for his work, supplemented by that of the Tribune.”15

  It was a revealing glimpse of how things were, and the powers that Darrow defied, in Chicago. Yet the truth was as stark as fresh dirt on a grave. The defense of Patrick Prendergast had been Darrow’s first big criminal case. And he had lost the mad newsboy to the hangman’s rope.

  Chapter 4

  POPULIST

  Ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell.

  As Darrow toiled to rescue crazy Patrick Prendergast, events outside the courthouse supplied an apt backdrop. Chicago was rocked by rage and anarchy, as federal troops and marshals battled mobs of unemployed and striking laborers in the violent climax of a nationwide workers’ uprising. It was called the “Debs Rebellion,” after Eugene Debs, whose American Railway Union was crushed by President Cleveland for its audacity and its leaders seized and jailed after bringing commerce to a standstill throughout most of the country.

  Darrow had been shaken by the state’s relentless insistence on killing Prendergast. Now he watched its army and its judges, deployed at the behest of corporations, quell the collective action of American workingmen. The experience left him angry and alienated. The idealist who had said, when he arrived in Chicago, that the “injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system” began to reconsider.

  The Panic of 1893 had set events in motion by exposing the gap between the gilded lifestyles of the robber barons and the grinding, depersonalizing existence of the industrial workforce. The usually restrained labor leader, Sam Gompers, captured the militant mood in January 1894 at a rally in New York when he chanted: “Oh angels shut thine eyes / Let conflagration illumine the outraged skies! / Let red Nemesis burn the hellish clan / And chaos end the slavery of man!” There were strikes across the country, and spontaneous “armies of the Commonweal” comprised of out-of-work men, bankrupt farmers, and tramps marched on state capitals and Washington. On April 24, the Times broke away from its coverage of the Prendergast case to report that Kelly’s Army was camping in Iowa, that Coxey’s Army was heading toward Washington, and that the financial markets were quaking: “A wave of panic swept over the exchange … Stocks tumbled … Moneybags shuddered and resolved to swell their contributions to the support of the militia on the morrow. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Huntingtons, the Pullmans and all the other plutocrats got home before dark, nor breathed they comfortably until they had double barred their doors and found refuge behind the solid masonry of their castles.”1

  Debs was a native of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he met early success as a local politician and railway union officer. He was tall, thin, and balding, indefatigable and brave. “There may have lived some time, some where, a kindlier … more generous man … but I have never known him,” Darrow said. “He never felt fear. He had the courage of the babe who has no conception of the word.” The labor movement was fragmented at the time, which allowed the railroads to pit rival occupations—engineers, firemen, switchmen, and the like—against one another. To resolve the problem, Debs launched the ARU in Chicago in 1893. It grew rapidly, especially after a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway.2

  The union was countered by the General Managers’ Association, headquartered in Chicago, through which two dozen railroads worked to cap wages and subdue their workers. A federal commission, charged with probing the causes of industrial unrest that summer, cited the GMA as an example of the “persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations” to “usurp” power in America. A strike at the Pullman works kindled the showdown. Its founder, George Pullman, had made his fortune designing, building, and operating commodious sleeping cars. Like many a self-made millionaire, he attributed his success to clean living and hard work; unlike many tycoons, he sought to give his employees an opportunity for both, by building a model town on the outskirts of Chicago. By 1893, some twelve thousand people lived in the tidy little city of Pullman. They could walk from work on safe, tree-shaded streets, past lawns and public parks, a library and theater and other civic amenities, to modern homes and tenements. But there were snakes in Pullman’s Eden. Rents
and utility bills were high, to pay Pullman’s hefty stock dividends. Workers faced eleven-hour days. Immigrant religions were discouraged. The village church, police, newspaper, and elections were controlled by the company. Gardening, decorating, and music making were regulated. The residents knew that company “spotters” mingled among them, reporting undesirable behavior, and that their leases gave the company the power to evict troublemakers. There was no hospital, for this was a town for productive workers, not the sickly. Pullman was “un-American,” the sociologist Richard Ely concluded. “It is benevolent well-wishing feudalism.”

  Pullman’s workers rebelled during the Panic, when the company slashed wages—but not rents. “Great destitution and suffering prevails,” the Times reported, “but the house rent to the Pullman company must be paid.” Debs recognized the fragility of his young union and opposed hasty action, but his members voted to boycott trains bearing Pullman cars. Civic delegations and union officials trekked to Pullman, seeking to forestall a confrontation. “We have nothing to arbitrate,” the company declared.

  George Pullman later told the strike commission that the money he would have lost in arbitration was not what moved him. “The amount … would not cut any figure,” he said. “It was the principle involved.” So what remedies, the commission asked, did the workingman have? A firm “could work a great deal of injustice to the men; no doubt about that,” Pullman vice president Thomas Wickes conceded. “But then it is a man’s privilege to go to work somewhere else.”