Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  The ARU launched its boycott on June 26, 1894. Freight and passenger travel came to a halt from Pennsylvania to California. Some 150,000 men walked off the job, and tens of thousands of working-class Americans wore white ribbons as an act of solidarity. It was “The Greatest Strike in History,” the New York Times announced, and coming as it did against a background of the Commonweal marches and violent strikes by miners and textile and iron workers, it thoroughly spooked the wealthy. “The struggle with the Pullman company has developed into a contest between the producing classes and the money power of the country,” Debs said. The GMA officials agreed; they set up a war room, and looked to the White House for help.3

  AS THE RAILWAY workers cheered their success, Grover Cleveland met with his advisers. The president was a Democrat from New York, with broad support on Wall Street, whose most notable accomplishments were the deals he made with J. P. Morgan and other financiers to stabilize the currency. “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering,” Cleveland said, when vetoing an emergency farm bill. “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”4

  Cleveland turned to Richard Olney, the attorney general, to handle the railway strike. Skilled and ruthless, Olney had left a job as counsel for one railroad and director of two others to join the cabinet. His sentiments can be gauged by a letter he wrote advising a railroad executive not to oppose the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. “The Commission … can be made of great use to the railroads,” Olney noted. “It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people.”

  Olney named Edwin Walker, yet another railroad lawyer, as a “special counsel” for the justice department in Chicago. And Thomas Milchrist, the U.S. attorney, sat in on the meetings of the GMA, where he asked that the railroads “report any interference with mail trains.” The attorney general was itching to intervene.5 Federal judges Peter Grosscup and William Woods, abandoning any pretext of impartiality, helped the government draft a request for an injunction and swiftly approved it. They issued what came to be called the “Gatling gun on paper,” ordering all persons to “refrain from interfering” with railroad traffic and banning anyone from coercing, inciting, or even “persuading” workers to strike. Olney was nothing if not bold; he based the government’s argument on the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was enacted in 1890 to fight trusts and monopolies but now was employed to crush the union.

  On the evening of July 2, U.S. marshal John Arnold informed Washington that he had gone out to the rail yards and read the injunction to the striking workmen, who “simply hoot at it.” The thousands of “deputies” he had recruited—toughs and drunks paid by the railroads—could not clear the tracks. Special counsel Walker (who privately called Arnold’s deputies “a mob … worse than useless”) informed Olney that it was “of utmost importance that soldiers should be distributed at several points within the city.” Cleveland gave his approval.

  Debs had consistently appealed “to strikers everywhere to refrain from any act of violence,” the strike commission would report. Until the U.S. Army marched in, in the early morning hours of Independence Day, things were relatively peaceful. But the soldiers were a provocation. And on July 4 the striking railway men were joined by thousands of the unemployed and industrial workers celebrating Independence Day, all in a giddy and often inebriated state. As the trains tried to move within protective cordons of troops, huge crowds gathered at the crossings, blocking progress with their bodies and tipping freight cars. The first boxcars were set aflame the next day as mobs of up to fifty thousand, by some estimates, massed along the tracks. That night, someone started a fire in the deserted grounds of the White City. Whipped by warm winds, the flames consumed the Exposition’s buildings. On July 6, after a railroad employee shot two rioters, hundreds looted and burned seven hundred railcars in south Chicago. “It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and the men and women dancing with frenzy,” the Inter Ocean reported. On July 7 a contingent of Illinois militia fired into a threatening crowd, killing four and wounding dozens.

  There was no evidence that the ARU organized or ordered the violence. But on July 10, with the propertied classes in full bay, the federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Debs and his men with criminal conspiracy. The union offices were raided, its records confiscated and leaders arrested. A week later, while out on bail, the union leaders were charged with contempt and jailed again. Their cells were rich with vermin, said Debs. Their jailor “showed me the bloody rope with which Prendergast had been hanged, and intimated with apparent glee … that the same fate awaited me.”6

  Liberals were stunned by the turn of events. Cleveland and Olney were Democrats, from the party of Jefferson and Jackson. “The Federal troops had broken Debs and his strike, and there was bitterness in the air, and poverty and misery about,” Edgar Lee Masters recalled. Jane Addams was struck by “the barbaric instinct to kill, roused on both sides, the sharp division into class lines, with the resultant distrust.” She saw Pullman as “a modern Lear,” raging after being spurned by his ungrateful “children.”

  Darrow had been helping the striking workers, trying to rent a hall and organize a protest meeting, even as he battled to save Prendergast. He had witnessed some of the violence. “As I stood on the prairie watching the burning cars … I was only sad to realize how little pressure man could stand before he reverted to the primitive,” he recalled. Debs and his men needed lawyers who would serve despite public censure. Stephen Gregory signed on and Henry Lloyd, who was friendly with Debs, recommended Darrow. “I knew that it would take all my time for a long period, with no compensation,” Darrow remembered. Years later, he told a friend that he wanted to turn the union down, but that his conscience forbade it: “I couldn’t get away with it—with myself.” And so he enlisted in the cause.7

  CLEVELAND HAD LAUNCHED a two-tracked legal assault on Debs and his men: the contempt proceeding, in which they were accused of violating the federal court’s injunction banning anyone from “inciting” workers to strike, and a criminal case that charged the union with conspiring to stop the mails and to interfere with interstate commerce. The contempt case was called first, before Judge Woods. The closing arguments took place in late September. Darrow ripped into the prosecution, scolding U.S. attorney Milchrist for labeling Debs and his men “dastardly criminals” and cowards.

  “There are various kinds of cowards,” Darrow said. “It was not brave for this man Milchrist to stand in a court where accident has placed him and heap vituperation on these men who cannot reply. That is not bravery.…”

  “I don’t need to take lessons in professional ethics from you,” Milchrist sputtered, leaping to his feet.

  “You ought to take them from somebody,” Darrow told him.

  Darrow challenged the government’s reliance on the Sherman Antitrust Act. “Restraint of trade” was the “evil meant to be aimed at,” Darrow said. “If it had been the intention of Congress to include strikes it would have said so.”

  No one expected that Judge Woods would admit error and reverse his own ruling, but if Darrow had any hopes of keeping Debs out of jail, he tossed them when accusing Woods of abusing power. “Every man has a right to quit his employment if he wishes. He may advise others to quit theirs,” Darrow said. “In the present state of industrial progress, capital is combined necessarily in large associations. Just as necessarily must labor be combined in large masses. So long as each keeps within its rights they must be left to fight it out, and no court by hastily issued order should disarm one of them on the field of
battle.”

  Even the Tribune admitted that Darrow had made “an exceedingly able argument … important and exciting.” But, as expected, Woods found Debs and the others guilty. A law passed to limit the depredations of corporate behemoths like the railroads was instead used to promote them. The Sherman law “was applied … against the men whom it was meant to protect,” Darrow said, “and in favor of those against whom every provision of the act was directed.”

  Debs was sentenced to jail for six months, and Darrow traveled to Washington to make arrangements for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, he was admitted to the Supreme Court bar. Members of Congress friendly to labor vouched for him, and the spectator pews of the old court chamber in the Capitol were filled with men and “magnificently-attired women, blazing with diamonds,” the newspapers noted, who were there to catch a glimpse of the “smooth-faced barrister” defending the notorious Debs.

  “There isn’t much to tell about the matter,” Darrow told a Washington Post reporter who had asked how things stood in Chicago. “The poor people side with Debs and the rich are against him. There is the situation in a nutshell. The philosophers and dreamers are on our side too; but they haven’t much influence … The forces of the plutocracy are so strong as to be almost irresistible.”8

  THE MARTYRDOM OF Eugene Debs moved on to its next stage: the criminal conspiracy trial before Judge Grosscup.

  Woods was, as Altgeld once said, a captive of the corporations; but Grosscup, even more so. “It is an outrage that a creature like Grosscup should be permitted to sit on the bench,” Theodore Roosevelt would gripe after hearing one of the judge’s rulings. Grosscup would ultimately step down amid charges that he traded favors with the railroads. In a speech in the spring of 1894, he had offered a glimpse of his beliefs when he denounced labor leaders as revolutionaries, intent on imposing “tyranny.” The “higher laws of civilization and advanced manhood” demanded that “this shadow on independent individuality” should be “removed effectively and at once,” Grosscup said. If not, it would “destroy the basis on which business … can be successful.”

  But in the criminal case Debs would face a jury, not just the judge. When the fight began in late January, Darrow strove to put the railroads, not Debs, on trial. It was not the union that met in secret or dispatched telegrams on a private wire, he told the jurors, it was the railroads. “The obstruction of the mails might have been the result of a conspiracy. But it is not the conspiracy of these men,” he said of the defendants. “If there was a conspiracy it was on the part of the General Managers’ Association, which desired to use the inconvenience of the public, and the feelings of sanctity for the mails, as a club to defeat the effort that was being made to better the condition of working men.”

  Debs and his men “published to all the world what they were doing. And in the midst of the excitement of a widespread strike they were never so busy but that they found time to counsel against violence,” Darrow told the jury. “For this, they are brought into a court by an organization which uses the government as a cloak to its purpose.”

  Grosscup, in his rulings, leaned toward the government. But in doing so, he added to the jury’s mounting sympathy for Darrow’s underdogs. So, too, did the furtive actions of George Pullman, who was subpoenaed to appear, but dodged the federal marshal sent to serve him. In the Chicago Post, the Irish barman Martin Dooley, the fictional creation of columnist Peter Finley Dunne, had delighted in Pullman’s skedaddling:

  “Gintlemin,” says he, “I must be off,” he says. “Go an’ kill each other,” he says. “Fight it out,” he says. “Defind th’ constitution,” he says. “Me own is not of th’ best,” he says, “an’ I think I’ll help it be spindin’ th’ summer … on th’ shores iv th’ Atlantic ocean.”

  The Tribune, however, offered excuses for Pullman. “It is not strange that he should be unwilling to go on the stand and be questioned by Mr. Darrow,” the editors sniffed. “It is not pleasant for a person who is at the head of a great corporation to be interrogated by persons unfriendly to him and who may put disagreeable inquiries to which he has to reply.”

  Indeed, the railroad executives who did testify, with their haughty manners and patchy memories, left a poor impression. And Walker blundered when he insisted that the ARU produce the minutes of its 1894 convention, which had been open to the public and would yield him little. Darrow responded by demanding the same information from the managers. “That was the knockout,” said Theodore Debs, the defendant’s brother. “The minutes … would have shown who the conspirators were.” After Eugene Debs, in a trim gray suit, wearing gold spectacles and a boutonniere, made an effective appearance on the stand, the government folded. On February 12, Grosscup announced that he was stopping the trial because one of the jurors had taken sick. Darrow, confident of victory, urged Grosscup to appoint a substitute, but the judge refused. It was clear what the verdict would have been. When the jurors were discharged they gathered around Debs to shake his hand. “Debs, when this trial opened I was in favor of giving you five years,” said one. “Now I am anxious to set you free.”9

  Debs did not have his freedom yet. The antagonists now trudged to Washington to argue the contempt case at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a rare appearance, Attorney General Olney himself took part, jousting with Darrow and the other defense lawyers in the oral arguments.

  Darrow ended Debs’s case with a spirited appeal. “When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their own rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows,” he told the justices, “we have no right to say they are criminals.” But his remarks had little effect on justices so famous for their retrograde decisions. On May 27 the Court ruled unanimously against Debs. “No wrong,” it said, “carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob.”

  Debs had done no such thing. And in the eyes of many Americans, in part because of the arguments and evidence presented at the trials, he and his men emerged as martyrs, Pullman as a buffoon, and Cleveland as Wall Street’s toady. The president was compelled to appoint the strike commission to investigate the events of the summer of 1894. It absolved Debs and placed much blame on industry.

  A furious Edwin Walker schemed to recover. He had been humiliated in the criminal case, he told Olney, but had used his influence to secure a compliant judge for the retrial. “The government will never be better prepared to try this case,” he wrote. “Judge Bunn was especially assigned to this case, at my request.” But Cleveland had enough of Debs. A new U.S. attorney dropped the charges. “There is not a public sentiment at this time which would sustain prosecution,” he admitted.10

  AS DARROW JOUSTED in court, prickly John Altgeld had gotten into a brawl with Cleveland. The governor had used the Illinois militia to maintain order in other strikes and dispatched detachments of the guard to trouble spots during the Debs crisis. He had things under control and the deployment of the army was “entirely unnecessary and … unjustifiable,” he told the president. “The Federal government has been applied to by men who had political and selfish motives.” He accused Cleveland of doing “violence to the Constitution.”

  The press, again, denounced Altgeld. “This lying, hypocritical, demagogical sniveling governor of Illinois does not want the laws enforced. He is a sympathizer with riot, with violence, with lawlessness and anarchy,” the Tribune declared. “He should be impeached.”11

  Altgeld held his ground. The president and his Wall Street allies, he declared, were a “small band of schemers … who have not a drop of Democratic blood in their veins, whose sympathies are entirely with the great corporations” which “treat the American republic as a foraging ground.” The governor declined an invitation to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday at the Iroquois Club because Olney was a guest. “Jeffersonism was the first-born of the new age of liberty and human progress,” said Altgeld, but “Clevelandism is the slimy off-spring of tha
t unhallowed marriage between Standard Oil and Wall Street.” He set out to end such influence by allying the Democratic Party with the Populist movement. In doing so, Altgeld set the Democrats on a course that, over time, would transform American government and give liberalism its greatest triumphs. In this crusade, Darrow served as his lieutenant.12

  Populism was rooted in the farms. Eastern financiers had sold Washington on a policy of tight money, based on the gold standard, that was especially tough on heavily mortgaged farmers. The railroad monopolies, meanwhile, had abused the growers by fixing shipping rates. Hard times fanned the movement, and in 1892 its presidential candidate carried six states, winning more than a million votes. Among other reforms, the Populists called for direct election of U.S. senators, a graduated income tax, and government regulation of railroads and utilities.

  “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress and touches even the ermine of the bench,” said their platform. “The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down … The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few … and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty.”

  Altgeld saw the great potential of linking urban workingmen to the farmers’ cause. So did Darrow, Debs, Henry Lloyd, and William Jennings Bryan, a young congressman from Nebraska who said government should expand the supply of money by backing the currency with both gold and more plentiful silver. But Populism was not an uncontested sell in the cities. Investors and bankers feared inflation, and were adept at persuading workers that their jobs and savings could be lost in a loose-money economy. Chicago became the testing ground—“the ideal place for beginning the welding of the radical reform elements in the artisan class with the radicals of the rural district,” as journalist Willis Abbot put it.