Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  “I would gladly avoid this if I could. I have stood in front of mobs so long that my heart is heavy and my head sore,” Darrow wrote to Addams. But “the powers of capital will try to stamp out all radical thought.”

  “I know that Isaak and his boy … are perfectly innocent of any crime and are in great danger,” he said. “See these people … and if they want me … I shall be ready to do all I can.” The fury passed. Isaak was released. A little later, Darrow gave Isaak’s daughter a job.15

  Darrow’s literary interests included journalism. When Hearst opened a newspaper in Chicago in 1900, Darrow took up his pen and joined the muckrakers—a breed of journalists, including Henry Lloyd, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens, who were stirring Americans with reportage that exposed shameful social conditions. On thirteen Sundays in 1902, Darrow wrote “Easy Lessons in Law,” an elegant series of columns in the Chicago American that revealed how the courts robbed the common folk of justice.

  Each of Darrow’s “lessons” has a mundane hero who is injured by the contrivances of the industrial age—railroads, skyscrapers, sweatshops—and turns to the law for aid. But once in court these victims find defeat at the hands of high-paid corporate lawyers, corrupt judges, and legal precedents—the “Doctrine of Fellow Servants” and the like—that place property above people.

  Darrow’s understated style and ice-cold irony presaged the work of twentieth-century realists in stories like that of John Swanson, a worker in a mill whose owner does not believe in unions, government regulation, or safety equipment. As a result, Swanson loses a hand in an industrial accident. “The board caught as the saw passed through, his foot slipped, he threw out his right hand to save himself,” Darrow wrote. “His hand fell on the side where the waste pieces of timber were wont to drop, and the blood trickled down in the saw dust below.”

  Pat Connor, an Irish railway man blacklisted for his role in the Debs strike, takes dangerous work on a night train, where he is decapitated by a low bridge. “The heavy oak beam struck him just above his nose and the upper third of his skull came off almost as clean as if cut by a surgeon’s saw,” Darrow wrote. “He really felt no pain whatsoever.”

  And James Clark, an ironworker, dies in a fall from a towering skyscraper. “When the workmen went to him they found a limp, shapeless bundle of flesh and blood and bones and rags,” Darrow wrote. Even the emperor Trajan insisted that nets be strung beneath the acrobats in the Roman circus. But “this was before Christianity and commercialism,” Darrow noted. In court, Clark’s widow receives nothing, and the judge goes on to speak at a Commercial Club banquet. “There he met some of the members of the beef trust, the railway combine and the associated banks. He spoke long and feelingly about the tyranny of labor organizations and his words were loudly cheered.”

  In a summary essay, “The Influences That Make the Law,” Darrow told readers that these tales were drawn from real cases he had witnessed, and he warned of the pernicious interests of the era. “This is the age of iron and steel,” he wrote. “Legal principles and decisions and individual rights and privileges have been as much changed, contorted and destroyed as have the old business methods that have been supplanted by electricity and steam.”

  The “independent artisan has been destroyed” and the legislatures were now manned by “lawyers … saloon-keepers and professional politicians” whose function “has sunk to the business of giving public property and privileges to the few, and executing such orders as the industrial captains see fit to give.”

  The legal profession, Darrow told his readers, must share the blame. “The judges are chosen from the ranks of lawyers, and by natural selection the brightest of these have been placed upon the bench,” he wrote. “These have been the ones who were formerly employed by corporations and great aggregations of wealth. There is no other clientage that can yield the money and influence which the ambitious lawyer craves.”16

  LIKE MANY OF his fellow radicals at the turn of the century—when the liberal impulse was strong but the structures for promoting it were weak—Darrow rambled around the Left. He would describe himself, variously, as a reformer, a Democrat, a philosophical anarchist, a socialist, a Populist, or a progressive. He was skeptical of human creeds, and had the lawyer’s knack for seeing all sides of an issue. Darrow was a “gathering point for all the ‘radical notions’ of the time … a dreamer, practical man, lawyer, politician, friend of labor, friend of women, friend of literature and of experiment,” wrote Hapgood.

  And if Darrow claimed no one cause, neither did any claim him. He was “regarded as ‘dangerous’ by the ultra-conservative, and as ‘crooked’ by the pure idealists, and as ‘immoral’ by the … ladies of blue stocking tendency,” said Hapgood. “He is radical, idealistic and practical at once … with a marvelous inconsistency of mind.”

  “As we grow older we feel more and more the hunger for applause instead of sneers,” Darrow said, as he entered his fifth decade. But for meager pay, and sneers, he continued to defend radical causes in court. In the fall of 1898, he traveled to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to represent an old Populist ally, the union leader Thomas Kidd, who had been jailed during a woodworkers’ strike. It was the Debs case, writ small. There was no attorney general claiming that the sanctity of the mails called for intervention: just local prosecutors, aping Ogden’s legal tactics. But things would be bad, indeed, for American workers if any local prosecutor in a company town could use the conspiracy statutes to toss union men in jail.

  Conditions were wretched in Oshkosh, a town of twenty-eight thousand dominated by seven big manufacturers specializing in the production of doors, windows, and custom millwork. The average man, typically an immigrant, earned under $1 for a day’s work ($240 a year, given the seasonal nature of construction), but even that was too much for the mill owners, who started hiring women and children and paid them 60 cents for each ten-hour day. The factories were run like prison camps. “All employees are to be in their places when the bell rings and whistle blows for starting, and must not absent themselves,” read the rules of the Paine Lumber Company. “Employees who quit their places … without our consent … are subject to damages … No unnecessary talking will be allowed during working hours.”

  The woodworkers called a strike. The governor dispatched units of the national guard to maintain order, and Kidd and two others were arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy. The trial began in mid-October. Darrow’s strategy, as in the Debs case, was to put the mill owners on trial. For the role of the Dickensian villain, Darrow selected George Paine, the union-hating owner of the town’s largest factory. Darrow recounted the steps that Paine took to break the strike: hiring Pinkerton detectives to infiltrate the union; intimidating and attempting to bribe witnesses. When he got Paine on the stand, Darrow forced him to admit he had pressured the local authorities to have Kidd indicted. And Darrow surprised everyone by calling the prosecutor, W. W. Quatermass, to the stand to testify about child labor violations in the factories.

  After two weeks of testimony, Darrow began his summation on October 31.

  “This is really not a criminal case,” he told the jury. “It is but an episode in the great battle for human liberty.”

  Only collective bargaining gave workingmen the leverage that they needed to free their families from servitude, said Darrow. But Paine had refused to negotiate. “He desired that these poor slaves should come to him and petition him singly, beg him as individuals, as Oliver Twist in the almshouse held out his soup bowl,” Darrow said.

  “The poor devil who works there for six or seven dollars a week cannot speak loud except in case of fire, and he cannot go out excepting he raise his hand like a little boy in school, and he cannot speak to his neighbor because it hinders him in his work,” Darrow said. “When the poor slaves go in there at a quarter to seven in the morning they lock the door to keep them there; and when the whistle sounds at twelve they send their guards around to unlock the doors. And when one o’clock comes again, this hig
h priest of jailers sends his turnkey back to lock up his American citizens once more so that they cannot leave the mill until nighttime comes.”

  Darrow spoke for eight hours over two days without notes. He closed with a tribute to Kidd, equating the union organizer with Christ’s disciples and the Abolitionists.

  “Those outlaws, those disreputables, those men and women spurned, despised and accused, were the forerunners of a brighter and more glorious day,” Darrow said. “Gentlemen, the world is dark … but it is not hopeless.”

  It took the jury less than an hour to acquit Kidd and his colleagues. Darrow earned only $250, though the union agreed, at his request, to print and circulate a pamphlet of his closing remarks. A Chicago newspaperman, traveling by train, came upon Amirus and spoke of the case with the old woodworker. The old man glowed at the mention of his son’s name.

  DARROW DID NOT ignore his criminal practice and showed, in these years, a continuing attraction to sensational cases. One began a few days before Christmas in 1898, when thirteen-year-old Thomas Crosby shot Deputy Sheriff Frank Nye. Crosby’s widowed mother, Marjorie, had struggled to keep her house through economic hard times. She hired lawyers and sued her dead husband’s firm for a considerable sum it owed her. But, ultimately, the bank foreclosed on her mortgage. For weeks before the shooting, Marjorie and her son, her sister, and her aged mother had lived on nothing but oatmeal and water, shivered for lack of coal, and took turns patrolling the house with a loaded revolver. She padlocked the gate and nailed boards over the windows. For young Thomas, saving the house took on overwhelming import. When Nye arrived to evict them and used a crowbar to pry the boards away, Thomas fired once, mortally wounding the deputy. The boy and his mother were arrested and charged with murder, and their home was seized.

  The trial got blanket coverage. The prosecutor was resolute: “Frank Nye was there on legal business and they knew it. The boy fired deliberately. The act constitutes murder.”

  When it came his turn, Darrow startled the courtroom by daring the jurors to hang the boy.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, rather than have you send this boy to the penitentiary or to the reform school, to be incarcerated among criminals, where his young life would be contaminated … I would have you sentence him to death,” Darrow told them.

  His bluff worked. Thomas was acquitted, and his mother was found guilty—but of manslaughter. Darrow appealed, and the Illinois Supreme Court threw out her conviction.

  The poignant tale would not be complete without a final ironic twist. A few days after the trial, Marjorie was notified that she had won a $17,700 judgment against her late husband’s firm—the money she had hoped would save her home.17

  DARROW WAS WORRIED about Altgeld’s declining health and spirits, and invited his friend to join his law firm, where the former governor was given top billing. The partners at Altgeld, Darrow, and Thompson stayed involved in politics and radical causes, including the plight of the Boers—the Dutch South Africans who were fighting a guerrilla war against imperial Britain. On March 11, 1902, after arguing a labor case in Chicago, Altgeld took the train to a speaking engagement in Joliet. He looked tired at the podium, but finished a forty-five-minute address in defense of the Boers by declaring that the universe, despite its swings, was ultimately just. As he stepped off the stage he was staggered by a stroke, collapsed, and died.

  Darrow was called to Joliet. He put Altgeld’s coffin on the train and took it back to Chicago. The body lay in state in the Chicago Public Library and thousands of mourners, despite the cold and snow, paid their respects. Darrow would give several memorial speeches in the weeks after his friend’s death. Some were long rebuttals of the governor’s critics. But his eulogy at the family funeral, held at Altgeld’s home, was the simplest and the best.

  “Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all,” Darrow said. “But once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim’s heart he will know no other smile but hers.

  “Today we pay our last sad homage to the most devoted lover, the most abject slave, the fondest, wildest, dreamiest victim that ever gave his life to liberty’s immortal cause,” he said.

  Altgeld had made Darrow’s career. He had gotten him jobs and clients and fees, introduced him to national politics, offered wise counsel, and molded his ethics and principles. Other than Amirus, no human being had done more to influence and guide Clarence Darrow. He would be missed.

  “My dear, dead friend, long and well have we known you, devotedly have we followed you, implicitly have we trusted you, fondly have we loved you,” said Darrow. “The heartless call has come, and we must stagger on the best we can alone.”18

  Chapter 6

  LABOR’S LAWYER

  Laws do not execute themselves in this world.

  On a mid-November day in 1902, Clarence Darrow climbed into the elevator cage at a Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company mine in northeastern Pennsylvania, grasped the iron bars, and sucked in his breath as he plunged into the earth. When Darrow left the cage, a quarter of a mile beneath the surface, he entered a warren of twisting gangways and steep-pitched tunnels, where bent, filthy men mined coal. Dressed in grimy overalls, their faces smeared with coal dust, standing, often, in shin-deep water, small groups of Britons, Slavs, or Italians worked by the light of the oil lamps affixed to their caps. They used hand drills and augers to open holes in the rock, which they packed with black powder and detonated. Then, with picks, they worked the shattered face, loading chunks of coal into rail cars. The air was damp, and stank of sulfur. The dust clogged the men’s lungs, inducing black lung disease. Cave-ins mangled the miners, or crushed them to paste; poisonous carbonic gases killed men in moments. A mixture of coal dust and methane, known as “firedamp,” fueled fiery explosions that roared down the tunnels with cyclonic power, tossing coal, timber, tools, mine cars, mules, and men. In the Pennsylvania anthracite fields, the miners died at a rate of ten per week.

  Anthracite was a dense, clean-burning coal, prized for home heating, and so an essential commodity. The great financier J. P. Morgan was among those who recognized the value of “black diamond,” and led the railroad interests that bought up 90 percent of the anthracite fields. They paid the mine workers, on average, a little more than a dollar a day. The miners had gone on strike, an epic confrontation was at hand, and they had hired Darrow to be their advocate.

  Henry Lloyd was with Darrow on the day they toured the mine. It was a dreadful experience, Lloyd said, “like a foretaste of the Inferno.”

  “You might as well get used to it,” Darrow told him. Heaven was reserved for Wall Street financiers. Infidels like themselves would be rooming with Satan.1

  TO SUPPLEMENT THEIR wages, the coal miners sent their daughters to work in the textile factories and silk mills that were built nearby to capitalize on the ready supply of child labor. The boys in the mining towns left school at the age of eleven or twelve to work in the breakers, towering frame buildings that housed rollers and crushers and chutes. The boys sat above the chutes and, as the coal tumbled beneath them, leaned down to pluck out worthless slate and rock. Some of the older or maimed men, their years in the mines ended, joined them—all subject to an overseer who would lash them with a stick if they dallied. They worked ten hours a day, six days a week.2 Darrow was drawn to their plight and wrote a story—“The Breaker Boy”—published by the American.

  One day his little companion who always sat beside him leaned too far over as he picked the slate. He lost his balance and fell into the trough where the lumps of coal ran down. He plunged madly along with the rushing flood into the iron teeth of the remorseless breaker … It took a long while to stop the mighty machine, and then it was almost an hour before the boy could be put together into one pile. Several days thereafter a man in a little town in Massachusetts thought that he saw blood on some lumps of coal that he was pouring into the
top of his fine nickel-plated stove—but still there is blood on all our coal—and for that matter on almost everything we use, but a man is a fool if he looks for other people’s blood.3

  THE MINERS WERE tough men. They organized unions and secret societies that included—until a Pinkerton detective infiltrated the group and helped the authorities hang twenty of them—the infamous Molly Maguires. There was more violence in 1897, during a strike organized by the fledgling United Mine Workers union, when nineteen miners were shot dead and dozens were wounded as a sheriff’s posse in Latimer, Pennsylvania, opened fire on a peaceful protest march. The militia was dispatched, and the strike collapsed. The UMW had met with success during the presidential election of 1900, thanks to the leadership of young John Mitchell, who had taken over its presidency at the age of twenty-eight. Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, the Republican campaign chairman, wanted to keep homes warm that fall and used the prospect of a Bryan victory to persuade Morgan and the operators to meet the union’s demands. But the coal companies bided their time. Two years later they moved to crush the union. And some 147,000 miners walked off the job in May 1902.

  “Our organization will either achieve a great triumph or it will be completely annihilated,” Mitchell wrote the union organizer Mother Jones. The first two casualties were strikers, shot down by the industry’s private security troops. The militia returned to the district with orders to shoot to kill. But the scales shifted in autumn’s chill. As the midterm elections neared, the Republicans grew frantic about the political fallout of rising coal prices and shortages.

  One railroad president, George Baer, aided the miners’ cause when he assured a worried clergyman that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for … by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.” Baer’s letter, reprinted in newspapers around the nation, captured the arrogance of the robber barons at a moment when middle-class Americans were beginning to show more sympathy toward labor. “A good many people think they superintend the earth,” said the New York Times, “but not many have the egregious vanity to describe themselves as its managing directors.”4