Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned

by John A. Farrell

  Miller’s tactics had offended delegates from around the state, who joined with their counterparts from Chicago to elect a rump leader, who gaveled the house to order with a broken chair rung. Darrow reviewed the rules of impeachment. That night, the speaker caved. Darrow then joined in the successful effort to pass the bill. It was the highlight of his career in the legislature, which lasted just the single term.14

  The struggle shifted back to Chicago, where the voters endorsed “immediate” municipal ownership at the polls in 1905, as Judge Edward Dunne was elected mayor. He hired Darrow, his friend and ally, as a special counsel to represent the city in a lawsuit that had been filed by the streetcar interests in the federal courts. Darrow’s old nemesis, the unscrupulous Judge Grosscup, had ruled that the transit companies had rights to run streetcars until 1958. The city appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Darrow argued and won the case.

  Dunne was a genial lace-curtain Irishman who lacked Harrison’s Machiavellian skills. And the voters had saddled him with a city council that preferred to negotiate franchise extensions. The mayor, seeking to please all, pleased few. Trying to get something passed, he wavered on municipal ownership, reembraced it under pressure, abandoned it once more, and endorsed it yet again. Progressives around the country were looking to Chicago to set an example, but “the Radicals” at City Hall, one journal reported, “seem incapable of really finishing anything; everything they have turned out so far has been just about half baked.”

  By the end of that first summer, Darrow had sent a letter of resignation to the mayor. “I have no right to say that my opinion is better than yours. It is very possible that yours is better than mine,” Darrow said. “But it is not fair to me that I should be committed to a policy that I believe will fail.” The resignation was not accepted, but neither was his advice. Darrow took to restating it in public as the mayor, sharing the podium, rolled his eyes in consternation. Finally, in the fall, Darrow left City Hall. “Our municipal ownership administration is very poor and will doubtless result in nothing,” he wrote Whitlock. In the break with Dunne, Darrow ended his twenty years in politics as he had spent it, marching to his own drum. Inspired by Amirus, he had seen politics as a place where a young man with a good heart and a passion for a cause could change the world. He was not unselfish; he wanted, following Altgeld’s prescription, to get the power and give things a twist. But now Amirus and Altgeld and Lloyd were dead—taken from him in such quick succession that he hardly had time to mourn. He had no father to honor, no captain to serve, no comrade with whom to soldier.

  “You are really running for mayor,” Darrow wrote Whitlock. “Well I guess I hope you will win though I cannot say why. It will mean horrible vexations of the spirit [and be] no possible good to anyone.” Darrow looked more to himself. A few weeks before Dunne faced the voters for reelection in 1907, the Tribune published a mean satire, from an anonymous author, comparing Dunne to Mark Tapley, the Dickensian feather-head of the novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Dunne had all Tapley’s frustrating characteristics, “except that Mark Tapley was loyal to his friends,” the piece declared. The anonymous author was Darrow.

  “Nothing has made me so happy in politics in recent years as the defeat of Dunne,” Darrow wrote Whitlock. “He is a man without brains, backbone or guts. He is unfaithful to every person and every thing, he is the nearest to nothing of any man that I ever knew, and while municipal ownership and progressive ideas lost something in his election, they have lost nothing in his defeat.”

  But Darrow’s friends and associates were upset by his actions, which they saw as selfish and cynical. “Dunne was weak, but he honestly stood for much if not all that Darrow pretends to advocate” and was replaced by “a spoils man who will use his position without scruple,” wrote Austin Wright, one of Darrow’s former clients. “A personal dislike, it does not seem to me, constitutes a good and sufficient ground for going over to the enemy.”15

  Some saw greed and cynicism in Darrow’s behavior. The editors of the American became alarmed when Darrow took fees from both the newspaper and the International Harvester Company for negotiating an end to their journalistic crusade against the firm, which had been evading payment of its property taxes. Darrow’s reputation was dented, as well, by his willingness to represent his supposed foes, the streetcar companies, in court. On behalf of the Chicago City transit firm, he led an unsuccessful attempt to kill a franchise granted to its competitor, the General Electric Railway Company.

  “There was a bulge in the pockets of the aldermen who voted for this ordinance,” said Darrow. “Nobody knows it better than the Electric railway company.”

  “Unless it be the City railway company,” said the rival attorney, and the courtroom erupted in knowing laughter.16

  Darrow’s image was further smudged when another streetcar firm, the Union Traction Company, got caught bribing jurors in personal injury cases, and he agreed to defend three Irish American lawyers charged in the scandal. It was a Chicago sensation. Extra bailiffs were required to control a courtroom crowded with rowdy Celts. Fistfights broke out when a guilty verdict was announced, and the angry Irish spectators rushed the prosecutor, shouting “Dog!” and “Scoundrel!”

  Darrow persevered, and two of the convictions were reversed on appeal. He then gave a job to a lawyer named Cy Simon, who was the Union Traction bagman in the case. Some months later, Masters discovered that their firm was receiving $150 a month from Union Traction to buy Simon’s continued silence. And whenever Darrow represented a client in an injury case against Union Traction, Masters said, the company would invariably agree to a generous settlement. The word spread and boosted their business. “It was bribery all around,” said Masters.

  “Darrow has no principles,” Wright told a mutual friend. “He professes to hold feelings of utmost contempt for millionaires, while his acts emphasize a greed for money.”

  “I once had a fondness approaching affection for Darrow,” Wright concluded, “but the withering blight of his moral bankruptcy fell upon every feeling of that kind.”

  The journalist Hutchins Hapgood was a bit more forgiving. Darrow could best be described, he wrote, as a philosophical anarchist who, in the name of liberty, refused to be ruled by nettlesome rules or creeds. There were advantages to such a pose. “It allows a man to be an opportunist,” Hapgood said, “while having a high ideal.”17

  Darrow’s involvement in another scandal made the front pages across the country when the Bank of America, a Chicago thrift, went bust in early 1906. The bank had been looted by its president, former judge Abner Smith. Darrow was a cofounder and a major stockholder.

  The idea for the bank was laudatory. It was to have been run for the benefit of working folks, whose pennies it would solicit by accepting deposits at neighborhood drugstores. Some five hundred families opened savings accounts. Darrow borrowed $7,000 to invest in the bank and deposited another $6,000. Masters invested $4,000. Even John Azzop, the elevator operator in their building, was persuaded to move his savings there.

  But Smith never had the capital reserves required by Illinois law. And he then okayed $250,000 in ill-secured loans for himself, associates, and members of his family. Darrow and the other stockholders were fortunate in but one regard: the bank failed quickly, allowing them to save the depositors’ money, if not their own. Darrow contained the scandal by alerting the authorities and announcing that he would personally guarantee the $25,000 in workingmen’s deposits that were at risk. They were paid out to folks like Azzop when they showed up with their bankbooks.

  “Darrow prevailed upon me to stop playing the races … and put my money in the bank,” said Azzop, after getting his money back. “I’m going to put this on a horse,” he told the press.

  Masters lost his $4,000. For years he hounded and pursued Smith, who was convicted and sent to prison. The episode also added to the friction between the law partners. When Darrow used the borrowed $7,000 to embellish the bank’s reserves, he had acted—though on a f
ar smaller scale—just like Smith, said Masters. But by serving as the whistle-blower and prevailing on his friends in the press, Darrow emerged as a hero. “He participated in the fraudulent incorporation,” Masters marveled, “and then prosecuted his confederate in the fraud, and escaped unexposed.”

  One cheerful cynic found his friend Darrow’s behavior irresistible. In the fall of 1906 Elbert Hubbard wrote a satirical ode for the Philistine, his literary magazine.

  “I love Darrow because he is such a blessed crook. He affects to be a brave man, but admits that he’s an arrant coward; he poses as an altruist, but is really a pin-headed pilferer,” Hubbard wrote. “People think he is bounteously unselfish and kind, whereas he dispenses and supplicates solely for Darrow & Co. He eloquently addresses the bar, bench and jury in public in the name of justice, and then privately admits the whole thing is a fraud.”18

  Others were concerned. Their knight seemed to have lost his way. In January 1907, Garland and his wife invited the Darrows to dinner. After they left, he described the evening in his diary. “I found him as grave and even more bitter than his writing indicates,” said Garland. “He weakens his cause by extreme expression. His uncompromising honesty of purpose and his aggressive cynicism make him repellent to many.”

  “As a lawyer he was always ready to defend the under dog,” said Garland, but “I was not entirely convinced that his action was dictated solely by a sense of justice. He takes a savage … joy in striking at society.”

  “I feel power but not high purpose in his program,” said Garland. “We began our careers on common ground, but he has gone on—or off—into a dark and tangled forestland.”

  Chapter 8

  INDUSTRIAL WARFARE

  The cynic is humbled.

  On the snow-swept evening of December 30, 1905, after weeks of planning and several bungled attempts, an ice-hearted killer named Harry Orchard wandered from a card game in the Saratoga Hotel in Caldwell, Idaho, and stumbled upon his quarry, former governor Frank Steunenberg, in the lobby.

  Orchard hurried to his room and took up the bomb he had hidden in his suitcase. “It had been one of those gloomy days,” Steunenberg’s brother Will would recall. “Snowing and blowing all day long.” Cloaked by darkness and the remnants of the storm, Orchard hurried to the Steunenberg house, just under a mile away. Working swiftly, he fastened his device to a gatepost.

  It was of simple design: when the gate was opened, a bit of fishing line would tug the cork from a vial of sulfuric acid that, spilling on blasting caps, would set off dynamite. On the way back to town, Orchard passed Steunenberg, walking home. The assassin was a block or two from the warm lights of the Saratoga, with its mansard roof and turrets and busy gaming tables, when he heard the blast. It was six forty-five p.m.

  Inside the Steunenberg house, the children had been watching for their father. He came into the yard, turned to close the gate, and was wrapped in a blinding flash. The explosion shredded skin and muscle on his right side, stripped him of his clothing, and threw him ten feet toward the barn. The bones of his legs were in splinters, and his right arm, with which he had reached down to close the gate, had “the inside blown completely out,” a brother recalled. The windows of the house were gone. There were shards of wood and glass and bits of the victim everywhere.

  His family ran to Steunenberg, but could not lift the big man, though he begged to be taken in from the cold. His flesh came away in their hands. “Someone has shot me,” he said, and then, “Lord help us.” They put him on a blanket and dragged him inside, where he lay writhing on a bed. His brothers urged him to tell them what happened, but he was deaf from the explosion and stared at them blankly. In the arms of his brother Will he died.

  “In a very few minutes great magnificent Frank had gone,” a sister-in-law wrote. “It was a mercy … as his agony must have been terrible.”

  “It is taken for granted,” his sister Josephine told relatives, “that it was done by … the dynamiters.”1

  THE VIOLENT STRUGGLE between capital and labor in industrial-age America reached a climax out west. There were sheriffs and courts and territorial assemblies, and a parade of new states into the Union. Yet it was still a land where shrewd men could acquire power through gold, guns, or legal trickery. By the terms of its cherished myth, the West was a land of independence. But as the century turned, the pioneers and prospectors were displaced by corporations that had access to the capital and technology needed for industrial-scale mining, timber cutting, and the building of cities and railroads.

  The miners were the spearhead of resistance to the new order. Absent owners like John D. Rockefeller spent no time fretting about working conditions in Idaho, Nevada, or Colorado, where their local superintendents, striving to meet corporate targets, sliced wages to as little as $1.80 a day. The frontiersmen, working their own silver claims and panning clear-water creeks for gold, raged at those who sought to make them wage slaves. “These adventurous characters, going out into a new country and plunging into the virgin, everlasting hills, where it would seem that at last all men would stand on the same footing, have suddenly discovered that amid these primitive surroundings the modern industrial system is … at its worst,” one journalist reported. The miners—rough combative men—began to organize. The mine owners—brutal and resolved—used gunmen and militias to crush the unions. The miners responded with dynamite.2

  “The contest verged on civil war,” Darrow recalled. In radical circles, the union violence was excused. “It is a duty to stop the lesser crime of dynamite, but it is an infinitely greater duty to extirpate the greater crime of the monopolist. The one has hardly slain its tens, the other slays its thousands daily,” his friend Henry Lloyd had written. “The one is spasmodic, impulsive, sporadic, exceptional … the other is organized wholesale destruction.” There was blood to be expected in any birth. “You cannot make a revolution out of rosewater,” Darrow said.

  Darrow would be at the center of the reckoning. For most of eight years, from the winter of 1906 through the fall of 1913, he left Chicago and spent his energies on two renowned cases in which he defended union men charged with wide-scale, bloody campaigns of terror. His ardor for sensation bore him to a conflagration from which he barely escaped. He would win several highly publicized trials in the West, and cut one notorious deal to snatch a client from the gallows. The experience would make him a national celebrity, but it also got him indicted, and cost him almost everything: his savings, his law firm, and, very nearly, his marriage, his freedom, and his life. It was his turn in Gethsemane: the Passion of Clarence Darrow.

  Darrow was among the first, in the wonder and promise of those first years of the century, to glimpse its savagery. And in the fire, his last illusions perished. It was a changed man, in some ways hollow, in others holy, who returned to Chicago.

  “The cynic is humbled,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, who stood by his side in the final act. “The man that laughed sees and is frightened, not at prison bars, but at his own soul.”3

  THE HOSTILITIES ERUPTED in the Coeur d’Alene territory, in the panhandle of Idaho, when workers began to organize in the early 1890s. They were met by the formation of the Mine Owners’ Association, which salted spies and informants throughout their ranks. In the course of a strike in July 1892, gun battles broke out at the Gem and Bunker Hill mines, the Frisco mine was destroyed by dynamite, and President Benjamin Harrison sent in troops to restore order. A few months later, union men from around the West joined together in the Western Federation of Miners.4

  The miners’ expectations soared in 1896 when, amid the silver craze, a Democratic-Populist “fusion” ticket swept Idaho and Frank Steunenberg, a thirty-five-year-old newspaper editor and state legislator, became the state’s first non-Republican governor. He was a bull of a man, tall, strong, and headstrong—one of six Steunenberg brothers who had settled in Caldwell, a whistle-stop on the Union Pacific Railroad, in keeping with their brother Albert’s dictum: “We are here for the money.�
�� In addition to the newspaper and politics, they had grown prosperous investing in timber, sheep, banking, mining, retailing, and real estate.5

  Some of the mine owners tried to make peace with their employees. But the hate ran deep, and old scores needed settling. There were whispers about an “inner circle” of union officials who were ordering beatings and executions. In 1899 several hundred miners, many wearing masks and carrying firearms, hijacked a Northern Pacific train, christened it the Dynamite Express, stopped in a series of mining towns to pick up more men, arms, and explosives, and seized and demolished the Bunker Hill mine. Steunenberg declared martial law and asked President McKinley to “call forth the military forces … to suppress insurrection.” The army arrived again. Some seven hundred miners and supporters were arrested, hauled before secret courts, and interned in makeshift concentration camps known as “bull pens.”

  The WFM in Idaho was shattered. Steunenberg was damned by union men, but the grateful mine owners bankrolled his business ventures. “A little sporadic violence … has been met by a vastly more dangerous and more infamous infraction of the law by the constituted authorities who took their orders from the employers … quite as rough, quite as lawless and quite as overbearing as any of the miners,” the journalist Willis Abbot reported to Lloyd.6

  THE STRUGGLE SHIFTED to Colorado, where labor had scored some initial success with passage of a law mandating an eight-hour day. When the pro-business judges of the state supreme court declared the measure unconstitutional, the voters amended the state constitution to allow it. But the corporate interests then blocked the implementing legislation. The union men were embittered; democracy seemed a fraud. “What is the use of your ballots anyway?” WFM president Charles Moyer asked. “You might as well tear them up.”7