Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (14 page)

“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.

It was no easy marriage; a dispute over the party platform shattered the unity at an organizational meeting in Chicago. Republicans and Democrats dispatched toughs to Populist gatherings, who roughed up delegates as the police looked the other way. Yet Altgeld persevered, and Darrow was his instrument, serving on the Cook County central committee of the newborn People’s Party.
¹³

In September, the Populists held their first big rally at the Central Music Hall. Several thousand members stomped the downtown streets in a torchlight parade, and Debs and
Ignatius Donnelly, a national leader, gave speeches. A week later, Darrow chaired another big gathering at
the hall, where the crowd heard him read from the radical poet
William Morris:

    
O why and for what are we waiting? While our brothers droop and die
,

    
And on every wind of the heavens a wasted life goes by
.

    
How long shall they reproach us where crowd on crowd they dwell
,

    
Poor ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell?

In October, it was Darrow’s turn as headliner. Men shouted, women fainted, and thousands battled with police before being turned away from the sold-out auditorium. “It was an audience of plain people, orderly, earnest and grave of face,” the
Tribune
reported, with more than a few “well-dressed comely women” eager to see Darrow. Inside, seven thousand were entertained by the Ladies Zither Club Orchestra. Then, as he rose to speak, hundreds climbed onto the stage and gathered around and behind him. He roughed up the Republicans, then turned, with relish, to Cleveland.

“I amongst the rest fondly believed that some of the pledges made in the Democratic platform would be kept. We trusted them with our aspirations, with our votes, with the political destiny of this country,” he said. “We trusted that they would make some effort to correct some of the abuses that had built up a country of masters and slaves.”

But “if the Administration of the Democratic Party has stopped long enough in its allegiance to Wall St. to give the workingman the slightest attention … I have failed to find that act,” said Darrow. “The demands of the East were complied with, and the interest of the millions who labor with their hands were trampled upon, for the benefit of the few who own the property and credits of the world.”

When Cleveland sent the army to break the railroad union it was “the most dangerous act ever committed by any President,” Darrow said, and “a precedent which some day may furnish a door for some ambitious ruler to ride over the liberties of the people, and the ruins of the Republic, to a dictator’s throne.…

“Mr. Cleveland has an Attorney General.” The audience hissed.

“He is a Democrat.” (More hisses from the audience.)

“Some of you may know his name.” (More hisses.)

“Your children will not.” (Laughter and applause.) “How does the Democratic Party of Illinois stand on this question today? Where does the Democratic Party of Illinois stand, with Cleveland or Altgeld?”

“Altgeld!” the crowd shouted. “Altgeld!”

And then, in closing, Darrow turned to his hopes, and those of his fellow Populists.

It may be that the platform of the party is not perfect. I presume that it is not. We may be out upon the sea in a leaky boat manned by visionists and cranks, that will sail but a little way before it meets the rocks and sinks forever.

But as for me, I would rather sail upon a raft out into the wildest and most tempestuous sea, beneath the blackest skies, moved only by the desires and hopes of those on board than to rest securely in the staunchest ship, anchored to the creeds and errors of the past.

It may be that we are dreamers … it may be that the land we seek is a far-off Utopia which lives only in the imagery of enthusiastic minds.

But not all ideals are simply visions. We have made them real in the past, we will make them real in the days to come.

Today the privileged institutions of America, fattened by unjust laws and conditions, boastfully proclaim that monopoly is king.

But I hear a voice rising loud and louder from the common people, long suffering and over patient, a voice which says in thunder tones, “Not monopoly but the People are king!” And that these people, emancipated and aroused, will one day claim their own.

Darrow rushed about the city, speaking for candidates like Lloyd, who was running a long-shot race for Congress, and battling his old pals in the Democratic machine, who had formed a “People’s Party Populist” ticket and tried to get it on the ballot in the place of the authentic Populists. It was an old Chicago trick, and Darrow foiled the plot.

The Populists capped their campaign in Chicago with a massive torchlight parade on November 3. Brass bands and fife-and-drum corps made the marching music, skyrockets and Roman candles lit the sky, and wagons bore transparencies—illuminated billboards—proclaiming, “The
People Are Coming.” Some twenty thousand tramped the streets, carrying signs, cheering, and honking horns. Darrow was among the speakers at the rally that followed, at Tattersall’s amphitheater. The crowd was so loud that he despaired of being heard. “Nothing but a trumpet or a fog horn could make any impression,” he would recall. But for all the excitement that it stirred, the Populist initiative in Chicago was a crushing disappointment. “It looked as if all Chicago was there,” Darrow recalled, “but if it was, most forgot to vote.”
¹⁴

In Illinois, and across the nation, the share of the vote claimed by Populist candidates rose in that off-year election. But the People’s Party was inadequately funded. The major newspapers were hostile. Catholics were alienated by the socialist jargon. Leading liberals like
Samuel Gompers and
Henry George kept their distance. And the big-city organizations, with money, patronage, and control of the election machinery, held their own. The Republicans were the real victors, as voters disenchanted with the Democrats clung to the two-party system. “Can anything be done … before liberty is dead?” Darrow wrote to Lloyd. “This is one of the days I feel blue.”

Lloyd tried to cheer him up. “Where the plutes are wrong is in their folly of supposing that they can cure … by force. They are as blind as the fools of power have always been,” he told Darrow. “The radicalism of the fanatics of wealth fills me with hope.” The 1894 contest had shown a way for the “Popucrats”—a coalition of the common man that would wrestle the Democratic Party from Cleveland and Wall Street and return it to the masses. “The revolution,” Lloyd said, “has come.”
¹⁵

Altgeld, too, was undeterred. He decided that the vehicle to crush Cleveland was the “free silver” issue—the demand that the United States base its currency on silver as well as gold. Because tight-money policies favored banks and creditors, Altgeld “always believed that … the demonetization of silver was a crime against the debtor and the poor,” said Darrow. As an economic prescription, Altgeld knew “that this question was magnified out of its true importance,” Darrow acknowledged, but as a potent political tool, the
silver issue had no rival. It became a vessel for a wide range of class and regional grievances. It was West versus East, and poor versus rich, and farmer versus banker. Tugged each way were workers and shopkeepers and middle-class professionals, whose
yearning for stability warred with their resentment against the commercial oligarchs.

In the middle, as well, was Illinois. The two electoral giants, New York and Pennsylvania, were reliably for gold and
Grover Cleveland, but if Altgeld could turn Illinois and the Midwest to silver, he could make his revolution. So Altgeld labored. So did Darrow, who shook off his blues and chaired the Chicago’s People’s Party 1895 convention, where he was chosen by acclamation to run for mayor. He had declined the nomination, citing the burden of his law practice.

The Illinois Democrats now split in two. Altgeld called for a Democratic “silver convention” to swing the party to the cause. Cleveland’s supporters, known as “gold bugs,” organized the “Honest Money League” in response.

The
Iroquois Club was shattered. Altgeld “is a good hater, and hates Mr. Cleveland so bitterly I am satisfied he started this agitation,” federal postmaster
Washington Hesing, a gold bug, declared at a meeting. When Darrow stood to defend the silver movement, hecklers interrupted him, demanding to know if he was still a Democrat.

“Find one word or one line which Thomas Jefferson ever wrote in favor of a gold standard,” Darrow challenged them, “or which any Democratic President ever uttered or supported up to the days of King Grover.”

His foes cried, “Shame! Shame!”

“A fig for your cries of ‘Shame!’ It is true,” said Darrow. “No person disputes the historical proposition that gold and silver were the constitutional legal money of the United States, that the mass of indebtedness that exists today, private, municipal and national, was contracted to be paid in gold and silver alike.”

The meeting ended in tumult. Postmaster Hesing and former mayor
John Hopkins almost came to blows in the club dining room, and might have had not Hesing grown so angry that he lapsed into his native German, mystifying Hopkins, who understood that he was being insulted but did not know exactly how.

The 1896 presidential election now commanded Darrow’s attention. Altgeld set out to seize control of the party at the Democratic national convention in Chicago that July, with a platform that called for a gold-and-silver-backed currency, safeguards for the right to strike, enactment
of an income tax, and other Populist planks. “It was a great revolutionary document,” said Darrow, which “breathed a spirit of defiance to the tyranny of the rich.” Never had a political party so repudiated its own incumbent president.

Yet Altgeld lacked a candidate; he was prevented from running for president himself. “It is a pity that Gov. Altgeld was not born on American soil,” said the
New York Times
. “He is their logical candidate, as he is their actual leader.” He and Darrow could only watch as Bryan roused the crowd in the platform debate, his roar reaching to the farthest corners of the Coliseum.

There were two great theories of government, Bryan said. One claimed that “if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.” But “the Democratic idea,” he said, was “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

Bryan defined the Democrats as the party of the little guy—the wage earners, small-town shopkeepers, miners, and farmers—and heaped scorn on the merchants of the East. “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world … the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere,” Bryan said, and now he was stepping back from the podium, and raising his arms, as in benediction, “we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then the Coliseum erupted. “Bryan did something to your spinal cord,” Darrow said. It was “the molten expression of pent up wrath against evils conterminous with the government,” said Masters. “Political idealism never had so thorough, so unimpeachable a presentation.” Altgeld held his cards for four ballots, as Bryan slowly picked up strength and other candidates fell away. Finally, on the fifth round of voting, Altgeld announced that Illinois would vote for Bryan; it triggered the cascade that gave him the nomination. It was the unmatched trick of American political history: with a single speech, a baby-faced thirty-six-year-old congressman had seized a presidential nomination, and turned his party in a new direction. “It was the first time in my life and in the life of a generation,” wrote journalist William
Allen White, “in which any man large enough to lead a national party had boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and the oppressed.”
¹⁶

B
RYAN FACED MANY
handicaps as he entered the fall election. He was young and inexperienced. The press was allied against him—the
New York Times
called him an “irresponsible, unregulated, ignorant, prejudiced, pathetically honest and enthusiastic crank”—and the gold bugs ran their own candidate and split the Democratic vote. Republican boss
Mark Hanna raised millions of dollars and outspent his foes, twenty to one. “Never were so many fraudulent votes cast,” Carter Harrison Jr. recalled. Every time Hanna ran out of money, the Republicans dispatched another trainload of currency, said Altgeld, and “debauched a continent.”