Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (47 page)

At Shell Mound Park, on the shore of the bay, a band struck up the “Marseillaise” and the musicians escorted Darrow to the podium, shoving and pushing their way through the crowd, which refused to stop cheering for a full ten minutes after he took the stage. “He was dusty and travel marked,” one newsman wrote, “and those who knew him prior to the strenuous days of the McNamara cases commented on the change wrought in his face and bearing.”

Like many of Darrow’s speeches, his talk that day strolled and wandered before it got around to soaring. He had never much liked parades, he told the crowd. If he walked he got tired and dusty; if he rode he felt guilty about those who walked. And “the great question between capital and labor cannot be solved by marching,” he said. Darrow dismissed many of the remedial bandages that he and the labor movement had battled for: eight-hour-day laws, women’s suffrage, child labor legislation. “We are busy patching and tinkering, and doing a poor job patching and tinkering at that.”

The working class must seize the earth’s natural resources and the means of production, he said. “There can never be any proper distribution of wealth in the world while a few own the earth—a few men own the mines, the railroads, the forests, while the great mass of men are bound to
compete with each other for a chance to toil,” Darrow told them. “There will never be a solution until all men are capitalists and all men workingmen … there can be no peace without it.” It was a banner day, but Darrow could not hide his hurt at how Gompers had forsaken him. He urged the workingmen and -women to “stand together in these contests and … not run away from comrades who, they believe, have made a mistake.”
³

Darrow’s next stop was Portland, where Mary had preceded him. She and Sara made the rounds of newspaper offices, working as an advance team to drum up interest and shape the coverage. Darrow arrived on September 10 before leaving for Nevada and Utah, where he was to meet with
Charles Moyer and confer on a copper mining strike. He concluded an otherwise dark and gloomy speech on a note of optimism. “The earth is moving, the universe is working, all the laws of creation are working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over,” Darrow said.
⁴

Sara and Mary could not help but be impressed. “She still believes
so entirely
in him. And God knows I am glad she does,” Sara wrote Wood, who shared her suspicion that Darrow had conspired to bribe the jurors. “What is the truth—our illusions or our cold and careful speculations and analysis?” Sara wrote. “Who knows?”

“I don’t forgive Mr. Darrow’s wrong to society,” she told her lover, “but I can forgive the man out of which it came because from his composite has come his great good.”
⁵

T
HERE WAS A
lull that fall between the drama of the first trial and the battle that lay ahead. In the interim, Darrow and his friends turned their attention to romantic intrigues and the complications of their free love beliefs. Darrow had made it clear to Mary that he would not leave his wife, despite what Ruby called “our present strained uncertain mental and physical vibration.”

And so Mary found a measure of solace in the arms of
Lem Parton, a journalist who courted her in San Francisco, who took her dancing in working-class halls, on hikes through the California foothills, and for long walks along the waterfront. She was, Lem told her, a “little sparkling elf-eyed lady with that dear devilish little pagan smile, which puts the old bunk world to flight.”
⁶
Darrow kept his hooks in Mary from afar. “I do
miss you,” he wrote in October, quoting lines of poetry and offering to send her money. “How I wish I were there,” he wrote, several weeks later. “How I will miss you if you are not here.”
⁷

Sara, deeply in love with Wood (and pregnant, for a time, with their child), sought a divorce from her husband,
Albert Ehrgott, but he refused to cooperate. Wood had loaned Albert money and posed as his friend, even as he seduced his wife. Now the minister threatened to expose the adulterers. “I warned you a long time ago and begged you to avoid inoculating my wife with your ‘free love’ philosophy,” Ehrgott wrote Wood.
⁸
Sara went to Darrow for help, and he urged her to establish residency in Nevada, where a friend of his was a local judge and would grant her a divorce. Before leaving, Sara crisscrossed the state of Oregon giving speeches and organizing women in that fall’s campaign for suffrage. Oregon voters gave women the vote that year but Sara, physically and emotionally drubbed, ended it in a sanitarium in Pasadena, California, seeking to recover from exhaustion and the onslaught of tuberculosis.

Wood was not ready to leave his comfortable hearth or wife and fulfill his promises to Sara. As a serial adulterer, Wood thought it important, moreover, to settle the terms of his involvement in the freethinkers’ colony—the literary commune—that he and
Fremont Older were now organizing near Los Gatos, a village in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. Darrow, Mary,
Helen Todd, and
Lincoln Steffens had all signaled their interest in joining.
⁹

Wood had concerns. “I want you to understand this is no joke about my being an anarchist and necessarily as such a believer in all freedom including free love,” he wrote to Older. “I despise marriage as an institution. I consider it a superstition and a bond and absolutely hurtful to society and obscuring the true relation of sex—union because of absolute affinity and mutual attraction.

“At my age, I hardly expect to run a red light district or a harem, but if I should be attracted to a woman and desire her as a companion I should not hesitate to put her under my roof, and whether she was my literary companion, my secretary, my cook, my mistress, or all these together I would consider my own affair,” he told Older. “I am not at all sure that the colony would be prepared to go so far in practice though they might in theory. I am very sure Mrs. Darrow would not in either theory or practice.”
¹⁰

Indeed, Ruby was everyone’s concern. Each couple or individual at “the ranch,” as they called the commune, would have their own home but would share common areas with the rest, the better to inspire thought, debate, and creativity. The chemistry was therefore quite important. Mary was willing to put up with Ruby, but Wood was not. “I hate to seem to pick out one person always as an example, but it has come to my knowledge recently that Mrs. Darrow is objectionable to
Lincoln Steffens, as we know she is to
Helen Todd, yourself, [and] Mrs. Older,” Wood told Older. “Are we, for love of Darrow and because of his need for companionship and consolation, to introduce into this colony a personality that may negate the whole purpose?”
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Sara, too, had little use for Ruby—especially after Darrow had dispatched his wife to visit her at the sanitarium. Ruby stayed for two hours. “She is all that the Olders say, and that is pretty terrible—a pitifully shallow suspicious mind that reminds one of a narrow coffin from which she is forever removing the lid and exposing some ancient idea long since a corpse to those of us who do not accept conventional morality, ethics and standards,” Sara told Wood.

“Isn’t she awful?” Mary wrote Sara. “It is she—the revelation that she was the woman he loved—that stabbed me to the very quick. And he loves her yet—best of all—I believe. Poor, ignorant, cheap, tawdry little creature.”
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Darrow also visited Sara at the sanitarium and, notwithstanding her health, his relationship with Mary, and his friendship with Wood, once more propositioned her. Sara was troubled, emotionally and intellectually. According to the philosophy of sexual freedom that they embraced, she told Wood, Darrow was acting as a free agent, responding to his nature, and should not be condemned. Yet he evoked revulsion just the same. So she made sure, when he came, that another woman was always in the room with her. Sure enough, his visits tapered off.

“I wish I could admire him more at short range,” she wrote. “But he looks at
all
women with one idea. When he sees a woman he sees
sex
. That’s
all
. I hate it. It’s abnormal.”
¹³

A
S THE LOVERS
coped with the discovery that little in love is free, the Bain case was moving toward trial.

In the happy days that followed the Lockwood verdict, the Darrow camp had presumed that the second trial would be a formality and shrugged off ominous signs.

The first was the dynamite case in Indianapolis, where the federal government was proving that the McNamaras had not acted alone, and demonstrating how the
Times
bombing was but part of a nationwide union conspiracy to use terror as a weapon. On December 28, three weeks before Darrow’s trial was to begin, the jury found thirty-eight of the forty defendants—including Olav Tvietmoe—guilty of a conspiracy to transport explosives with illegal intent. The verdict spurred huge headlines in Los Angeles and across the country.

Mary had caused her own sensation in Indianapolis. Writing for a union journal, she denounced the “farce” of a trial “in which money, prestige, power, was the prosecutor of want and obscurity.” There was a hullabaloo in court, and the judge banned Mary from the courtroom. “The judge is a tyrannical vinegar bottle, dyspeptic, lean as an empty pea pod, for years a petty politician and … a prosecutor of the bitterest type,” she complained.
¹⁴
With her usefulness ended in Indiana, Mary returned to Los Angeles to resume work as Darrow’s operative: interceding with potential witnesses, or posing as a cosmetic saleswoman or a harried mother (using Sara’s daughter as a prop) to gain entry into the homes of potential jurors and gauge their sympathies. Lem was dismayed. “This whole business seems sinister and hopeless and you seem too fine and sweet,” he wrote her.
¹⁵

A new cast of players also promised to make the second trial more than a perfunctory exercise.
Wheaton Gray, the counsel for the M&M, had been installed as a special prosecutor. Unwilling to admit that Earl Rogers had outfoxed him, Fredericks blamed Judge Hutton for his defeat. (“We simply could not overcome the damnable atmosphere that counsel on the other side created in the courtroom,” he said. “As long as the court allowed them to do it we were helpless.”) A new judge—William Conley—would steer a different course. Whenever the lawyers “appeared on the point of indulging in inflammable personalities, Judge Conley put a quick stop to them,” the
Times
noted. There would be no “shilly shally” this time. Indeed, when the defense tried to read the forty testimonials to Darrow into the record, Conley cut the number to five.

The facts of the case contained a significant difference from those the state presented in the Lockwood trial.
Bert Franklin had given
Robert Bain a $400 bribe
before
Darrow and Steffens began to negotiate the McNamara guilty plea, and so the defense could not claim, as it had in the first trial, that Darrow had no motive for corrupting the jury.
¹⁶

And no sooner did the trial begin than it was resolutely clear that Rogers would not dominate this courtroom. Rogers was in awful shape, pale and shaking in court. After ineffectually cross-examining Bain, the lawyer disappeared for several days. Word was passed to the press that he was recuperating from an “illness” in a sanitarium. Rogers was “always uncertain at critical times,” Darrow griped in a letter to Paul.

Darrow understood the danger that lawyers face when representing themselves in court—their judgment is distorted, and every argument seems self-serving. Nor was he happy with the jury, which, he suspected, contained some hostile members. But he tried to pick up the slack, firing questions when Franklin, nervously jiggling a big gold watch, took the stand. Looming before the witness, with his hands in his pockets and head thrust forward, Darrow caught his former employee on several inconsistencies. He brought out the terms of the deal that Franklin struck with the city’s capitalists and got him to plead forgetfulness on some important details.
¹⁷

The defense wasn’t losing, but it wasn’t winning. Rogers returned to the courtroom with a flourish on February 6, announcing his intent to continue in Darrow’s defense though it meant risking death. With a nurse and a doctor standing by in an anteroom, Rogers—seemingly unable to rise from a wooden swivel chair, his arms dangling at his sides—cross-examined Lockwood and had him relate how Fredericks had schemed to entrap Darrow and then rewarded Lockwood with a job on the county payroll.

“Franklin would never have come out to bribe you at all if you hadn’t called him up and made arrangements at the orders of Fredericks,” Rogers said.

“Probably not,” Lockwood admitted.

“You got that job as a reward for testifying against Darrow … didn’t you?” Rogers said.

At the lunchtime recess, a concerned Conley came down from the
bench and ordered Rogers to withdraw. “I can’t, Judge … I’m going to do it if it kills me,” Rogers told him. But, threatened with a contempt citation, he left for two more weeks.
¹⁸

Behind the scenes, the maneuvering continued. On February 12,
George Schilling wrote to Darrow from Chicago, saying that a friend of
John Harrington had offered, for “considerable money,” to keep Harrington from testifying. The approach had been made by an investigator named Cooney, who shared an office with Harrington in Chicago and had testified in the Lockwood trial. If well paid, Cooney promised to “fix things up so that neither he nor Mr. Harrington would be witnesses.”