Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (50 page)

Darrow was happy for her. “I am sure it will be all right and if not you will both have sense enough to stop it,” he said. But he urged her to retain some independence: “Mary don’t settle down to the
conventional
married lady, but write, write.” Two years later, when she told him she and Lem were expecting a baby, he wrote: “Life isn’t worthwhile, and still we keep producing it [but] there is no joy like a child, perhaps no sorrow too.” Darrow’s feelings for Paul were heartfelt. They were business partners in the Greeley gas venture, and Darrow a happy grandfather who made time to spend holidays and summer vacations in Colorado. He wrote to Mary of “the consolation that Paul has brought.”
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C
HICAGO’S RADICALS WERE
glad to have Darrow back. The
Lawyers Association of Illinois, a group he and John Altgeld had helped found as an alternative to the staid bar association, held a banquet in his honor. More than two hundred people attended.

“They have robbed him of his fortunes; they have robbed him of his fair name, but they have not destroyed his character,” said the Reverend
John Gillan, a Catholic priest who often sent impoverished parishioners to Darrow for legal help. “Did he ever refuse to take up a case? No. They had no money; they were poor; they were down-trodden; they were suffering, but it was always a glad welcome, always a hand extended; never a refusal.”

Darrow was moved. His chest heaved as he listened, and when it was
his turn to speak, the members of his audience had to strain to hear. He began on a self-deprecating note. “I have not so very long ago heard considerable objections to myself,” he said, of his trials in Los Angeles. “I have a suspicion that neither my enemies nor my friends have told the exact truth … and still a stronger suspicion that I shall not tell it either.…

“At times I felt that I stood alone in the world, and it is not a bad feeling,” he told them. “And it is well enough for a man once in a while to feel that he stands alone and is ready to fight the world. It is good for your courage; it is good for your character.”
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Darrow was invited to speak, in those first weeks back, at the Elizabeth Cady Stanton guild, the Society for Rationalism, and the Walt Whitman fellowship, where the women in the audience scandalized the editors at the
Tribune
by lighting “dainty cigarets” after dinner.
Hamlin Garland found him “vigorous and full of fight.” He gave talks in New York and other eastern cities, visited with
Gertrude Barnum, and wrote to the unbridled
Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose bohemian friends at her Greenwich Village salon had welcomed him and urged him to relocate. “The lure of New York is still in me. It is a dangerous place for me to visit,” Darrow said. “But … the habit of procrastination is … strong and old with me.”

Darrow was not back for long before an old friend from the Secular Union, the socialist
Peter Sissman, suggested they be law partners. If he didn’t return to the courtroom, Sissman told him, it would be a “tacit admission” of guilt. Darrow agreed to split the proceeds of the new firm equally with Sissman, whose civil practice subsidized them both at first. Over time, they would be joined by the scholar
Victor Yarros, who worked as a researcher and investigator, and two young attorneys,
William Carlin and
William Holly, who would never forget the experience.

Darrow tried his first significant case in June. He took it mainly to advertise that he was back. It was an arson case in which the star witness was the firebug himself—testifying under a grant of immunity against the men who hired him to burn down their woolen goods store. Darrow told Paul there was “not a chance to win” and the jury quickly found his client guilty. He fared better in the defense of the defendant’s secretary, a naive young lady charged with perjury for helping her employer manufacture an alibi. Darrow secured a promise for a pardon from the governor, then made it redundant by getting her acquitted. “I must have made a good
speech,” he told Sissman, “because the jury was in tears and even the judge turned his face to the wall.”
⁵

A fine array of scoundrels made their way to his door. The million-dollar forger
Peter Van Vlissingen and a doctor who poisoned his wife with chloroform—Dr.
Haldane Cleminson—got Darrow to plea for reductions in their sentences. When real estate dealer
Carleton Hudson was exposed as a con man—“J. Rufus Wallingford, the Count of Coxsackie”—he hired Darrow to keep him from jail. And Darrow persuaded then-Governor
Edward Dunne to pardon
Newton Dougherty, a former superintendent who had fleeced the Peoria public schools of $700,000. Darrow saved the seventeen-year-old killer
William Rahn from the gallows, not by pleading the boy innocent by virtue of insanity but by presenting evidence of mental deficiencies and persuading a judge to show mercy. A year later, Darrow used the strategy again and kept
Russell Pethick, the crazed delivery boy, from the noose.

The work was therapeutic. “I am fairly happy, for me,” Darrow told Older. “I believe I have got over the self-pity.” But some saw a waste of his talents. Darrow had an “irresistible impulse … to help stupid and ungrateful persons who were totally incapable of applying or using the excellent advice that he always gave,” said lawyer
Harold Mulks.

Darrow was his old provocative self when he addressed the Women’s Law League, a gathering of what the newspapers called “pretty lawyer-esses.” Women were not so clever, and could “never expect the fees that men get,” he said. Why not give up on corporate law, he asked them, and build a practice “you can have solely for your own? …

“The poor man … charged with murder … can’t get a decent lawyer to defend him … Make that your field,” Darrow said slyly. “You won’t make a living at it, but it’s worthwhile and you’ll have no competition.”

He stayed in the public eye. It must have been pleasant to see himself portrayed as a hero in
From Dusk to Dawn
, a silent movie made by socialist filmmakers, based loosely on the McNamara case. (Very loosely. The workers win.) Segments of the ninety-minute drama, which mixed staged scenes and documentary footage, had been filmed during the trial in Los Angeles, with Darrow and
Job Harriman re-creating their roles in court. It had a national release, and a half-million people saw the film in New York alone.
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And in early 1914, Darrow joined another of Chicago’s well-known
defense lawyers,
Charles Erbstein, in the sensational defense of rich, petite
Louise Van Keuren and her lover, the impecunious but dashing jeweler
George Penrose.

Louise was charged with murdering her husband when he broke into the front door of an apartment as Penrose snuck out the back. In court, she wept, moaned, and collapsed on cue, and then posed for photographers. She had not recognized her husband, Darrow insisted, though the dead man had been shot from so close that he had powder burns on his face.

It took the jury an hour to free Louise. The prosecutor,
W. W. Witty, took his loss philosophically and, when reporters asked for his reaction, offered a Chicago maxim: “You can’t convict a woman of murder in Cook County, especially if she is a pretty woman.”
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D
ARROW HAD NO
such advantage in the toughest criminal case he handled in those first months back from California. An attractive white woman was the victim, and the defendant,
Isaac “Ike” Bond, was an African American.

Ida Leegson was an artist, working as a nurse to pay for her studies, who had placed an ad in the newspaper, looking for work. On an October afternoon she set out to meet a potential client. The next morning, her body was found on the prairie. She had been raped and strangled.

The search for the killer was a travesty. The initial description of the suspect was of a short white man. Then came reports that a black man had pawned Leegson’s watch in a shop on State Street, and witnesses told police of seeing a tall “copper-colored” Negro in the company of a white girl. The sensational news of her death, her naked body, and the race of her killer (“Negro Her Murderer … Girl Tortured for Hours”) made front pages across the country. It was soon open season on dark men in the Midwest. Bond, a former deputy, was questioned by police in Gary, Indiana. He went to the Chicago pawnshop to clear himself, but instead the owner fingered him as the murderer.

Critics like
Edgar Lee Masters often looked for baser motives—money, publicity—in Darrow’s willingness to defend the misbegotten. But there was no percentage in representing Ike Bond in Chicago in 1914. The city was roiled by prejudice and hate, and would erupt in an ugly race riot in the summer of 1919, in which thirty-eight people would die. Bond “had
no money, his friends had none either, and no compensation was to be counted on,” Yarros recalled. But Darrow took the case. “Most identifications are of little value unless a witness has been acquainted with the subject,” Darrow believed. “If a man is black that is identification in itself, in most minds.”

The jury was “seething” after the prosecution gave the gory details of the rape and murder. Respectable white folks—a pawnshop clerk, a railroad cop, a streetcar motorman—swore they had seen Bond in Chicago at the time of the killing. Bond’s black friends from Gary tried to give him an alibi. “The material upon which he had to rely for a defense was the testimony of several ignorant, illiterate and stupid” witnesses who gave “incoherent, rambling, uncertain and contradictory statements,” Darrow’s friend Mulks recalled. “It is practically impossible to conceive of a case where a sentence of death would appear more inevitable.”

But in closing, Darrow challenged the all-white jurors to confront their own prejudices. His eloquence worked its magic. Though they brought in a verdict of guilty, the jurors spared Bond’s life. Of the dozens of men Darrow saved from the hangman, Bond’s rescue was one of the more miraculous. Privately, even he was certain that Bond was guilty.

A few months later, in a public forum, Darrow explained his tactics. “You try to throw around the case a feeling of pity, of love, if possible, for the fellow who is on trial,” he said. If the jurors can be made to identify with the defendant and his “pain and position” they will act “to satisfy themselves.” At this point, the case is won, Darrow said. Juries will furnish their own rationalization. “If a man wants to do something, and he is intelligent, he can give a reason for it,” said Darrow. “You’ve got to get him to want to do it … That is how the mind acts.”

The ordeal in Los Angeles had changed him. That “sad, hard experience made me kindlier and more understanding and less critical,” Darrow would say. “He had been on the ropes,” said
Francis Wilson. “He knew what it was to suffer.” Not too long after the Bond trial, Darrow saved the life of nineteen-year-old
Edgar Hettinger, a psychiatric patient who had slashed the throat of a woman because he wanted money for a bicycle. Darrow persuaded a judge to accept a guilty plea, and the troubled young man escaped the noose. And when the Chicago police arrested a chronic petty criminal called “Booster” on what they called “general principles,” Darrow took up his defense. It did not matter that “Booster” had a long
record, Darrow told the judge. The police have no right to harass citizens. His client had been arrested while walking down a sidewalk. “He had done no wrong. He is accused of disorderly conduct and there is no evidence,” Darrow said, and Booster went free.
⁸

Darrow’s life was percolating again. “He is surrounded by the maim, the halt and the blind and to get an audience with him is like getting an audience with King George,” Mary told Sara after a visit to Chicago. “I cannot see that his prosecution in any way hurt him, except financially. His name draws an immense audience. His practice—half charity—is tremendous.”
⁹

He was no longer America’s leading labor lawyer, but Darrow played a role in one more notorious working-class tragedy. On Christmas Eve, 1913, in the copper-mining community of Red Jacket, Michigan, hundreds of children and their parents jammed the second-floor meeting room of a community building, the Italian Hall. The party had been organized by the wives of Finnish, Italian, and Slavic miners, members of the Western Federation of Miners who had been on strike for six months.

The boys and girls were standing in long lines to see Santa Claus or opening their gifts when a man in the crowd yelled “Fire!” The revelers panicked and rushed for the staircase that led down to the street. Some fell, causing those behind them to tumble as well. Children were trampled and squeezed to death as bodies blocked the stairway, rising to its ceiling, crushing those below them. It was over in minutes, but it took rescuers hours to disentangle the dead. Incredibly, seventy-three people—including fifty-nine children—had been killed. That night,
Charles Moyer, the head of the WFM, blamed the mining industry for the tragedy.

Bill Haywood had gone to the Wobblies, and
George Pettibone was dead. But Moyer still led the WFM. When the miners went on strike that summer, he had hired Darrow as a union negotiator. The two of them met with Governor
Woodbridge Ferris, and Darrow tried to broker a settlement with the mining companies. Each side offered some minor concessions, but violence overran the talks. The mining companies hired ruffians and detectives and organized a vigilante group called the “Citizens’ Alliance.” Two union men died when company gunmen surrounded a boardinghouse and opened fire, and on Labor Day a fourteen-year-old girl participating in a protest march was shot in the head. Union assassins
retaliated, murdering three strikebreakers in early December. Then came Italian Hall. The local newspapers accused Moyer of exploiting the tragedy, and he was cornered by a mob in his hotel room, shot in the back, dragged through the streets, shoved on a train, and told not to return.