Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (54 page)

America had caught up to Darrow. He would spend the 1920s defending Reds and Negroes, corrupt politicians, bootleggers, and criminal fiends. He made cynical wisecracks and promoted his humanistic strain of atheism and—instead of being condemned—was lauded for it. In the Roaring Twenties, he fit right in.

D
ARROW BROKE WITH
the Wilson administration in a speech in Chicago in late 1919. The existential threat of war had passed, he told his audience, but the government retained the habit of repression. On the two days before he spoke, federal and state authorities had raided homes and meeting places in fifteen cities in search of communists and anarchists, in what came to be known as the Palmer Raids. It was the beginning of the
Red Scare.

“A strong element of society, under the cry of a sort of super-patriotism, is today doing all that can be done to crush the liberties of the American people,” Darrow warned. “They would leave it an offense to speak and to write and to print … they would seize those whom they believe to be against them, send them to jail, because they are violating the powers that be.…

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!” Darrow told the audience, quoting Thomas Jefferson and Wendell Phillips. “No man can speak his convictions, no man can write them, and no man can print them with the fear of the jail in his heart! He must speak them freely and unafraid. Even if he speaks extravagantly and wildly and foolishly, he must be left to do it freely.”
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It was a gutsy speech, which Darrow backed with action. When a band of violent anarchists asked for help, he went to their aid. The case had its roots in a bloody incident in Milwaukee during the war when, as an organist played “America,” the anarchists and police exchanged gunfire at a loyalty rally organized by an evangelical minister. Two anarchists died. Several weeks later, the police were called to the minister’s church after a suspicious package was found on the property. The parcel was taken to the station house, where, as police milled around, it exploded, killing eleven people.

In this enflamed atmosphere eleven Italian anarchists were put on trial, not for the bombing, but on assault charges stemming from the initial shootout. Though only two of them had been seen with guns, all were convicted of assault with intent to murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Darrow and Sissman took the appeal, and Darrow made the oral arguments before the
Wisconsin Supreme Court. It reversed the verdicts of nine of the defendants. The sentences of the two remaining anarchists were commuted by the governor three years later.
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Anarchism returned to the news in June 1919, when a soft spring night in Washington, D.C., was ripped by an explosion on the doorstep of Attorney General
Mitchell Palmer. The police concluded that an assassin had tripped and blown himself to pieces. Scattered in the debris were copies of a handbill from “The Anarchist Fighters” with the promise “There will have to be bloodshed.” Reports soon reached Palmer of other explosions around the country at the homes of judges and other prominent men.
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The June bombings were not the only sign of disorder. A wave of mail bombs aimed at members of Wilson’s cabinet, U.S. senators, and others had been stopped by an alert postal inspector. Race riots ripped Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Wobblies fired on a parade in the state of Washington, and in the resultant chaos one of the union gunmen was hauled from jail by a lynch mob and hanged. A general strike in Seattle,
national coal and steel strikes, and a police strike in Boston led a long list of ugly labor disputes. And in 1920, a bomb killed twenty-nine people on Wall Street.

Palmer was a square-jawed former congressman and judge who hoped to succeed Wilson in the White House. The bombing of his R Street townhouse gave him a personal motive and a political opportunity to crack down on American radicals. Federal and state authorities raided meeting places, seized and deported immigrants, and put U.S. citizens on trial for treason. “America won’t be a safe place to live in after a while,” Darrow told his old friend
Neg Cochran after a second set of mass raids on New Year’s Day in 1920. By mid-January Darrow was in Washington, lobbying against “this mad crusade against freedom,” as he described it in a letter to Debs.

America’s Reds, inspired by the revolution in Russia, welcomed the confrontation. Meeting in Chicago in the summer of 1919, in characteristic disarray, the militants broke from the staid old socialists. The new American
Communist Labor Party was led by native-born Reds like millionaire
William Bross Lloyd, journalist
John Reed, and former New York State assemblyman
Benjamin Gitlow, and dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist rule.
Emma Goldman and other noncitizens had been herded out to Ellis Island and put on a “Soviet ark” for Europe, but the Americans had rights and looked to Darrow to defend them. He quickly agreed, not because he shared their beliefs (“I am getting afraid of everyone who has conviction,” he told Mary. “I presume when the Soviets get to boss the world they will snuff out what little freedom is left”), but because of the bedrock liberties at risk.
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The first to go to trial, in early 1920, was Gitlow, who had been charged by New York officials with “criminal anarchy” for writing and publishing a “Left Wing Manifesto” in a radical newspaper. The essay outlined Marxist beliefs and predicted that the workers would one day rise against the capitalist order, but stopped short of urging its readers to start building barricades, shooting police, or throwing bombs themselves. Gitlow was the son of Russian immigrants, raised on the Lower East Side of New York in a home and community steeped in radical ideas. At their first meeting, he made it clear to Darrow that he would not recant. “I know you are innocent,” Darrow warned him. “But they have the country steamed up.” He persuaded Gitlow not to take the stand, where he would
be subject to cross-examination, but his client insisted on exercising his right to address the jury. Darrow knew what that would mean. “Well, I suppose a revolutionist must have his say in court even if it kills him,” he concluded.

Darrow expected the prosecution to excite the jurors with fearful descriptions of revolution, and so he tried to move the case along. “I want to say … so that it may save time, that my client was the business manager and on the board of this paper, and there will be no attempt on his part to deny legal responsibility for it,” he announced. But Judge
Bartow Weeks allowed the prosecutor to call witnesses to Gitlow’s actions (one of whom was arrested for her beliefs as she stepped down from the stand) and others to describe the violence inherent in revolutionary doctrine. Darrow then told the court that, though the defense would offer no testimony, Gitlow wished to address the jury.

It did not go well. Gitlow rambled on in the pedantry of a true believer (“Now, the Russian workers set up a form of government known as the dictatorship of the proletariat …”), which spurred Judge Weeks to repeatedly interrupt him, causing Darrow to object, over and again. Finally, Gitlow ended with a brave flourish: “I am not going to evade the issue. My whole life has been dedicated to the movement which I am in. No jails will change my opinion.”

Darrow tried to sway the jury with a closing argument that portrayed Gitlow as an intellectual whose ideas posed no threat, were protected by the First Amendment, and stood within American traditions. George Washington was a revolutionary, he reminded the jurors. So were Jesus Christ and John Brown. “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right to amend it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it,” said Darrow, quoting Lincoln’s first inaugural address.

“That was Lincoln,” Darrow said. “If Lincoln would have been here today, Mr. Palmer, the Attorney General of the United States, would send his night-riders to invade his office and the privacy of his home and send him to jail.

“I would place no fetters on thought and actions and dreams and ideals of men, even the most despised of them,” Darrow continued. “Whatever I may think of their prudence, whatever I may think of their judgment, I
am for the dreamers. I would rather that every practical man shall die if the dreamer be saved.”

But if Darrow made an impact with his closing address, it did not survive the bracketing it got between Gitlow’s talk and the prosecutor’s patriotic exhortation. The jurors were mannequins and the judge “a fiend,” Darrow told Mary. “There was no chance.”
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The jurors took just three hours to find Gitlow guilty, and Judge Weeks sentenced him to five to seven years of hard labor.
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D
ARROW RETURNED TO
Chicago, but he was back in the courtroom in April, defending Reds in nearby Rockford.

The Rockford case showed how far the government was prepared to go with its witch hunts. The Palmer Raids in that small factory town began at five p.m. on Friday, January 2, and continued into the predawn hours of Saturday. The police found no guns or bullets or dynamite, just a large number of immigrants, including young girls and teenage boys whose names—like Lukashevich—the locals had difficulty spelling. By the middle of the following week, the dragnet had expanded to include the town’s “intellectuals,” targeting a socialist former alderman; Dr.
Alfred Olson, a town physician whose “reading has been along the line of works of a radical and Socialist character”; and
Alice Beal Parson, a local club woman.

The account of Parson’s arrest offered a glimpse of what the good people thought was dangerous behavior. “The radical utterances of Mrs. Parson have been town talk for a long time,” the local newspaper reported. “Her activities and associations with those inclined toward revolutionary proceedings were known to all her acquaintances and friends who deplored the situation deeply, but their admonitions and friendly counsel are said to have been of no avail. She appeared to glory in her fanaticism, they said, and to live largely for the purpose of devouring ‘Red’ literature.” For this, she was prosecuted.
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The immigrants were held for deportation and the American citizens were charged under an Illinois law—a newly passed statute that prohibited citizens from advocating not just violent revolution, but “reformation” of their government via writing, speaking, joining a group, organizing meetings, or carrying banners and flags.

The prosecutors and the defense lawyers agreed to a test case, and
Arthur Person was chosen to stand trial. He was a simple factory hand, a Swedish American immigrant who was arrested without resistance as he returned home from work one day and, when asked why he was a communist, told the police that he believed the United States should be run for the workingman. He had become interested in communism through conversations with Dr. Olson, his family doctor. His wife was “known as an extremist also” and “would have been taken into custody too, but for the fact that her … little children needed her care,” the paper reported.

The prosecution put on witnesses—a newspaper reporter and a government investigator—who had attended the chaotic birth of the Communist Labor Party the previous summer but knew nothing of Person. Darrow got a laugh—and scored a point—when a local stenographer told the jury that the treasury of the Rockford communists had been all of thirty cents. “That would be only a dime apiece for the lawyers,” Darrow said, nodding at his two co-counsels, “if the treasury has not been swelled to any extent since.”

The key issue in the trial was whether Person recognized that the party he joined was advocating violent revolution. It was reasonable to believe, Darrow contended, that Americans like Person thought change would arrive in some golden future through perfectly legal means.

“Behold a party of seven obscure people going out to conquer the world with thirty cents,” Darrow told the jury. “What did these people do? Talked and dreamed … just as all these poor idealists have always done.…

“The enemies of this Republic are not the working men who give their lives and strength,” said Darrow. “The danger to this country is not from them. It is from those who worship no God but greed; it is from those who are so blind and devoted to their idol of gold that they would destroy the Constitution of the United States; would destroy freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.…

“This man is obscure, he is unknown, he is poor, he has worked all his life, but his case is one that reaches down to the foundation of your freedom and to mine,” Darrow said. “If twelve men should say that they could take a man like him and send him to prison and destroy his home … you should hang this courthouse in crepe and drape your city hall with black.”

The jury deliberated for six hours and returned a verdict of not guilty.
And Arthur Person, wrote one journalist, “went home to his wife and children and has been just as harmless to the government of the United States as before.”
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A
S GRATIFYING AS
the Person victory was, he was but a minnow in the Red Scare. The true catch—Lloyd and other leaders of the
Communist Labor Party—was prosecuted in a national show trial in Chicago, which began in May and lasted all summer.

The government crackdown on the Left was succeeding. Lloyd and his friends had not even had a year to organize their little cadre of Reds before they were tied up in court, jailed, or deported. Gitlow was dispatched to Sing Sing. Reed was in Russia, where he would soon die of typhus. That left Lloyd as the final prize.

The Harvard-educated millionaire was the son of Darrow’s old friend Henry and had inherited his father’s flair. When he was not seized in the January raids (he was spending the holidays at the family estate in Winnetka) he had invited the authorities to come and get him. “Violence is the only way,” Lloyd told a newsman. He was pleased to be indicted.
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