Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (8 page)

Many in the community were struck by Darrow’s speaking skills, his wry sense of humor, and his restless, inquiring mind. George Schilling was a prominent trade unionist when he encountered Darrow at a gathering of freethinkers. The other speakers had gone too far in mocking the ministry of Jesus Christ, and Darrow “jumped in, and with a ten-minute speech defended the carpenter’s son of Judea with such a sympathetic, persuasive voice that I fell in love with him,” Schilling recalled. “We became fast friends.”

Though Darrow admired Christ’s teachings, he doubted his divinity, and was a regular with Schilling at the Secular Union. It had been organized to oppose the “infliction” of religion on secular society, and met, appropriately, in an abandoned church. “The religion for which we are struggling and which must prevail in the future is not based upon … a Supreme Being,” Darrow told a standing-room-only crowd of nonbelievers at Easter in 1888. “But … a foundation deep in human reason.”

Here, Darrow expressed the deterministic philosophy that would guide him all his life. “The worst of all cruel creeds and of all the bloody wrongs inflicted by the past can be found in the barbarous belief that man is a free moral agent,” he said.

“The political and religious rulers of the world have ever taught that each individual possessed the power to choose the right or wrong … and if he chose the bad it was because he … preferred the sin,” said Darrow. That was ignorance, and folly. Man was but a leaf, tossed and bashed in the “great moving restless universe of which he forms so small a part.”

Darrow enlisted in the local Democracy, as the party was called, and was dispatched to Rock Island, Warren, Dixon, and other small towns on behalf of President Cleveland in the 1888 election. After an appearance at a YMCA hall in Moline, he was described as a “Chicago orator and reformer” and hailed for his “brilliant and forcible exposition.” He was not so well received when debating in Belvidere. “Poor Darrow,” the
Tribune
reported, was “completely demolished.” So, in that Republican year, was Cleveland.

Darrow sought out influential men in the community to cultivate their friendship. To the wealthy reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, Darrow sent an ingratiating note asking to “allow me to thank you for your brave and able letter in yesterday’s
Herald
. It will do much good. The cause of organized labor is fortunate in having such a champion.” Lloyd was a scholar and a journalist related through marriage to an owner of the conservative
Tribune
. With long white hair and a drooping mustache, he looked a bit like Mark Twain. As early as 1881, he had started writing about the pernicious influence of trusts and monopolies, and his 1894 book
Wealth Against Commonwealth
was a model for muckrakers to come. His home in Winnetka became a salon for radicals. It wasn’t long before Darrow was attending. “He is one of our best young lawyers,” Lloyd told a friend, “and a zealous friend of the working men.”
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L
LOYD AND
D
ARROW
would join many crusades in the coming years, but none so eruptive as that which brought them together during Darrow’s first months in Chicago—the execution of the Haymarket defendants. It was “not the first unholy verdict rendered by a jury and sustained by a court, but it is perhaps the most unrighteous,” Darrow declared.

In the fall of 1897, as three hundred policemen armed with rifles and shotguns guarded the approaches to the Cook County jail, four men cloaked in spectral shrouds dropped through the gallows and, kicking and writhing, slowly strangled to death. The hangman had erred, their necks did not break, and it took them time to die.
Albert Parsons,
August Spies,
George Engel, and
Adolph Fischer were anarchists, a word which came to evoke nihilism, but which then described a utopian philosophy.

The anarchists saw the one-sided nature of the transaction between capital and labor, witnessed the great disparity in wealth that resulted, and recognized the awful toll that the industrial age took on workers. They believed that men would rise, seize power from the ruling class, and live without government or laws. The most aggressive formed paramilitary groups like the Irish Labor Guards or the Bohemian Sharpshooters, who, before the authorities banned such activities, drilled in the parks and paraded with rifles and uniforms.

The movement’s short-term goals were modest, however, and shared by mainstream labor groups. American wage earners, using strikes and boycotts, were demanding an end to ten- or twelve-hour shifts and agitating for an eight-hour day that spring. On May 3, 1886, in a clash at the McCormick works, the police opened fired, killing several men. A protest was called for the next night at an intersection called the Haymarket.

The rally was small and orderly, but as it drew to an end, an officious police captain ordered his men to clear the street. Someone threw a bomb at the advancing police column, and in the explosion and resultant gunfire, dozens of officers were wounded, eight fatally. “Goaded to madness, the police were … as dangerous as any mob, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between the peaceable citizen and the Nihilist assassin,” the
Tribune
reported.

“Excitement was at fever heat,” Darrow recalled. The public hysteria was not limited to Chicago. In an “acute outbreak of anarchy a Gatling gun … is the sovereign remedy,” the
New York Times
advised. “Later on hemp, in judicious doses, has an admirable effect.”

None of the anarchists was conclusively tied to the furtive bomber. Six of the defendants were not at the scene that night, and the two others were on the speakers’ platform, not down on the sidewalk from where the bomb was thrown. Their crime was incitement: they were alleged to have inspired the assassin with their ideas. “There is no evidence,”
Albert Parsons wrote, “that I or any of us killed, or had anything to do with the killing … But it was proven clearly that we were, all of us, anarchists, socialists, communists … unionists. It was proven that three of us were editors of labor papers; that five of us were labor organizers and speakers at workingmen’s mass meetings … Of these crimes against the capitalist class they found us guilty.”

Judge
Joseph Gary, conducting the trial as a public spectacle (he saved seats behind his bench for stylish young ladies who giggled and ate candy), gave wide latitude to the prosecution and, with his closing instructions to the jury, ushered the anarchists to their deaths. If the defendants “by print or speech” had encouraged a murderous act, Gary told the jurors, “then all such conspirators are guilty of such murder, whether the person who perpetrated such murder can be identified or not.”
⁵

Darrow was outraged. He had arrived in Chicago in the period between the trial and the executions, and joined a group of prominent citizens urging
clemency for the defendants. Those who did so paid a price. Lloyd, a leader in the movement, was disinherited by his wife’s wealthy family.
William Black, the anarchists’ attorney, had earned the Medal of Honor in the Civil War but now was shunned. The trial “left me in debt, without a business and without a clientage, and in a community all of whose wealthy citizens were in active hostility to me,” he wrote.
⁶
Nevertheless, Darrow enlisted. In August 1887, he wrote a letter to his friends at the
Democratic Standard
in Ashtabula, recounting a visit with the anarchists in jail.

“They are a good looking intelligent lot of men. At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that I was something of a crank myself … they entered freely into conversation,” Darrow reported. “They imagine that wealth is so strong that it controls legislation and elections and that we can only abolish present evils by wiping out capital and starting over new.

“It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system, to understand how intelligent men can believe that the repeal of all laws can better the world; but this is their doctrine.”

The real issue at stake in the Haymarket case, Darrow told the folks back in Ohio, was free speech: “Whether one who advocates doctrines that the world believes to be wild and revolutionary, who wildly and generally advises killing and destroying, without however counseling the doing of a particular act against any particular person, can be held guilty of murder.

“I believe the establishment of such a doctrine would be a vital blow at freedom of speech and of the press,” Darrow wrote.

He added, as an afterthought: “You will see by this that I still retain my unfortunate habit of looking at main questions in a different light from the majority.”

“I hope you will not conclude that I am an Anarchist,” he wrote. “I think their doctrines are wild if their eyes are not.”
⁷

At the time, Darrow was a member of a single-tax group inspired by author
Henry George, who had initially supported the Haymarket defendants but now was running for political office in New York, and modulating his beliefs. He infuriated Darrow and the others by declining to publish the club’s resolution asking for clemency in his organization’s newspaper.
⁸
Darrow wrote a stinging letter to
The Solidarity
, a labor publication in New York, accusing George of cowardice.

“Think what dangers hang around free speech if a thoughtless word, a foolish sentence or an unguarded utterance may, after months or years, be said to cause another’s death,” Darrow said. He dissected the case, criticized Gary’s conduct of the trial, and finished with a flourish.

“I have my dreams of a future time when injustice and oppression will be banished from the earth; when hunger, cold and want with tattered rags, and hollow eyes, shall keep pace no more with luxury and wealth,” Darrow said. He compared the anarchists to the abolitionists, and especially
John Brown: “The image of a brave heroic man, standing calmly on the scaffold waiting for the cause he loved so well.”

“It has been ever thus,” Darrow wrote. “Sometime, when the bitter feelings of the hour are gone, justice touched with pity and regret will look down on Chicago’s barbarous feast of blood … and deal fairly by the memory of the death.”
⁹

The clash with George soured Darrow to the single-tax cause. When George came to Chicago in 1889 to speak at a gathering of the American Tariff Reform League, Darrow joined those who foiled his efforts to dominate the proceedings. In his turn at the rostrum, Darrow assailed his former hero. The solution to the country’s economic inequities was not the single tax but free trade, Darrow said, and his ringing denunciation of Republican economic policy won him wide notice, even if the next day’s
Tribune
did refer to him as “Charles” Darrow.

He was, he later conceded, “oratorical” in those days. “Commerce has been the greatest civilizer of the earth; it has called into existence the ship with her white wings and throbbing heart, and sent her laden with her freight of human souls to penetrate the mists and darkness hanging over unknown lands; it has made a chart of the trackless seas and over them its pioneers have traveled to the darkest corners of the globe with the first glad tiding of the coming morn,” he said. “It has carried the civilization, literature, art and religion of one land and showered these like the dews of heaven to coax forth the flowers of light and life from the moldy and decaying superstitions of the past.”

The Republican Party’s support for a protectionist tariff was blocking that white-winged ship of throbbing heart, Darrow said. And it enriched the master at the expense of the workingman. “What force during these years of plenty has been tearing the wife from the workman’s home and
his children from school? It is the greed of those whom your unjust laws have made rich and great that is sending fathers, husbands and brothers to the street and filling up the factories with the mother and the tender child,” he said. “In the name of humanity, has not property been protected quite enough? Shall we not do something for the poor and the weak?”

Years later, Darrow acknowledged that he had drowned “such ideas as I had” in “a cloud of sounding metrical phrases.” But to his immense satisfaction, the reaction to his speech equaled that given George. The
Herald
was among the papers that praised him. “Darrow has a strong, clear voice, a good presence, and will take front rank among the orators of Chicago,” it declared. The speech marked him as a comer, and journalists started paying attention to the “scholarly young lawyer.”

“Never again have I felt that exquisite thrill of triumph,” Darrow recalled. But he was not content; he yearned to convert ideas to action. He and Lloyd explored a scheme to buy the
Chicago Times
and provide the city with a radical labor voice. And he had been in Chicago for but a short while when he told his socialist friend Schilling: “What ought to be done now is to take a man like Judge Altgeld; first elect him mayor of Chicago, then governor of Illinois.”
¹⁰

O
F
D
ARROW’S MENTORS
,
John Peter Altgeld had the most vivid personality and the most lasting impact. “He was the first man to know there was a Clarence Darrow,” Darrow said.

Altgeld was the son of German immigrants who had settled in Ohio. At the age of sixteen he enlisted in the Union Army and after the war worked as a laborer and schoolteacher while studying law at night. He came to Chicago in 1875, made his fortune in real estate, and was elected judge. Altgeld was shy and diffident, but well read, ambitious, and intense. “His character was that of the philosopher, of the seer, of the dreamer, of the idealist” yet “there was mixed with that … the practical touch of the politician,” said Darrow. “He knew how to play to those cheap feelings which the politician uses to inspire the vulgar mob.”