American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (35 page)

Dozens and dozens of questions. Each was hurled like a sharp spear: an armory of doubts. But Franklin was never the real target. Darrow’s only hope was to pierce the jury’s certainty.

Still, as Darrow kept doggedly at it, it must have been hard going. For he knew Franklin had been telling the truth. And that he was guilty.

And then it was August 14 and time for the closing arguments. Inside the courtroom every chair was filled, and in the rear people stood shoulder to shoulder. Another thousand spectators jammed the corridor outside, pushing and shoving in the sweaty heat to get in. The bailiffs closed the doors, but that only incited the crowd. They surged forward. A woman fainted. People were having difficulty breathing; there was a solid mass of bodies with little space for any air. But the crowd was determined. They pushed, shoulders banging and banging against the locked but quivering courtroom doors. So the bailiffs raised their truncheons and waded into the turmoil. It was madness and confusion, but still the crowd wouldn’t disperse. They wanted to hear Darrow, and only when he rose and walked slowly toward the jury box did they fall into a sudden and absolute silence.

The old warrior began with his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his voice as low and weak as a small child’s moan. He seemed uninterested in arguing the facts of the case. Instead, his words were a valedictory. He summed up the life he had lived and the causes he had believed in. He wanted people to know the choices he had made, and the deep pride these decisions still gave him. He was addressing the jury, but he might just as well have been explaining to himself why he had done what he had. His was a confident, defiant tautology.

Darrow started at 2:22
P.M.
and continued without stop until the judge recessed for the evening. The next morning he resumed as if he had simply paused in midsentence. And with this heartfelt fluency he continued until the bells at St. Vincent’s Cathedral a block away tolled noon and he had had his final say.

It was a masterwork, a song of constant passion. His own intimate tribute to his life.

He argued:

“What am I on trial for, gentlemen of the jury? You have been listening here for three months. If you don’t know, then you are not as intelligent as I believe. I am not on trial for having sought to bribe a man named Lockwood. There may be and doubtless are many people who think I did seek to bribe him, but I am not on trial for that. I am on trial because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I have stood by labor all these years, and have brought down on my head the wrath of the criminal interests in the country.”

He cajoled:

“Do you suppose they care what laws I might have broken? I have committed one crime, one crime which is like that against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. I have stood for the weak and the poor. I have stood for the men who toil. And therefore I have stood against them.”

He apologized:

“Now gentlemen, I am going to be honest with you in this matter. The McNamara case was a hard fight. Here was the district attorney with his sleuths. Here was Burns with his hounds. Here was the Erectors’ Association with its gold. A man could not stir in his house or go to his office without being attacked by these men ready to commit all sorts of deeds . . . We had to work the best we could.”

_____

He offered dignity to the McNamaras:

“I would have walked from Chicago across the Rocky Mountains and over the long dreary desert to lay my hand upon the shoulder of J.B. McNamara and tell him not to place dynamite in the
Times
Building . . .

“Lincoln Steffens was right in saying this was a social crime. That does not mean it should have been committed. But it does mean this: It grew out of a condition of society for which McNamara was in no wise responsible. There was a fierce conflict in this city exciting the minds of thousands of people, some poor, some weak, some irresponsible, some doing wrong on the side of the powerful as well as the side of the poor. It inflamed their minds—and this thing happened.

“Let me tell you, gentlemen, and I will tell you the truth. You may hang these men to the highest tree; you may hang everybody suspected; you may send me to the penitentiary if you will; you may convict the fifty-four men indicted in Indianapolis; but until you go down to fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again. They will come as the earthquake comes. They will come as the hurricane uproots the trees. They will come as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air. We are a people responsible for these conditions, and we must look results squarely in the face.”

He cried, tears racing down his face:

“I know my life. I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect. It has been human, too human. I have felt the heartbeats of every man who lived. I have tried to be the friend of every man who lived. I have tried to help in the world. I have not had malice in my heart. I have had love for my fellow men. I have done the best I could.”

_____

As he finished, the jury wept unashamedly along with him.

At 9:20 the next morning, the judge offered a final word of advice to the jury. “May God give you the wisdom to see the right and the courage to do the right.” Then the twelve men went off to decide Darrow’s fate.

Forty minutes later the jury returned.

“What does it mean?” Ruby asked her husband.

“Maybe they want some instructions,” he said. The trial had lasted three months. There were five thousand pages of transcripts in eighty-nine volumes. It seemed impossible that a verdict could have been reached so quickly.

Judge Hutton addressed the jurors: “Your pleasure?”

“A verdict,” said Foreman Williams.

“You may read it.”

The foreman paused and then spoke in a loud, clear voice: “Not guilty!”

At lunchtime the celebration moved from the courtroom to the nearby Café Martan. A photograph was taken of the victory luncheon, and it remains a revealing memento. There is Ruby in a wide-brimmed dark hat, hair pulled up to reveal a long stately neck, and her face is radiant. With the verdict, her worries lifted. Next to her is Darrow. A lock of hair falls carelessly over his forehead as he bends to read the afternoon papers’ reporting on the verdict. He has been vindicated, but there is no look of triumph on his face. His pouchy face is set in stern resolve. He was judged not guilty, but he knew he was not innocent. It is the face of a man who understands how narrow was his escape and who realizes the responsibilities he must assume. With today’s verdict, the McNamara case was finally over. He must now find the spirit to move forward with the flow of history. And standing behind Darrow, her sharp eyes craning over his shoulder as she attempts to read the newspaper he’s holding, is Mary Field. Hers is a secret smile, for she also knows the truth. She, too, knows how close Darrow came to giving in. She knows he has been blessed. Mary and Darrow are no longer lovers. But some ties remain, and at this moment it’s as if she’s looking at him filled with a wondrous question: What will my Darrow do with this unexpected gift of the rest of his life?

FORTY-FIVE

____________________

A
MERICA BEGAN TO CHANGE
. With the verdict and the end at last of the McNamara case, it was as if the national equilibrium had been restored. Politics became less rancorous. Terror no longer seemed a sustainable ideal. Strikes continued, but the class war had eased; a new civil war pitting labor against capital no longer seemed a possibility. Entrepreneurial opportunities took shape, and they spread through the nation’s cities and towns as a more hopeful alternative to the desperation of violence. Another harbinger: Just three months after the acquittal in Los Angeles, the progressive idealist Woodrow Wilson was elected president. The country was on its way to becoming a different place. And swept along by this transforming flow of modern American energy, Darrow became a movie star.

Frank Wolfe, the McNamara defense team’s publicist and Socialist city council candidate, had written and directed an epic. Released in 1913,
From Dusk to Dawn
was a five-reel extravaganza with a cast of more than ten thousand, a rambling story about love and politics. And it was a film, as Wolfe was the first to acknowledge proudly, that would not have been possible without the precedent of D.W.’s genius.

The Biograph movies had been Wolfe’s entire film education. He had sat in the dark and watched and learned. D.W. had taught him that moving pictures could tell a story, and that the story could have a moral and intellectual force. He had been seduced by D.W.’s new aesthetic. Close-ups, cross-cutting, realism, star performers—Wolfe had unashamedly purloined an innovative cinematic grammar from the Biograph one-reelers.

Wolfe was D.W.’s child, but—his own great intellectual gift—his political passions and experiences ran deeper than his teacher’s. And from this hard-won knowledge, he created a film that was a product of its unique moment in American history. It was a story fundamentally about justice. Its tacit message: After the years of terrorist bombings, twentieth-century America needed to find the moral wisdom to do things in a better, more equitable way.

Dusk
told a wonderfully hopeful yarn. Iron molder Dan Grayson and laundress Carlena Wayne fall in love and battle for better wages and working conditions. Cavalier managers fire them both. A resolute Dan, however, fights backs—not with bricks or bombs but with nonviolence. He organizes the workers. Marching in orderly formations, hands firmly clasped and mouths shut in a defiant silence, the strikers refuse to be intimidated by management. And they triumph. The laundries and iron foundries become more reasonable places to work. In recognition of this accomplishment, Dan is persuaded to run for governor on the Socialist ticket. The workers flock to the polls, and Dan wins in a landslide. The movie ends with this vision of a peaceful, democratic solution to the inequities in American life; and Dan and Carlena, their hands entwined in a lovers’ secure grasp, vow to “become comrades for life.”

Visually, the film is a spectacle. Wolfe’s ambition was purposefully large. He staged rallies bursting with people, panning his camera over thousands of extras. He interspersed into the narrative actual footage of the masses marching in Labor Day parades, of line after line of stolid picketers staring down real-life management goons, of rows of dismal tenements. The total effect is visceral: The movie is as sprawling, tumultuous, and momentous as the first decade of the twentieth century.

And the film is filled with stars. Wolfe, though, cast from a different yet no less distinguished troupe than his mentor. In
Dusk
labor leaders and Socialist politicians play themselves. But it is Darrow, the instinctive actor, whom the camera adores. He steals the movie.

True, Darrow’s part is deliberately tailored to his strengths. But this accommodation makes his performance no less riveting. After Dan’s nomination for governor, his wary enemies frame him. He is put on trial for conspiracy charges, and the legendary Darrow arrives to handle the defense. Rumpled yet charged with a remarkable fervor, staring into the camera with a fierce light in his eyes, Darrow delivers a spellbinding speech to the jury. It is, word for passionate word, taken directly from the redeeming summation he made at his own trial. Of course, Dan is acquitted too.

Dusk
was an unexpected commercial success. In New York it was booked into the entire Loews chain, and a half-million people saw it. In Chicago and nearby towns, it played in forty-five theaters in two weeks and set attendance records. From there it moved on to movie theaters around the country.

And so the ideas flowed, from politics to art and back to politics and on and on across the nation, in a recurring circuit of relevance and inspiration. D.W.’s prophecy that movies would become “a new force in the intellectual world as revolutionary as electricity” was more than a poetic simile. The current of energy now coursing through American life was inescapable and transforming.

And just as the student had learned from the master, D.W. learned from Wolfe, too. He now dreamed of creating a spectacle. He wanted to bring the scale and drama of the nation’s defining moments to the screen. But first he would have to break with Biograph.

When he returned from California, D.W. found the new studio in the Bronx a disappointment. The commercial success of his films had paid for the two huge indoor stages—one artificially lit, the other a daylight studio—as well as officelike dressing rooms and oversize prop and wardrobe rooms. But it gave him no pride. He found the structure numbing, as dreary as a factory. He was an artist, and when he walked into the new building, he felt his spirits sink.

The studio heads sensed this resentment; and cautious and ungrateful, they were quick to encourage it. D.W. was making them uncomfortable. The scale of his filmmaker’s vision had grown too large. It scared them. It was too ambitious and therefore too expensive.

Jeremiah Kennedy, Biograph’s chief money man, made the studio’s position clear. “The time has come for the production of big fifty-thousand-dollar pictures,” he told D.W. “You are the man to make them. But Biograph is not ready to go into that line of production. If you stay with Biograph it will be to make the same kind of short pictures that you have in the past. You will not do that. You’ve got the hundred-thousand-dollar idea in the back of your mind.”

Kennedy was right; and without bitterness D.W. left. He decided to align himself with Harry Aitken’s Mutual Films. “Mutual Movies Make Time Fly” was the independent studio’s slogan. But with ruthless determination D.W. was preparing to make a film that did much more than that.

Just days before his deal with Mutual was announced, a full-page ad appeared in the
New York Dramatic Mirror.
The ad was signed by Albert H.T. Banzhaf, who identified himself as “counselor at law and personal representative.” But D.W. was the advertisement’s guiding force.