Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (19 page)

Darrow was called to Joliet. He put Altgeld’s coffin on the train and took it back to Chicago. The body lay in state in the Chicago Public Library and thousands of mourners, despite the cold and snow, paid their respects. Darrow would give several memorial speeches in the weeks after his friend’s death. Some were long rebuttals of the governor’s critics. But his eulogy at the family funeral, held at Altgeld’s home, was the simplest and the best.

“Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. She will have nothing from him who will not give her all,” Darrow said. “But once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes has burned into the victim’s heart he will know no other smile but hers.

“Today we pay our last sad homage to the most devoted lover, the most abject slave, the fondest, wildest, dreamiest victim that ever gave his life to liberty’s immortal cause,” he said.

Altgeld had made Darrow’s career. He had gotten him jobs and clients and fees, introduced him to national politics, offered wise counsel, and molded his ethics and principles. Other than Amirus, no human being had done more to influence and guide Clarence Darrow. He would be missed.

“My dear, dead friend, long and well have we known you, devotedly have we followed you, implicitly have we trusted you, fondly have we loved you,” said Darrow. “The heartless call has come, and we must stagger on the best we can alone.”
¹⁸

Chapter 6

LABOR’S LAWYER

Laws do not execute themselves in this world.

O
n a mid-November day in 1902, Clarence Darrow climbed into the elevator cage at a Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company mine in northeastern Pennsylvania, grasped the iron bars, and sucked in his breath as he plunged into the earth. When Darrow left the cage, a quarter of a mile beneath the surface, he entered a warren of twisting gangways and steep-pitched tunnels, where bent, filthy men mined coal. Dressed in grimy overalls, their faces smeared with coal dust, standing, often, in shin-deep water, small groups of Britons, Slavs, or Italians worked by the light of the oil lamps affixed to their caps. They used hand drills and augers to open holes in the rock, which they packed with black powder and detonated. Then, with picks, they worked the shattered face, loading chunks of coal into rail cars. The air was damp, and stank of sulfur. The dust clogged the men’s lungs, inducing black lung disease. Cave-ins mangled the miners, or crushed them to paste; poisonous carbonic gases killed men in moments. A mixture of coal dust and methane, known as “firedamp,” fueled fiery explosions that roared down the tunnels with cyclonic power, tossing coal, timber, tools, mine cars, mules, and men. In the Pennsylvania anthracite fields, the miners died at a rate of ten per week.

Anthracite was a dense, clean-burning coal, prized for home heating, and so an essential commodity. The great financier
J. P. Morgan was among those who recognized the value of “black diamond,” and led the railroad interests that bought up 90 percent of the anthracite fields. They paid the mine workers, on average, a little more than a dollar a day. The
miners had gone on strike, an epic confrontation was at hand, and they had hired Darrow to be their advocate.

Henry Lloyd was with Darrow on the day they toured the mine. It was a dreadful experience, Lloyd said, “like a foretaste of the Inferno.”

“You might as well get used to it,” Darrow told him. Heaven was reserved for Wall Street financiers. Infidels like themselves would be rooming with Satan.
¹

T
O SUPPLEMENT THEIR
wages, the coal miners sent their daughters to work in the textile factories and silk mills that were built nearby to capitalize on the ready supply of
child labor. The boys in the mining towns left school at the age of eleven or twelve to work in the breakers, towering frame buildings that housed rollers and crushers and chutes. The boys sat above the chutes and, as the coal tumbled beneath them, leaned down to pluck out worthless slate and rock. Some of the older or maimed men, their years in the mines ended, joined them—all subject to an overseer who would lash them with a stick if they dallied. They worked ten hours a day, six days a week.
²
Darrow was drawn to their plight and wrote a story—“The Breaker Boy”—published by the
American
.

One day his little companion who always sat beside him leaned too far over as he picked the slate. He lost his balance and fell into the trough where the lumps of coal ran down. He plunged madly along with the rushing flood into the iron teeth of the remorseless breaker … It took a long while to stop the mighty machine, and then it was almost an hour before the boy could be put together into one pile. Several days thereafter a man in a little town in Massachusetts thought that he saw blood on some lumps of coal that he was pouring into the top of his fine nickel-plated stove—but still there is blood on all our coal—and for that matter on almost everything we use, but a man is a fool if he looks for other people’s blood.
³

T
HE MINERS WERE
tough men. They organized unions and secret societies that included—until a Pinkerton detective infiltrated the group
and helped the authorities hang twenty of them—the infamous
Molly Maguires. There was more violence in 1897, during a strike organized by the fledgling United Mine Workers union, when nineteen miners were shot dead and dozens were wounded as a sheriff’s posse in Latimer, Pennsylvania, opened fire on a peaceful protest march. The militia was dispatched, and the strike collapsed. The UMW had met with success during the presidential election of 1900, thanks to the leadership of young
John Mitchell, who had taken over its presidency at the age of twenty-eight. Senator
Mark Hanna of Ohio, the Republican campaign chairman, wanted to keep homes warm that fall and used the prospect of a Bryan victory to persuade Morgan and the operators to meet the union’s demands. But the coal companies bided their time. Two years later they moved to crush the union. And some 147,000 miners walked off the job in May 1902.

“Our organization will either achieve a great triumph or it will be completely annihilated,” Mitchell wrote the union organizer
Mother Jones. The first two casualties were strikers, shot down by the industry’s private security troops. The militia returned to the district with orders to shoot to kill. But the scales shifted in autumn’s chill. As the midterm elections neared, the Republicans grew frantic about the political fallout of rising coal prices and shortages.

One railroad president,
George Baer, aided the miners’ cause when he assured a worried clergyman that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for … by the Christian men of property to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.” Baer’s letter, reprinted in newspapers around the nation, captured the arrogance of the robber barons at a moment when middle-class Americans were beginning to show more sympathy toward labor. “A good many people think they superintend the earth,” said the
New York Times
, “but not many have the egregious vanity to describe themselves as its managing directors.”
⁴

In Washington, President Roosevelt grew anxious. “I fear there will be fuel riots of as bad a type as any bread riots we have ever seen,” Roosevelt wrote a friend. He dreaded the responsibility of imposing order with violent measures “which will mean the death of men who have been maddened by want and suffering.” The president called the union leaders and the mine owners to Washington. Mitchell was a conservative trade unionist who recognized that the union’s fate lay with public opinion. He had
a calm and modest deportment and deferred to Roosevelt. The operators sulked like brats. No American president had intervened in a labor dispute, except to crush strikers. “I now ask you to perform the duties invested in you as President,” the coal industry’s
John Merkle told Roosevelt, “to at once squelch the anarchistic conditions of affairs existing in the anthracite coal regions by the strong arm of the military at your command.”

Mitchell behaved “with great dignity,” Roosevelt recalled. “The operators, on the contrary, showed extraordinary stupidity and bad temper, did everything in their power to goad and irritate Mitchell, becoming fairly abusive in their language to him, and were insolent to me.”

Roosevelt’s combative nature allowed but one response; he threatened to send federal troops to seize the mines. A week later, Secretary of War
Elihu Root met with Morgan on the billionaire’s yacht, the
Corsair
, to broker a deal. The miners would return to work, and a federal commission would hold hearings and impose a binding settlement. It was a momentous day. An American president had interceded in an economic dispute on behalf of labor.

“Industry had grown. Great financial corporations … had taken the place of the smaller concerns,” Roosevelt wrote, explaining his actions in his memoirs. “A few generations before, the boss had known every man in his shop … he inquired after their wives and babies; he swapped jokes and stories.

“There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who controlled the anthracite industry, and the … men who worked in the mines,” said Roosevelt.

The result was “a crass inequality in the bargaining relation,” the president said. “The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies … could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner … however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.”

“A democracy can be such, only if there is some rough approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it,” said Roosevelt. “This the great coal operators did not see.”
⁵

L
LOYD OFFERED TO
assist the miners and urged Mitchell to hire Darrow as the lead attorney. It was not a lawsuit where a jury of citizens
might be swayed by a spirited appeal. The seven-man commission was led by a federal judge and had but two members with evident sympathy toward labor. It might not be “a Darrow case,” Lloyd worried. Indeed, Darrow had just made headlines for calling Roosevelt a “brutal murderer” in the war with Spain. But Mitchell found he liked Darrow, put aside the objections of some of his advisers, and hired him.
⁶

The opening act took place in November, at the Lackawanna County courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania, beneath the chandeliers of the second-floor courtroom of the Superior Court. Dressed alike in judicial black, the seven commissioners took their places in leather chairs. Mitchell, garbed in his own long black coat and black tie, bowed respectfully and read an opening statement. He was calm and forceful, though when he described the hard lives of the miners, his voice trembled. If they could earn just $600 a year, Mitchell said, the miners could leave their children in school, where they could learn the skills to better themselves.

When Mitchell finished, he took the witness stand, and Darrow led him through a brief series of questions before the coal company lawyers rose to cross-examine. It was clear, from the start, that both sides viewed the hearings as a battleground for public support. Darrow and Mitchell dwelled on the inhumane conditions, exploitative wages, and dangers of mining coal. The lawyers for the industry strove to paint the miners as selfish, violent Reds. Their lead attorney, and the toughest interrogator, was
Wayne MacVeagh, a former U.S. attorney general.

“Don’t you know as well as you know your name is
John Mitchell that in spite of the authorities of this city, of this county, and of this state, this whole region has been treated for five months to a veritable foretaste of hell?” MacVeagh asked.