Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (23 page)

But Whitlock was launching a political career in Toledo and so, ignoring his own insight, Darrow turned to another literary lawyer. Edgar Lee Masters was thirty-four when he joined the firm, publishing verse under
a pseudonym because of the public’s poor opinion of poets. His biggest achievement to this time was marrying the daughter of a railway executive. He was short and precise, “a man with a strange, rare mind,” Ruby thought.

Like Darrow’s, the bulk of Masters’s practice was on the civil side. Though they leaned toward the underdog, Darrow, Masters & Wilson would take either the injured plaintiff or the corporate defendant as clients. That is what lawyers did. In one notorious case, Masters defended
“Mother” Mary Lyons, who was charged with employing an underage girl at her brothel. He had been hired to do so by
Egbert H. Gold, a lecherous rich man who kept the teen quartered at the whorehouse for his personal use. That was fine with Masters, until Gold failed to pay his fee. Then Masters sued him, and publicly exposed the man’s tawdry behavior.

Masters had much in common with Darrow, maybe too much. As literary men, both were American realists. In politics, they venerated Jeffersonian principles. (Masters had a bust of Jefferson in his office.) If the poet’s father,
Hardin Masters, was not a bookish infidel like Amirus, he was still a roguish sort whose independent ways clashed with the “dour Puritanism” of their town. And Masters, too, had endured a childhood with an emotionally distant mother of New England stock. “Her cutting words, her flaming temper froze my heart,” he recalled.

As men, Darrow and Masters craved the love and attention they had missed as boys. Each dreamed of artistic fame. In the meantime, they scrapped for fees and fought for radical causes, hung out with the literary set, and cheated on their wives. Masters was a devoted patron of Chicago’s high-class whorehouse, the Everleigh Club, and wrote odes to “Maxine” and the other corseted, silk-ribboned harlots. “I had never been able to see anything wrong in erotic indulgence,” he recalled. “On that subject I was as emancipated as an animal.” Each was smart and both could be mean, but Darrow was better at disguising it. Masters was a hater.

At first, and for several years, the Darrows were charmed by the new law partner. Ruby recalled “mighty jolly” nights with Masters and his wife and other friends, sharing wisecracks over cocktails and dinner. Darrow had wooed him for some time, Masters recalled, and he had resisted. “I was in doubt about making an alliance with a lawyer who was in some quarters feared, in others detested, who was redolent of free love, anarchism,
socialism and what not,” he said. “There was something shabby about his repute, as there was a good deal shabby about his dress and his personal hygiene … His eyes in good humor were kindly and sleepy; in anger they were like Marat’s or Robespierre’s—or a rattlesnake.”

Financial woes brought Masters to heel. “I had desperate hours when my bank balance was down,” he confessed, and if he joined Darrow, “perhaps in a few years I could lay up enough to retire and write poetry.”

Darrow was the rainmaker, and by far the better man before a jury. Masters was a fine legal technician who wrote compelling appellate briefs and kept Darrow focused on the business. “I drove the human insects out of the office as their loafing place, where they sat about discussing anarchy, free love, Bryan, the coming revolution and all such things,” said Masters. “Soon the office ran as quietly as a sewing machine.” Before long, they were earning as much as $30,000 each a year—the equivalent of more than half a million dollars now—and Masters had bought a fine house in Hyde Park and was taking his wife to Europe.

Their early success masked discord.
Hardin Masters had practiced law, his son complained, “by ear, by inspiration, by great bursts of energy,” and so did Darrow. As the lead partner, Darrow would dump cases on Masters without warning and head off to a remunerative lecture date. Once, when Darrow disappeared, it cost the firm a $25,000 payday. He had a relaxed attitude toward the obligations of partnership, as well. When short on cash, Darrow would pocket a fee—in effect, stealing from the firm. Darrow’s “drawl and his sleepy ways, his humorous turns of speech, his twisted ironies made him a pleasant man to be with. He seemed an old-fashioned soul, easy and lounging and full of generosities,” Masters would recall. But “he was penurious, grasping and shrewd. According to some of the descriptions of Lincoln, those who speak of Lincoln’s cunning and his acting ability, I think he was more like Lincoln than anyone.”

“He was a radical to the outward view [while] using that pose to play with the corporations … and get money,” Masters recalled. “He was always gambling in the stock market and generally losing. It was this thirst for money that ruined him.”
⁵

And so Masters never became an intimate friend, like Altgeld, that Darrow could turn to for counsel. Lloyd was that sort of comrade, but Darrow was dismayed to discover, on the day he returned from his honeymoon,
that his friend had died of pneumonia while he was away. “I loved him as I have few people and trusted him as I did almost no one else,” Darrow wrote to Lloyd’s widow. “I can scarcely think of anything today but this.”

Masters had been with the firm a few months when he and Darrow joined in the defense of
John Turner, an anarchist from Great Britain who had been seized in New York in October 1903 and ordered to be deported under the terms of the “Anarchist Exclusion Act,” passed in the wake of the McKinley assassination. Masters wrote an elegant brief, and he and Darrow argued the case before the
U.S. Supreme Court. “No danger exists to this country from without. No danger exists to it from the … acts of Jacobites within,” they wrote. “The danger which now confronts the people of this country is the aggression of government.”

Their appearance at the Supreme Court, however, was not a good experience. Masters got up and spoke for an hour and “was greatly heckled by members of the court.” Darrow did well for fifteen minutes, Masters recalled, “then his wings wobbled.” The Court unanimously ruled against Turner. “Governments … cannot be denied the power of self-preservation,” the justices concluded.

Darrow fared better at rescuing Masters’s brother-in-law, Dr.
Carl Stone, who had been convicted under the Comstock laws and fined $500 for selling patent medicines, including the supposed contraceptive “Dr. Lefevre’s French Female Pills,” through the mail. Masters had gone to see the U.S. postal inspector on the case, who told him that “the country was full of sexual immorality” and that “the way to stop it was to have the women understand that they could not indulge themselves without taking the risks of nature.”

“I could do nothing with this violent fool,” Masters recalled. But by calling in favors at the federal courthouse, Darrow had “Dr. Lefevre” listed as “David Stone,” and the doctor was able to escape identification until a newspaper reporter, working on an unrelated story, stumbled upon the ruse two years later. When confronted, Darrow conceded he had “done all I could to shield” the Stone family. The doctor was ruined nonetheless. “Carl gasped like an animal caught by the dogs in a thicket,” Masters said. Stone drank too much, “fell into shabby adulteries,” and, after contracting typhoid fever, died.
⁶

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of December 30, 1903,
Helen Masters got an ominous phone call from her husband. “I just wanted to know if you … are home,” he said, then hung up.

Many such calls were made that day, as word spread through the Loop of a fire at the Iroquois Theatre. It was Christmas week, and the city’s new playhouse was packed for a matinee of the musical comedy
Mr. Bluebeard
. At around three fifteen p.m., the gaily costumed chorus opened the second act. Above them, a stagehand in the catwalks saw a bit of curtain touching a spotlight catch fire. The flames spread swiftly and, as burning sheets of painted scenery fell to the stage, the actors ran toward the stage door. The rush of air through the door sent a wave of fire roaring—like a cyclone, witnesses would say—out into the audience, igniting seats and clothing. Women and children writhed in agony and were suffocated in the fiery fumes, or trampled as they fled. For days the newspapers tried to help grieving families identify the bodies (“Boy—Lace shoes; black bow tie, with red dots; black stockings; about 10 years old”). More than six hundred people died. There were no exit signs, no fire alarm, and no sprinklers. No theater employee had been trained for an emergency. Skylights that might have vented the smoke were nailed shut. Segments of fire escapes were missing.

Chicago’s building commissioner had warned Mayor Harrison and the aldermen that the city’s theaters were death traps, but the matter had been referred to committee. After an inquest, the mayor, the city fire marshal, one of the theater’s owners, and others were indicted. Then, on January 12, while tempers raged and even the city’s clergymen were demanding retribution, Darrow published a letter in the
Daily News
asking the citizenry to show restraint.

“Had the theater been constructed … with the view of making life as safe as possible these dead would be still alive,” Darrow wrote, making no excuses for those at fault. “It is likewise plain that if the city officials had compelled the enforcement of the ordinances … these lives would have been safe … This terrible tragedy was the direct result of an effort to save money at the serious risk of human life.”

But “to send anyone to prison for this dire disaster could not bring
back one of the dead,” said Darrow. “It would be vengeance pure and simple and the fruits of vengeance are always evil.” In Chicago, every day, working people died while raising buildings or laboring in factories and railroad switchyards. Poorer folk lost their lives in train accidents in which wealthier customers, traveling in safer cars, emerged unscathed. “The victims of our cruel greed, with maimed limbs and broken lives, are met at every corner of the street,” Darrow wrote, “and every graveyard is sown thick with the forgotten dead whose lives have been sold for gold.…

“Grievous are the sins of this commercial, money-getting age,” Darrow concluded. “It’s neither just nor humane to lay all the cruelty and sin of a generation upon the shoulders of a few men, who are no more responsible than any of the rest.”

Darrow had friends at City Hall and clients in the theater industry. But his sentiment was authentic. He had made similar appeals when the Harrison assassination and the Haymarket case caused comparable ferment. Eventually, the criminal charges against Harrison and most other city officials were dropped. In the civil litigation, Darrow’s law firm represented families of the fire’s victims. At one point,
Nellie Carlin, who specialized in probate cases for the firm, “shattered all records” for a female attorney. The plaintiffs, however, received a cruel setback when federal judge
Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled against them on a technicality. In the end, very few of the victims’ relatives received anything.
⁷

H
ARRISON’S TROUBLES WERE
good news, at least, for William Randolph Hearst, who was running for president and contending with the mayor’s own presidential ambitions.

Purists of the Left and Right detested Hearst. The forty-year-old congressman and publisher had used his newspapers to crusade against trusts and corruption and to advance progressive causes, earning him the enmity of the moneyed class. But Hearst’s raw opportunism and his role in starting the Spanish-American war alienated as many liberals. Darrow was a realist, and Hearst was a client. So he took the view of the publisher’s working-class supporters in New York—“Hoist, Hoist, he’s not the woist!”—and helped organize the William Randolph Hearst League
in Chicago. “I cannot understand nor help regret his present political attitude,” said the appalled
Eugene Debs, when asked about Darrow’s actions.

To curry support among midwestern Democrats, Hearst had opened the populist
American
in Chicago in 1900. The antics of those who worked in the “madhouse on Madison Street,” as the Hearst building became known, added spice to the city’s already formidable, fiercely competitive journalism, and not a few of Chicago’s famous gangsters learned their craft in the violence that marked the circulation wars. When a band of Hearst “sluggers”—most of them former prizefighters—were arrested after destroying a newsstand, beating its proprietor unconscious, and brazenly driving off in an
American
circulation wagon, Darrow defended them. Years later, after they graduated to bootlegging, murder, and other crimes, he remained their attorney.
⁸

In one sensational case, Darrow, Masters & Wilson represented Hearst in a dispute involving the famous Wild West sharpshooter
Annie Oakley, who claimed to have been libeled when a wire service reported that she had been caught stealing “the trousers of a Negro” to get money for her drug habit. In fact, it was a different Annie—a burlesque dancer named
Maude Fontenella who sometimes performed as “Any Oak Lay”—and the genuine cowgirl spent years profitably suing the newspapers that had carried the story. Maude was brought to Chicago by Hearst’s private detectives to testify at the trial. After sizing her up, Masters got her to a doctor for a shot of cocaine before she took the stand. It invigorated the witness, but the jury found for Oakley.