Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (26 page)

“Darrow prevailed upon me to stop playing the races … and put my money in the bank,” said Azzop, after getting his money back. “I’m going to put this on a horse,” he told the press.

Masters lost his $4,000. For years he hounded and pursued Smith, who was convicted and sent to prison. The episode also added to the friction between the law partners. When Darrow used the borrowed $7,000 to embellish the bank’s reserves, he had acted—though on a far smaller scale—just like Smith, said Masters. But by serving as the whistle-blower and prevailing on his friends in the press, Darrow emerged as a hero. “He participated in the fraudulent incorporation,” Masters marveled, “and then prosecuted his confederate in the fraud, and escaped unexposed.”

One cheerful cynic found his friend Darrow’s behavior irresistible. In the fall of 1906
Elbert Hubbard wrote a satirical ode for the
Philistine
, his literary magazine.

“I love Darrow because he is such a blessed crook. He affects to be a brave man, but admits that he’s an arrant coward; he poses as an altruist,
but is really a pin-headed pilferer,” Hubbard wrote. “People think he is bounteously unselfish and kind, whereas he dispenses and supplicates solely for Darrow & Co. He eloquently addresses the bar, bench and jury in public in the name of justice, and then privately admits the whole thing is a fraud.”
¹⁸

Others were concerned. Their knight seemed to have lost his way. In January 1907, Garland and his wife invited the Darrows to dinner. After they left, he described the evening in his diary. “I found him as grave and even more bitter than his writing indicates,” said Garland. “He weakens his cause by extreme expression. His uncompromising honesty of purpose and his aggressive cynicism make him repellent to many.”

“As a lawyer he was always ready to defend the under dog,” said Garland, but “I was not entirely convinced that his action was dictated solely by a sense of justice. He takes a savage … joy in striking at society.”

“I feel power but not high purpose in his program,” said Garland. “We began our careers on common ground, but he has gone on—or off—into a dark and tangled forestland.”

Chapter 8

INDUSTRIAL WARFARE

The cynic is humbled.

O
n the snow-swept evening of December 30, 1905, after weeks of planning and several bungled attempts, an ice-hearted killer named
Harry Orchard wandered from a card game in the Saratoga Hotel in Caldwell, Idaho, and stumbled upon his quarry, former governor
Frank Steunenberg, in the lobby.

Orchard hurried to his room and took up the bomb he had hidden in his suitcase. “It had been one of those gloomy days,” Steunenberg’s brother Will would recall. “Snowing and blowing all day long.” Cloaked by darkness and the remnants of the storm, Orchard hurried to the Steunenberg house, just under a mile away. Working swiftly, he fastened his device to a gatepost.

It was of simple design: when the gate was opened, a bit of fishing line would tug the cork from a vial of sulfuric acid that, spilling on blasting caps, would set off dynamite. On the way back to town, Orchard passed Steunenberg, walking home. The assassin was a block or two from the warm lights of the Saratoga, with its mansard roof and turrets and busy gaming tables, when he heard the blast. It was six forty-five p.m.

Inside the Steunenberg house, the children had been watching for their father. He came into the yard, turned to close the gate, and was wrapped in a blinding flash. The explosion shredded skin and muscle on his right side, stripped him of his clothing, and threw him ten feet toward the barn. The bones of his legs were in splinters, and his right arm, with which he had reached down to close the gate, had “the inside blown completely out,” a brother recalled. The windows of the house
were gone. There were shards of wood and glass and bits of the victim everywhere.

His family ran to Steunenberg, but could not lift the big man, though he begged to be taken in from the cold. His flesh came away in their hands. “Someone has shot me,” he said, and then, “Lord help us.” They put him on a blanket and dragged him inside, where he lay writhing on a bed. His brothers urged him to tell them what happened, but he was deaf from the explosion and stared at them blankly. In the arms of his brother Will he died.

“In a very few minutes great magnificent Frank had gone,” a sister-in-law wrote. “It was a mercy … as his agony must have been terrible.”

“It is taken for granted,” his sister Josephine told relatives, “that it was done by … the dynamiters.”
¹

T
HE VIOLENT STRUGGLE
between capital and labor in industrial-age America reached a climax out west. There were sheriffs and courts and territorial assemblies, and a parade of new states into the Union. Yet it was still a land where shrewd men could acquire power through gold, guns, or legal trickery. By the terms of its cherished myth, the West was a land of independence. But as the century turned, the pioneers and prospectors were displaced by corporations that had access to the capital and technology needed for industrial-scale mining, timber cutting, and the building of cities and railroads.

The miners were the spearhead of resistance to the new order. Absent owners like
John D. Rockefeller spent no time fretting about working conditions in Idaho, Nevada, or Colorado, where their local superintendents, striving to meet corporate targets, sliced wages to as little as $1.80 a day. The frontiersmen, working their own silver claims and panning clear-water creeks for gold, raged at those who sought to make them wage slaves. “These adventurous characters, going out into a new country and plunging into the virgin, everlasting hills, where it would seem that at last all men would stand on the same footing, have suddenly discovered that amid these primitive surroundings the modern industrial system is … at its worst,” one journalist reported. The miners—rough combative men—began to organize. The mine owners—brutal and resolved—used gunmen and militias to crush the unions. The miners responded with dynamite.
²

“The contest verged on civil war,” Darrow recalled. In radical circles, the union violence was excused. “It is a duty to stop the lesser crime of dynamite, but it is an infinitely greater duty to extirpate the greater crime of the monopolist. The one has hardly slain its tens, the other slays its thousands daily,” his friend Henry Lloyd had written. “The one is spasmodic, impulsive, sporadic, exceptional … the other is organized wholesale destruction.” There was blood to be expected in any birth. “You cannot make a revolution out of rosewater,” Darrow said.

Darrow would be at the center of the reckoning. For most of eight years, from the winter of 1906 through the fall of 1913, he left Chicago and spent his energies on two renowned cases in which he defended union men charged with wide-scale, bloody campaigns of terror. His ardor for sensation bore him to a conflagration from which he barely escaped. He would win several highly publicized trials in the West, and cut one notorious deal to snatch a client from the gallows. The experience would make him a national celebrity, but it also got him indicted, and cost him almost everything: his savings, his law firm, and, very nearly, his marriage, his freedom, and his life. It was his turn in Gethsemane: the Passion of Clarence Darrow.

Darrow was among the first, in the wonder and promise of those first years of the century, to glimpse its savagery. And in the fire, his last illusions perished. It was a changed man, in some ways hollow, in others holy, who returned to Chicago.

“The cynic is humbled,” wrote
Lincoln Steffens, who stood by his side in the final act. “The man that laughed sees and is frightened, not at prison bars, but at his own soul.”
³

T
HE HOSTILITIES ERUPTED
in the Coeur d’Alene territory, in the panhandle of Idaho, when workers began to organize in the early 1890s. They were met by the formation of the Mine Owners’ Association, which salted spies and informants throughout their ranks. In the course of a strike in July 1892, gun battles broke out at the Gem and Bunker Hill mines, the Frisco mine was destroyed by dynamite, and President
Benjamin Harrison sent in troops to restore order. A few months later, union men from around the West joined together in the Western Federation of Miners.
⁴

The miners’ expectations soared in 1896 when, amid the silver craze,
a Democratic-Populist “fusion” ticket swept Idaho and
Frank Steunenberg, a thirty-five-year-old newspaper editor and state legislator, became the state’s first non-Republican governor. He was a bull of a man, tall, strong, and headstrong—one of six Steunenberg brothers who had settled in Caldwell, a whistle-stop on the Union Pacific Railroad, in keeping with their brother Albert’s dictum: “We are here for the money.” In addition to the newspaper and politics, they had grown prosperous investing in timber, sheep, banking, mining, retailing, and real estate.
⁵

Some of the mine owners tried to make peace with their employees. But the hate ran deep, and old scores needed settling. There were whispers about an “inner circle” of union officials who were ordering beatings and executions. In 1899 several hundred miners, many wearing masks and carrying firearms, hijacked a Northern Pacific train, christened it the Dynamite Express, stopped in a series of mining towns to pick up more men, arms, and explosives, and seized and demolished the Bunker Hill mine. Steunenberg declared martial law and asked President McKinley to “call forth the military forces … to suppress insurrection.” The army arrived again. Some seven hundred miners and supporters were arrested, hauled before secret courts, and interned in makeshift concentration camps known as “bull pens.”

The WFM in Idaho was shattered. Steunenberg was damned by union men, but the grateful mine owners bankrolled his business ventures. “A little sporadic violence … has been met by a vastly more dangerous and more infamous infraction of the law by the constituted authorities who took their orders from the employers … quite as rough, quite as lawless and quite as overbearing as any of the miners,” the journalist
Willis Abbot reported to Lloyd.
⁶

T
HE STRUGGLE SHIFTED
to Colorado, where labor had scored some initial success with passage of a law mandating an eight-hour day. When the pro-business judges of the state supreme court declared the measure unconstitutional, the voters amended the state constitution to allow it. But the corporate interests then blocked the implementing legislation. The union men were embittered; democracy seemed a fraud. “What is the use of your ballots anyway?” WFM president
Charles Moyer asked. “You might as well tear them up.”
⁷

In 1903, miners and mill workers in the Cripple Creek district went on strike. Governor
James Peabody dispatched the state militia under the command of a mine manager named
Sherman Bell. The expedition was paid for by the mine owners and the troops were there to break the union, Bell declared. His job was to “exterminate ’em.” Moyer was arrested on a bogus charge of flag desecration and held for months.

As in Idaho, acts of “union violence” in Colorado were sometimes committed by provocateurs hired by the mining industry to discredit the labor movement. One miner who played both sides for money was a particularly conscienceless killer who had participated in the Coeur d’Alene troubles before coming to Colorado. He went by many names, most recently
Harry Orchard. He was of medium height, with a round face and a “deep rounded barrel of a body … balanced sturdily on short, stout legs—a most excellent and workmanlike human machine, with the power and directness of a little Orkney bull,” as one journalist described him. Those who met him were struck by Orchard’s callousness. “He is without the … imagination of the ordinary man,” a reporter wrote. The consequences of his violent acts and the suffering of his victims “simply do not present themselves to him.” In November 1903, as Orchard told it, he helped bomb the Vindicator mine. That won him an invitation to Denver and entree to the leaders of the federation—President Moyer, Secretary-Treasurer
William “Big Bill” Haywood, and an explosives expert named
George Pettibone.