Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (30 page)

Darrow soon won the respect of even the royalist press. At the start of the trial, the
New York Sun
correspondent noted the lawyer’s “tilted eyebrows, sardonic mouth and long and rather unkempt hair.” A month later the same reporter found Darrow “a man of intellect and subtlety” with “an old shoe manner” and “a capacity for getting inside the skin of a witness
that is possessed by few lawyers. There is nothing theatric about him. He never strikes an attitude. He never explodes. He stands before a witness and just bores into his mind, gently, shrewdly with every appearance of wanting merely to know just the truth and nothing more.…

“He knows how to browbeat, too; when he thinks it will serve his turn,” the correspondent wrote, “but he adapts his method to his man and seldom makes a mistake.”

On the third weekend in May, Darrow appeared at the Columbia Theatre to lecture on
Walt Whitman. It was a big event for Boise and a welcome diversion for the out-of-town reporters, who were growing tired of the local recreation: a municipal swimming pool, bush-league baseball, and the ongoing prosecution of the Great La Fayette, a traveling healer who proposed to cure gallstones with snake oil and a mysterious manipulation of the wrist. The Pinkertons, Senator Borah, and Judge Wood were there, leaning forward in their seats to catch each word, and a knot of socialist and capitalist scribes, mingling like “the lion and the lamb.” Darrow had even “had his hair manicured for the occasion,” the
Sun
noted. “The result was … a sacrifice of the pictaresque.” All agreed that Darrow “had made a good talk.” Then “the whole bloodthirsty crew poured out of the theatre and strolled slowly home under the stars discussing the philosophy of Walt Whitman.”
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With his twenty years of experience handling Chicago’s raucous corps of reporters (where he was a member of the press club), Darrow was adept at massaging scribes. He even joined them in the opening weeks of the trial, filing a bylined story of five or six paragraphs for each day’s edition of the
Times
. “McParland is a well-preserved well-fed man, 65 or 70 years old,” he wrote in one dispatch. “He never goes out in the street without a bodyguard. No one can see why this is necessary but the old detective evidently feels it is best to be on the safe side.”

Should the laborites resort to violence, one “substantial man” of Boise told the
Times
, “the solid men of this State” would put three hundred armed men on the street. To impress Barrymore, McParland lifted up his mattress at the Idanha Hotel and revealed a dozen rifles.

Darrow’s rivalry with the Federation’s regular lawyer,
Edmund Richardson—each called himself the lead attorney—was exacerbated by the size of the
defense team, which made everything unwieldy. Of the dozen lawyers, the most noteworthy addition was
Edgar Wilson, a former
congressman who had been, for many years, Judge Wood’s law partner.
³
Among other things, Darrow and Richardson quarreled over the techniques used by Darrow’s investigators—one of whom had suggested that they exploit Borah’s weakness for women by planting a comely secretary as a spy in his office. At one point, Darrow threatened to quit. “I certainly can not stay in it with the understanding that he is leading counsel and that he will give directions,” Darrow wrote his clients. Adjustments were made and he stayed on, with a guarantee that he would make the final closing address.
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T
HE STATE OPENED
its case on June 4. The jurors were freshly shaved. Nevada Jane was wheeled to Haywood’s side with red roses in her lap. Haywood looked drawn and anxious; he had suffered agonizing pain in the previous forty-eight hours and been treated with shots of morphine.
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To keep the defense guessing, Hawley’s opening speech revealed as little as possible. But it was clear that the state would have Orchard tell of all his bloody deeds to demonstrate that Haywood was the linchpin in a conspiracy that stalked victims throughout the West. The WFM was responsible not only for the death of Steunenberg, said Hawley, but “of scores of others besides.” Darrow was on his feet, objecting at the first mention of violence outside Caldwell. “That … hasn’t anything to do with this case,” he protested. Haywood was not even a member of the union when, years earlier, Orchard had ridden the Dynamite Express through the Coeur d’Alenes. The only issue, he argued, was whether Haywood helped kill Steunenberg. But the judge overruled the objection. The state could try to prove the existence of a conspiracy, said Wood, and he would strike out any extraneous information later. This was no consolation for Darrow, who believed that “nothing can be stricken out of a human consciousness after being once let in.” And so he or Richardson leaped up each time Hawley introduced another of Orchard’s alleged degradations. They got under Hawley’s skin, interrupted his train of thought, and signaled the jury that this was all a matter of conjecture, not fact.

Darrow was mendacious when, while recounting how McParland persuaded Orchard to confess, Hawley referred to “this gentleman, who will be on the stand.”

“You mean McParland?” Darrow asked.

“Yes,” said Hawley.

“Or Orchard?”

“Both of them will be on if you desire.”

“I didn’t know which. You said gentleman,” Darrow said, drawing out the word.

“That may be very cunning, those kind of remarks, but they are entirely out of place,” Hawley said. “This gentleman to whom I am referring was Mr. James McParland, the terror of the evil-doers throughout the West, and whose very presence in any community is security for the good order of that community.”

“That will be proven, I suppose?” asked Richardson.

Hawley had been selected as the “goat”—the foe Darrow chose for needling and vilification. Darrow would be so persistently mean, in the coming weeks, that Hawley’s son would threaten to thrash him.

H
ARRY ORCHARD WAS
called to the courtroom late on the morning of the second day. He was neatly barbered, plump and pink, and barely recognizable—if not for the five gun-toting guards who conveyed him to the witness chair. There was a rustling in the courtroom as people rose to get a better view. “Sit down!” shouted one of Orchard’s larger bodyguards, silencing the crowd. A man with a bundle beneath his coat (it turned out to be a spare set of overalls) was seized, wrestled from the room, and searched. The hired guns of each side eyed each other warily.

“How he beamed whenever he was escorted down the aisle to the witness chair,” Ruby remembered. “So genuinely enjoying the limelight.” Hawley told Orchard to begin at the beginning, and “put it in narrative form.” For much of that day and the next, the killer told his tale. He’d had months of McParland’s deft coaching to revise and rehearse—to emphasize facts that could be double-checked and to artfully fudge the rest. He had written it down, and polished it, for an “autobiography” that he sold, with the state’s contrivance, for $1,000 to
McClure’s
magazine.

“It was a revolting story of a callous degenerate,” Haywood recalled, “and no one will ever know how much of it was true.”

R
ICHARDSON HAD CLAIMED
the honor of cross-examining Orchard. Tall and bald, with a cropped red mustache and impeccable clothing, he was almost fustian. Darrow believed that important witnesses in major cases were so well rehearsed that “as a rule it is futile to go over in cross-examination the testimony already given.” But Richardson chose to batter the witness with a barrage of questions. “Although Mr. Richardson was an able man, he was somewhat lacking in subtlety,” Darrow recalled. “Orchard remained perfectly cool and … repeated on cross-examination the story already told.”

Like Darrow, many of the newspapermen gave Richardson poor reviews. But his cross-examination raised many matters for the jurors to consider. Orchard acknowledged a host of sneaky, unmanly sins that breached the Western code of honor. He admitted to being a bigamist, an ore and powder thief, an informer, and a liar with a history of embellishing his criminal prowess. “I have told some people about things I have done that I never did,” he conceded.

“It was your habit to lie about everything, wasn’t it?” Richardson asked him.

“Yes … whenever it suited my purpose,” Orchard replied.

Richardson established that Orchard was a double agent, working for the railroad and mine owners in Cripple Creek. And he suggested that Orchard bore a private grudge against Steunenberg, for when the federal troops arrived in the Coeur d’Alenes in 1899, Orchard had been forced to flee, after selling his interest in the Hercules mine. The owners of the mine who remained behind became quite rich. The destitute Orchard had visited one of them,
Gus Paulson, and seen all the wealth he had forfeited just before he left for Caldwell to kill the governor.

At times, Orchard contradicted himself, or had to be rescued by the prosecutors. But because he generally kept his cool, he was ruled the victor of the showdown—and his reputation for credibility, forged that week, survived for decades. Mesmerized by Orchard’s monotone performance (and encouraged by Borah and McParland), many of the reporters abandoned their professional skepticism.
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“Never a man like this sat in the witness chair before,”
Oscar Davis wrote in the
Times
. In the months before he killed Steunenberg, Orchard had yearned to escape the slaughter, yearned to buy a ranch, yearned for “an end … of the bloody calling,” Davis said. But the evil inner circle
would not allow it. Haywood was “insatiable of blood, vindictive, savage, revengeful” and drove poor Harry on. “It was kill, kill, kill with him, kill and never cease,” and Orchard was merely the “obedient murder machine” who “did as he was told.” Until, with McParland’s gentle guidance, Orchard had made his spiritual journey “beyond caring.”

Orchard was “telling this story on his own account, not to secure immunity or pardon or commutation of sentence,” Davis asserted. “The man now sitting in the witness chair at the Haywood trial is not a criminal.” Indeed, between Richardson and the assassin, “Orchard is now the stronger moral force,” the
Times
reporter announced. “It is indeed a modern miracle.”
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Harry Orchard was, of course, nowhere near “beyond caring.”
William Pinkerton, in a private agency memo, derided the notion that Orchard had found Jesus, or was “saved” by divine grace. The killer was “a human demon” and “a murdering scoundrel” and the “only reason why” this “cold blooded desperado” gave any information at all, Pinkerton wrote, “was to save his own worthless hide.” Yet McParland, Hawley, and Gooding would fulfill their part of the bargain. To the dismay of many in Steunenberg’s family, Orchard would escape the noose and get special privileges in the penitentiary, where he lived in a comfortable little cottage, making money from various enterprises. The fate of the actual killer was a trifling matter, said Hawley, when compared to the need to crush the union. “From that time on,” Hawley said proudly, still trying to win Orchard his freedom two decades later, “there has not been … trouble of any kind occasioned by the action of the Western Federation.”
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F
OR ALL ITS
artful telling, Orchard’s testimony had a glaring weakness: there was no corroboration. McParland and his men—given that they’d had a year to do their work, and had infiltrated Haywood’s defense team—were remarkably ineffective.

They could show that Orchard knew Haywood, had stayed at Pettibone’s house, and had worked as Moyer’s bodyguard. There were hotel records and eyewitness testimony to place Simpkins—a member of the union’s executive committee—with Orchard as he stalked Steunenberg, and two bank drafts sent to Simpkins from Haywood. And there was a
telegram sent from the Federation’s Spokane law firm on the day after Orchard’s arrest, informing the Caldwell authorities that lawyer
Fred Miller was on his way—before Harry ever sent for him. If Orchard wasn’t working for the Federation, why did it rush to his defense?

This evidence, and other bits and pieces, established Orchard’s familiarity with the members of the “inner circle,” but was far from enough to convict Haywood of murder. Simpkins was a union organizer, Idaho was his territory, and as treasurer Haywood routinely sent bank drafts to his officers and organizers. Besides, Orchard had admitted to being broke, stealing from cash registers, and borrowing from friends in the weeks before the murder: If he was Haywood’s prized assassin, being bankrolled via Simpkins, why was he out of money?

Orchard’s own words had revealed him as a cheat, thief, bigamist, and perjurer. He worked for what side would pay him, in a war where the use of spies and double agents was common. The state had dressed him up, but there was no way the jurors could not conclude that he was a thoroughly corrupt and villainous individual, with a supreme motive to lie. “We had little corroborating evidence,” Hawley would later complain. He and Borah began to prepare excuses. They were “greatly disappointed in some of the witnesses brought here by Detective McParland,” the
Denver Post
reported. “The State has been misled by Pinkerton detectives who promised to produce indubitable evidence to connect Haywood.”
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The prosecutors introduced hotel ledgers and bank records and witnesses from around the West to confirm the dates and destinations of Orchard’s travels. Colorado authorities testified that they found an unexploded bomb like the one that killed Steunenberg buried at the gate of a state supreme court justice, just where Orchard said it was. And witnesses put Orchard in the neighborhood on the day when the San Francisco home of Bunker Hill mine owner
Fred Bradley was bombed. But when Hawley and Borah rested their case, in late June, there was very little implicating Haywood. “Many witnesses appeared … to substantiate much that Orchard said about himself, but none supplied the direct positive connection between the assassin and Haywood,” wrote the
Boston Globe
’s
John Carberry. Even the
Statesman
had to admit that “many who have been following the case … cannot see how the evidence tends to connect Mr. Haywood sufficiently to convict him.”
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