Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (33 page)

McParland railed at Darrow, and undoubtedly was the source for reporters who variously assigned the verdict to bribery, corrupt bailiffs, or cowardly jurors. Davis blamed the verdict on the judge’s instructions, and Roosevelt on the jurors’ fear of union retaliation. But Cobb set blame on the president. The Idaho authorities had foolishly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a fair trial, the publisher griped, and “spoiled a good hanging.”
¹⁹

Chapter 10

FRAILTIES

He was always … the lone wolf.

D
arrow was back in Idaho in early September, preparing to defend
Steve Adams in a retrial of the north woods murder case. The exaltation he felt at the Haywood verdict had faded amid a series of troubles. “Your letter came today just when I needed it. For I was blue as the devil,” Darrow wrote
Brand Whitlock. “The enemy, stung by my victories, have been firing hot shot into me—and some of my associates, jealous … have been helping them.”

Darrow had been snubbed by Haywood when Big Bill’s victory tour roared through Chicago, and lost a public spat with the press over whether he excused violence at the trial. (Darrow denied it; the transcript clearly showed he had.) “This is the mad brawling of an anarchist,” the
Tribune
told its readers. “The Idaho jury heard the most unseemly, abusive, inflammatory speech ever delivered in an American courtroom … It was a long tirade against religion, morality and law [for which] Mr. Darrow has only scoffs and sneers.”

Darrow was “an infidel, a misanthrope, a revolutionist, a hater of the rich, a condemner of the educated and the polite, a hopeless cynic,” said the
New York Sun
. He had “grown gray and rich … in the service of labor, and no man living has been able to coin more money out of popularity with workingmen.” The harsh opinions offered in the press were abetted by Richardson, whose feud with Darrow had erupted again in the last weeks of the trial. “I will try no more cases with Clarence S. Darrow,” said Richardson. He called Darrow “a most persistent and disgusting newspaper advertiser.”

“Mr. Richardson was … very egotistical, arrogant and exceedingly jealous,” Darrow, in turn, told reporters. In the end, Pettibone and Moyer stuck by him, and Richardson left the defense. But Darrow was feeling the searing caress of fame. It was one thing to be the hometown bad boy, another to be a national symbol for godlessness and anarchy. When he failed to stand at a Spokane restaurant as the band played “America,” Darrow was hissed by the crowd. He wrapped himself, as best he could, in the comfort of martyrdom. “I don’t know as either of us are entitled to any sympathy for what we have lost for our convictions,” he wrote Debs. “We have likewise gained much.”
¹

Then, on the eve of the Adams trial, Darrow became suddenly, gravely ill. He was in Boise when he was struck by flulike symptoms and terrible pain. The city’s only specialist lanced his ear, hoping to drain an abscess, and the worry displayed by Ruby to friends back in Chicago made its way into print.
C. S. DARROW IS ILL; TUMOR ON BRAIN
, the
Tribune
announced, erroneously.
THE MAN WHO DEFENDED HAYWOOD MAY SOON FACE THE OMNIPOTENT JUDGE
, said the
Washington Post
. The press linked his physical and spiritual ailments. “That the illness … was aggravated by events subsequent to the Haywood trial is little doubted,” the
Tribune
reported. “Where he had enemies he had made them more bitter … He found himself unable to disregard criticism … with the serenity which was characteristic. It never had worried Darrow before that his views, beliefs and statements condemned him in the minds of the great majority of his fellow citizens. This time it did.”

Darrow was warned that the infection might spread to the mastoid bone and then to the brain, with a risk of meningitis. The doctor left the wound open, for irrigation and drainage, and told Darrow to watch for swelling. It was a potentially fatal condition. The physicians of 1907 did not have X-ray machines to assess such an illness or antibiotics and sulfa drugs to cure it. He left the hospital on October 6, but only for a day. Four days later he appeared in court for a hearing on the Pettibone case, bundled in a heavy overcoat. He returned to the hospital immediately and did not depart before mid-October, when he went to San Francisco seeking the advice of a specialist. Ruby was put in charge of irrigating the ear, boiling water to sterilize the instruments, sharpening the points of the hypodermic needles, and giving Darrow injections of codeine to help him sleep at night.

Darrow had tried to keep the second Adams trial in the mining country around Wallace, but the judge approved the prosecution’s motion for a change of venue to rural Rathdrum. On October 30, against the advice of his doctors, Darrow arrived to take charge of jury selection. He would remember this time as “one continuous orgy of pain.” They boarded with a local family, in a cottage near the courthouse. “I was becoming used to the hypodermic,” he recalled. “It took more and more to put me to sleep.”

The prosecution launched its case on November 5. It had difficulty getting witnesses to testify after a bomb at his own gate tore former sheriff
Harvey Brown apart, so the jury listened as the lawyers recited testimony from the transcript of the first trial. On two days in mid-November, Darrow cross-examined McParland before a standing-room-only crowd. He had the detective tell of his exploits as a spy for hire to illustrate how McParland trafficked in deception. And he pressed McParland on the promises the detective made to induce Adams to testify.

The showdown was cut short, however, so that Darrow could be taken to Spokane for treatment. The doctor there prescribed rest, but rest was not an option. “There was scarcely a moment in court when I was not in pain,” he recalled. “When the pain was unbearable, as it often was, we had to resort to the hypodermic.”

As in the first trial, Darrow set the claim jumper’s death in the context of frontier justice. The pioneers had “subdued” the forest, Darrow said, and then “the coming of the jumpers led the older settlers to indulge in the carrying of firearms and to hold meetings at which jumpers were discussed and the best means of getting rid of them. It was almost open warfare.” Anyone might have killed Tyler. Hawley sprung a surprise toward the end, introducing letters written by Adams that had not been offered as evidence at the first trial. “I was glad to hear of your belief in my innocence,” Adams had told his family. “I wish to God that I was, but I fell in with bad company and was led to commit a number of most vile sins.”

Darrow gave his closing address on November 23. “If there ever was a cause or justification for poor men standing together, this is such justification,” he told the jury. “These powerful interests that are back of this case are not interested in
Steve Adams … The pretense is made that a man is being prosecuted for one crime when the whole civilized world knows it is a delusion and a lie … He is being tried because he went back on McParland and repudiated his statements.” Back in Boise, the
Statesman
told its readers that the state’s case was “100 percent stronger than at the first trial.” But the jury declared itself hopelessly deadlocked. The eight members who voted for acquittal had not been able to budge four jurors who believed Adams was guilty. Another good hanging spoiled.
Calvin Cobb aimed his fury at Darrow, the “blood-stained figure of anarchy” who “stalks into our courts and brazenly justifies murder.”
²

T
HREE DAYS AFTER
the Adams verdict, Judge Wood called Pettibone to trial. There was a good reason to rush: the defendant was fatally ill. The prosecutors wanted to hang him, and his lawyers wanted to win him a few months of liberty before he died.

As in Rathdrum, things moved quickly. Hawley led off for the state, telling the story of Steunenberg’s death. He characterized Pettibone as the counselor, paymaster, and armorer for the federation’s campaign of terror. Once more,
Harry Orchard took the stand. He had “remembered” further details in the intervening months, including the sensational claim that Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone had bragged about belonging to a secret “inner circle,” in which killing was a prerequisite of membership.

There was speculation before the trial about how Darrow would cross-examine Orchard. Richardson’s attacks had failed to shake the witness, but surely Darrow could not forgo some attempt to shatter Orchard’s poise? Darrow treated Orchard differently. He did not pick at Orchard’s story, looking for inconsistencies. The best thing to do was let Harry Orchard show his detestable self. After Orchard would admit to burning down a business for the insurance money or shortchanging farmers for their milk, or stealing another man’s wife, or blowing up a mine, Darrow would ask:

“You didn’t know Pettibone then?”

“No,” Orchard would reply.

“Nor Moyer or Haywood?”

“No.”

Darrow’s “cross examination was rigid and effective,” the Associated Press reported, “in that the witness was pictured as an inhuman monster, a murderer, bigamist, perjurer, gambler, thief and incendiary.” Darrow closed his cross-examination on a Saturday evening by describing each of
Orchard’s confessed crimes in minute detail and asking, “You did that, did you not?”

“Yes, sir, I did,” Orchard replied. The witness looked miserable, perhaps realizing that without
Oscar Davis to tell it otherwise, the world would lose its sympathy for the merry-eyed murder machine. Indeed, the humbled press corps had dropped their lavish testaments to McParland’s skills and the “miracle” of Orchard’s religious conversion. “Mr. Darrow with dextrous hand drew for the jury not the picture of a repentant murderer aiding justice, but invested Orchard with the crimson-stained robes of a craven assassin,” said the
Globe
. He had compelled Orchard “to depict himself as a despicable slayer of men … an inhuman fiend … and a wretch who lay in wait for his victims and shot them in the back.”

But when court reconvened on Monday, Darrow was not there. Nor on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It was almost time to open the defense, and the lead attorney was in agony, confined to bed. Darrow made it to Friday’s session of the trial, looking far from well. He questioned a witness that day and Saturday, with short, raspy inquiries and ill-tempered insinuations. He got a brief reprieve for the Christmas holiday but was required to return to court on December 26 to make the opening argument for the defense. He did not have the strength to stand on his feet. Nor to raise his voice. He got permission to sit as he made his remarks.

A chair was set in front of the jurors. As a hushed courtroom strained to hear him, for two hours, Darrow spoke slowly, and at times with obvious effort. He apologized for his infirmity, and announced that this would be his final appearance at the trial.

D
ARROW HAD WIRED
his friend C. E. S. Wood in Oregon, asking him to “answer quick” if there was a “first class ear expert” in Portland. But instead of traveling to the cold and wet Northwest, Darrow and Ruby left for Los Angeles on December 27. An old pal, the writer
James Griffes, had made arrangements for the couple. Darrow was admitted to the California Hospital, to be treated by Dr.
John Haynes, and Griffes found a bungalow for them near the Church of the Angels. They were accompanied by
Billy Cavanaugh, a stonecutter from Chicago who had met Darrow in Boise and acted as a bodyguard and companion.

In California, Darrow received good news. On January 4, the jury acquitted Pettibone, and Hawley announced that the state would drop the charges against Moyer. Having heard the evidence twice, said Judge Wood, it was clear there was “nothing” beyond Orchard’s testimony to connect Moyer to Steunenberg’s murder. Pettibone left the courthouse clinging to the arm of his wife; he would die from cancer the following summer. Haywood missed the funeral.