Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (46 page)

Darrow laughed at the claim, made by Ford, that the state had the right to pursue such tactics—but not the defense. “Isn’t that wonderful, gentlemen?” he asked. “The prosecution has a right to load us up with spies and detectives and informers and we cannot put anyone in their office?” But for all the district attorney’s advantages, he told the jury, the prosecution had a flimsy case. “They had detectives in our office. They had us surrounded by gumshoe and keyhole men at every step—and what did they secure? Nothing, nothing,” Darrow said.

“If you twelve men think that I, with thirty-five years experience, general attorney of a railroad company of the city of Chicago, attorney for the elevated railroad company, with all kinds of clients and important cases—if you think that I would pick out a place half a block from my office and send a man with money in his hand in broad daylight to go down on the street corner to pass $4,000, and then skip over to another street corner and pass $500—two of the most prominent streets in the city of Los Angeles; if you think I did that, gentlemen, then find me guilty. I certainly belong in some state institution.…

“I am as fitted for jury bribing as a Methodist preacher for tending bar,” Darrow said.

But if the barons of industry could dispatch their private armies to crush the unions, bribe, cheat, and spy, he asked, didn’t the workingmen have the right to fight back?

“I would have walked from Chicago across the Rocky Mountains … to lay my hands upon the shoulder of J. B. McNamara and tell him not to place dynamite in the
Times
building,” he told the jurors. “All my life I have counseled gentleness, kindness and forgiveness for every human being.”

But “there was a fierce conflict in this city, exciting the minds of thousands of people, some poor, some weak, some irresponsible, some doing wrong on the side of the powerful as well as upon the side of the poor—and this thing happened.…

“Until you go down to fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again. They will come as the earthquake comes. They will come as the hurricane that uproots the trees. They will come as the lightning comes,” he said. “We as a people are responsible for these conditions, and we must look results squarely in the face.” In the audience, Anton Johannsen found himself weeping.

James McNamara “had nothing to gain,” Darrow said. “He believed in a cause, and he risked his life in that cause.”

“Whether rightly or wrongly, it makes no difference … I would not have done it. You would not have done it. But judged in the light of his motives … I cannot condemn the man.”

“None of the perpetrators of this deed was ever morally guilty of murder. Never.”

So ended the first day. He resumed the next morning, after another mob scene at the courtroom doors. Hysterical women had grasped at his hands, like some holy man or prophet, as he made his way into court.

He began by speaking about Harrington and the dictograph. The prosecution may have thought their eavesdropping tool was a nifty new toy, but it clashed with the spirit of the West. It was sneaky—a tool of weasels and moneyed tricksters.

“Think of it a moment,” said Darrow. “Wouldn’t it be better that every rogue and rascal in the world should go unpunished than to say that detectives could put a dictograph into your parlor, in your dining room, in your bedroom and destroy that privacy which alone makes life worth living?”

The state’s admission that the trap had been set by Walter Drew’s operative confirmed Darrow’s claim that he had been targeted by the oligarchs because he was a friend of working folks. “Do you want to tell me that the Erectors’ Association, that would be guilty of a shame like this, would not be guilty of plotting my ruin?” he asked the jurors.

The people of California differed on much, but this they knew: their state had long been in the grip of corrupting enterprises like the Southern Pacific Railroad, known for buying politicians and judges.

The courtroom was silent now.

“I know I could have tried the McNamara case, and that a large class of the working people of America would honestly have believed, if these men had been hanged, that they were not guilty,” said Darrow. “I could have done this and have saved myself … I could have made money.”

But “if you had hanged these men … you would have settled in the hearts of a great mass of men a hatred so deep, so profound, that it would never die away,” he said. “I took the responsibility, gentlemen. Maybe I did wrong, but I took it, and the matter was disposed of and the question set at rest.…

“I acted out the instincts that were within me. I acted according to the teachings of the parents who reared me, and according to the life I had lived,” he said. “But where I got one word of praise, I got a thousand words of blame and I have stood under that for nearly a year.…

“I know the mob. In one way I love it, in another way I despise it,”
he said. “I have been their idol and I have been cast down and trampled beneath their feet.…

“No man is judged rightly by his fellow men,” said Darrow. “We go here and there, and we think we control our destinies and our lives, but above us and beyond us and around us are unseen hands and unseen forces that move us at their will.”

After all, Darrow said, finishing softly with a bit of verse,
Life is a game of whist. From unknown sources / The cards are shuffled and the hands are dealt
. Jurors looked at the floor; two of them were crying. The judge, struggling to contain his own emotions, traced figures with his finger on his desk.

“I have taken the cards as they came; I have played the best I could,” said Darrow. “I know my life, I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect; it has been human, too human.”

But “I have felt the heartbeats of every man who lived,” he said. “I have tried to help in the world. I have not had malice in my heart. I have had love.”

F
REDERICKS SHOULDERED THE
task of closing the case for the prosecution. He asked the jurors to think of justice, the sanctity of the jury system, and the need to preserve the rule of law.

Darrow’s “oration” had been “plausible, eloquent … But that, my gentlemen, only reflects the ability of the man, and has mighty little to do with his guilt or innocence,” he said.

The key to the case is to “find out who furnished Franklin the money,” said the district attorney. “Now let us look. Someone connected with the defense, certainly. That circle can be drawn.” And “of all the men in all the world who might have been there at that particular time, isn’t it strange that as the officer of the law put his hands upon the felon Franklin, that felon’s boss—Darrow—should come right up and stand by his side?

“Can logic, tears or wails or fears convince you that Clarence Darrow was there by accident? Ah, nonsense! Nonsense! Absurd!”

Fredericks finished on a Friday. On Saturday morning the judge charged the jury. It began its deliberations just after nine a.m.

Darrow looked haunted. He remained in the courtroom, pacing nervously,
hands shoved deep in his pockets. Ruby wept, ceaselessly. Fredericks retired to his office.

Hardly any time passed before the jury called for the bailiff. It had taken thirty-five minutes and three quick ballots for the jurors to reach a decision. Darrow smiled at the sounds of cheers and clapping in the jury room. It was a good omen. So was the short deliberation. And so was the fact that Fredericks stayed away, sending Ford to get the results.

The twelve men filed back into the box. They had indeed reached a verdict, they told the judge. “Not guilty,” said the foreman. Darrow sighed deeply. Johannsen let out a victory whoop. Ruby hugged her husband and his friends crowded around. “Oh, I can’t talk. I can’t talk. I am so happy. It is wonderful,” Ruby said. “I knew it. I knew it.”

Several jurors and bailiffs and then Judge Hutton came to congratulate Darrow. “Hundreds of thousands of Hallelujahs will go up from as many throats when they hear of this,” Hutton told him.

“Look this way,” the photographers shouted as their flashbulbs lit the room. “I can’t look all ways at once, gentlemen,” the happy Darrow told them. The crowd of well-wishers pushed him back against a wall. “Thank you. Thank you, friends!” he called out. It was a “long, hard ordeal,” he told reporters, and he vowed to go on, fighting for the needy.

The
Examiner
polled the jurors. It was a simple chore to reach a verdict, they declared: the evidence was lacking, and the prosecution had not proved its case. “Darrow has been dealt with very unjustly,” one told the paper. “He should never have been put on trial unless there was evidence enough to convict him.”

The celebrants lingered in the courtroom, not wanting the moment to end. Then they made their way to a workingman’s café just down the street from the courthouse. It took Darrow half an hour to get there, as he was repeatedly stopped by admirers who demanded to shake his hand. Mary treasured a photograph taken at the victory party. It showed Darrow and wife Ruby sitting at a table with a crowd behind them. Standing between them, joyous, was Mary.

Within hours, however, their joy was tempered by dismay. Word came from the courthouse. Fredericks had announced that his office would proceed with the second bribery count, and put Darrow on trial for buying the vote of juror Robert Bain.
³²

Chapter 13

THE SECOND TRIAL

A sensitive man must bribe to save.

T
wenty years later, when her fervid adoration of Darrow had been somewhat allayed by time, Mary Field Parton admitted to her diary that even she—the lover who shared his secrets and his bed during those searing months in California—suspected he had bribed the McNamara jurors.

At the time, Mary vowed to everyone—even her sister Sara, to whom she confided all—that Darrow was innocent. But one night in January 1934, in the pages of her leather-covered notebook, she summoned “memories burned in with red hot rods” from the time when he was “crushed and weighted with the desertion of friends, with betrayal, with the impending doom of jail.”

“Bribing a juror to save a man’s life?” Mary wrote. “He wouldn’t hesitate … If men are so cruel as to break other men’s necks, so greedy as to be restrained only by money, then a sensitive man must bribe to save.”

T
HE DISTRICT ATTORNEY
had no choice but to soldier on. “The loss of this case has greatly injured Fredericks,”
Larry Sullivan wrote Erskine Wood. “The public condemnation … is general and vigorous.”

The average Californian may have believed that society had been compensated for the
Times
bombing by the long prison terms given the McNamara brothers, Harriman’s defeat, and the price Darrow paid during the first bribery trial. As Darrow put it, “even savages do not compel their prisoners to run the gauntlet more than once.”
¹
And the city’s ruling
clique had reason to be content; the Owens Valley aqueduct would bring fortunes to the men who bought land on the water’s route to the sea. But Fredericks had political ambitions; he would eventually run for governor. And so he pressed ahead. “The district attorney told me when I was out there that he would wear you out,” former senator
Richard Pettigrew wrote to Darrow. “It is clear persecution.”
²

As the news of the Lockwood verdict spread, Darrow received congratulatory telegrams and letters from around the country. Working-class resentment over the McNamara case was fading. On August 31, he took the train to San Francisco. He was met at the station by a brass band and hundreds of cheering supporters and smiled through his tears at the welcome. Darrow rode through the city at the front of the Labor Day parade, sharing an automobile with Tvietmoe, Mayor
P. H. McCarthy, and other labor leaders. “One figure dominated the marching hosts above all others. Time and again his name rang out, flashing along the line from end to end and back again—Darrow—labor’s big-hearted champion,” the
San Francisco Daily News
reported.