Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (87 page)

5.
Idaho Daily Statesman
, June 2, 1907. The paper called the attack “neuralgia.” In
Roughneck
, Haywood biographer Peter Carlson says physicians later identified it as a stomach ulcer.

6.
McParland had tried to get Adams to write a narrative as well. “Orchard having written this biography it will simply be impossible for any counsel to shake his testimony,” the detective told Gooding. But “Adams as we are all aware has a poor memory” and “will not make a first class witness.” Like Orchard, Adams should write it all down and “read it over time and time again so that everything connected with this case and with his life will be freshly impressed and stamped upon his memory,” the detective said. McParland reports, HIS; McParland reports, PP; Darrow,
Story of My Life;
Ruby to Stone, CD-LOC; Haywood,
Autobiography
.

7.
See
New York Times
, June 6, 7, 9, 12, 1907.

8.
Hawley remarks in “Arguments Presented in Favor of Commutation” at the Idaho pardon board hearing on
Harry Orchard, Nov. 13, 1922; Pinkerton letter, Nov. 16, 1920, PP.

9.
There was also testimony about an unsigned letter to Orchard that arrived in Caldwell after his arrest. He swore it was from Pettibone, assuring him that money was on the way. Yet the letter itself had been destroyed, and the Caldwell sheriff later denied, under oath, that it was Pettibone’s handwriting. Hawley in “Arguments Presented”;
Denver Post
, June 17, 1907;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, June 22, 1907;
Boston Globe
, Dec. 28, 1907.

10.
Boston Globe
, June 15, 1907;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, June 22, 1907.

11.
Idaho Daily Statesman
, June 25, 1907;
New York Sun
, June 25, 1907;
New York Times
, June 25, 1907;
Chicago Record-Herald
, June 25, 1907;
Chicago Examiner
, June 25, 1907;
New York Daily Tribune
, June 25, 1907; Fremont Wood,
The Introductory Chapter to the History of the Trials of Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone, and Harry Orchard
(Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1931).

12.
Boston Globe
, July 13, 1907; Haywood,
Autobiography; New York Times
, July 12, 1907;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, July 12, 1907;
Chicago Tribune
, July 12, 1907;
Chicago Daily News
, July 12, 1907.

13.
Chicago Tribune
, Aug. 3, 1907.

14.
Idaho Daily Statesman
, July 25, 1907;
Boston Globe
, July 25, 1907;
Idaho Evening Capi
tal, July 25, 1907;
New York Times
, July 25, 1907.

15.
New York Times
, July 26, 1907;
New York Sun
, July 26, 1907;
Los Angeles Times
, July 26, 1907;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, July 26, 1907; Haywood,
Autobiography
.

16.
Jess Hawley, “Notes on Haywood,” quoted in David Grover,
Debaters and Dynamiters
(Corvallis: Oregon State University, 1964).

17.
Haywood,
Autobiography;
McParland reports, IHS; Statement of Anton Johannsen, CD-CHI.

18.
Darrow,
Story of My Life;
Stone interview with Otto Peterson, clerk of court; Ruby Darrow to Stone, CD-LOC;
New York Herald
, July 29, 1907;
New York American
, July 29, 1907;
Philadelphia Evening Telegraph
, July 29, 1907; Haywood,
Autobiography
.

19.
The journalist Mark Sullivan suggested that an old Scottish verdict—“not proven”—best described the outcome of the Haywood case. It remains an American mystery. There are surely assassins (John Wilkes Booth) who work within conspiracies. But it is possible that Darrow and Richardson had it right, and that Orchard, like most American assassins (Eugene Prendergast, Lee Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, and many others),
bore some crazed grudge against Steunenberg and acted without specific direction, hoping to be hailed as a savior when the deed was done. Orchard was certainly not an efficient conspirator. He was broke, thieving, gambling, and clumsy, called attention to himself, and appears to have made no plan to escape or to hide the incriminating evidence contained in his luggage.

Haywood went on to a militant career with the Wobblies, grew even more radical, and died a revolutionary—yet no other Harry Orchard ever surfaced in his life, or that of Moyer. If there was a union conspiracy, it may have stopped at Orchard and Simpkins or reached only as far as Pettibone, the happy tinker of death. Yet anything short of Haywood and Moyer would have left the union leadership intact, and that was not what McParland, Hawley, and the others were aiming for.

C. P. Connolly of
Collier’s
magazine listed a dozen “peculiar features” of the trial, suggesting that Judge Wood, his bailiffs, or the jurors were corrupted. In his own memoir,
Oscar Davis wrote that “there was talk at Boise after Haywood had been set free that the jury had been bought. Whether there was any foundation for any such talk or not, I never knew.” Both reporters, however, were Roosevelt and Borah partisans.

It took twenty years, but the prosecution did finally admit the weakness of its case. In 1927, Hawley spoke at the dedication of a statue of Steunenberg in Idaho. The “overwhelming confirmation of Orchard’s testimony in regard to other crimes,” he conceded, had lessened the convincing quality “of the small amount of corroborating proof connecting Haywood with the Steunenberg murder.”

What did Darrow believe? We can’t be sure. “Darrow clearly intimated to me that the Moyer people were guilty,” Erskine Wood recalled. But it was probably just Darrow’s “inordinate vanity” that caused him to say so. “I think he might say it, [even] if they were not,” Wood said. Darrow rarely spoke about his trials when they were over. But years later, he almost blurted something to George Francis, a young lawyer who asked him about Idaho. “Haywood didn’t kill Steunenberg. I’ll tell you who did,” he said, before catching himself and saying, “No, I won’t either.”

Stone interview with Francis and Hawley remarks, CD-LOC; Sullivan,
Our Times;
C. P. Connolly, “Pettibone and Sheriff Brown,”
Collier’s
, Jan. 25, 1908; Oscar Davis,
Released for Publication
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925); Roosevelt to Whitelaw Reid, July 29, 1907, Theodore Roosevelt papers, Library of Congress; Cobb to Alford Cooley, Oct. 3, 1907, quoted in Lukas,
Big Trouble;
Haywood,
Autobiography
.

CHAPTER 10: FRAILTIES

1.
Darrow had to defend his remarks for years. He had never “urged cruelty or that the working man should be exempt from the law,” he wrote journalist Mark Sullivan in 1930. What he said was “that regardless of how many wrongs they commit, or how many brutalities they are guilty of, their cause is just.” Letter to Sullivan, quoted in
Our Times
; Darrow to Whitlock, Nov. 29, 1907, BW; Darrow to Debs, Oct. 1907, ALW;
Chicago Tribune
, July 29, 1907;
New York Sun
, July 27, 1907;
New York Times
, Aug. 7, 1907;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, Aug. 2, 1907.

2.
Adams was tried one last time in the summer of 1908 for the 1902 murder of a mine manager in Telluride and found innocent. Darrow,
Story of My Life;
Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Adams trial transcript, CD-UML; Darrow to Wood, Dec. 26,
1907, CESW-HL;
Idaho Daily Statesman
, Oct. 11, Nov. 8–27, 1907;
Los Angeles Herald
, Nov. 14, 1907;
Chicago Tribune
, Oct. 5, 6, Nov. 14, 25, 1907;
San Francisco Call
, Oct. 20, 1907;
Washington Post
, Oct. 27, 1907;
Spokane Evening Chronicle
, Nov. 24, 1907;
New York Times
, Nov. 25, 1907, July 16, 1908.

3.
Idaho Daily Statesman
, Nov. 27–Dec. 31, 1907, Jan. 1–7, 1908;
Los Angeles Times
, Dec. 14, 27, 1907;
San Francisco Call
, Dec. 15, 29, 1907;
Salt Lake Herald
, Dec. 27, 1907, Jan. 5, 1908;
Boston Globe
, Dec. 28, 1907, Jan. 5, 1908;
Los Angeles Herald
, Dec. 29, 31, 1907;
Los Angeles Examiner
, Jan. 5, 1908;
New York Times
, Jan. 2, 5, Aug. 2, 4, 1908;
Chicago Tribune
, Jan. 21, Feb. 11, 1908;
McClure’s
, June 1908; Noah D. Fabricant, MD, “When Clarence Darrow Had an Earache,”
The Eye, Ear, Nose & Throat Monthly
, Dec. 1958; Jean Strouse,
Morgan
(New York: Random House, 1999) and Walter Lord,
The Good Years
(New York: Harper, 1960).

4.
Masters, unpublished autobiography, ELM; Darrow to Edgar Lee Masters, Nov. 29, 1907, Masters to WFM, Jan. 4, 1908, Jan. 22, 1908, Jan. 28, 1908, and WFM to Masters, Jan. 6, 1908, Jan. 24, 1908, Masters to Carter Harrison, Mar. 21, 1938, ELM; Ruby Darrow letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Masters,
Across Spoon River;
Darrow,
Story of My Life
.

5.
Masters, unpublished autobiography, ELM; Ruby letters to Stone, CD-LOC; Darrow to Brand Whitlock, Dec. 13, 1910, BW; Darrow to William Walling, July 14, 1910, NAACP;
Chicago Tribune
, Apr. 7, 1908.

6.
New York Sun
, May 30, 1909;
Chicago Tribune
, June 4, 1899; Mark Sullivan,
Our Times;
Stone notes, CD-LOC; Carole Merritt,
Something So Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908
(Springfield, IL: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008); Ida Wells-Barnett,
Lynch Law in Georgia
(Chicago: Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899); Darrow, “The Problem of the Negro,” transcription of remarks in the
International Socialist Review
, Nov. 1, 1901.

7.
Darrow’s talks on race earned him public censure. At one point in his Cooper Union speech he predicted that just as time and intermarriage had eroded the enmity among European immigrant groups, the problem of race relations “will undoubtedly some time far in the future be worked out by race amalgamation.” Darrow “Advises Negroes to Marry Whites,” read the headlines across the country, and for several days he was the target of anger and ridicule in white America. He caused another stir, and was booed and jeered, when he addressed fifty thousand union sympathizers in San Francisco on Labor Day in 1909—and urged them to move past racial prejudice and ease restrictions against Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
Evening American
, Aug. 19, 1908;
Chicago Tribune
, May 13, 17, 19, 20, 1910; Proceedings of the National Negro Conference, May 1910, NAAC;
New York Times
, May 13, 1910; Michael Kazin,
Barons of Labor
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

8.
Darrow’s failure in another case had long-lasting repercussions. In 1907,
Fred Warren—the editor of the
Appeal to Reason
—had been incensed by the Haywood trial. No prominent capitalist would be kidnapped like the Federation leaders, Warren claimed—and to illustrate his point he offered $1,000 to anyone who would abduct William Taylor, a former Kentucky governor, and return him to the state for trial on an outstanding murder charge.

Federal prosecutors indicted Warren for misusing the mails, and Darrow was among the lawyers who defended the editor. “The government offered to take a fine of $25, in case of a plea of guilty,” Darrow recalled. But Warren wanted “not an easy way out, but advertising notoriety for the paper and himself. I soon found out I was employed to sell newspapers … a disagreeable job.” They lost the case; Warren blamed Darrow and began to collect and distribute derogatory information about him. Debs warned Darrow that “many of your former friends have lost confidence in you” because he had “gone over to the other side purely for money.” When Darrow needed the support of the leading socialist journal, it would not be there. See U.S. Justice Department files, brief and correspondence on the Warren case, May 1909, National Archives, and also Debs to Darrow, Feb. 19, 1912, Warren to L. C. Boyle, Dec. 12, 1910,
Eugene Debs collection, Indiana State University; Darrow to Caro Lloyd, Dec. 8, 1910, and Feb. 8, 1911, HDL.
Myeroff v. Tinslar
, 175 Ill. App. 29; Geoffrey Cowan,
The People v. Clarence Darrow
(New York: Times Books, 1993);
Chicago Tribune
, Nov. 3, 6, 12, 13, 1908, Sept. 25, Oct. 26, 1909, Feb. 10, 24, 25, 26, Mar. 4, May 9, 11, Aug. 4, 1910.

9.
Edwin Maxey, “The Rudowitz Extradition Case,”
The Green Bag: An Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers
, Vol. 21, 1909; Frederick Giffin, “The Rudowitz Extradition Case,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
, Spring 1982;
New York Times
, Jan. 27, 1909;
Chicago Evening Post
, Dec. 6, 1908;
Chicago Daily News
, Dec. 5, 7, 1908, and Jan. 27, 1909;
Chicago Tribune
, Nov. 6, 14, 24–29, Dec. 1, 6, 10, 13, 24, 25, 27, 1908, and Jan. 4, 13, 14, 15, 27, Feb. 14, 15, June 17, 1909.