Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (12 page)

The following morning, Judge Payne read his instructions to the jury. In less than two hours, it reached a verdict. Prendergast would die.

“Mr. Darrow’s closing argument would have swept us all off our feet,” said juror
William Steinke, who admitted that some of his colleagues had been moved to tears. But the jury felt a duty to avenge the murdered mayor. “We felt that we could not be honest and still allow such an appeal to influence our decision.”

Now began the grim last dance of lawyers in a capital case. Darrow and Gregory offered a motion for a new trial; it was denied. On July 11, Darrow took the train to Springfield, accompanied by attorney
James Harlan, to see Altgeld. All three men knew the visit was useless, but the governor welcomed the two lawyers, joined them at dinner, and rode with them in a carriage around town. There was no changing his mind.

Darrow and Gregory tried federal court, but the judge declined to intervene. “Yes, it is all over,” Darrow told the reporters as the courthouse
emptied. “The country seems determined to hang an insane man and I guess we will have to allow it to do so.” Prendergast went meekly to his death on Friday, July 13. Gregory was there to offer what comfort he could to the condemned man, but Darrow was not. It was all too horrid, and disheartening, and sad.
¹⁴

The editors at the
Tribune
should have been pleased. Yet something marred their joy. The Harrisons had taken the side of striking workers in that year’s industrial unrest and scored great circulation gains. The
Tribune
’s editor,
Joseph Medill, viewed the mayor’s sons as ingrates.

“It was the
Tribune
that prevented the insanity inquiry from being tried before a judge selected by the murderer’s lawyers, and resulted in having the trial before a sterner and less sympathetic jurist. And it was the
Tribune
’s powerful special attorney who successfully prosecuted your father’s murderer to the gallows,” Medill wrote Carter Harrison Jr. “The assassin would never have been hung but for his work, supplemented by that of the
Tribune.”
¹⁵

It was a revealing glimpse of how things were, and the powers that Darrow defied, in Chicago. Yet the truth was as stark as fresh dirt on a grave. The defense of
Patrick Prendergast had been Darrow’s first big criminal case. And he had lost the mad newsboy to the hangman’s rope.

Chapter 4

POPULIST

Ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell.

A
s Darrow toiled to rescue crazy Patrick Prendergast, events outside the courthouse supplied an apt backdrop. Chicago was rocked by rage and anarchy, as federal troops and marshals battled mobs of unemployed and striking laborers in the violent climax of a nationwide workers’ uprising. It was called the “
Debs Rebellion,” after Eugene Debs, whose American Railway Union was crushed by President Cleveland for its audacity and its leaders seized and jailed after bringing commerce to a standstill throughout most of the country.

Darrow had been shaken by the state’s relentless insistence on killing Prendergast. Now he watched its army and its judges, deployed at the behest of corporations, quell the collective action of American workingmen. The experience left him angry and alienated. The idealist who had said, when he arrived in Chicago, that the “injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system” began to reconsider.

The
Panic of 1893 had set events in motion by exposing the gap between the gilded lifestyles of the robber barons and the grinding, depersonalizing existence of the industrial workforce. The usually restrained labor leader, Sam Gompers, captured the militant mood in January 1894 at a rally in New York when he chanted: “Oh angels shut thine eyes / Let conflagration illumine the outraged skies! / Let red Nemesis burn the hellish clan / And chaos end the slavery of man!” There were strikes across the country, and spontaneous “armies of the Commonweal” comprised of out-of-work men, bankrupt farmers, and tramps marched on state capitals and Washington. On April 24, the
Times
broke away from
its coverage of the Prendergast case to report that Kelly’s Army was camping in Iowa, that Coxey’s Army was heading toward Washington, and that the financial markets were quaking: “A wave of panic swept over the exchange … Stocks tumbled … Moneybags shuddered and resolved to swell their contributions to the support of the militia on the morrow. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Huntingtons, the Pullmans and all the other plutocrats got home before dark, nor breathed they comfortably until they had double barred their doors and found refuge behind the solid masonry of their castles.”
¹

Debs was a native of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he met early success as a local politician and railway union officer. He was tall, thin, and balding, indefatigable and brave. “There may have lived some time, some where, a kindlier … more generous man … but I have never known him,” Darrow said. “He never felt fear. He had the courage of the babe who has no conception of the word.” The labor movement was fragmented at the time, which allowed the railroads to pit rival occupations—engineers, firemen, switchmen, and the like—against one another. To resolve the problem, Debs launched the ARU in Chicago in 1893. It grew rapidly, especially after a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway.
²

The union was countered by the General Managers’ Association, headquartered in Chicago, through which two dozen railroads worked to cap wages and subdue their workers. A federal commission, charged with probing the causes of industrial unrest that summer, cited the GMA as an example of the “persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations” to “usurp” power in America. A strike at the Pullman works kindled the showdown. Its founder,
George Pullman, had made his fortune designing, building, and operating commodious sleeping cars. Like many a self-made millionaire, he attributed his success to clean living and hard work; unlike many tycoons, he sought to give his employees an opportunity for both, by building a model town on the outskirts of Chicago. By 1893, some twelve thousand people lived in the tidy little city of Pullman. They could walk from work on safe, tree-shaded streets, past lawns and public parks, a library and theater and other civic amenities, to modern homes and tenements. But there were snakes in Pullman’s Eden. Rents and utility bills were high, to pay Pullman’s hefty stock dividends. Workers faced eleven-hour days. Immigrant religions were discouraged. The village church, police, newspaper, and elections were controlled by the
company. Gardening, decorating, and music making were regulated. The residents knew that company “spotters” mingled among them, reporting undesirable behavior, and that their leases gave the company the power to evict troublemakers. There was no hospital, for this was a town for productive workers, not the sickly. Pullman was “un-American,” the sociologist
Richard Ely concluded. “It is benevolent well-wishing feudalism.”

Pullman’s workers rebelled during the Panic, when the company slashed wages—but not rents. “Great destitution and suffering prevails,” the
Times
reported, “but the house rent to the Pullman company must be paid.” Debs recognized the fragility of his young union and opposed hasty action, but his members voted to boycott trains bearing Pullman cars. Civic delegations and union officials trekked to Pullman, seeking to forestall a confrontation. “We have nothing to arbitrate,” the company declared.

George Pullman later told the strike commission that the money he would have lost in arbitration was not what moved him. “The amount … would not cut any figure,” he said. “It was the principle involved.” So what remedies, the commission asked, did the workingman have? A firm “could work a great deal of injustice to the men; no doubt about that,” Pullman vice president
Thomas Wickes conceded. “But then it is a man’s privilege to go to work somewhere else.”

The ARU launched its boycott on June 26, 1894. Freight and passenger travel came to a halt from Pennsylvania to California. Some 150,000 men walked off the job, and tens of thousands of working-class Americans wore white ribbons as an act of solidarity. It was “The Greatest Strike in History,” the
New York Times
announced, and coming as it did against a background of the Commonweal marches and violent strikes by miners and textile and iron workers, it thoroughly spooked the wealthy. “The struggle with the Pullman company has developed into a contest between the producing classes and the money power of the country,” Debs said. The GMA officials agreed; they set up a war room, and looked to the White House for help.
³

A
S THE RAILWAY
workers cheered their success, Grover Cleveland met with his advisers. The president was a Democrat from New York, with broad support on Wall Street, whose most notable accomplishments were the deals he made with J. P. Morgan and other financiers to stabilize the currency. “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering,” Cleveland said, when vetoing an emergency farm bill. “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.”
⁴

Cleveland turned to
Richard Olney, the attorney general, to handle the railway strike. Skilled and ruthless, Olney had left a job as counsel for one railroad and director of two others to join the cabinet. His sentiments can be gauged by a letter he wrote advising a railroad executive not to oppose the creation of the
Interstate Commerce Commission. “The Commission … can be made of great use to the railroads,” Olney noted. “It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people.”

Olney named
Edwin Walker, yet another railroad lawyer, as a “special counsel” for the justice department in Chicago. And
Thomas Milchrist, the U.S. attorney, sat in on the meetings of the GMA, where he asked that the railroads “report any interference with mail trains.” The attorney general was itching to intervene.
⁵
Federal judges
Peter Grosscup and
William Woods, abandoning any pretext of impartiality, helped the government draft a request for an injunction and swiftly approved it. They issued what came to be called the “Gatling gun on paper,” ordering all persons to “refrain from interfering” with railroad traffic and banning anyone from coercing, inciting, or even “persuading” workers to strike. Olney was nothing if not bold; he based the government’s argument on the
Sherman Antitrust Act, which was enacted in 1890 to fight trusts and monopolies but now was employed to crush the union.

On the evening of July 2, U.S. marshal
John Arnold informed Washington that he had gone out to the rail yards and read the injunction to the striking workmen, who “simply hoot at it.” The thousands of “deputies” he had recruited—toughs and drunks paid by the railroads—could not clear the tracks. Special counsel Walker (who privately called Arnold’s deputies “a mob … worse than useless”) informed Olney that it was “of utmost
importance that soldiers should be distributed at several points within the city.” Cleveland gave his approval.

Debs had consistently appealed “to strikers everywhere to refrain from any act of violence,” the strike commission would report. Until the U.S. Army marched in, in the early morning hours of Independence Day, things were relatively peaceful. But the soldiers were a provocation. And on July 4 the striking railway men were joined by thousands of the unemployed and industrial workers celebrating Independence Day, all in a giddy and often inebriated state. As the trains tried to move within protective cordons of troops, huge crowds gathered at the crossings, blocking progress with their bodies and tipping freight cars. The first boxcars were set aflame the next day as mobs of up to fifty thousand, by some estimates, massed along the tracks. That night, someone started a fire in the deserted grounds of the White City. Whipped by warm winds, the flames consumed the Exposition’s buildings. On July 6, after a railroad employee shot two rioters, hundreds looted and burned seven hundred railcars in south Chicago. “It was pandemonium let loose, the fire leaping along for miles and the men and women dancing with frenzy,” the
Inter Ocean
reported. On July 7 a contingent of Illinois militia fired into a threatening crowd, killing four and wounding dozens.