Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (21 page)

“It is well for them to say we are anarchists and criminals, that we are drunkards, that we are profligates, that we cannot speak the English language, that we are unruly boys,” Darrow responded. “But it would come with far better grace from them if they could show that ever once, ever once in all their administration of these lands and of these natural bounties which Mr. Baer thinks the Lord gave to him to administer, that ever once they have considered anyone but themselves.”

At times Darrow stood there, in his swallow-tailed coat, vest, and black tie, talking in conversational tones. But then he would crouch and stride across the floor, wheel toward the crowd, and thunder. He would pose, with his right hand in his pocket and his left arm raised, or wag his index finger like a rapier. As he built toward a climax he’d raise his voice, wave his right arm high, form a fist, and bring it crashing down. “In the vicinity of Scranton are at least twenty mills—silk mills, knitting mills, thread mills—where little girls from twelve to thirteen or fourteen years of age are working ten hours a day, twelve hours a day, and twelve hours at night as well,” he said. “Is there any man so blind that he does not know why that anthracite region is dotted with silk mills?

“They went there because the miners were there,” Darrow said. “They went there just as naturally as the wild beast goes to find its prey; they went there as the hunter goes where he can find game. Every mill in that region is a testimony to the fact that the wages that you pay are so low that you sell your boys to be slaves of the breaker and your girls to be slaves in the mills.

“I have no doubt the railroad president loves children,” Darrow said. “Neither have I any doubt that the wolf loves mutton.”

If it was an industrial war, if there was violence, then the operators must share the blame, Darrow said. Eight or nine men may have been killed, and “here and there dynamite was used, never once to destroy life, always to frighten,” he acknowledged. But what of the widows and children of the miners killed beneath the earth, and of the Coll family and others who suffered at the hands of the industry and its stooges?

“There are all kinds of violence in this world,” he said.

“I
KNOW THAT
we speak in a way against things that are. I believe that we dream of things that are yet to come,” Darrow said, as he neared the end of his plea.

“Judge us in the light of all the impossibilities that confronted us; in the light of the severe travail through which we passed; in the light of the
material which we were bound to use; in the light of the fearful, appalling odds that we faced,” he asked.

“The blunders are theirs,” he said, referring to Baer and the other operators. “The blunders are theirs because, in this old, old strife, they are fighting for slavery, while we are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the rule of man over man, for despotism, for darkness, for the past. We are striving to build up man. We are working for democracy, for humanity, for the future.”

When he was done, the transcript says, there was “great and long continued applause.” The demonstration lasted five minutes or more, as folks crowded around Darrow to congratulate him. Mitchell was the first, grasping his lawyer’s hand in thanks and approval. And “many of the capitalist women,” Lloyd noted, “were quite carried away.”

Darrow “began the day before with … the commission … almost openly against him. He closed with their undivided interest and admiration,” said Lloyd. His friend was a man of “iron nerves and steel strength,” he wrote. “After making that day and a half speech … he went out to dinner.”
¹²

The commission’s
final report gave the UMW much of what it wanted. “A good, substantial victory,” Darrow told the press. “We didn’t get all we asked, but what we did get is better than what we agreed to take last winter.” There was a 10 percent raise and the adoption of an eight- or nine-hour day, depending on a man’s duties. The commission urged the state to replace the industry’s private police force with professional agencies answerable to the public, and to crack down on child labor abuses. But while happy with the decision, Darrow scorned the dicta. The commissioners chastised strikers for the violence and did not require that the coal operators recognize the union. In defending the “open shop” principles of industry, the commissioners had behaved in a “most cowardly” way, he told Lloyd.

It was, nevertheless, a remarkable achievement. Unions were joining the American mainstream. “The opinion of the commission is that trade unionism has come to stay and that employers must deal with these conditions,” Darrow said. “That is a great victory.” When
Samuel Gompers was asked, years later, to pick the most crucial battle in organized labor’s struggle in America, he chose the Great Strike of 1902. Mitchell’s leadership, the drama of the hearings, and the arrogant behavior of the coal
barons had convinced the public, and even a Republican president, that labor deserved a voice in American economic affairs.

There was a feeling, among unionists, that a tide had turned. Roosevelt was going after the trusts, and would soon call for federal income and inheritance taxes on the men he called “the malefactors of great wealth.” But the robber barons would not be caught off guard again. There would be more industrial crises, and extremists on both sides, hardened in the war, would turn to kidnapping, murder, and dynamite.
¹³

D
ARROW RETURNED TO
Chicago, where on February 16, six thousand people braved cold and snowy weather to welcome him, Lloyd, and Mitchell at the Auditorium. Darrow spoke, without a script, for ninety minutes. It was probably thirty minutes too long, Lloyd told his wife, but a marvelous feat of oratory just the same.

Darrow now faced a choice he had postponed as the coal commission finished its work. There was a viable movement to elect him mayor of Chicago. He was forty-five years old. If he was serious about a career in politics, this was his great chance.

It wasn’t only radicals who urged Darrow to run. Carter Harrison Jr., who had been elected mayor in 1897, had parted from the Svengali who had guided his career, the Democratic chieftain
Robert “Bobbie” Burke, after the jovial rascal had been indicted for pocketing public funds. Seeking revenge, Burke joined the mayor’s enemies, and cast about for someone to defeat him. Darrow could win the votes of liberals and laborers, and yet the Democratic organization knew him as “a man you can talk to.” And so Darrow was approached by both radical unionists and machine Democrats and urged to run for mayor.

“You now have an opportunity in this city such as comes to but few men in a generation, and seldom to the same man twice,” a socialist editor,
A. M. Simons, told him. It was an appealing proposition, but Darrow—immersed in the coal hearings, hundreds of miles from Chicago—was in a terrible position to weigh it. “I am told that … I can have the Democratic nomination by saying the word and that election would surely follow,” Darrow told the
Daily News
. But “I do not know these things of my own knowledge.”

Were the radical forces united and strong? His friend
Thomas Kidd,
the woodworkers’ chief, thought not. The unions in Chicago were split into factions, and engaged in a struggle for control of the local Federation of Labor, complete with “scenes of wild disorder,” the papers said, that featured “slugging and the firing of revolvers.” Could Darrow believe Burke’s sweet promises? Would he split the progressive vote and help elect a Republican? And, most important, did he really want to be mayor?

“I hate the fight and trouble and worry of a political campaign. I am getting lazy and like my friends and books, etc., and would rather be left alone,” he told
Daniel Cruice, a young labor lawyer who was helping to organize the boom. Darrow also knew that in order to be elected, he would have to forfeit his independence. “I do not believe that a fellow like me could get a Democratic nomination. By the time he got it, he would be so tied up that he would be like any other political hack.”

Such questions could not be answered in Scranton or Philadelphia. So Darrow stalled. “I have been quoted as saying to friends of Mr. Harrison that I would not be a candidate,” Darrow told
George Schilling in a letter from Philadelphia. But Schilling should pass the word: “I have made no such statements, no pledges of any kind.” The crowd of young radicals took this as a “yes,” and ordered fifty thousand “Darrow for Mayor” campaign buttons. If Gompers and Mitchell supported him, and Hearst’s
American
pushed his candidacy, he might even be elected.
¹⁴

The capitalists were aghast. Should Darrow be elected, warned the
National Manufacturers Association, Chicago would see “the red flower of anarchy in perfect political bloom.” But many radicals also showed a lack of enthusiasm. “Mr. Darrow … is essentially a sentimentalist,” wrote the socialist leader
Daniel De Leon in the
Daily People
. “He is of that sympathetic class, among the well-to-do and professional men, whose heart does more bleeding for the woes of the workingman than its head does thinking.” The working class needed to elect its own leaders, said De Leon, not look to be saved by the feckless bourgeoisie. “The road that leads over the Darrows must be blocked.”
¹⁵
And Gompers and Mitchell were cool to the idea. “You ought not be wasted,” said Gompers, urging Darrow to devote his “great gifts of heart and brain” to the labor movement. “Poor Darrow … he cannot make up his mind,” Lloyd wrote, after joining an all-day meeting of Darrow’s advisers at his law office on February 21. “He thinks this may be his ‘opportunity.’ ”

As Hamlet brooded, the Harrison forces were not idle. The mayor took a bold stance on municipal ownership of the streetcar lines, depriving Darrow of that popular issue. A businessman working for Harrison paid $9,000 to teamster boss
John Driscoll to undermine Darrow’s union support. And word came to Darrow that the
American
would not be with him. Hearst had his own political ambitions—to win the White House in 1904—and needed Harrison in Illinois.
¹⁶
“If the
American
had seen fit to be with me, it could have been accomplished,” Darrow told Cruice. But “the
American
would support Harrison to satisfy some of Mr. Hearst’s political ambitions.”

Darrow announced that he would not run, and Cruice was nominated by the unionists instead. In assessing the episode, it is hard not to believe that Darrow made the right choice. “I value my independence more than I do any office,” he said. And that was surely true.
¹⁷

D
ARROW’S PERFORMANCE IN
the coal strike had brought him fame and prominence. He was now the nation’s leading labor lawyer. But notoriety made Darrow a target, as well. His actions were spotlighted and his flaws magnified. When announcing that he would not run for mayor, Darrow had promised Cruice not to endorse another candidate, and “to do you some good at the right time.” It was a hasty pledge, which he almost immediately broke, inspiring withering criticism.

The quandary was the streetcar war. The transit companies were maneuvering to kill all legislation that would give the city the authority to own and operate its streetcars. Darrow was a leader in the movement for municipal ownership. He knew Cruice could not win and that Harrison was far stronger on the issue than the Republican candidate. Judge
Edward Dunne, a colleague in the movement, asked Darrow to endorse the mayor. In return, Darrow would get patronage jobs for his friends, and Harrison’s backing should he choose to make a run for higher office. Cruice and his supporters were stunned, and then incensed, by the news.
DARROW BRANDED A LABOR TRAITOR … A STAB IN THE BACK
, read the headlines in the
Tribune
.

“When Clarence S. Darrow was defending men who had bribed juries in cases where crippled children were asking for justice from the traction
companies which had injured them, it was explained in extenuation that he was acting as ‘a lawyer.’ I suppose it will be explained he is acting as ‘a lawyer’ now,” an angry unionist, William Burns, sputtered at a rally. Another old ally, Altgeld’s friend
Joe Martin, called Darrow “a creature of purchase.”

In a letter to Cruice, Darrow tried to explain. “It [was] a promise which, if I should keep … would mean that I would help sacrifice the rights of the people of Chicago,” he wrote. Responding to accusations that he defended unions only for fat fees, Darrow offered a public accounting. He received $1,000 for his months of work in the Debs case, he said, and $10,000 in the coal arbitration. “I closed my office for four months” to represent the miners, Darrow noted. “I told them that ordinarily I would charge $100 a day but that I would take their case and when I got through they could pay me what they liked, or nothing at all. I got them a raise of $8 million and $3 million in back pay and I sent them a bill for $10,000 … I would have sent a corporation a bill for $50,000 for the same work.”