Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (25 page)

A
MERICA HAD ENTERED
the Progressive Era, that time in the country’s history when middle-class Americans, alarmed at the excess of industry and the pervasive corruption of the Gilded Age, launched mighty crusades to curb big business and make government more powerful, honest, and responsive. Darrow, moving dexterously from populist to progressive, became a leading actor in the nationwide movement for municipal reform.

Throughout Darrow’s years in Chicago, various reform movements had attempted to quell the city’s rampant corruption. “Chicago under my father, and in lesser degree under me, was what is known as a ‘wide open town,’ ”
Carter Harrison Jr. acknowledged in his memoirs. Each Harrison served five terms as mayor, with the help of a roster of political allies that included “saloonkeepers of high and low degree, gamblers, dive-keepers, men about town of shady connections, the Madames of the brothels, and the owners of the less disreputable of the ten cent Flops.”

The anything-goes attitude reached beyond the streets of the Levee. Factories were dangerous. The air was thick and black, and the waters polluted. The alleys were strewn with garbage and the streetcars were crowded, filthy, and freezing in winter. Shamed by critics, a group of the city’s better folks organized the
Civic Federation. A smaller and more focused organization—the
Municipal Voters’ League—followed in 1896. Of sixty-eight aldermen, it announced, fifty-seven were thieves. They were branded “the gray wolves.”

Yet even in that target-rich environment there was “one man who stands out conspicuous among all the rest,” wrote the muckraker
William Stead. His name was
Charles Yerkes, and he built and operated much of the city’s streetcar system in North and West Chicago. Yerkes was hardworking and arrogant, had served time in prison for fraud, and had few
illusions about his fellow man.
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He could have profited discreetly, like the local transit barons who owned the Chicago City Railway on the south side of town, if the streetcar franchises that he purchased were not due to expire in 1903. Yerkes needed an extension of his franchise rights, and that gave the aldermen in Chicago and the legislators in Springfield a prized opportunity to auction their votes. Yerkes played the game with zest. It was Yerkes who “first made boodling a serious business,” wrote
Lincoln Steffens.

Yerkes wanted his franchises extended to ninety-nine years. In 1895, he offered Altgeld a bribe of at least $500,000 if the governor would approve an “eternal monopoly” bill. Yerkes was “a man of iron will, and as bold as any buccaneer who ever sailed the financial seas,” Darrow recalled. And Altgeld desperately needed the money. “I knew all of Altgeld’s most trusted friends; we often discussed the matter among ourselves,” said Darrow. “All that was required was to withhold a veto and let it become a law.” But Altgeld issued a very public veto, with a ringing declaration of the rights of the citizens to control their streets.

When Yerkes finally triumphed in Springfield, pushing a franchise extension through the legislature in 1898, former governor Altgeld joined with Mayor Harrison, the
Municipal Voters’ League, and angry crowds (some of whom threatened the aldermen with nooses) to block the enabling legislation in the city council. Harrison’s two knavish allies—Bathhouse and Hinky Dink—opposed Yerkes, who lost in the council by a single vote. In return, the Levee lords secured the mayor’s protection of the First Ward’s saloons, gambling houses, and brothels. Yerkes had enough. He sold his interests and went to London, where he helped build the Underground, and offered no apologies. “I was fighting the Devil in Illinois,” he said. “I fought him with fire.”
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Municipal control of streetcars and other utilities became a potent political issue. In city after city, the citizenry called for government to run public services. Darrow acquired a national reputation in the struggle, as an ally of reform mayors like
Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones and his successor,
Brand Whitlock, in Toledo;
Tom Johnson in Cleveland; and the socialist
Emil Seidel in Milwaukee. In 1903, during Darrow’s term in the Illinois legislature, the battle came to Springfield, where a measure to give Chicago the authority to run its own streetcars was imprisoned in committee by house speaker
John Henry Miller and allies of the transit
interests. Chicago’s representatives jumped to their feet and climbed on desks, demanding to be recognized. When Miller refused to call on them, some smashed chairs and tables, waving the legs as clubs as they moved toward the rostrum.

W
ILD RIOT IN THE HOUSE
, the
Daily News
reported. Members shouted “Coward!” and “Roll call!” and “Liar!” as “the advance of the moving host” became “threatening.” Fistfights broke out. Men grappled and tumbled about the dais. Darrow knocked a foe to the floor, by one account, and dumped a wastebasket on his head. The speaker, surrounded by a praetorian guard, declared the house adjourned, beat a hasty retreat to his private rooms, and barricaded the door.

Miller’s tactics had offended delegates from around the state, who joined with their counterparts from Chicago to elect a rump leader, who gaveled the house to order with a broken chair rung. Darrow reviewed the rules of impeachment. That night, the speaker caved. Darrow then joined in the successful effort to pass the bill. It was the highlight of his career in the legislature, which lasted just the single term.
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The struggle shifted back to Chicago, where the voters endorsed “immediate” municipal ownership at the polls in 1905, as Judge
Edward Dunne was elected mayor. He hired Darrow, his friend and ally, as a special counsel to represent the city in a lawsuit that had been filed by the streetcar interests in the federal courts. Darrow’s old nemesis, the unscrupulous Judge Grosscup, had ruled that the transit companies had rights to run streetcars until 1958. The city appealed to the
U.S. Supreme Court, and Darrow argued and won the case.

Dunne was a genial lace-curtain Irishman who lacked Harrison’s Machiavellian skills. And the voters had saddled him with a city council that preferred to negotiate franchise extensions. The mayor, seeking to please all, pleased few. Trying to get something passed, he wavered on municipal ownership, reembraced it under pressure, abandoned it once more, and endorsed it yet again. Progressives around the country were looking to Chicago to set an example, but “the Radicals” at City Hall, one journal reported, “seem incapable of really finishing anything; everything they have turned out so far has been just about half baked.”

By the end of that first summer, Darrow had sent a letter of resignation to the mayor. “I have no right to say that my opinion is better than yours. It is very possible that yours is better than mine,” Darrow said. “But
it is not fair to me that I should be committed to a policy that I believe will fail.” The resignation was not accepted, but neither was his advice. Darrow took to restating it in public as the mayor, sharing the podium, rolled his eyes in consternation. Finally, in the fall, Darrow left City Hall. “Our municipal ownership administration is very poor and will doubtless result in nothing,” he wrote Whitlock. In the break with Dunne, Darrow ended his twenty years in politics as he had spent it, marching to his own drum. Inspired by Amirus, he had seen politics as a place where a young man with a good heart and a passion for a cause could change the world. He was not unselfish; he wanted, following Altgeld’s prescription, to get the power and give things a twist. But now Amirus and Altgeld and Lloyd were dead—taken from him in such quick succession that he hardly had time to mourn. He had no father to honor, no captain to serve, no comrade with whom to soldier.

“You are really running for mayor,” Darrow wrote Whitlock. “Well I guess I hope you will win though I cannot say why. It will mean horrible vexations of the spirit [and be] no possible good to anyone.” Darrow looked more to himself. A few weeks before Dunne faced the voters for reelection in 1907, the
Tribune
published a mean satire, from an anonymous author, comparing Dunne to Mark Tapley, the Dickensian feather-head of the novel
Martin Chuzzlewit
. Dunne had all Tapley’s frustrating characteristics, “except that Mark Tapley was loyal to his friends,” the piece declared. The anonymous author was Darrow.

“Nothing has made me so happy in politics in recent years as the defeat of Dunne,” Darrow wrote Whitlock. “He is a man without brains, backbone or guts. He is unfaithful to every person and every thing, he is the nearest to nothing of any man that I ever knew, and while municipal ownership and progressive ideas lost something in his election, they have lost nothing in his defeat.”

But Darrow’s friends and associates were upset by his actions, which they saw as selfish and cynical. “Dunne was weak, but he honestly stood for much if not all that Darrow pretends to advocate” and was replaced by “a spoils man who will use his position without scruple,” wrote Austin Wright, one of Darrow’s former clients. “A personal dislike, it does not seem to me, constitutes a good and sufficient ground for going over to the enemy.”
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Some saw greed and cynicism in Darrow’s behavior. The editors of
the
American
became alarmed when Darrow took fees from both the newspaper and the
International Harvester Company for negotiating an end to their journalistic crusade against the firm, which had been evading payment of its property taxes. Darrow’s reputation was dented, as well, by his willingness to represent his supposed foes, the streetcar companies, in court. On behalf of the Chicago City transit firm, he led an unsuccessful attempt to kill a franchise granted to its competitor, the
General Electric Railway Company.

“There was a bulge in the pockets of the aldermen who voted for this ordinance,” said Darrow. “Nobody knows it better than the Electric railway company.”

“Unless it be the City railway company,” said the rival attorney, and the courtroom erupted in knowing laughter.
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Darrow’s image was further smudged when another streetcar firm, the
Union Traction Company, got caught bribing jurors in personal injury cases, and he agreed to defend three Irish American lawyers charged in the scandal. It was a Chicago sensation. Extra bailiffs were required to control a courtroom crowded with rowdy Celts. Fistfights broke out when a guilty verdict was announced, and the angry Irish spectators rushed the prosecutor, shouting “Dog!” and “Scoundrel!”

Darrow persevered, and two of the convictions were reversed on appeal. He then gave a job to a lawyer named
Cy Simon, who was the Union Traction bagman in the case. Some months later, Masters discovered that their firm was receiving $150 a month from Union Traction to buy Simon’s continued silence. And whenever Darrow represented a client in an injury case against Union Traction, Masters said, the company would invariably agree to a generous settlement. The word spread and boosted their business. “It was bribery all around,” said Masters.

“Darrow has no principles,” Wright told a mutual friend. “He professes to hold feelings of utmost contempt for millionaires, while his acts emphasize a greed for money.”

“I once had a fondness approaching affection for Darrow,” Wright concluded, “but the withering blight of his moral bankruptcy fell upon every feeling of that kind.”

The journalist
Hutchins Hapgood was a bit more forgiving. Darrow could best be described, he wrote, as a philosophical anarchist who, in the name of liberty, refused to be ruled by nettlesome rules or creeds. There
were advantages to such a pose. “It allows a man to be an opportunist,” Hapgood said, “while having a high ideal.”
¹⁷

Darrow’s involvement in another scandal made the front pages across the country when the
Bank of America, a Chicago thrift, went bust in early 1906. The bank had been looted by its president, former judge
Abner Smith. Darrow was a cofounder and a major stockholder.

The idea for the bank was laudatory. It was to have been run for the benefit of working folks, whose pennies it would solicit by accepting deposits at neighborhood drugstores. Some five hundred families opened savings accounts. Darrow borrowed $7,000 to invest in the bank and deposited another $6,000. Masters invested $4,000. Even
John Azzop, the elevator operator in their building, was persuaded to move his savings there.

But Smith never had the capital reserves required by Illinois law. And he then okayed $250,000 in ill-secured loans for himself, associates, and members of his family. Darrow and the other stockholders were fortunate in but one regard: the bank failed quickly, allowing them to save the depositors’ money, if not their own. Darrow contained the scandal by alerting the authorities and announcing that he would personally guarantee the $25,000 in workingmen’s deposits that were at risk. They were paid out to folks like Azzop when they showed up with their bankbooks.