Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (32 page)

“I don’t believe that this man was ever loyally in the employ of anybody,” Darrow said. “I don’t believe he ever had any allegiance to the Mine Owners’ Association, to the Pinkertons, to the Western Federation of Miners, to his family, to his kindred, to his God or to anything human or Divine.

“He was a soldier of fortune ready to pick up a penny or a dollar or any other sum in any way … to serve the devil if he got his price, and his price was cheap,” said Darrow. “He never did get a good price for trying to kill a man until McParland got a hold of him … and told him the value of killing a man … his life for Haywood’s.”

“There is nothing in this case but Orchard. Orchard, an unspeakable scoundrel; Orchard, a perjured villain; Orchard, the biggest coward on record; Orchard, shifting the burden of his sins upon these men to save his life,” he told the jurors. “If you men can kill my client on his testimony, then peace be with you.”

As for Haywood, “I don’t claim that this man is an angel. The Western Federation of Miners could not afford to put an angel at their head. Do you want to hire an angel to fight the Mine Owners’ Association and the Pinkerton detectives and the power of wealth? Oh, no gentlemen; you better get a first class fighting man who has physical courage, who has mental courage, who has strong devotion, who loves the poor, who loves the weak, who hates iniquity and hates it more when it is with the powerful and the great,” said Darrow. “An angel would not be fitted for that place and I make no claim of that.

“But he is not a demon. If he were a demon or a bad man he would never be working in this cause, for the prizes of the world are somewhere else,” Darrow said.

He had been speaking, over two days, for eleven hours. He was almost sobbing now and his cheeks, and those of many in the courtroom, including some jurors, were tracked with tears. He grasped the edge of the table for support.

I have known Haywood—I have known him well and I believe in him. I do believe in him. God knows it would be a sore day to me if he should ascend the scaffold …

But … other men have died in the same cause in which Bill Haywood has risked his life. Men strong with devotion, men who love liberty, men who love their fellow-men have raised their voices in defense of the poor, in defense of justice, have made their good fight and have met death on the scaffold, on the rack, in the flame, and they will meet it again and again until the world grows old and gray.

Bill Haywood is no better than the rest. He can die, if die he needs. He can die if this jury decrees it; but, oh, gentlemen, don’t think for a moment that if you hang him you will crucify the labor movement of the world; don’t think that you will kill the hopes and the aspirations and the desires of the weak and poor.

You people who are anxious for this blood, are you so blind as to believe that liberty will die when he is dead? Do you think there are no other brave hearts and no other strong arms, no other devoted souls who will risk all in that great cause which has demanded martyrs in every age of the world? There are others and these others will come to take his place; they will come to carry the banner where he could not carry it.

Gentlemen, it is not for him alone that I speak. I speak for the poor, for the weak, for the weary, for that long line of men who, in darkness and despair, have borne the labors of the human race. The eyes of the world are upon you—upon you twelve men of
Idaho tonight. Wherever the English language is spoken or wherever any foreign tongue known to the civilized world is spoken men are talking and wondering and dreaming about the verdict of these twelve men that I see before me now.

If you kill him your act will be applauded by many. If you should decree Bill Haywood’s death in the great railroad offices of our great cities men will sing your praise. If you decree his death, amongst the spiders of Wall Street will go up paeans of praise for these twelve good men and true who killed Bill Haywood. In every bank, almost, in the world, where men wish to get rid of agitators and disturbers, where men hate him because he fights for the poor and against the accursed system upon which they live and grow rich and fat—from all those you will receive blessing and praise, that you have killed him.

[But] there are still those who will reverently bow their heads and thank these twelve men for the life and character they have saved. Out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide ocean where men are sailing the ships, through our mills and factories, down deep under the earth, thousands of men and of women and children—men who labor, men who suffer, women and children weary with care and toil—these men and these women and these children will kneel tonight and ask their God to guide your judgment. These men and these women and these little children—the poor, the weak and the suffering of the world—will stretch out their hands to this jury and implore you to save Haywood’s life.

Darrow’s last few words were barely audible. He seemed to stagger to his chair. Haywood and his other lawyers surrounded Darrow, and even Borah elbowed his way in to offer his compliments. It had been a golden moment, and Darrow had done it justice.

N
OW IT WAS
Borah’s turn. That night a thousand people, dressed in their finery, crowded the courthouse and the lawn outside to hear Idaho’s young lion. To Darrow, the scene evoked Lord Byron’s lines on the ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo:

    
There was a sound of revelry by night
,

    
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then

    
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright

    
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men
.

Borah attacked like Wellington’s cavalry, swinging a saber. Darrow was his target.

“If I were fighting for the cause of labor, I would not seek to engender hatred and ill-will, faction against faction, or class against class. I would not inveigh against law; I would not inveigh against society; I would not inveigh against every man who owns his home or his farm; I would not inveigh against Christianity,” Borah said. “Without such things the laboring man goes down into slavery and dirt.”

And there was something the jurors should remember about Orchard, said Borah. Repugnant and vicious—yes, but.…

“There is another peculiarity about this homicidal maniac. As the greatest reader of the human heart once said, ‘There must be method in his madness.’ In all his scurrying here and there, killing where he would and where he could, he always lit upon the enemies of the Western Federation of Miners,” the prosecutor said. “Maniac? A very necessary maniac.”

After an hour Thursday night, Borah resumed the next morning, and finished his summation that evening. Haywood’s mother and Steunenberg’s widow, overcome by emotion, needed to be helped from the courtroom.

“You have no doubt often in this case been moved by the eloquence of counsel for the defense,” Borah said. “But as I listened to the voice of counsel and felt for a time their great influence, there came to me, after the spell was broken, another scene … I remembered again the awful thing of December 30, 1905 … I felt again its cold and icy chill, faced the drifting snow and peered at last into the darkness for the sacred spot where last lay the body of my dead friend and saw true, only too true, the stain of his life’s blood upon the whitened earth.

“I saw Idaho dishonored and disgraced. I saw murder—no, not murder, a thousand times worse than murder—I saw anarchy wave its first bloody triumph in Idaho.”

Borah’s peroration did not match Darrow’s (the senator wrote a more dramatic finish for a published version), but he had linked the bits of circumstantial
evidence into a chain that enveloped Haywood—or at least observers thought so. In the shorthand and immediacy of the newspapers, all that came before was forgotten, and Haywood’s fate now rested upon this final face-off: Darrow versus Borah. And Borah had won.

Borah had shown “wonderful lucidity” and “deadly precision,” Davis wrote. “It was a display of intellectual power that amounted almost to revelation … The dingy courtroom was lighted up by a flame of living fire as this man stood there pleading the case of outraged law.”
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When the senator ended his speech that Friday night, a consensus had formed. The best the defense could hope for was a hung jury, or a compromise verdict of second-degree murder.
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D
ARROW HAD, TYPICALLY
,
soared high and low throughout the trial. He “was a man of moods,” said his friend, the Chicago labor leader
Anton Johannsen. “He would have faith in the morning and be despairing in the evening.” At one point Darrow strode into the jail grinning, and shouted to his clients: “We’ve got the sons of bitches!” At another he was so downcast that the irreverent Pettibone ordered him to cheer up because “You know it’s us fellows that have to be hanged.”
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The jury began to deliberate late Saturday morning, and Darrow remained at the courthouse, fearing and expecting, like most, a quick guilty verdict. As the hours went on, he remained anxious, and appeared to be hoping for a hung jury. “It takes only one,” he told a reporter. The press and the lawyers settled in, drawing chairs together as makeshift beds. According to the courthouse scuttlebutt, the jury had taken a quick vote, and gone 10 to 2 for conviction. The Associated Press carried the story to the waiting nation; it seemed but a matter of time before the two holdouts were converted.

Just before ten p.m., the judge went home. The courtroom was swept of the newspapers and sandwich wrappings and cigar butts, and locked up for the night. Darrow could not sleep; he roamed the streets with friends and reporters, finally settling in a house across the street from the courthouse. At midnight the rumors were again specific. One of the holdouts had caved; it was now 11 to 1, and Haywood would surely hang.

On Sunday morning, before seven a.m., telephones started ringing in Boise. The jury had reached its verdict. No audience gathered at this early
hour, just reporters and lawyers. Darrow was among the first to arrive, his eyes red and his skin ashen. Haywood was brought up from the jail, still dressed in yesterday’s clothing, testament to a sleepless night. Borah was missing, but Governor Gooding stood in the doorway.

The morning sun streamed through the courtroom windows, heralding another hellish day. Darrow put his arm around his client and said quietly, “Brace up there, now, Bill.”

Haywood sat erect, red-faced, his arm hooked upon the high back of his chair. The jury was brought in, looking grim.

“Have you agreed upon a verdict?” Wood asked.

“We have,” said the foreman. There was fumbling with the envelope. The judge looked at the verdict and handed it to his clerk to be read. Darrow covered his face with his hands.

“State of Idaho against William D. Haywood,” the clerk intoned. “We the jury in the above entitled cause find the defendant, William D. Haywood, not guilty.”

An instant of shock; then pandemonium.

“Bill, you’re free, you’re free, do you know it?” Darrow told him, grasping Haywood by the hands. Richardson rose to make a motion, but couldn’t get the words out. “The defendant will be discharged,” Wood declared, “and the jury dismissed.” Hawley departed; Gooding disappeared.

Haywood gleefully shook hands with the jurors, who crowded around the labor leader and his lawyers.

“I want to say, Mr. Darrow, that I like you. I liked the way you handled this case,” said juror Russell. “I believe you are honest and what you said went a long way with me.”

“And you, too, Mr. Robertson, were with us,” Darrow told the aged Scot. “I was afraid of you. I was afraid you could not forget that Gov. Steunenberg was your friend.”

“So he was, Mr. Darrow,” Robertson replied. “But do you suppose that after Harry Orchard, that wretch, killed him that I could sit and see him try to throw it off on Mr. Haywood? No, sir.” He walked off chuckling at the way he had fooled the lawyers.

“Mr. McBean,” said Darrow, reaching to pull the juror into the circle. “We never could figure just where you stood.”

“Mr. Darrow, I didn’t know myself,” he replied. “When the state got through I was in doubt. And when you finished I was in doubt. The judge
said if any of us had doubts we must acquit. I said that is good enough for me.”

And Darrow told Foreman Gess, “I didn’t know as you liked my attack on Mr. Hawley, as I believe he and you are old friends.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Gess replied. “I know how lawyers are.”

Ruby was searching for Darrow, squeezing her way through “a solid jam of humanity on every street … trying to get to the winners, shouting, surging, waving, smiling, crying aloud their joy over the victory.” As she made her way down Main Street she saw Borah, “in the doorway at the foot of the stairway that led up to his office … one shoulder leaning against the wall, hands in pockets, feet crossed, hat tilted to one side, the picture of abject despair.”

Haywood, grabbing Darrow’s hat instead of his own in his excitement, rushed from the courtroom. He went first down the stairs, to greet his codefendants.

“That’s good,” said Moyer, who never stopped shaving as he heard the news.

“Give my regards to Broadway,” said Pettibone.

Then Haywood went to the hospital, where his mother was being treated for exhaustion and a Federation lawyer,
John Murphy, was dying of tuberculosis. Murphy’s two withered arms reached up. He knew his friend well. He placed his hands on Haywood’s cheeks and said, “Bill, you are a great big-hearted fellow. In your hour of triumph be humble.” In a walk through Boise the next day, Darrow told Haywood much the same thing—to stay out of trouble and keep a low profile—but his client rejected the advice. “His arguments had no weight with me,” he said. “Darrow had been employed as a lawyer and not as a mentor.”
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