For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago (23 page)

It was a brilliant maneuver that caught the prosecution by surprise. Pullman refused to appear in court—he ignored the subpoena—and by a lucky coincidence one of the jurors became ill, forcing the judge to discharge the jury. The judge announced that he would postpone the trial until May, but Pullman’s refusal to appear in court had torpedoed the state’s case against Debs and the conspiracy charges were quietly dropped.
²⁴

It was a famous victory—for Debs, of course, and for Clarence Darrow. This had been a bitter contest, an epic battle between capital and labor, and it had captured the attention of the nation. Darrow had rescued Debs from a lengthy prison term, and now Darrow had the fame and renown that he had so much desired. He was no longer merely a Cook County attorney. Darrow was now the most famous lawyer in the United States.

I
N SUBSEQUENT YEARS, EACH CASE
that Darrow undertook enlarged his reputation; he had become a mythical figure who, through a combination of charisma and guile, always defeated his enemies. His private life was often tempestuous—his first wife, Jessie, had divorced him in 1897, and six years later Darrow married Ruby Hamerstrom—but in public Darrow seemed beyond reproach.

In 1897 he struck at the conspiracy laws a second time, in his defense of Thomas Kidd, the general secretary of the Amalgamated Woodworkers Union. Kidd had organized employees of the Paine Lumber Company in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in a strike for higher wages. The local authorities had charged Kidd with conspiracy. Darrow used the same strategy that he had employed on behalf of Eugene Debs. The real conspiracy, Darrow claimed in court, was between the Paine Lumber Company and the state authorities to crush the woodworkers’ union. Darrow succeeded a second time: the jury acquitted Kidd of all charges.
²⁵

Darrow relished such opportunities to defend workers against their bosses. The cause of the working class was always just, Darrow believed, and his defense of constitutional rights served to extend the democratic liberties of all people. And it was a happy coincidence that such labor trials brought Darrow enormous publicity as the foremost advocate of the oppressed and downtrodden. Darrow had little patience for the humdrum business of the law: the accumulation of evidence, the winnowing of precedents, and the logical construction of a client’s case. Such tasks constituted a necessary evil, which had to be borne if he was to make a living. Darrow always carried such burdensome tasks ungraciously, hoping always to make enough money so that he could choose his clients. Darrow’s enthusiasm caught fire only when great principles were at stake, most typically when he could fight on behalf of the underdog.

In 1907 Darrow assumed responsibility for the defense of the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners on charges of murder. Labor struggles between mine workers and the owners had convulsed the western states for decades and had grown in ferocity year by year. During the previous decade, the miners had successfully organized unions and had won national support for their strikes, eliciting sympathy and assistance from the American Federation of Labor.

Nowhere was the struggle more bitter, more protracted, and more violent than in Idaho. Battles between capital and labor within the state had lasted for years, and memories of the violence inflicted by both sides persisted in the mining districts long after hostilities had subsided. In 1899 Frank Steunenberg, the governor of Idaho, had earned the enmity of the mine workers’ unions after using troops to crush a series of strikes in the Coeur d’Alene region. Six years later, long after Steunenberg had left office, a bomb exploded at his residence, instantly killing him.
²⁶

The authorities quickly found the murderer. Harry Orchard had been in the nearest town, Caldwell, for several days, planning the bombing. After the police discovered explosives in his hotel room, Orchard confessed to the killing of Steunenberg. But, Orchard claimed, he had not acted alone: leaders of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had ordered the bombing. One month later the Idaho authorities seized three WFM officials, William (Big Bill) Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, in Colorado and transported them, illegally, without extradition papers, to Idaho.
²⁷

At the trial of Bill Haywood in May 1907, Clarence Darrow attacked the prosecution’s star witness, Harry Orchard, as a liar and a perjurer. Orchard, by his own admission, had lived a rootless, peripatetic existence, drifting through the western states and leaving behind him a trail of mayhem and destruction, including no fewer than nineteen murders. Orchard was not a credible witness, Darrow asserted; he had agreed to testify against Haywood and the other WFM leaders in exchange for a lesser sentence.

Darrow, in his closing speech, mesmerized the jury into acquiescence; the twelve jurymen retired to consider their verdict and returned to declare Haywood not guilty. It was a stunning verdict, received with jubilation by the labor unions. That evening, as the mine workers held a victory parade through the streets of Boise, congratulatory telegrams from around the nation began to arrive, praising Darrow for his magnificent defense of the union officials. The trial of Bill Haywood had been a national event, reported each day by newspapers around the country, and Darrow had consolidated his position as the most famous attorney of his generation.
²⁸

B
UT
D
ARROW’S RENOWN WAS NOT
to last. Three years later, on 1 October 1910, a bomb destroyed the
Los Angeles Times
building, killing twenty workers. The newspaper had long been a bitter enemy of the labor unions. Metal trades workers in Los Angeles had been on strike through the summer, and the
Los Angeles Times
had led a campaign to defeat the strike. Soon the authorities had two suspects in custody: John J. McNamara, the secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, and his younger brother, Jim McNamara.

Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared that the brothers were innocent: no union leader would have countenanced such a destructive and malicious act. Just as the authorities had framed Bill Haywood three years previously for the killing of Frank Steunenberg, so they had now determined to send the McNamaras to the gallows. The frame-up was an attack on the American labor movement, Gompers announced, and the entire resources of that movement would be at the disposal of the defense.

Clarence Darrow arrived in California to take charge of the defense in June 1911. The trial was to be the next round in the battle between capital and labor, and unions from around the country had sent funds to support the defense. The attack on the McNamara brothers was an attack on workingmen everywhere, and with Clarence Darrow at the helm, it was an attack that was sure to be repulsed.
²⁹

But Darrow soon realized that the brothers had in fact bombed the
Los Angeles Times
. Jim McNamara, the younger brother, had placed the bomb beside some barrels of printer’s ink in an alley adjacent to the
Times
building. The massive explosion had caused fatalities that neither brother had either anticipated or desired. The evidence against the brothers was incontrovertible, and if Darrow proceeded with the defense, there was every chance that the court would find them guilty and send them to the gallows.

On 1 December 1911, the McNamara brothers pleaded guilty. For organized labor, the pleas came as a shock—labor had endlessly proclaimed the innocence of the McNamaras and had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the defense fund. Clarence Darrow was the obvious scapegoat. Had Darrow not assured the world that the McNamaras were innocent? The labor movement had accepted Darrow’s word; he had taken the unions on a long and expensive ride, confessing the brothers’ guilt only after having spent enormous sums of money in preparing a defense. When had Darrow first realized the guilt of the defendants? Had his assurances of their innocence been a means of squeezing the unions for defense funds and thus enriching himself?
³⁰

Darrow’s reputation lay in tatters. He was now a pariah, shunned by the labor unions as unreliable and untrustworthy. And Darrow himself now faced the possibility of a prison sentence: one of his assistants had attempted to bribe a prospective juror, and in spring 1912, the authorities indicted Darrow for suborning bribery. He escaped a prison sentence—in his first trial, the prosecution failed to convince the jury that he had been a knowing participant in the bribery plot; and in a second trial, the jurors had failed to agree among themselves.
³¹

Darrow was now free to return to Chicago, yet his career and fame seemed over, damaged beyond repair. He could still practice as an attorney, of course, and he could still earn a living, but he would never again command the national spotlight in defense of the oppressed. Darrow seemed condemned to the fate he had always hoped to avoid: a humdrum law practice.

In 1914 he became a partner with a socialist lawyer, Peter Sissman, and established the law firm of Darrow, Sissman, Holly, and Carlin, with offices at 140 North Dearborn Street. Despite his association with Sissman, the labor unions and socialist groups in Chicago shunned Darrow. There would be no work for him from that quarter in the aftermath of the crushing humiliation in Los Angeles, and Darrow, cut off from the labor movement, began an association with some of Chicago’s less savory characters, including prominent members of the mob. In 1916, after the state’s attorney, Maclay Hoyne, began an investigation into illegal gambling, Darrow represented Mont Tennes, a gangster who controlled betting at the Hawthorne racetrack. The following year Hoyne oversaw an investigation into political corruption and caught Oscar DePriest, the sole black alderman, in his net. Hoyne indicted DePriest for bribing the police and for his connections to gambling rings and prostitution rackets within the African-American community, but after a lengthy trial, Darrow won the acquittal of DePriest on all charges. Darrow also secured the acquittal of Charles Healey, Chicago’s chief of police, who had been charged with corruption and bribery in 1917.

The entry of the United States into World War I confirmed his friends’ suspicion that Darrow had drifted away from radical politics and toward the center. Darrow had become an ardent supporter of American involvement and of Woodrow Wilson, on moral grounds: Germany, an aggressively militaristic power, had violated the neutrality of Belgium. Darrow joined the National Security League, the principal group advocating American participation in the war, and spent several months in 1917 and 1918 traveling around the country speaking in support of the government’s foreign policy.

Yet Darrow strongly opposed Wilson’s antidemocratic restrictions on free speech at home, and Darrow’s efforts on behalf of anarchists, communists, and antiwar protesters helped restore some of his reputation within progressive circles. In 1917 anarchists in Milwaukee fought a gun battle with the police and subsequently received long prison sentences for conspiracy to assault with intent to murder. Eighteen months later, in March 1919, Darrow presented the appeal to the Wisconsin supreme court and succeeded in overturning the convictions.

Darrow also defended members of the Communist Labor Party on charges of violating the Espionage Act. Twenty members of the party stood trial in 1919 in the Cook County Criminal Court. Despite Darrow’s best efforts, including a closing speech that attacked the prosecution for trampling on the constitutional rights of the defendants, the jury found the communists guilty of advocating the overthrow of the government.
³²

Darrow thus managed to remain in the public eye throughout the 1910s. His pronouncements and opinions continued to appear in the Chicago newspapers, of course, and occasionally his court cases would attract attention outside Cook County, in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. He had reached—and passed—middle age, yet he still retained an uncanny ability as an attorney. He had become a fixture at the Cook County Criminal Court, representing as varied an assortment of clients as one might expect to find in a metropolis such as Chicago: corrupt politicians; bootleggers and saloon keepers; pimps, prostitutes, and owners of massage parlors; embezzlers, gamblers, and gangsters; and, of course, a steady stream of murderers.

N
O ASPECT OF
D
ARROW’S CAREER
before the Criminal Court was as significant in transforming his philosophy of crime and criminal justice as his efforts on behalf of Chicagoans indicted for murder. Until around 1915 Darrow clung stubbornly to the belief that all crime was, in one sense or another, economic crime. Criminals broke the law, Darrow believed, because they were impoverished, uneducated, and destitute; they had been reared in poverty and, deprived of any semblance of education or training, they had no way to make a living by normal means. They had no choice but to engage in criminal activity.

In June 1914, the warden at Joliet Prison invited Clarence Darrow to speak to the prisoners on crime and punishment. Darrow was well known for his opposition to the prison system, and his visit to Joliet was, according to the warden’s critics, ill judged and inappropriate. But Darrow had come in support of the warden’s inauguration of a more liberal regime at Joliet, and in his talk he endorsed the relaxation of the disciplinary system and urged the inmates to cooperate with the honor system introduced earlier that year. The prisoners, at least, received Darrow’s speech with good grace—Darrow absolved them of blame and attributed their incarceration to the effects of impoverishment. “Most all the people in here are poor,” Darrow drawled to his captive audience, “and have always been poor; have never had a chance in the world…. The first great cause of crime is poverty, and we will never cure crime until we get rid of poverty…. Most of the crimes committed, like burglary and robbery and murder, are committed by boys, young people…. And they are boys of a certain class; boys who live in a tenement district; boys who are poor, who have no playground but the street; boys [who]…gradually learn crime, the same as we learn to be a lawyer, and, of course, after they get started then it is easy.”
³³