Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (40 page)

“His attitude toward women,” she told Wood, “is disgusting in the extreme.” Sara had a way of tweaking her lover’s jealousy with tales about men who sought to bed her and it is possible that she embellished her encounters with Darrow. But Wood responded with ire.

“Darrow is above all things selfish, with a not necessary adjunct to selfishness, vanity, and a side development, avarice,” Wood wrote.

When Mary first proposed to cover the trial, Wood explained, Darrow “did not need Mary to feed his vanity, for he is a general at the head of an admiring swarm. He feels amply idolized in the centre of a great stage. He feared she would compromise him with the world and he is in such a matter a coward.”

But then “Mary arrives, he finds she is discreet … He is glad she has come, has a spasmodic return of physical passion which makes him even gay and adoring,” Wood wrote. “She is delighted, forgets all and idolizes.”

“Now for prediction,” Wood concluded. “When he is sated he will treat her like a sucked orange.”

“A woman’s body is nothing more to Darrow than to the Sultan—a delicious morsel to be taken everywhere, found and forgotten,” Wood wrote. “A woman’s mind is nothing to him except that the adoration of a brainy woman is more subtle flattery. But he’d take flattery from a chorus girl.”

Darrow was displaying the manic behavior he’d shown in the Haywood trial. He would arrive at Mary’s flat, alive with great plans for the day, and take the sisters on delightful excursions. On other days he would mope, bark rudely, and curse. “Due to his age and to the fact that he places his heart and his soul in the interest of his defendants,” Darrow was “unable to stand the terrible responsibility … and he lost faith and hope and became discouraged,” Johannsen recalled. He “seemed to be in constant fear that his clients would be … sent to the gallows.”

At some point Ruby discovered her husband’s California philandering, adding to Darrow’s anxiety. She blamed Mary and other camp lovelies for throwing themselves at him and dismissed his affairs as meaningless rutting. His old Sunset Club friend
W. W. Catlin found Darrow “far more cynical and callous” than when he knew him in Chicago. “The idea of loyalty to a principle seems rather to amuse than inspire him now,” Catlin told Wood. And “as to woman, especially, he is now rather gross where he formerly was fine.”
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D
URING THE SUMMER
and fall, as Darrow fenced with the prosecutors, he had tried, through various intermediaries, to see if Fredericks was open to a deal.

“It was borne in on me day by day that this man I knew who trusted
everything to me could not be saved,” Darrow recalled. As he grew to know the McNamaras, “I heard these men talk of their brothers, of their mother, of the dead; I saw their human side,” said Darrow. “I wanted to save them.”
¹⁸

Then, in mid-November, Lincoln Steffens came to town. The dapper little muckraker had just returned from Europe, where he had dined with Burns in Paris and been persuaded that the McNamaras were guilty. In London, an English labor leader had challenged Steffens to write about not whether union leaders turned to violence, but why. Steffens liked the idea. He lined up the necessary newspaper clients and headed for Los Angeles. “Dear Dad,” he told his father, “I am to write for my newspapers the situation back of the McNamara trial; not the trial itself, but the cause, consequences, and the significance thereof.

“It’s a delicate job, somewhat like handling dynamite, but somebody has to tackle it hard,” he joked. “Why shouldn’t I be the McNamara of my profession?”
¹⁹

On November 19, Steffens joined Darrow on a trip to Miramar, the sprawling La Jolla estate of the wealthy press lord
E. W. Scripps. Despite his great fortune, the self-described “old crank” was something of a radical who sympathized with the workingman. Scripps had plans to publish a newspaper called the
Day Book
in Chicago and wanted Darrow’s help promoting the journal among working-class audiences. He believed Darrow was a realist, a man like himself, guided not by weakly “altruistic sentiment” but by “contempt and hatred for … the sins of our class.” He thought Darrow had great “physical and moral courage” and concluded that the lawyer’s famous cynicism was a mask.

Scripps gave his visitors a tour of the private auto speedway he had built on his property and introduced them to Berkeley zoologist
William Ritter, the founding scientist at the new oceanographic institute that the Scripps family was financing. Later the three men retired to the great study, where the publisher considered his visitors and thought them an odd pair: Steffens the “little litterateur” and Darrow “a great big brute of a man, with every fiber coarse, but sturdy.” Scripps read aloud from a “disquisition” he had written, defending “belligerent rights” in industrial warfare. They spoke of Harriman’s mayoral campaign, which had stunned the city by triumphing in the October 31 primary and was now in a runoff with Mayor Alexander. Darrow sketched a pessimistic outline of where
things stood in the trial. The case against James McNamara, Darrow said sorrowfully, was a “dead cinch.”

Steffens was moved, and inspired to act. He would not merely write about the case, he would help Darrow settle it. Over breakfast the next morning, Steffens outlined his idea to Darrow. He proposed to call on “the big men” in town and let them know that a deal could be had. He would try to persuade them, he said, that it was in their interest to end their costly war with the unions. Darrow consented. “I hate to have a man hang that I undertake to defend,” he said, “and I cannot bear to think of this boy being killed.” But he was not without skepticism. The fate of James McNamara, he suspected, would not be an issue. If McNamara pled guilty before the December 5 election, it would discredit Harriman. And the men with the greatest motive for vengeance—the Otis-Chandler crew—so feared the effects of a socialist victory on their plans for the aqueduct and other business schemes that they would trade blood for money.

The hitch, Darrow told Steffens, was John McNamara. Labor might deliver an itinerant printer like James to San Quentin, but not John, a national leader. His confession would humiliate Gompers and disgrace the unions. Drew and the steel industry, who were bankrolling the prosecution, would insist that John plead guilty too. But off Steffens went with a promise to be discreet, and an understanding that Darrow would deny the whole endeavor if Fredericks exposed the negotiations.

The first call that Steffens made on Darrow’s behalf showed their appreciation for the leverage offered by the political situation: it was Lissner, the governor’s savvy operative, whom the state’s frantic elite had named to rescue the campaign against Harriman. Lissner immediately recognized the opportunity and, with the help of a friendly go-between, persuaded Chandler to sign off on a deal that would imprison James for life and set John free. Chandler and
Otto Brant—another of the partners in the aqueduct scheme—brought the proposal to Fredericks, who insisted on hearing it from Darrow. They spoke the next day in court.

“What is this gink Steffens trying to do?” Fredericks asked.

“This fellow would plead guilty,” Darrow told him, nodding at James, “if the other fellow could be turned loose.”

Fredericks rejected the offer. John McNamara would have to plead guilty too, the district attorney said, or “We will hang them both.” But
the talks went on, and a greater number of interested parties were called into the circle. Drew was notified and told Fredericks that the steel industry didn’t care about the fate of the McNamaras, as long as they made full confessions. He was most concerned about public opinion and saw no need to give labor a martyr. “The important thing is the effect upon the public mind,” Drew told Fredericks. “I hardly believe JJ intended to kill twenty-one people and would personally be willing to see the murder case dismissed on condition of a full confession.” But he was insistent on guilty pleas from both brothers. Otherwise, “it will always be said that JB … sacrificed himself for his older brother and that both were innocent.”
²⁰

Darrow summoned Older to Los Angeles for advice. They had lunch with Steffens, and Darrow told the editor that the case for James was “utterly hopeless” and that, in the end, they would probably have to, as Older put it, “throw John J. to the wolves” as well. Older told Darrow what he already knew: that his career as a labor lawyer would be over if he pled the brothers guilty. Labor was paying the bills, Darrow conceded, but he had been employed “to save these men’s lives.” Darrow sent a wire to Gompers, asking that he send a representative like Tvietmoe or Nockels to California from Atlanta, where the national labor chiefs were gathered at the AFL convention. And that weekend he sat down with his clients.

The McNamaras had no illusions about their chances. In court that week, after Bordwell issued yet another unfavorable ruling, James had murmured to Darrow: “You might as well get a rope.” Each brother agreed to plead guilty, but only if it saved the other. James would confess if the state would drop its charges against John, and John would plead guilty to save James from hanging. There the bargaining stood—initiated, progressing, but not conclusive—on the morning of Tuesday, November 28, when
Bert Franklin, Darrow’s top jury investigator, was arrested on the corner of Third and Main streets, in the act of bribing a juror—as Darrow stood there, watching it go down.
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F
RANKLIN WAS A
former federal marshal and detective, an undistinguished hanger-on with the local courthouse gang. He had been given the job of taking the lists of potential jurors and compiling reports on their loyalties, backgrounds, and beliefs. But he did more than draw up
the book. As in Idaho, the defense team sought to frighten off undesirable jurors by warning them of the expected length of the trial, or of the violent passions the conflict would unleash. And, in league with someone on the McNamara defense who supplied the money, Franklin set out to buy jurors.

In early October, Franklin made a $400 down payment to juror
Robert Bain, a seventy-year-old Civil War veteran who agreed to take $4,000 to vote not guilty. Just to be sure, the brazen Franklin approached a half dozen other jurors and reached a second $4,000 deal with a former sheriff’s department employee named
George Lockwood, who alerted Fredericks. As he paid off Lockwood, Franklin was arrested by Detective
Sam Browne—just as Darrow crossed Main Street to join them. Browne pushed Darrow aside and hustled Franklin away. A few moments later, at the courthouse, Darrow asked the detective: “My God, Browne. What is all this?”

“You ought to know what it is,” Browne replied. “It’s bribery.”

“My God, I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world,” Darrow said. “If I had known this was going to happen this way I never would have allowed it to be done.”
²²

Franklin’s arrest spurred huge headlines in the city’s newspapers. “We gave him no such sum of money for any such purpose,” Darrow told reporters, and the initial news stories did not mention Darrow’s presence at the scene. But it was a huge blow and stoked Darrow’s desire to settle the case. He told Steffens to assure “your people,” as he liked to call the business leaders, that the defense still wanted a deal. Nockels arrived in Los Angeles and was briefed. Steffens convinced a roomful of civic leaders to accept the settlement. And Fredericks, after consulting his political advisers, agreed on the final terms. The state would accept James McNamara’s plea and ask the judge for clemency, said Fredericks, if John pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of ordering the Christmas, 1910, bombing of the Llewellyn Iron Works.

Now the brothers had to give their consent. On Thursday, which was Thanksgiving Day, their supporters treated the McNamaras to a fine turkey dinner, with dessert and cigars, in the city jail. The brothers spent the rest of the day listening to Darrow and the other lawyers.

“I am thinking of you, J.B.,” said Darrow.

“Yes,” said James, “and I am thinking of you, Darrow.” Both of them knew the plea would injure labor, and that labor would look for, as Older had put it, “a goat.”

James held out for most of the day, knowing how John’s confession would hurt the union cause. Davis warned him that unless he pled guilty, the state would hang John too. And Darrow promised him that if the brothers pled guilty, the state would not prosecute Tvietmoe and the other California labor leaders.
Joseph Scott had a priest summoned, who spoke quietly to James. Ultimately, John McNamara threatened to plead guilty on his own, if need be, to save his brother’s life. “I was overwhelmed by a two hundred thousand dollar defense, with a constant nightmarish fear, that there was great danger of taking the San Francisco ‘labor leaders’ with me,” James recalled. On Thanksgiving night, Davis went to see Fredericks at home. The district attorney brought out cigars, and they confirmed the deal.
²³

S
OMEHOW, THE SECRET
kept. Reporters were puzzled when the next morning’s session was postponed until the afternoon and then convened with two notable features: the grim expressions of the defense attorneys and the unusual presence of John McNamara, who had not been attending his brother’s trial.

James and John chewed gum. Darrow sat at the end of the long defense table, looking anxious and gnawing on a pencil. First James and then John withdrew their pleas of not guilty and, when asked by Bordwell, declared themselves guilty.

The judge ended the short session, and Darrow tried, without much success, to put himself between the reporters and the McNamaras. Darrow looked stricken, like a hunted animal, the
Times
reported. “I did the best I could,” he said. “I am very tired, worn and sorrowful … I hope I saved a human life out of the wreckage.”