Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (42 page)

Before asking Rogers to represent him, Darrow took Ruby to the small town of Hanford, where they watched him clinch a case involving a contested inheritance. Mrs. Darrow’s haughty ways quickly enrolled Adela, then seventeen, in the women-who-hate-Ruby club. And though Rogers told his daughter that Darrow’s lax grooming habits were in part a calculated tactic to demonstrate solidarity with the common man, she found the rumpled suits and dirty fingernails offensive.
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Friends of both men were confounded at the news of their collaboration. “The thing that … shocked me was that you should employ such a notorious corporation corruptionist and all around capitalist retainer,” Debs told Darrow in an otherwise affectionate letter. It was no doubt a sign of peril, Debs wrote, that Darrow had been “driven to engage the lead-wolf, to escape the pack.”

Rogers, for his part, was accosted by pals like Lawler and
Times
reporter
Harry Carr. Rogers had been in his office, across the street from the
Times
, on the night of the bombing. He had burned his hands helping victims flee the inferno and lost a friend in
C. Harvey Elder, the editor who jumped from a window. But “they’ve caught Darrow in a trap, a nasty, cold-blooded, planned, baited trap. I am against traps,” Rogers told Carr. “An informer is the chief witness against him. I am against informers.”

“You obstinate, sentimental Irish bastard,” Carr said.
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T
HE SIREN
F
AME
drew Rogers to Darrow’s side, and admiration for the champion of underdogs. It surely was not money. The AFL had stopped payment on the final $10,000 draft that Darrow requested in the McNamara case.
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The Darrows would have to survive on their own while trying to save something for Ruby to live on, should he be imprisoned at San Quentin. The two counts of bribery would be tried separately, and even if Darrow was acquitted in the Lockwood case Fredericks could try him again on charges of bribing Bain. Years might pass before he was receiving rather than paying out legal fees, and only then if he was not
disbarred. “Hard times are coming on,” Darrow told Paul. “I may never be able to make any more money.”

The Darrows left the house on Bonnie Brae and took a flat far from town, in Ocean Park, near Venice. They tried to cap expenses at $90 a month, and Darrow asked Paul if they could reduce the monthly payment to Jessie from $75 to $50. “They had no right to do this to me,” Darrow wrote his brother-in-law,
Howard Moore. “But the evidence against me is strong … I may have to leave you all for a time.” He took long walks on the beach with friends, railing at his predicament. “You may say that I am assuming Darrow to be guilty. I am,” his friend Catlin wrote after one such visit. “Darrow said no word to me of innocence.”

The Darrows ate at home or in cafeterias, and Ruby darned their clothes and tracked their few expenses. Two pairs of cheap stockings. A 29-cent collar. An 85-cent nightgown. Two 50-cent vests. “Ruby writes as though they are reduced to bread and water,” wrote Darrow’s sister-in-law Helen. His sister Jennie, in turn, urged Ruby to watch Darrow’s diet—to serve him only light food, “not hearty meals that will clog the system with poisons.” She warned Ruby that her brother might withdraw, and be “stony and unemotional as the sphinx” under the strain.

“We don’t plan for even a day at a time, and cannot tell when we ever will,” Ruby wrote a friend. “He is 54 years old and he is
Poor
. I am doing
Everything
myself in a little apartment.” And yet, Ruby said, “No matter what happens, there is no woman in the world that I would trade shoes with.” The Darrows were grateful when their old friend Jim Griffes invited them to suppers of canned corned beef and potatoes, and late-night debates about free will.
LeCompte Davis and his wife remained loyal as well. And an admirer, Dr.
Perceval Gerson, led another group that befriended the Darrows. They named themselves the “Heart to Heart Club” and treated Darrow to dinners of pounded steaks, biscuits, lemon pie, and literary discussions.
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Darrow assembled a list of books to take with him to the penitentiary. “What a hell of a trap I’m in,” he told Gerson. The doctor, a believer in nonviolence, suggested that Darrow resist not evil. “State the facts of the case and take the consequences without resistance,” he told Darrow.

“Gerson, you’re right, but I can’t do it,” Darrow replied. His freedom and livelihood were at stake.
¹⁰

Darrow needed $25,000, he figured, to meet his legal expenses.
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“So
many people think I have money when really I have been in debt all my life,” he wrote the mine workers’
John Mitchell. “Surely I have served long and faithfully and … the unions would not let me go to prison without a defense.” But Mitchell wrote back that “it is absolutely impossible for the miners to do anything at this time.”
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Darrow begged Gompers for aid. “In every crisis I have stood by labor and my convictions and always given my best,” Darrow reminded him. “I am in serious trouble … I need help to protect my liberty.” The AFL chief waited a month before sending a frigid reply. “I can not see how we can raise any money,” Gompers wrote. It was Darrow’s own fault. “Believing, aye, almost firmly convinced of the innocence of the McNamaras we strained every nerve to raise as near as possible the amount of money you suggested … Upon learning that they were guilty, the first intimation of which was conveyed to the rank and file as well as to the officers of the labor movement through their confession, I am free to say to you that in my judgment any general appeal for funds to defend you … would fall upon indifferent ears.”
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Darrow was wounded, as well, by the silence from Toledo, where
Brand Whitlock seemed to have abandoned him. “Mr. Darrow is so crushed,” Mary wrote Whitlock. “You, I am sure, can say something to help him.” Ruby wrote Whitlock as well. “Are you, that he has always deemed one of his bravest and strongest fellow soldiers, turning deserter?” she asked. “HOW CAN you have remained silent so long!” she demanded. “Are you ALL GOING to sit on the fence and see this man marched past you to prison?”

At one point, Gerson grew alarmed at Darrow’s drinking. “Let him alone,” Rogers told the doctor. “The liquor is good for him at a time like this.”
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D
ARROW WAS INDICTED
at the end of January. Fredericks gave him the courtesy of not arresting him at home. He went to court, was formally charged with bribing Bain and Lockwood, and released on $20,000 bail. If convicted on both charges, Darrow would face up to thirty years—the rest of his life—in prison. “Darrow … pale and nervous as a man of his highly sensitive organization must be under a prolonged strain … endured the ordeal with fortitude,” the
Examiner
reported. He straightened up, lit a cigarette, and forced a smile for the reporters.

“This will be a real fight,” Rogers promised the press. “There will be no milk and water methods in this trial.” The newspapers confirmed his prediction when a series of leaks from the prosecution apprised Californians that Darrow had been found at the scene of the bribery. “Well, boys, is everything fixed?” he was said to have asked, with his arms draped around Franklin and Lockwood. It was a blatant lie that would not be repeated in court, but it troubled Darrow, who had great respect for the “spiritual weight” of public opinion on jurors.

By pleading not guilty, Darrow formally denied the charges. And in his private correspondence with those closest to him—Everett, Jennie, Mary, Paul—he said he had done nothing wrong. “There is no right to get me,” he wrote his son. But legally guilty could be morally right—certainly in Darrow’s code of ethics, where the motive and not the act was the controlling measure of morality. In explaining what happened, Darrow chose his words carefully. “Can’t make myself feel guilty,” Darrow told Everett in a telegram. “My conscience refuses to reproach me.”

“As you know the ax has fallen,” Darrow wrote
Edgar Lee Masters. “Well, I chose my life and must stand the consequences.” Masters took this as a confession.
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Many of Darrow’s friends rallied around him. Older wired, “Keep your courage high.” And
Gertrude Barnum sent a telegram saying, “History repeats itself. Big men in the patrol wagon. Little men in the band wagon.”
Cy Simon, the Chicago jury briber he had taken into his office, offered to do “anything at all” and take “any sort of chance” to help the man who had rescued him from an identical predicament.
John Jones, writing as a representative of “a large number of the Colored Lawyers in Chicago,” pledged their “unmovable and unchangeable faith and confidence in your innocence.” And from San Francisco came a telegram from Mary. “Your indictments come on Tom Paine’s birthday. Humanity’s friends travel the same road,” she wrote. “Keep up your courage. Friends are with you.”

Debs wrote, saying how “exceedingly touched and pained” he was by Darrow’s dilemma and offering him hard-earned advice. “The thing of most vital concern to you now is that Darrow, above all others, shall stand by himself and be strong enough, even in his present situation, in which he is being tried by fire.”

Darrow’s pride had constrained him from asking friends for money.
But once labor deserted him, he had no choice. He wrote to Erskine Wood, begging him for $500 or $1,000. Three days later, embarrassed, he wrote Wood again and withdrew the request. Wood sent a check anyway. “I need it so badly I will keep it,” Darrow told him. “I hope you will get the money back. I believe you will.”

“I have no sense of pride or shame, only rage, and would cheerfully sit on every street corner in the land … with a tin cup,” Ruby wrote to Older. She drew up a list, which was sent to Masters, of prominent men who “must be made to understand” the financial crisis that the Darrows faced. Masters set out to solicit money and to collect depositions that could be used as character references. Many were helpful, but one jurist—federal judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis—declined, telling Masters that “they had caught Darrow at last, and he was glad of it.”
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Scripps distanced himself as well. Like many, he presumed Darrow was guilty. “No one will believe that Franklin could have handled such sums … without the knowledge of the chief counsel for the defense,” wrote
C. D. Willard, a municipal reformer in Los Angeles, to the publisher.

February brought a fresh crisis. Portly
John Harrington, threatened with prosecution, made a deal to corroborate Franklin’s tale. The ardent
Oscar Lawler was now working as a federal special prosecutor, and at his direction Harrington took a hotel room that had been outfitted with a dictograph by
Robert Foster, a detective working for
Walter Drew and the steel industry. Darrow and Harrington met repeatedly, with Harrington trying to get Darrow to make an incriminating statement for the hidden microphone, and Darrow, suspecting a trap, striving to avoid it.

“Are you going to testify against me, John?” Darrow asked.

“I would not say a word, but, my God, Darrow, I won’t perjure myself for any man,” said Harrington.

“I am sorry you have that in your head,” said Darrow. “I will give you anything you ask within reason. I wish you would name the amount. Don’t desert me on this thing.”

The episode came to an inconclusive end, though not until the state leaked a sensational account of the “Dictograph Trap” to the newspapers.

Drew, who was in constant contact with Fredericks, told a henchman in late February that Darrow would plead guilty and “tell all he knows” about Gompers if spared a prison sentence. This story was also fed to the press. “He is a man of great sensitiveness and already he has suffered terribly,”
the
Times
said. “Will he go further and appear in court for weeks while … his inmost secrets are bared?” The roguish defense investigator,
Larry Sullivan, thought not. Darrow “will either plead guilty or commit suicide,” Sullivan predicted in a letter to Wood.
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But it was far from rare for a defendant or a go-between to explore the terms of a plea bargain with a district attorney and then reject them. His foes no doubt leaked the tale to further the perception of Darrow’s guilt. It was never a real possibility, he later insisted. “I had no information to give,” Darrow said, though he noted that this was “as much as Franklin or Harrington had.” He could have “told them any story that I saw fit,” he recalled. “I could have purchased my liberty at the price of my honor.” But he did not.

Honor did not keep Darrow from other intrigues. In April, with the start of the trial just a few weeks away, he and Ruby joined a gathering of friends in San Francisco. At one point, Johannsen pulled Wood aside and asked if he would help them kidnap Harrington. Both Darrow and Rogers had waylaid witnesses in their careers. While certainly illegal, it was—like stealing evidence or paying witnesses exorbitant amounts as “expenses”—a not-unheard-of tactic. “I am sure Darrow knows of it,” Wood wrote Sara.

Wood told Johannsen he would take no part in it. Anton was philosophical. He admired Wood’s strength, Johannsen said. Darrow, on the other hand, was a weak man—too soft to either stand by his principles or to prosper at wickedness. Darrow had “departed on a piratical course,” Johannsen said, but was, in the end, “too flabby to be a pirate.”
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T
HE TRIAL BEGAN
on May 15. There was no apparent irony in the day’s
Herald
, which noted how Ruby had been accompanied up the hill to the courthouse by “Miss Mary Field of San Francisco, who is making a stay in this city and spending most of her time with Mrs. Darrow.” In the turbulent weeks at the end of the McNamara trial, Mary and Darrow had ended their affair. Mary was “widowed,” Wood decided. Sara concurred. Her sister had once seen Darrow “as a Napoleon who was changing the map of Labor’s world,” Sara wrote Wood. “So fade our dreams, so fall our ideals, so pass our stars.”