Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned Read online

  In Washington, President Roosevelt grew anxious. “I fear there will be fuel riots of as bad a type as any bread riots we have ever seen,” Roosevelt wrote a friend. He dreaded the responsibility of imposing order with violent measures “which will mean the death of men who have been maddened by want and suffering.” The president called the union leaders and the mine owners to Washington. Mitchell was a conservative trade unionist who recognized that the union’s fate lay with public opinion. He had a calm and modest deportment and deferred to Roosevelt. The operators sulked like brats. No American president had intervened in a labor dispute, except to crush strikers. “I now ask you to perform the duties invested in you as President,” the coal industry’s John Merkle told Roosevelt, “to at once squelch the anarchistic conditions of affairs existing in the anthracite coal regions by the strong arm of the military at your command.”

  Mitchell behaved “with great dignity,” Roosevelt recalled. “The operators, on the contrary, showed extraordinary stupidity and bad temper, did everything in their power to goad and irritate Mitchell, becoming fairly abusive in their language to him, and were insolent to me.”

  Roosevelt’s combative nature allowed but one response; he threatened to send federal troops to seize the mines. A week later, Secretary of War Elihu Root met with Morgan on the billionaire’s yacht, the Corsair, to broker a deal. The miners would return to work, and a federal commission would hold hearings and impose a binding settlement. It was a momentous day. An American president had interceded in an economic dispute on behalf of labor.

  “Industry had grown. Great financial corporations … had taken the place of the smaller concerns,” Roosevelt wrote, explaining his actions in his memoirs. “A few generations before, the boss had known every man in his shop … he inquired after their wives and babies; he swapped jokes and stories.

  “There was no such relation between the great railway magnates, who controlled the anthracite industry, and the … men who worked in the mines,” said Roosevelt.

  The result was “a crass inequality in the bargaining relation,” the president said. “The great coal-mining and coal-carrying companies … could easily dispense with the services of any particular miner. The miner … however expert, could not dispense with the companies. He needed a job; his wife and children would starve if he did not get one.”

  “A democracy can be such, only if there is some rough approximation in similarity in stature among the men composing it,” said Roosevelt. “This the great coal operators did not see.”5

  LLOYD OFFERED TO assist the miners and urged Mitchell to hire Darrow as the lead attorney. It was not a lawsuit where a jury of citizens might be swayed by a spirited appeal. The seven-man commission was led by a federal judge and had but two members with evident sympathy toward labor. It might not be “a Darrow case,” Lloyd worried. Indeed, Darrow had just made headlines for calling Roosevelt a “brutal murderer” in the war with Spain. But Mitchell found he liked Darrow, put aside the objections of some of his advisers, and hired him.6

  The opening act took place in November, at the Lackawanna County courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania, beneath the chandeliers of the second-floor courtroom of the Superior Court. Dressed alike in judicial black, the seven commissioners took their places in leather chairs. Mitchell, garbed in his own long black coat and black tie, bowed respectfully and read an opening statement. He was calm and forceful, though when he described the hard lives of the miners, his voice trembled. If they could earn just $600 a year, Mitchell said, the miners could leave their children in school, where they could learn the skills to better themselves.

  When Mitchell finished, he took the witness stand, and Darrow led him through a brief series of questions before the coal company lawyers rose to cross-examine. It was clear, from the start, that both sides viewed the hearings as a battleground for public support. Darrow and Mitchell dwelled on the inhumane conditions, exploitative wages, and dangers of mining coal. The lawyers for the industry strove to paint the miners as selfish, violent Reds. Their lead attorney, and the toughest interrogator, was Wayne MacVeagh, a former U.S. attorney general.

  “Don’t you know as well as you know your name is John Mitchell that in spite of the authorities of this city, of this county, and of this state, this whole region has been treated for five months to a veritable foretaste of hell?” MacVeagh asked.

  “I don’t know anything of the kind,” Mitchell replied.

  “Well, you will before we are through with you,” MacVeagh promised.

  On they went, for five days, like bare-knuckled boxers in a marathon bout. Darrow, admiring Mitchell’s performance, did not interfere. The most intense clashes came over Mitchell’s insistence that the union had a right to employ boycotts and other forms of intimidation to keep nonunion workers from taking the miners’ jobs during a strike. MacVeagh had Mitchell read aloud from a roster of men who died that summer, many at the hands of union sympathizers.

  MACVEAGH: “You never heard that on the fifth of June a mob of your men attacked the Stanton Colliery?”

  MITCHELL: “No, sir.”

  MACVEAGH: “Did you hear of a mob on that same day attacking the Hollenback breaker and burning 150 yards of fence and shooting their pistols and guns?”

  MITCHELL: “I did not.”

  “If a community … is aroused to a great pitch of excitement and violence, and murders are committed in consequence of the assertion of your right to deny other men the right to labor for their living,” MacVeagh told him, “then I say the consequences are upon your head.”7

  But in the judgment of the reporters covering the hearings, Mitchell won the first round. And he was followed to the stand by expert witnesses who, under Darrow’s questioning, described the cruel hazards of mining. “The lung when seen on post mortem is very black. It looks like a chunk of anthracite coal,” said Dr. James Lenahan, the health officer for the city of Scranton. Other doctors testified to the horrible effects of poison gas and disfiguring burns, and to how their work stunted the development of the breaker boys.

  “Mitchell is a wonder,” Lloyd told his wife. And “Darrow is doing splendidly; he has not made a single false move.” MacVeagh urged Morgan and the railroads to settle. The commission adjourned, and Darrow, Mitchell, and Lloyd traveled to Washington to haggle with MacVeagh at the Willard Hotel, where the two sides neared agreement. “We are to have something better than arbitration—conciliation,” Lloyd wrote. “Darrow … is a master hand at this sort of thing.” But the industry backed out of the deal. Hamlin Garland ran into the negotiators at the Willard and found Darrow “haggard” and Mitchell “sad, very sad.”8

  BACK IN SCRANTON, Darrow made the operators pay for their change of heart. He summoned a series of Dickensian characters to the stand to tell about life in the anthracite fields.

  There was the blind and disfigured David Davis, a father of five who lost his eyes and an ear in an explosion. “My left eye was blown out clean, and my right eye was blown out on my forehead,” he testified. And Harry Williams, who left school at the age of nine, told how he lost a leg in the mines at sixteen and was back at the breaker for the rest of his working life. “Poor, poor boy,” one of the commissioners was heard to murmur.

  Andrew Chippie was a twelve-year-old child—“a chubby little duckling of a boy,” said Lloyd—sent by his mother to work in the breaker at the age of ten, after his father died in a tunnel collapse. In all that time Andrew had not seen his pay because the coal company docked his wages for rent owed by his father. “We offered as witness today a little boy too little to be a witness. He was eight years old but only about five years grown,” Lloyd wrote his wife. “He was not too young to work in the breaker; he earned 62 cents a week.”

  “The Chairman ruled him out,” said Lloyd. “But he couldn’t rule out of his mind the tragicomic spectacle of the little wage-earner, smiling and blushing, an industrial Tiny Tim.”

  Then Theresa McDermott, eleven, and Annie Denko, thirteen, a
nd Helen Sisscak, eleven, told how they worked twelve hours a day in a silk mill in violation of state law for as little as three cents an hour.

  “Would you rather go to school?” asked Chairman George Gray.

  “We can’t, I have to go to work,” said Denko.

  “I would like to see your father,” Gray grumbled.

  “From our theory of the case the employers ought to be seen,” Darrow told the chairman. “What about the employer? The father could not send them there if he did not take them.”

  “Laws do not amount to much, I find, up here in the mining region,” said the chairman, noting the statutes that banned child labor.

  “Laws do not execute themselves in this world,” Darrow replied.

  And then there was Henry Coll, fifty-seven, whose family was evicted from company housing that fall. It was raining, he told the commissioners, as he and wife struggled to protect her aged mother and to cover their belongings. They had to travel seven miles to find another house. His wife grew terribly ill.

  “She went to bed … and she got choked clean and fair and died in five minutes,” Coll said.

  “Died?” asked the chairman, who had been stretching his legs as Coll testified, and now stopped in his tracks.

  “Yes, died; yes, sir,” said Coll. “I buried her yesterday … She died in my hands.”

  Tears ran down Coll’s cheeks, and women in the courtroom wept. The “simple human element” was the key to the miners’ case, Jane Addams recalled, “sheer pity continually breaking through and speaking over the heads of the business interests.”

  Just before the hearings broke for the Christmas holidays, Darrow ambushed the opposition by calling J. L. Crawford, one of the coal company presidents, to the stand. It was a tactic Darrow employed from time to time—submitting the champions of the other side to withering cross-examination—and MacVeagh had opened the door when he contended that the poor would pay the cost in higher coal prices if the miners won more money. Darrow wanted the commissioners to hear how well the operators were doing. “We are not here to show Mr. Darrow our bank account,” one owner sputtered. But before the day was over, the industry acknowledged it was making fine profits and Gray announced that the commission would be governed by the presumption that the companies could afford to pay higher wages.9

  THERE WERE SETBACKS. Darrow and Lloyd had recruited the jurist Louis Brandeis to help demonstrate how the parent railroads cloaked profits by charging their own mining subsidiaries inflated shipping fees. “These gentlemen owned the railroads and they owned the mines, and were taking money out of one pocket and putting it into the other,” Darrow argued. But the commission declined to hear the evidence.10

  And Darrow was not alone in recognizing the power of a compelling human story. The coal industry lawyers summoned a regiment of nonunion miners, officials, and townsfolk to recount the acts of violence that took place during the strike. Shop owners described the devastating effects of union boycotts and witnesses told of the beatings they received, the windows broken by rocks, and the dynamite that destroyed their front porches. George Good, a nonunion man, told how he and two friends and the sheriffs who protected them were assaulted by a mob of several thousand in the town of Shenandoah. “We began to be intercepted by women and men who began to call us ‘Scab!’ and to pull at our clothes and spit on us,” he said. “Right behind me … was a woman with a hatchet trying to get at me, and a man with an axe.” The brother of a deputy, trying to help the men, was beaten to death.

  Darrow liked jousting with the coal company witnesses, especially General John Gobin, the national guard commander whose “shoot to kill” order had generated much sympathy for the union. The order authorized a rifleman, when meeting a “riotous element” throwing stones, to “carefully note the man attacking the column and, being certain of his man, fire upon him without any further orders.” Darrow got the aged general to admit that the order could be applied, not just to armed mobs, but to rock-throwing boys and to bystanders.

  “You say you had the right, where a mob or a number of people were resisting your soldier, to kill them if necessary?” Darrow asked him.

  “Yes sir, I claim so,” said the general.

  “Did you consider that you had authority, if a boy should throw a stone at you on the street, to shoot the boy?”

  “It would depend altogether upon the size of the boy.”

  “Can you tell your authority, sir, under the laws of this State, in reference to killing boys who stoned your soldiers?”

  “Well, I never had occasion to exercise my mind on that matter,” the general said.

  By the time Gobin left the stand, Darrow had given the country a vivid glimpse into the minds of the authorities who suppressed industrial protests. The general conceded that the “most serious” wrongdoing he had witnessed was “the teaching of the young through that region their utter want of respect for the law.”

  “Did you see any mobs or riots?” Darrow asked.

  “No, sir,” the general replied.

  “And no murders?”

  “None.”11

  IN THE EVENINGS and on weekends, Lloyd and Mitchell and Darrow darted about the Northeast, appearing before various political and civic organizations. Darrow and Lloyd expressed their reservations when Mitchell gave up his famous, battered felt hat and bought a new derby for a meeting with the tony National Civic Federation. Mitchell, in turn, was baffled when Darrow hooked up with the East Coast literary swells and attended a lecture by Emma Goldman. “When I was … younger, I hoped to reform the world, but I gave it up,” Darrow told her afterward. “I love my fellow man. I’ll do what I can for him, but I don’t expect too much.”

  Lloyd admired Darrow’s energy. “I am not adapted to this kaleidoscopic life. I feel distracted. Adrift,” Lloyd wrote his wife. “How Darrow keeps the threads … I cannot imagine.” It was self-preservation. At forty-five, Darrow was seeing life, more and more, as a joke with a terrifying punch line. “I think it is because it gives me something to do; busies my mind,” he said, of his furious pace, “and helps me work off attacks of the blues.”

  After Christmas, the hearings were moved to Philadelphia, where millionaires at the saucy Clover Club gave a warm welcome to the tuxedo-clad, cigar-smoking Mitchell and his lawyers. “There is no irreconcilable conflict,” the union chief told the businessmen. “As an American I believe there is no problem that we, as Americans, are unable to solve.” The labor movement had come a long way from Haymarket.

  At one point, the union team was visited by Mother Jones, who challenged Darrow’s admiration of the “Christ-like spirit” of Eugene Debs. “Debs is a molly-coddle,” Jones said. “He could have won that strike. Why didn’t he burn the Pullman cars? Burn the depots? Show them he meant business.”

  Darrow peered at her for a moment. “And the newspapers call you the ‘Angel of the Miners,’ ” he said.

  Darrow was “universally popular. He is full of fun, courtesy and vigilance and has mastered the technicalities of the case with wonderful ease,” Lloyd told his wife.

  THE ANTAGONISTS BEGAN their closing arguments in early February. Baer, reading from a prepared text, gave an imperious defense of laissez-faire principles. “The perplexing question why one man should be strong, happy and prosperous, and another weak, afflicted and distressed,” he said, “may be answered by Seneca’s suggestion that the purpose was to teach the power of human endurance and the nobility of a life of struggle.”

  Darrow began speaking at two o’clock that afternoon, resumed the next morning, and did not end until evening. Every seat in the courtroom was taken; spectators lined the walls, and hundreds had been turned away. Judges and the local archbishop joined the crowd. Darrow spoke without notes. He did not take a direct road to his destination, but wandered back and forth across the path, like the waggle of a bee. He spoke of the hardships of mining, switched to the mathematics of wages, rumbled about the causes of industrial warfare, returned to the dangers th
at the miners faced, stirred in more statistics, and so wove, over the hours, the context for the case. Darrow capably reviewed the perplexing ways in which miners and laborers were paid, some by the hour, others by the ton. And he argued, with passion, that the unique dangers faced by miners justified their demands for better wages.

  “They have come in here with broken arms, and disfigured faces, and broken legs, and with one eye and with no eyes,” Darrow said. “If the civilization of this country rests upon the necessity of leaving these starvation wages to these miners and laborers or … upon the labor of these poor little boys from twelve to fourteen years of age who are picking their way through the dirt, clouds and dust of the anthracite coal, then the sooner we are done with this civilization and start over anew, the better.…

  “Take these children from the breaker and shorten this day,” he urged the coal operators. “You will find ways to increase the production of your breaker and ways to increase the production of your mine, and you will never miss the little boys with their black faces, and you will never be sorry that you allowed these men to live a little while longer on the face of the earth.”

  The short-term economics—hours and wages—were not the dominant issue. For months, the miners had been willing to settle the strike for a 10 percent raise. And it seemed likely that the commission would agree to cap the hours in a workman’s day. The unsettled quarrel was over the union. Baer and his colleagues abhorred the thought of giving the miners a role in their business; it was why the operators had all those witnesses tell frightening tales of murder and riot, to portray the union as a lawless mob.