WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman
two for a failed raid on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Maryland, to arm slaves so they could rebel against their Southern owners. Clarence was not quite four when the Civil War began, but old enough to have indelible memories of that war, the abolition of slavery and the assassination of President Lincoln.
Growing up, Darrow remained close to his mother Emily, who died when he was just fifteen. When he reached manhood, he was taller than average and heavy set. He looked like someone used to manual labor. Actually, Clarence loved to dance, but like his father, he was happiest with his nose in a challenging book. It took a number of tries before Darrow was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1878. Two years later, he married the daughter of a local mill owner and settled down to law practice not far from his home town. By age thirty, he had found that life in Ohio lacked worldly stimulation and moved with his wife Jessie and young son Paul to the vibrant, sinful city of Chicago.
Darrow found the company of avant-garde writers and painters irresistible. He admired free thinkers who disdained bourgeois relationships. By 1897, his magnetic personality had attracted a serious new lover. He divorced his wife and spent much of his spare time entertaining his new bohemian friends, reading, writing, and arguing philosophy. Darrow had a handsome, rectangular face with straight brown hair that flopped to one side of his high forehead. Despite his affinity for the cosmopolitan life of Chicago, he never shed the down-home mannerisms of the small town where he was raised. He mesmerized women with his piercing gray-green eyes, soft voice and animated style. Over time, in court, he grew more careless of his appearance, wearing wrinkled, outdated suits and not bothering to keep his hair combed. By 1903, his dissolute life had sapped much of his vigor. Thankful for someone to look after his daily needs, he married Ruby Hamerstrom, a journalist a dozen years younger than himself.
When Darrow accepted his friend Eugene Debs’ invitation to help defend the three most militant union leaders in the country, he counted on Ruby to accompany him to Idaho’s capital, where he had never been. Darrow expected to face open hostility from Boise’s citizens still grieving for their assassinated governor and outraged at the radical WFM, which they blamed for Steunenberg’s death. Ironically, Darrow had just published a booklet on the virtues of turning the other cheek. Biographer Irving Stone notes that when Darrow agreed to join the defense team for this sensationalized murder, the veteran Chicago lawyer “knew that it would be the toughest case of his career, a knock-’em-down, and drag-’em-out brawl with no holds barred.”16
In the spring of 1907, memory of the despised Pinkerton agency’s role in precipitating the Haymarket Square massacre still loomed large. The widow of one of the martyrs was featured in a Chicago parade on behalf of the three WFM leaders. Some more conservative labor unions distanced themselves from the WFM for fear that its militant leaders were guilty as charged. But the issues championed by the WFM – grueling work shifts, safety, and living wages – remained top national concerns of conservative and radical unions alike. Close to a hundred thousand men and women gathered on Boston Common to protest the railroading of the champion of the eight-hour day. One reporter called it “the greatest demonstration the Hub has ever witnessed.”17 In Manhattan, an estimated forty thousand polyglot immigrant workers paraded down Fifth Avenue singing “The Marseillaise” and wore red arm bands or kerchiefs in support of the arrested WFM leaders.
Marchers nationwide were particularly angry at President Roosevelt’s prejudicial use of his own bully pulpit to condemn the three arrested union officials as “undesirable citizens.”18 Tens of thousands of workers bought buttons proudly identifying themselves as “undesirable citizens,” too, with the nickel cost of each button going to the defense fund. Other sympathizers hid their support for fear of being fired. Roosevelt ignored criticism from the press. The feisty president repeatedly characterized the WFM leaders as “thugs and murderers” whom he equated with the notorious Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania.19
The upcoming Idaho trial became the focal point of potential class warfare. One of the most prominent champions of the defendants was another co-founder of the IWW, labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (Mother Jones magazine is named for her). By her late sixties, the Irish widow had already been branded “the most dangerous woman in America” – a proud Socialist most famous for leading a Children’s Crusade in 1903 from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to President Roosevelt’s estate in Long Island to protest the exploitation of child labor.20 Mother Jones had campaigned hard since the 1870s for the rights of mineworkers from Pennsylvania to Colorado. In 1906, she traveled across the country fund-raising for her colleagues Haywood, Pettibone and Moyer, spreading word of their kidnapping by government agents hell-bent on destroying the Western Federation of Miners.21
In May of 1907, mainstream and Leftist media swarmed to cover what the Boston Globe called a “determined struggle between labor unions and capital” and Socialists deemed “the greatest trial of modern times.”22 Debs was eager to cover the trial himself for the Appeal to Reason. Darrow emphatically told Debs to stay away – it would be hard enough to defend the three WFM leaders without turning the trial into a referendum on Socialism. As the trial began, a reporter for the Boise Statesman claimed that “the eyes of the civilized world are on these great proceedings.”23
Two of Idaho’s ablest lawyers headed a team of four prosecutors: six-foot-four unsophisticated “I-dy-ho” bar leader James Hawley, and “Silver” Republican and newly-elected Senator William Borah. Borah was a renowned ladies’ man a generation younger than his rough-hewn colleague and had been a close friend of Steunenberg. Borah and Hawley had teamed up successfully before in prosecuting leaders of the mineworkers for the 1899 bombing in Coeur D’Alene. Both felt they now had an iron-clad case for hanging the WFM’s national leaders, aided by McParland’s detective work.
Neither side had any objections to the appointment of former U.S. Attorney Fremont Wood as the trial judge. The Republican jurist was an imposing Yankee from Maine, known for his even-handed rulings. Judge Wood first pleased the defense by granting their motion for change of venue to Boise from Steunenberg’s inflamed hometown of Caldwell. The defense team then added to their table a prominent member of the Boise Bar who had once been Judge Wood’s partner. Trying not to miss a trick, they also seated Haywood’s crippled wife and freckle-faced nine-year-old daughter in the front row of spectators, along with his mother and older daughter. To the disappointment of the prosecution team, also looking for sympathy from the jury, Steunenberg’s widow refused to attend the trial. McParland fumed at how Haywood was being portrayed as such a model husband and father: when arrested in Denver, Haywood had been found “stripped naked in a room in an assignation house” with his young sister-in-law.24
For protection against assassination, Idaho’s Governor Gooding had law enforcement question all suspicious strangers and usher them out of town. He moved his own family to the same hotel as Pinkerton’s McParland, both under armed guard. Gooding also succeeded in getting federal reinforcements stationed at Boise’s edge and secretly encouraged armed vigilantes among local businessmen. For extra insurance, the prosecutor placed a sniper in the attic of a grocery store where he had a clear view of the courthouse. President Roosevelt was kept apprised of the situation, but the Secret Service doubted the WFM would be foolish enough to pull anything.
It took a month and a half just to select the twelve jurors – all white males, of course. Under British common law, women had been categorically excluded from jury service in all but a few specialized types of cases due to a “defect of their sex.” This practice continued in the colonies and the United States, with each state mostly free to decide for itself what restrictions it imposed on jury qualifications. The high court also gave its approval to keeping women off juries altogether – which almost all states still did at the time of the Haywood trial, with varying justifications.
Darrow had limited choices in the relatively homogenous community that prohibited him from following his usual formula for success in Chicago trials: “Never take a German; they are bullheaded. Rarely take a Swede; they are stubborn. Always take an Irishman or a Jew; they are the easiest to move to emotional sympathy.”25 Among other subjects, Darrow inquired if they would vote to hang an anarchist. One candidate responded, “Yes, if I understand what an anarchist is, I would hang him on