Читать книгу The Story of my Life - Clarence Darrow - Страница 14

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In Ashtabula, Ohio, Judge Richards had given me the little book, "Our Penal Code and Its Victims," by John P. Altgeld. I had never heard the name before, but had read the book because of the friend who put it into my hands; up to that time I had the conventional view of crime and criminals. In a vague way I believed that a criminal was somewhat different from other men. He was evil and malignant, because he deliberately chose that way of life. I never had reflected that his composition and environment had any share in his conduct.

This book, written by John P. Altgeld, then a Chicago judge, set forth how laws and their administration were largely responsible for the criminal. It made a deep impression on my mind, and on arriving in Chicago the first man that I deliberately sought was Judge Altgeld. He seemed surprised that a man in Ohio had read his book. He told me that he had published and circulated it at his own expense, and very few had ever heard of it. Naturally he was pleased that it had fallen into my hands, and that I had liked it. He asked me a great many questions about myself, and invited me to call again. So I saw him from time to time, and he seemed to take an interest in my affairs and expressed a wish to help me if the opportunity should occur. Later, I discovered that he had been very active in the election of DeWitt C. Cregier for mayor, and that he had urged him to appoint me as assistant corporation counsel, when the change of politics had forced the former incumbent out of office. This indicated that he had recognized me as one of his disciples and followers.

Judge Altgeld had come to America when about six years of age. He was independent and aggressive, and believed in justice as he understood the word. He soon showed his sympathy for the labor movement, and through a fusion of trade-unionists and Democrats was elected to the bench. As a judge he was efficient and assertive and always in sympathy with the underdog. He was likewise a very ambitious man. He had good business sense and was always ready to take a chance. In the course of a few years he had accumulated about half a million dollars through dealings in real estate.

Judge Altgeld was on the bench in 1886 when the famous anarchist case was tried in Chicago. This case grew out of a movement for a general labor strike in May of 1886. A meeting was called for the night of May 4th by an anarchist group in the Haymarket Square, a wide area on the west side of Chicago. A permit was granted by the city, allowing the meeting to take place. When the 1st of May had passed, with many threats of disturbance, some of the citizens were fearing greater trouble, so the mayor, Carter Harrison, Sr., went to the square and listened to what the speakers said. The talks were made from a wagon brought to serve as a platform. The night was unpleasant, so only a small crowd assembled. It began to rain and more than half the audience left the street. Sam Fielding, an Englishman, once a Methodist revivalist, was speaking. The mayor told the policeman that the meeting was all right, and then he started for home.

No sooner had the mayor disappeared than a company of policemen marched up to the wagon and commanded the meeting to disperse. Fielding replied that they were about to go home anyhow. Thereupon a bomb was thrown from an alley into the Square, which landed in the midst of the policemen, killing seven and injuring about fifty. Immediately the city was aroused, and a man-hunt followed. Eight men were indicted for murder: Parsons, Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg, Fielding, Schwab, and Neebe. Previous to this meeting in the Haymarket, a number of halls and assembly rooms had been raided and closed. There was evidence that three of the group, Fischer, Engel and Lingg, had agreed that if the police attempted to search halls or break up gatherings they would use force to defend their rights to assemble. Also there was evidence that Lingg had made the bomb that exploded at the Haymarket.

Fielding, Parsons, Schwab and Spies were scarcely acquainted with Engel, Fischer and Lingg. Spies was the editor of the Arbeiter Zeitung, a radical daily paper to which Parsons often contributed. Schwab was an editorial writer on the paper. Parsons was a printer on the Chicago Daily News, and a frequent speaker at radical meetings; and Neebe was connected with the circulating department of the Arbeiter Zeitung; the paper was an old-time German sheet, very radical in its tendencies, which had been published in Chicago for eleven years before, and even after, this event. Its editorial writers and contributors often printed inflammatory articles on general subjects, but were never interfered with by the postal authorities. It was not seriously claimed that Parsons, Spies, Fielding, Schwab, or Neebe knew anything whatever about any contemplated violence at the meeting in the Haymarket Square.

The court permitted files of the Arbeiter Zeitung and The Alarm, a paper published by Parsons, to be read in evidence, and allowed the speeches of Parsons in Chicago and various other cities in the United States to go into the record; and speeches by Fielding at different meetings, with the editorials of Schwab, were offered at the trial. The judge instructed the jury that if they believed, from the evidence, that these speeches and articles contributed toward the throwing of the bomb they were justified in finding the defendants guilty of murder.

At the time of the trial the country was aflame, and the jury was shamelessly packed to procure conviction. The jury returned a verdict sentencing Neebe to fifteen years in the penitentiary, and all the others to death. This sentence was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the State, and the day of execution was fixed. In the meantime thousands of citizens protested that the verdict was unjust. Among these were many members and ex-members of the bench, a number of the best-known lawyers, some of them representing railroad corporations and other great interests; and several bankers, including the president of the First National Bank of Chicago, Lyman J. Gage. Petitions for clemency poured in from all parts of the earth.

Richard J. Oglesby was then governor of Illinois. He was a former general in the Civil War and had been prominent in politics for many years. After giving consideration to all the petitions he commuted the sentences of Fielding and Schwab to imprisonment for life, but Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fischer were hanged; and Lingg, a boy about twenty-one, managed to get a percussion cap of some sort which he put into his mouth, exploded it, and thus tore his head to pieces.

While many judges of the sitting court petitioned and worked for clemency, Altgeld remained silent. He did quietly send money and clothing to the families of the men during their trial and their sojourn in jail.

The anarchists were executed November 11th, 1887. From the time of their death constant efforts were carried on for the pardon of those who were confined in prison. For some years William Penn Nixon, editor-in-chief of The Chicago Inter-Ocean, was chairman of the amnesty committee that carried on the campaign. These petitioners grew into the tens of thousands and included men of all classes of Chicago and the whole United States. It was but a very few years after the executions until the bar in general throughout the State, and elsewhere, came to believe that the conviction was brought about through malice and hatred, and that the trial was unfair and the judgment of the court unsound, and that the opinion of the court was a standing menace to the liberty of the citizen.

John P. Altgeld was elected governor in 1892. His friends and the public in general always considered him radical. He was a humane, kindly man, and no one doubted his courage. It was commonly believed, and often stated, that if he were elected he would pardon the anarchists. Most of those who had been working for their release thought that the pardon would be his first official act. I was one of that number and told him so. He replied that it would not be; that many affairs of state demanded his prior attention. He said that when he could spare the time he would go over the case and do what he thought was right, but he must take his own time in this matter.

Often after that I urged him to act, but he always eluded the suggestion. Finally I felt impatient and worried, and wondered if we could have been deceived in Altgeld. All of his friends realized that he had never held any anarchistic or even especially socialistic views. We knew that he was upright, liberal, honest, humane, and had thought that was enough, but I now believed that the time had come for a last talk with him about pardons in the anarchist case.

I went to him, confiding that his friends were growing doubtful and restless and disappointed, and that it should be done at once. I told him that every one expected it, that it had been generally asked for by all the people, that it would not even create hostility toward him, and that I and others could see no excuse for waiting. Mr. Altgeld turned to me deliberately and calmly said:

"Go tell your friends that when I am ready I will act. I don't know how I will act, but I will do what I think is right." Then turning to me he added: "We have been friends for a long time. You seem impatient; of course I know how you feel; I don't want to offend you or lose your friendship, but this responsibility is mine, and I shall shoulder it. I have not yet examined the record. I have no opinion about it. It is a big job. When I do examine it I will do what I believe to be right, no matter what that is. But don't deceive yourself: If I conclude to pardon those men it will not meet with the approval that you expect; let me tell you that from that day I will be a dead man."

I knew the governor's attitude toward me. He knew the depth of my devotion to him, and he knew how absolutely I believed in that pardon. I was sure that he would have told me his intention if he would have told it to any man. I was certain that he did not know then what he would do. I reported to my friends that it was useless to bother him again. All we could do was to wait.

About six weeks later the news came in the daily papers. It had been so long delayed that it came like a stroke of lightning, it seemed so abrupt and unexpected. He issued his pardon message. And what a message it was. It left no one in doubt as to how he felt. Immediately throughout the world a flood of vituperation and gall was poured out upon Altgeld's head. Of course very few knew anything about the facts, and fewer cared anything about them. Governor Altgeld was in the way of the forces that control the world, and he must be destroyed.

The main objection was launched against the part of the message that criticised the trial judge. This criticism was caustic and severe. The public thundered as though it were treason to censure a judge; but of course it is as admissible and necessary to criticise a judge as any other public servant, and it is largely criticism that has any tendency to keep officials interested in meeting situations. It should be done with the wish to be fair, but I have found a limited number who ever tried to be just where they have any personal feeling in a case. In the mountain of protest heaped on the devoted head of John P. Altgeld no one ever undertook to show that his reasons were not good or his judgment unsound. As it was, he had no power to grant clemency to the dead. He could not have pardoned Schwab and Fielding if Governor Richard J. Oglesby, a Republican and conservative, had not saved their lives. It is perfectly plain that he would not have saved them if he had not been satisfied that there was not sufficient evidence to connect them with the killing.

I have always felt sure that in the pardoning of the men Governor Altgeld would not have been true to his office and himself had he failed to act. But I feel that Governor Altgeld was wrong in laying all the blame to Judge Gary, the trial judge. Undoubtedly his rulings were biased and unfair, but where is the man who, under the lashing of the crowd, is not biased and unfair? If Judge Gary erred, the Supreme Court was still more to blame; it required one whole volume of the Supreme Court reports for explanations and excuses to justify the judgment of the trial court, and to palliate and excuse the verdict of the jury; and their decision came a year after the trial, and there were seven judges who might have divided the responsibility. To severely blame Judge Gary meant blaming a judge for not being one in ten thousand, and few men can be that and live.

If only Governor Altgeld had consulted some one I believe the great mass of the criticism directed against him would have been spared. He needed but to marshal the influential men from all ranks that had petitioned for the pardon; he needed but to point out that Governor Oglesby had saved their lives, and to call the attention of his censors to the fierce and bitter passions that reigned supreme at the time of the trial. But Altgeld never shirked responsibility. He accepted, and seemed almost to court the opposition of the world. I never ventured to tell him that he should have or might have performed his act in any other manner. And now he and all his family have long since passed to dust, and only his work and the memory remain. Many a time I have said that posterity would vindicate him. But it will not; a man's record, rightly or wrongly, is settled as he goes along. Posterity has affairs of its own to look after.

I went to the State Capitol as often as I could after the pardon was granted. The great building seemed lonely and abandoned. The governor's suite of rooms were barren and deserted. He was almost always alone. Still there was at least one man, brave and true, and understanding, who found no day too short and no night too dark to serve the man he loved. This was George A. Schilling, the secretary of labor. Mr. Schilling was about the first man I met when I came to Chicago, and he has been a close friend ever since. He is still living, at the age of eighty-one.

I used to go to the governor's quarter and sit and look at him in silence, just to be with him. He was never a great talker. Few really thoughtful people are voluble. Altgeld never gossiped; he never spoke of trifling things, and on the platform he almost never told a story. Yet, now and then, he would do that atrocious thing, but fortunately the stories never seemed to belong to the man or fit the time or place.

A speaker asks an audience to come and listen to his views, and they have done him the honor to come. Out of the whole span of life they have but an hour or two in which they can be together to consider the matter in hand. Life and such hours are too important and scarce to be wasted on the mere repetition of stories, most of which could be, and probably have been, read or heard before. Instead of yielding to idle conversation it might profit one to cultivate silence and contemplation. After all, every one virtually spends most of the time alone, or wishing he could be alone.

Altgeld was essentially a lonely man. And those were appallingly lonely days after the pardoning of the anarchists. The public let loose its vials of wrath and malice on his devoted head. But he did not wince and never complained. He could not tolerate sympathy. He felt that it was an assumption of superiority and the suggestion of defeat. The brave man goes straight ahead. He moves silently but with the force of the glacier or fate itself. His heart may be torn and bleeding, but it never shows in his face, and he is too proud to explain even when he knows that a word would make things right. Altgeld never moaned or cried in his agony, but went straight onward down his appointed path though he knew that it led to doom.

The second time Altgeld ran for office was some two years after the pardon message. By that time his friends were rallying around him, and even the time-server and hypocrite once more sat on his doorstep, asking for alms. The vote he received was not less than the rest of the ticket; in many places it was more. The newspapers, the profiteers, the money-mongers, and the pharisees, fought him bitterly; but in the humble dwelling-places of the poor, in the factories and mills, among the failures, the misfits and despised, he was worshipped almost as a god. For the maimed and beaten, the sightless and voiceless, he was eyes and ears, and a flaming tongue crying in the wilderness for kindness and humanity and understanding.