Читать книгу WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME - Lise Pearlman - Страница 11

The solid column swept past – painters, carpenters, hod-carriers, masons, iron workers – every sort of trade-union, each with its own banners – and an extraordinary number of bands all playing the Marseillaise . . . an indescribable color of martial zest . . . Here were 40,000 men marching in New York City . . . because three labor leaders are on trial for murder in a state two thousand miles away. [E]ven a conservative like myself could see . . . how effective it was . . . a sort of contagious fervor.

– NORMAN HAPGOOD, EDITOR OF COLLIER’S WEEKLY, DESCRIBING THE MAY 4, 1907, SOCIALIST PARADE DOWN FIFTH AVENUE¹

Big Bill Haywood had the intimidating look of a real-life Cyclops. He was built like an ox and had lost an eye in a childhood whittling accident. Haywood never bothered to obtain a glass eye. He wore a tall cowboy hat to tower over companions. On the rare occasions he took off his Stetson, the two-hundred-pound spokesman for the Western Federation of Miners stood just under six feet tall. He was clean-shaven with neatly parted short brown hair, oversized features and prominent jowls. When photographed, he presented a half-profile with only his good left eye facing the camera.

The “Lincoln of Labor” was born in 1869 in the Utah territory where his father was a Pony Express rider. He was three when his father died and nine when he lost his right eye, the same year he first started working in the mines. Violent confrontations over union demands for worker safety, a $3 minimum daily wage and an eight-hour day were then common throughout the nation. Federal or state troops had to be called in to restore peace some five hundred times, almost always at the instigation of politically powerful industrialists.

Haywood was an impressionable seventeen when Chicago’s infamous Haymarket Square riot broke out in May of 1886. He devoured newspaper accounts of how the mayhem started. First, police and private detectives killed six strikers. The following day an unknown protestor threw a bomb at the police, who responded by shooting into the crowd, some of whom returned gunfire. After the dust settled, seven policemen and three protesters were dead. About a hundred others were injured, most of them police officers. Eight leading anarchists and militant socialists who had addressed the May Day rally were tried for murder. All were convicted based solely on charges that the deaths were “the bloody fruit” of their “villainous teachings.”² Four were hanged in 1887. The hysteria-driven executions turned the four Haymarket Square rally organizers into instant martyrs for their cause.

Local unions in frontier states were mired in similar bloody confrontations with owners of gold, silver, copper, lead and coal mines. The horrendous working conditions of rough-hewn, poorly educated men, who drank too hard and seldom enjoyed civilizing female companionship, created an extremely volatile situation. Miners typically worked ten hours a day, six days a week down dangerous shafts. One third of all men who worked a decade in gold and silver mines wound up seriously injured from falling rocks or from inhaling clouds of silica dust sent up by new “widow-maker” compressed air drills; one out of eight died in the mines.³

It was easy to hate the big businessmen back East who exploited the mine workers. Only able-bodied men were paid. There was no workers’ compensation, no health benefits. Disabled workers simply lost their jobs and were replaced with others equally desperate for employment. The mining industry in the late 19th century made extensive use of dynamite as a new commercial blasting technique. By the mid-1880s, American anarchists and militant labor leaders had found other uses for Alfred Nobel’s invention.

Banding together in unions that could cripple the mines with strikes was the mineworkers’ only hope to improve their lot. But management of the mines infiltrated unions with spies and resorted to private armies. The hired guns used brute force to break strikes and policed the mining facilities with rifles, killing strikers with impunity. Union members fought back with sabotage and violence against scabs. In 1892, alarmed by the increasing class violence in Idaho, President Benjamin Harrison sent out federal troops to conduct mass arrests of union members. Then came the devastating financial collapse of 1893. It caused a ripple effect of bankruptcies and a surplus of out-of-work laborers competing for jobs in the mines.

Facing wage cuts, strikebreakers, armed company guards, and mass arrests, union members in Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Utah and South Dakota merged to form the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The WFM almost instantaneously developed a reputation as the most militant union in the country. By the turn of the century, pitched battles between the WFM and state-supported owners would become known as the Colorado Labor Wars. It was the closest the United States “has ever approached outright class warfare.”⁴

Haywood was twenty-seven when he joined the WFM in 1896. An impassioned speaker, he rose quickly to national prominence as a champion of labor’s goals, shouting to enthusiastic crowds, “Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep.”⁵ By May of 1907, the burly activist had served on the Executive Board of the WFM for seven years. President Theodore Roosevelt immediately took keen interest when Haywood was accused with two other WFM leaders of ordering the assassination of Idaho’s former Governor Frank Steunenberg. The bombing death looked all too much like WFM payback for the governor having called in federal troops to impose martial law to end Idaho’s labor wars. Executing the leadership of the WFM for that crime could throttle the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World in its infancy.

In 1896, Steunenberg had been nominated as both the Democratic and Populist candidate for Idaho’s governor. Both groups enthusiastically endorsed thirty-six-year-old Nebraskan firebrand William Jennings Bryan for President that year in hopes of revitalizing the nation’s economy with silver-backed currency. Though McKinley defeated Bryan, Steunenberg had won the Idaho election, with labor union backers and the vote of “Silver” Republicans, by a comfortable margin. Steunenberg became the first non-Republican to hold that office since the rough and tumble remnant of Eastern “Oregon country” was admitted to the union in 1890, a year after its neighboring states of Montana and Washington.

Steunenberg was reelected in 1898 with a smaller majority, which still included the support of union men. During his second term, antagonism reached the boiling point between the WFM and the owners of the Bunker Hill concentrator. A $250,000 smelting plant in Wardner, Idaho, the Bunker Hill concentrator had been recognized when built as the largest such facility on the planet. (It would be a multi-million-dollar investment in today’s dollars.) Unlike most other mine owners, the San Francisco owners of Bunker Hill still adamantly refused to recognize unions. The facility’s president had recently gone a step further and begun purging Irish miners from his work force as un-American agitators. On April 29, 1899, local union members in Burke, Idaho, retaliated with a breathtakingly bold act of sabotage.

Scores of armed union men kept the employees of the Bunker Hill concentrator at bay while another couple of hundred masked associates – armed with rifles, bats and shotguns – commandeered a train. They brought the train to Wardner and unloaded sixty dynamite cartons, which a few volunteers then placed at strategic points under the concentrator. Then all of the men high-tailed it out of Wardner just before the explosives blew the concentrator and nearby buildings to smithereens. The union’s extraordinary violence shocked Governor Steunenberg. At the demands of the irate railroad and Coeur D’Alene mine owners, the governor surprised the union by re-imposing martial law to restore order. With his own National Guard off serving in the Spanish-American War, Steunenberg asked President McKinley to deploy federal troops. Within days, the President purposely chose to send veteran black soldiers in the 24th Infantry Regiment to quell the uprising, knowing how insulted the miners would be.

The segregated soldiers of the 24th Infantry had been the most heroic American combatants at San Juan Hill, in the recent Spanish-American War, though Assistant Secretary of War Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders had received most of the credit. But the regiment of black soldiers was bitter at the prejudice the men suffered upon their return and increasingly fractious. Now they had an outlet for their frustration – strict orders from their white officers to indiscriminately round up union members and sympathizing townsmen in the Coeur d’Alene region and lock them up without mercy. As expected, the French-Canadian, Irish, Welsh and Cornish locals then arrested without charges especially resented being herded into filthy bullpens by “niggers” called in by the government at the behest of the hated mine owners. Meanwhile, Idaho’s Attorney General Samuel Hays boasted to the press: “We have taken [the union] monster by the throat and we are going to choke the life out of it.”⁶

Hays was obviously speaking not just for himself but for the Populist governor the Democratic union had helped elect. Republican governors had previously authorized mass arrests, but this time the illegal round-up was followed by federal troops enforcing a new county permit requiring all mine workers to deny or renounce membership in any militant union. The illegal ordinance was squarely directed at the local branch of the WFM – all done with the approval of Steunenberg. Union men turned on him, calling Steunenberg a “Benedict Arnold” to their cause.

Though the WFM had recently broken with Samuel Gompers’ more collaborative American Federation of Labor in the East, the WFM and its supporters retained substantial national clout. Steunenberg was summoned to Washington to answer charges of misconduct. A specially convened congressional committee hearing addressed his wholesale suspension of the constitutional rights of so many Idaho citizens in the Coeur D’Alene region. Though Democrats were livid, the Republican majority stood firmly behind Steunenberg’s imposition of martial law. To the WFM, this was the final indignity. Steunenberg was condemned by its leaders, including Haywood, as an enemy of the working class. Death threats against Steunenberg followed.

As the labor strife escalated, opposition to Steunenberg prevented his renomination. He retreated to private life as a farmer, banker and real estate developer. Steunenberg may have thought he was safe on the sidelines, but in the escalating labor wars, it was getting harder to find any haven. In 1904, in just one incident, thirteen strikebreakers died in a bombing at a Colorado train station. Rumor had it that WFM’s Big Bill Haywood ordered that hit, though the union claimed the bomb had actually been set off at the behest of local mine owners. By then, use of agents provocateurs was well-documented, but so was murder and mayhem by mine workers, who again faced brutal retaliation.

Reformers in several states had succeeded in getting some protective laws passed, only to see victory snatched away by the United States Supreme Court in April of 1905. In a hotly contested case with national repercussions, a bare majority of justices in Lochner v. New York threw out protective legislation limiting bakers to sixty-hour weeks as an interference with freedom of contract. Over a vigorous dissent, the court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the right of business owners and workers to negotiate any hours of employment they agreed upon, explaining that the employee might want the extra money from longer hours. State laws to protect workers from exploitation violated both the purchaser’s and seller’s “liberty of contract.”⁷ In reality, there were always workers desperate enough to take practically any job offered. The landmark ruling protected owners’ property interests in imposing working conditions that Progressive legislatures deemed inhumane.

The Lochner case foreshadowed the invalidation of a host of other new laws for worker protection, but its most immediate impact was to galvanize the founding of the revolutionary IWW in June 1905. Just six months later, former Governor Steunenberg lost his life when he opened the booby-trapped side gate to his Caldwell, Idaho, farmhouse. The mine owners then secretly gave Idaho’s current governor the funds to hire Pinkerton’s chief of its Denver office, James McParland, to investigate the explosion. The assassination had all the earmarks of yet another violent episode in the ongoing class strife.

McParland was the most famous private eye in America. He already had substantial experience with the Colorado Labor Wars, where mine owners kept him on retainer. The ace detective, now in his sixties, had catapulted to national fame almost thirty years before for his role in destroying another militant mineworkers’ organization in Pennsylvania. The Molly Maguires had originated as a secret society in Ireland that retaliated against oppressive British landlords. In the 1870s they were rumored to have reemerged in the Scranton anthracite minefields, where some Irish emigrants had settled following the devastating mid-century potato famine in their homeland. Yet it was never clear how active the Molly Maguires were in the deadly guerrilla warfare between union organizers on one side and, on the other, a coalition of mine owners, local police, and judiciary whom the mine owners controlled. It benefited management to tag any ardent union man with that label, realizing that “The name of Molly Maguire being attached to a man’s name is sufficient to hang him.”⁸

The situation in Pennsylvania back in the 1870s differed little from that in the West at the turn of the century: “labor was at war with capital, Democrat with Republican, Protestant with Catholic, and immigrant with native.”⁹ By early 1875, a newly formed Irish union called a strike to challenge grueling working conditions. The strike ended when starving workers capitulated in June. Later that summer, the Molly Maguires reportedly started regaining strength. The Pinkerton Agency had already sent James McParland to Pennsylvania as an undercover agent using the pseudonym Jamie McKenna. He started out as a drinking buddy of Irish unionizers and eventually became secretary of the Molly Maguires.

McParland succeeded in his charade for more than two years, all the while passing on information to Pinkerton. The Maguires suspected a spy in their midst when vigilantes organized by a mine owner raided a duplex where three members of the secret society resided, killing one of them and his pregnant sister. It did not take long for them to accuse the man they knew as McKenna, who, fleeing from a lynch mob, barely escaped with his life.

McKenna later emerged as Pinkerton Agent James McParland, the state’s star witness against the gang. McParland’s testimony helped clinch twenty hangings on “Black Thursday” – June 21, 1877 – for the commission of revenge killings, many of which McParland likely knew about in advance and did nothing to prevent. Some of those who were hanged may have only been found guilty by association. Labor historian Joseph G. Rayback credits that trial with “temporarily destroy[ing] the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public the impression . . . that miners were by nature criminal in character.”¹⁰ McParland’s nickname in the agency became “Pontius Pilate.” Three decades later, Irish Catholics in his own community still scorned McParland as a traitor to his people.

By the time McParland arrived in Caldwell, Idaho, in January of 1906 an itinerant sheep dealer going by the name of Thomas Hogan had already been arrested for Steunenberg’s murder. Hogan was found with incriminating evidence in his hotel room. When questioned by the sheriff, Hogan admitted his name was Harry Orchard, that he had once lived in the Coeur D’Alene mining region and knew the WFM leadership. McParland befriended the prisoner and obtained a confession by assuring Orchard the state was really after the WFM inner circle. Orchard then implicated WFM Secretary-Treasurer Big Bill Haywood; its president Charles Moyer; and former WFM executive board member George Pettibone. Orchard claimed the three men gave him instructions in Denver to go to Idaho to kill Steunenberg as an example to other political enemies that they could never escape revenge. Orchard said it was only the latest of many terrorist acts he performed for the WFM.

The Constitution did not permit extradition of the WFM leaders in Denver for ordering a murder in Idaho. Undaunted, McParland colluded with the governors of Idaho and Colorado, other state officials and the Union Pacific Railroad to kidnap the three WFM leaders. To make the kidnapping look legal, they prepared traditional extradition warrants falsely claiming the three WFM leaders were in Idaho on the night of the murder and were fugitives from justice. On a cue from McParland, the three suspects – who were already under surveillance – were then arrested on unspecified charges without being given an opportunity to alert family or their lawyers. The trio were then handcuffed and placed in leg irons and spirited across state lines on a train later dubbed “the Pirate Special.” The train arrived in Boise in record time and the three men were placed in cells on death row while awaiting trial for Steunenberg’s murder. Meanwhile, the Governor of Idaho publicly asserted his belief in their guilt, and McParland boasted in a press release, “They will never leave Idaho alive.”¹¹

Source: http://idahoptv.org/productions/specials/capitoloflight/tourgrounds.cfm.

Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg

After union men blew up a huge, non-union smelting plant in Wardner, Idaho, in April 1899, Steunenberg called in federal troops to enforce a new (unconstitutional) county ordinance requiring all mine workers to renounce membership in any militant union – squarely targeting the Western Federation of Miners that had supported his election. Union men denounced Steunenberg as a Benedict Arnold and forced his retirement from public life after one term.

Source: “Idaho Meanderings” by Gov Steunenberg’s great grandson, http://steunenberg.blogspot.com/2011/12/12301905-today-in-history.html

The newspaper caption reads: “Former Governor Frank Steunenberg killed by an explosion at his home in Coldwell, Idaho.”

Source: http://idahoptv.org/trial/images/steunenberghouse.jpg.

Retired Gov. Frank Steunenberg was killed by a bomb as he entered the gate at his Idaho home in December of 1905. Photo from “A Good Hanging Spoiled – The Verdict, July 28th, 1907” by John T. Richards, Jr.

Source: http://pynchonclass.blogspot.com/2012/09/western-federation-of-miners.html

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood

Defendants: three leaders of Western Federation of Miners. Big Bill Haywood (center) goes to trial first. 1907 photo. (WFM button reproduced above.)

Source: Mother Jones photo 1902, U.S. Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division; digital ID cph.3a10320. Photo of Debs in 1897 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

Left: Labor activist Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) campaigned for funds to support the WFM leaders’ defense. Right: Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs sent his attorney Clarence Darrow to represent Haywood.

Socialist Party of America leader Eugene Debs shot back, “If they don’t, the governors of Idaho and Colorado and their masters from Wall Street, New York, to the Rocky Mountains had better prepare to follow them.”¹²

Irate WFM lawyers challenged the unorthodox arrests and extradition all the way to the United States Supreme Court. But the political pressure was so intense, they stood no chance. At the justices’ annual White House visit on the Monday when the high court began its 1906 fall term, Roosevelt weighed in by asserting his opinion that Moyer and Haywood were undesirable citizens – just three days before oral argument on the propriety of the labor leaders’ forcible abduction from Colorado. Roosevelt most likely assumed that the justices were already prepared to give short shrift to the radicals’ appeal, but could not resist a heavy-handed hint as to how he hoped they would rule. Two months later, the high court issued its opinion. With only one dissenter, the Supreme Court ruled that any challenge to the illegality of the kidnapping had to be lodged in Colorado. Once the men were transported to Idaho, Idaho had authority to try them for conspiracy to assassinate its ex-governor. It is often said that possession is nine-tenths of the law. In this case, possession was ten-tenths of the law. The men had been spirited out of state without having an opportunity to challenge their kidnapping in Colorado. WFM supporters considered the bootstrap Supreme Court ruling to be as odious and unsupportable as the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that helped precipitate the Civil War.

Eugene Debs wasted no time excoriating McParland and the two governors, linking them with “the capitalist tyrants” who martyred the Haymarket speakers two decades before. Debs threatened all-out war by Socialists: “If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and their brothers, a million revolutionists will meet them with guns.”¹³ At the same time, Debs called for a broader national labor strike than the crippling railroad strike he had orchestrated in 1894. Colorado’s Socialist Party named Haywood its candidate for governor while he sat in his Idaho jail cell facing murder charges. Though he was not expected to win, Haywood amazed observers by quadrupling the party’s last gubernatorial vote count.¹⁴ In the meantime, radical union members and Socialists across the country angrily took to the streets with banners, torches and flags, proclaiming Haywood’s innocence. They were particularly incensed about the Pinkerton agency’s underhanded role in the matter.

Labor had long considered Pinkerton men lowly spies for management and blamed the infamous May 4, 1886, Haymarket Square riots partly on the agency. The bloody riots had caused a severe setback to the growing eight-hour-day movement. The day before the bloodshed in Haymarket Square, Pinkerton detectives helped Chicago police end a violent confrontation between scabs and strikers locked out of the Cyrus McCormick Harvester Works by killing six strikers and wounding many more. The bombing of the local police that started the Haymarket riot appeared to be in retaliation.

Though four of the speakers at the Haymarket rally had been hanged shortly afterward, three of the eight were still languishing in prison in 1898 when a new Democratic governor of Illinois pardoned them for lack of proof of their involvement in the bombing. The chief advocate of that pardon was Chicago labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had become Eugene Debs’ lawyer four years before when Debs faced criminal conspiracy charges for leading the 1894 railroad strike. Darrow had first made his mark as a corporate attorney for the city of Chicago and then as a railroad lawyer before he defected to the other side to defend Debs.

By 1907, when Debs asked Darrow to join the team representing the three accused WFM leaders, the accomplished fifty-year-old defense lawyer was not yet a household name. He had, however, already earned a formidable reputation as a passionate opponent of the death penalty and champion of labor and underdog causes. Darrow liked to claim that he never lost a client to the death penalty, but that was only true if one didn’t count the time he argued a post-trial sanity motion in 1893 for the convicted assassin of Chicago’s mayor. It was impressive enough that Darrow could boast that he had never lost a capital case to a jury.

Born in 1857 in rural northeastern Ohio, Clarence Seward Darrow was destined from the cradle for a life of passionate advocacy. The fifth of eight children of Amirus and Emily Eddy Darrow, Clarence inherited an insatiable appetite for knowledge from both parents. Their families had each migrated to Ohio from New England, where their ancestors had fought in the Revolution. Amirus Darrow first trained for the Unitarian ministry, then quit because he questioned his faith in God. Despite becoming an agnostic, Amirus retained firm convictions about right and wrong and a hide impervious to ridicule – traits he also passed on to his famous son. Clarence recalled his father fondly as the “village infidel.”¹⁵

Amirus barely eked out a living as the town undertaker for the hamlet of Kinsman, Ohio, near the western border of Pennsylvania, just south of Lake Erie. He likely played a key role when Kinsman became a stop on the Underground Railroad. His wife Emily was more practical than Amirus, but shared her husband’s idealism and fondness for books. She was a passionate suffragette and advocate of other liberal causes, which her son Clarence would likewise embrace with fervor.

Clarence grew up internalizing his parents’ abhorrence of slavery and admiration for the fiery John Brown. Brown had been hanged when Darrow was 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 sight.”²⁶

The sheriff’s handpicked jury pool was heavily skewed against wage earners, but the two sides ultimately agreed on twelve men. All of the jurors had started out as farmers or ranchers. One had since become a real estate agent, another a construction foreman and one a building contractor. Eleven of the bewhiskered men were over fifty. (Darrow’s other rule of thumb was: “Old men are generally more charitable and kindly disposed than young men; they have seen more of the world and understand it.”)²⁷ Eight were Republicans, three Democrats and one a Prohibitionist. Like the Thaw jury in New York earlier that year, the men were sequestered for the duration of the trial. They were permitted to read newspapers only after deputies cut out any coverage of the case. Of course, some of them had read slanted local articles against the WFM leadership before they were picked for the jury panel.

Both teams had secretly conducted extensive investigation of eligible jurors in advance. The defense team eventually discovered that their chief intelligence gatherer was a Pinkerton spy, who skewed his reports and copied them to the other side. The defense may have planted its own mole on the prosecution side. It was an era known for corrupt tactics, and this was an extraordinarily high stakes case. By the time the ten peremptory challenges for each side were used up, the prosecution was satisfied, but the defense hoped only for a hung jury. Darrow and his co-counsel were painfully aware that most of the men had voted for, done business with or otherwise had been familiar with Governor Steunenberg, including one juror who boarded the governor in his Boise home for two years. Only one juror had ever been a member of a trade union. Socialist papers were even more pessimistic. They assumed the panel had already made up their minds to do the prosecution’s bidding.

Prosecutor William Borah deliberately sought to inflame the jury with his claim that the trial was for a crime “a thousand times worse than murder.” It was “anarchy displaying its first bloody triumph in Idaho.”²⁸ A parade of prosecution witnesses took the stand to describe Steunenberg’s violent, agonizing death and the poorly groomed stranger spotted casing the farmhouse beforehand. The spectators in the packed courtroom were mesmerized when the confessed bomber finally took the stand. McParland had worked hard maintaining the good will of the assassin now known as Harry Orchard and in keeping him well-guarded from retaliation. Over the sixteen months since Orchard’s arrest, McParland had also “transformed [him] from [an] unshaven, ill-kempt, shifty-eyed felon” to a “carefully attired” and “manicured” man who “might be a Sunday School superintendent.”²⁹

Orchard, a forty-year-old Canadian whose real name was Albert Horsley, had been accompanied into the courtroom by armed guards. The doors were then locked to keep out the overflow crowd of hundreds of men and women anxious to get a glimpse of the governor’s assassin. Inside the courtroom, deputies and plainclothes detectives provided additional security. The remarkably composed star witness then testified in a low, credible monotone for several days, detailing his career as a union terrorist. He claimed that he had participated in the 1899 bombing of the compression mill in Wardner and that he set the bomb in 1904 at a Colorado train depot, killing thirteen scabs. He claimed to have targeted several other political enemies of the WFM, detailing an aborted attempt on the life of Colorado’s ex-governor and two members of its Supreme Court. Then came the damning testimony that was intended to seal the prosecutors’ case: that Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone promised Orchard several hundred dollars and a ranch if he assassinated Steunenberg to intimidate other WFM adversaries.

The newly beefed up Western Union office worked at a record pace to transmit the news to the nation from the hordes of mainstream and Socialist reporters who had descended on Boise to cover the story firsthand. Collier’s Weekly magazine described Orchard as “the most remarkable witness that ever appeared in an American court of justice.”³⁰ New York Times correspondent O. K. Davis proclaimed that the witness “upon whose testimony the whole case against Haywood, Moyer, and the other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners is based” told “a horrible, revolting, sickening story . . . as simply as the plainest . . . most ordinary incident . . . and as it went on, hour after hour, with multitudinous detail, clear and vivid here, half-forgotten and obscure there, gradually it forced home to the listener the conviction that it was the unmixed truth.”³¹

Though Judge Wood was incensed at the prosecution for permitting jailhouse interviews of Orchard to influence public opinion during the trial, Wood privately agreed with Davis’s assessment of Orchard’s credibility. Unbeknownst to the parties, the judge and the New York Times correspondent took several weekend fly fishing trips together during the pendency of the trial.

Meanwhile, observers could not help but notice that WFM’s pompous Colorado counsel, Edmund Richardson, had difficulty sharing the leadership of the defense team with the equally egotistical Darrow. The two often disagreed vociferously on strategy, but Darrow reluctantly deferred to Richardson when he insisted on cross-examining Orchard. Though the veteran WFM lawyer brought considerable skills to his grilling of the state’s star witness, most observers believed Orchard easily won that courtroom match-up. (In the next trial of WFM’s George Pettibone, when Orchard was again the chief witness, Darrow conducted the cross-examination himself. He was credited with doing a masterful job of discrediting Orchard as a convicted felon, bigamist, company spy and tool of Pinkerton’s agency. The jury reportedly responded by recoiling from Orchard as if he were “the carcass of a dead animal.”)³²

Yet, in Haywood’s trial, Richardson scored some points. Even after months of preparation, Orchard’s story was confusing. He claimed to be a paid assassin of the union, but acknowledged that some of the misdeeds he committed were on his own initiative or that of the mine owners. None of the state’s witnesses was able to corroborate the complicity of the WFM leader in Orchard’s dastardly act in Caldwell. Before trial, one of Orchard’s alleged collaborators had disappeared without a trace, and another, Steve Adams, retracted his own confession at the urging of Clarence Darrow. Detective McParland suspected that Darrow bribed Adams, but had no proof. The prosecution was forced to rely only on circumstantial evidence to support Orchard’s conspiracy claim. The defense in the Haywood trial put on a hundred of its own witnesses, including Haywood, who denied all of Orchard’s charges.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:James_mcparland_pinkerton_agency.jpg

Pinkerton agent James McParland (left), then the most famous detective in America, arrested Albert Horsley (a.k.a. Harry Orchard) (pictured below) for Steunenberg’s assassination. McParland then groomed Horsley as the star witness for the prosecution against the leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, whom McParland kidnapped from Colorado to face the death penalty for allegedly conspiring to hire Horsley to kill Steunenberg. McParland cleaned Horsley up to look far more presentable at trial. One reporter described the transformation as turning an “unshaven, ill-kempt, shifty-eyed felon” into a “carefully attired” and “manicured” man who “might be a Sunday School superintendent” (John E. Nevins, Milwaukee Journal, June 6, 1907, 1)

Source: http://www.3rd1000.com/history3/events/cdamines/1892-1899.htmp

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27122232

Harry Orchard (left) when arrested in 1906 and (right) in 1907 as star witness for the prosecution of Big Bill Haywood

In the follow-up trial of WFM leader George Pettibone, Darrow destroyed Orchard’s credibility – revealing him as a convicted felon, bigamist, company spy and tool of Pinkerton’s agency. The jury recoiled from Orchard as if he were “the carcass of a dead animal” (Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense, New York: Signet Books, 1941, 1969), 280.

It was customary at the time for closing arguments to last up to a day and a half apiece. Judge Wood allowed all four veteran attorneys that privilege. The courtroom was filled to capacity with Governor Gooding and James McParland showing up for the first time to lend their weight to the proceedings. Hawley went first, attributing Orchard’s confession to “the saving power of divine grace.”³³ He disavowed any effort by the state to make war on the WFM or that the mine owners had a role in financing the prosecution – statements that Hawley knew to be false, having taken a very active role himself in fund-raising to “rid the West entirely” of the WFM.³⁴

Edmund Richardson went first for the defense. The meticulous, balding Denver lawyer in his three-piece suit stood and lectured the jury from a distance. Richardson suggested that Orchard might have acted out a personal grudge against the governor who had authorized the outrages committed by the “colored troops” against Orchard’s fellow miners in Coeur D’Alene. “If you had been there, covered with vermin, . . . gentlemen of the jury, . . . you would have attained in your breast a righteous hatred for every person who had anything to do with causing your humiliation and suffering.”³⁵ Alternatively, Richardson suggested that Pinkerton’s agency used that lingering wrath as a cover for hiring Orchard to kill Steunenberg and for misdirecting blame on the WFM leadership.

Darrow sensed the jury had already made up its mind to convict Haywood and invested himself in an extraordinarily moving, closing argument attacking the prosecution as a conspiracy to behead the WFM. In stark contrast to Richardson, the unconventional, shaggy-haired Chicagoan doffed his jacket and thumbed his suspenders in animated conversational style within arm’s length of the jury. For eleven hours, Darrow alternately dared them to hang his client if he was guilty of such a heinous crime and pleaded with them to believe in Haywood’s innocence as he did. He ended with a sterling defense of self-sacrifice in class struggle:

[O]ther men have died in the same cause in which Bill Haywood has risked his life, men strong with devotion, men who love liberty, men who love their fellow men have raised their voices in defense of the poor, in defense of justice, have made their good fight and have met death on the scaffold, on the rack, in the flame and they will meet it again until the world grows old and gray. Bill Haywood is no better than the rest. He can die if die he needs, he can die if this jury decrees it; but, oh, gentlemen, don’t think for a moment that if you hang him you will crucify the labor movement of the world . . . Think you there are no brave hearts, no other strong arms, no other devoted souls who will risk all in that great cause which has demanded martyrs in every land and age?³⁶

Darrow’s aim was to obtain a hung jury by convincing any doubter among them to hold out for acquittal. By the time he finished, he was drenched with perspiration and sobbing. At the very least, he had greatly impressed the motley WFM supporters gathered outside the courthouse. Yet Senator Borah drew the biggest crowd for his final argument. Boise’s most prominent citizens turned out in full force. Widow Belle Steunenberg finally made an appearance, arriving from Caldwell with one of her sons. A thousand people remained outside, unable to get into the courtroom.

It seemed that all of Boise could smell an historic hanging in the air. Prominent citizens had already begun planning a huge, multi-day picnic celebration. Still, Judge Wood reminded the jury that Orchard’s testimony required corroborating evidence of Haywood’s complicity in that specific crime. He instructed them that they should view Orchard’s testimony with skepticism if they believed it resulted from promises of leniency by the prosecutor. When the jury left the courtroom, Darrow wearily confided to a newsman, “It only takes one,” spawning rumors that Darrow, too, expected a conviction.³⁷

After only four hours, the jury sent a note to the judge. A quick agreement on a verdict sounded like bad news for Haywood, but that turned out to be a false alarm. The panel only wanted to review some exhibits. As jury deliberations proceeded through the night, Darrow paced and listened to disheartening talk that the jury had gone from seven-to-five for acquittal to ten-to-two for conviction. Then shortly before dawn someone standing outside the jury’s window overheard an eleven-to-one vote and ran to a newspaper office, which issued an exclusive within the hour.

Darrow heard the raucous celebrants in the street and purchased his own copy hot off the press. When he read that only one juror still held out for acquittal his heart sank. At 6:30 a.m. the attorneys were summoned to court to hear the verdict read. Darrow passed women and men in the streets decked out in their Sunday best, giddy with excitement over the upcoming festivities. In stark contrast, both Darrow and Richardson appeared lead-footed and downcast. When Haywood arrived from his cell, Darrow told his client to prepare for the worst.

To Haywood and his counsel’s surprise and relief, the eavesdroppers got it backward. The jury had leaned all night toward a defense verdict. Early that morning, the last holdout for conviction changed his mind to make it unanimous. Hawley registered shock as Haywood won acquittal for lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It was the miners who then declared a holiday, hoisting Darrow on their shoulders as they paraded around amid outraged locals who spread rumors the jury must have been bought off. Others, like President Roosevelt, speculated that the jurors feared reprisal if they convicted the hero of the violent labor union. Elated Socialists across the nation quickly proposed Haywood as their presidential candidate. Anarchist Emma Goldman sent President Roosevelt a telegram: “Undesirable citizens victorious. Rejoice!”³⁸

Hawley and Borah blamed the result on the judge’s careful jury instructions. Jurors themselves indicated that they focused on the need for corroboration of Orchard’s testimony. The prosecutors figured Haywood only escaped the noose because Darrow somehow engineered Steve Adams’ retraction of his confession that he acted as Orchard’s accomplice. Hawley and Borah badly wanted to turn things around when they tried Pettibone. The prosecutors decided to go after Adams again to get him to turn state’s evidence against Pettibone.

Darrow had barely gotten back to Chicago to resume his practice when he was summoned back to defend both Adams and Pettibone. Doped up nightly fighting the flu and severe mastoiditis, Darrow won a hung jury in the Adams case. Then, appearing near death, he commenced a brilliant defense of Pettibone. When Darrow reached the point he could only make it to court in a wheel chair, his doctors ordered him off the case to recuperate in California. Co-counsel then completed the case and won Pettibone’s acquittal. In jail, Pettibone had been stricken with cancer. He went back to Denver and died that summer following an unsuccessful operation.

By the time of Pettibone’s acquittal, Steunenberg’s reputation had suffered a severe setback. Borah himself faced federal charges that, when Steunenberg was governor, the two had conspired to perpetrate a series of fraudulent land deals. At this point, Idaho officials cut short their losses in attempting to destroy the WFM leadership. Charges against Moyer were dropped. Moyer had never favored violent tactics. Soon after his trial, he ousted the more aggressive Haywood from the WFM. Haywood went on to head major strikes over the next decade as a leader of the IWW. Yet some Socialists would have much preferred the boost they believed their movement would have gotten had Haywood, Pettibone and Moyer instead been martyred. They assumed Roosevelt would have faced far greater threats of mass strikes had the three labor leaders been hanged.

Roosevelt saw no benefit from Haywood’s acquittal, which he called a “gross miscarriage of justice,” from a jury he assumed had been terrorized.³⁹ Yet had the Supreme Court not given its blessing to the illegal extradition from Colorado, no Idaho murder trial could have taken place. Given the blatant due process violation that brought the three labor leaders to Idaho and the extremely prejudicial pretrial publicity, workers throughout the country would never have believed in the legitimacy of a guilty verdict.

Judge Wood’s conscientious instructions, the jury’s cautious deliberations and the resulting acquittals showed workers everywhere that the fix was not in for conviction. The underdog prevailed, giving them hope their own situations would improve within the current political structure. One wonders how close the nation came to widespread violence, how much anger would have erupted in the streets and exacerbated pre-existing class, ethnic and religious divisions had Boise’s citizenry gotten their coveted hangings.

When Darrow’s doctors wheeled him out of the Pettibone murder trial before it ended in January of 1908, neither the ailing champion of labor nor his wife Ruby counted on his surviving the agonizing train trip to Los Angeles. A few weeks later a surgeon performed a life-saving operation, draining a swollen mastoid behind his ear, after which Darrow still faced a long, uphill recovery. For months, Darrow did not speak and barely ate. Ruby kept all visitors at bay and shielded her husband from any business decisions, including frantic letters urging him to sell his investments. Darrow’s convalescence in Los Angeles coincided with an economic depression that wound up bankrupting the successful lawyer from prolonged inattention to his affairs.

When Ruby finally told her husband all his savings were gone, he threatened never to forgive her for forcing him to go back into law practice and start all over building up a retirement fund. They barely scraped the train fare together to return to Chicago. Darrow rejoined his old law firm, vowing to concentrate on high-paying cases to quickly put together enough money to retire again. He had never even received all the fees promised him for disrupting his practice and jeopardizing his health to defend Haywood and Pettibone in Idaho. But Darrow did receive a solemn vow from grateful labor leaders after the unexpected victories in Boise – they would never ask him to defend a political murder trial again.

Samuel Gompers remembered that promise well when he showed up on Darrow’s door step to beg Darrow to come West again in 1911 for an even bigger class confrontation than the Haywood murder trial. Darrow told the head of the American Federation of Labor (“AFL”) an emphatic no. The circumstances were dreadful. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building at one o’clock on Saturday morning, October 1, 1910, had shocked the nation. The building collapsed in flames. Twenty-one non-union employees died trying to escape. Somehow, on borrowed presses, key employees of the Times published the news in a one-page special edition the same day, placing the blame squarely on union men.

The attack on the newspaper and an undetonated bomb found outside the owner’s home had followed four months of escalating labor-capital confrontations. Harry Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, was the self-proclaimed general of the movement to break the back of the unions, not only in Los Angeles but across the nation, through the militant Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M). Otis was also on a mission to destroy businesses that dared to support unions. Labor retaliated with equal fervor against non-unionized businesses. In June of 1910, union members, strikebreakers and police had come to blows. Local judges sided with management, issuing multiple restraining orders and jailing hundreds of strikers. To many labor supporters, the accusation that militant men were behind a retaliatory terrorist attack on the Times seemed too pat. The mass murder drew so much outrage that it dwarfed concerns over abusive labor practices and anti-union businesses. Why would union men be that short-sighted?

Coincidentally on the day of the bombing, William Burns, the celebrated sleuth who had already eclipsed Pinkerton as this generation’s “Great Detective,” arrived in Los Angeles to make a speech. Burns had rocketed to fame when President Theodore Roosevelt sent him to expose rampant political corruption in San Francisco after the city received unprecedented funds for rebuilding following the Great Earthquake and fire of April 1906. That investigation had prompted stunning indictments for graft and bribery against the mayor and entire board of supervisors, as well as political boss Abraham Ruef, the chief of police, and officers of major utilities and of a local railroad. Mayor Schmidt was forced to resign; Ruef alone went to prison.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photo-los-angeles-times-building-post-bombing.jpg

Photo of bombed out headquarters of the Los Angeles Times October 1, 1910

Source of newspaper image: L. .A. Times, Oct. 1, 1910, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HONNOLDMUDD LIBRARY OF THE CLAREMONT COLLEGES CONSORTIUM

Newspaper headline story put out by the staff on borrowed presses the same day of the explosion. Los Angeles had already developed a reputation as “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.” Just four months before the bombing, a major confrontation between union members and strikebreakers prompted local judges to issue multiple restraining orders and jail hundreds of strikers. Labor supporters were suspicious that the terrorist attack on the Times was actually meant to hurt the labor movement. The mass murder dwarfed concerns over abusive labor practices and anti-union businesses. Why would union men be that short-sighted?

Harry Otis immediately asked Burns to head the investigation into the bombing of the Times. Burns soon realized that it bore similarities to suspicious bombings of non-union work sites his agency had investigated across the country. After six months of intensive national effort, detectives zeroed in on two brothers, James and John McNamara, as the key suspects. John McNamara was the national secretary of the AFL-affiliated Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. Like the Pinkerton men who illegally kidnapped the WFM leaders in Colorado in 1906 and whisked them to Idaho for trial, Burns’ agents kidnapped the McNamara brothers in the Midwest and transported them to Los Angeles before anyone could challenge their extradition.

Labor leaders smelled a frame-up and wanted to provide the McNamara brothers with their biggest legal guns. (It was, in any event, still more than two years before the city would be the first in the nation to employ a public defender.) AFL President Gompers joined Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs in rallying millions of union supporters nationwide – far broader support than for the Haywood trial – with charges that the McNamara brothers were being railroaded for murder.

Gompers tried to convince Darrow that he was the only lawyer in the country with the skills to save the lives of the McNamara brothers and prevent labor from losing its war against closed shops. Darrow still declined. Back when Darrow had been recuperating in Los Angeles, he and Ruby had seen the polarized city first hand. Customers at local stores had to choose between union and “open” shops and expect to suffer retaliation for their partisanship. In its relatively short history, Los Angeles had developed a reputation as “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.”⁴⁰

Business leaders in Los Angeles attributed the city’s rapid rise to the much lower pay scale compared to the unionized city of San Francisco. In the Southern California city, there seemed to be an unending supply of new job-seekers willing to work when management fired employees lobbying for higher pay and better working conditions. Even in San Francisco organized labor faced stiff opposition from owners bringing in replacement workers. A failed San Francisco Streetcar strike in 1907 for an eight-hour day had made national news when it left 31 people dead and 1100 injured, mostly passengers.

L.A. employers took note of other major strikes across the country, particularly the 1909 “Uprising of 20,000” in Manhattan’s garment district. Harry Otis figured that by executing the McNamara brothers he might deter similar uprisings across the country. Darrow dreaded being thrust back into the center of the labor wars, but he did not want the McNamara brothers’ deaths on his conscience. Against his better judgment, Darrow ultimately yielded to Gompers’ entreaties. He would live to regret that decision.

To counter the extraordinarily negative publicity, the union arranged for a movie biography to be filmed of John McNamara, proclaiming his innocence. The popular nickelodeon galvanized workers nationwide. Meanwhile, in March of 1911 at the very same factory where the 1909 garment district uprising had occurred, a great fire broke out. Nearly 150 garment workers lost their lives as panicked young seamstresses vainly tried to escape the flames only to find the exit doors locked. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was the worst disaster in New York City before September 11, 2001.

While headlines generated sympathy for exploited factory girls in the East, “Great Detective” William Burns was systematically building a strong case to execute the McNamara brothers and break the back of organized labor. Burns’ agency uncovered irrefutable evidence from secret files in the Iron Workers’ Union that the bombing was the end result of a five-year sabotage campaign carried out at the direction of union leaders on non-union sites. John McNamara even bragged of the Los Angeles bombing in the presence of an undercover agent.

In an early use of bugging devices, Darrow’s visits to his clients in jail were recorded without their knowledge. With the array of witnesses and physical evidence against them, Darrow was astounded at the McNamaras’ recklessness. Both were extremely remorseful. They said they had intended the bomb to go off at 4 a.m. when the building was empty. Yet as the two were privately confessing their guilt, the Socialist press kept promoting the McNamara brothers’ innocence. Big Bill Haywood called for a general national strike to coincide with the first day of the McNamaras’ trial.

This time, Darrow expected his string of victories in keeping clients from execution to end in ignominious defeat. Darrow became so depressed that he also began acting recklessly. He renewed an affair with a woman reporter from New York who came out to cover the trial. If their trysts became public knowledge, it would have ruined his own reputation. Meanwhile, the police caught an investigator on Darrow’s staff approaching two different jurors with bribe offers. Darrow could see no way that he could pull off an acquittal or a hung jury.

When muckraker Lincoln Steffens interviewed the McNamara brothers, their guilt was so manifest that Steffens strongly urged Darrow to have the brothers change their pleas. Darrow knew that labor leaders would vigorously oppose any such move. They would much rather claim the two men as martyrs. Yet Darrow told Steffens, “I can’t stand it to have a man I am defending hang.”⁴¹ Darrow convinced the two brothers to save their lives by pleading guilty and publicly repenting the innocent deaths they caused. Darrow saved them from execution – and avoided a crushing defeat – but at the price of having organized labor turn on him. Union members had contributed hard-earned money to raise Darrow’s legal fees only to watch the celebrated lawyer pocket the payment and eventually plead the brothers guilty.

As a consequence of the plea bargain that dramatically ended the McNamaras’ trial, the labor movement suffered a huge blow to its credibility. The Los Angeles District Attorney then compounded Darrow’s personal woes by prosecuting the famed lawyer on bribery charges – by far the worst legal fiasco of his career. Darrow contemplated suicide, but hired another giant in criminal defense, Los Angeles attorney Earl Rogers, to defend him. When Rogers kept showing up to court drunk, Darrow took over his own defense. For the first and only time, Darrow’s emotional pleas asked jurors to salvage his own career. In one of the two attempted bribery trials, jury empathy won Darrow an acquittal; the other ended in a hung jury. To avoid a retrial, Darrow had to agree to forfeit his license to practice in California. Fed up with labor, he headed back to Chicago.

So it was not Clarence Darrow that Bill Haywood asked to defend him in his next political trial in the spring of 1918, the longest criminal trial the United States had ever prosecuted. By then the coalition that had backed the WFM’s defense in the 1907 murder trial had long since collapsed. Haywood and the IWW split from WFM leadership shortly after the Boise cases ended. In 1911, the IWW parted ways from Eugene Debs and the Socialists. Yet Haywood remained a formidable labor leader, viewed by the business establishment as the “most hated and feared figure in America.”⁴² The “Wobblies” whom Haywood championed, ultimately attracted three million factory, mill and mine workers to their ranks, a coalition including non–English-speaking European immigrants, women, and African-Americans in an era when some unions expressly excluded blacks, while others took aggressive steps to block both African- and Asian-Americans from their own labor pools.

Source: http://murderpedia.org/male.M/m/mcnamara-brothers.htm

Labor activists James and John McNamara (above, left and right) were arrested for the murder of 21 people in the October 1, 1910, bombing of the Los Angeles Times. John McNamara was the national secretary of the AFL-affiliated Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. While in jail, the McNamara brothers confessed to a reporter friend of Darrow’s that they had intended the bomb to go off when the building was empty. Darrow feared losing his first clients to the death penalty. Police caught one of Darrow’s investigators attempting to bribe two jurors. Darrow then saved the brothers’ lives by pleading them guilty, alienating the union paying for their defense. Darrow then himself faced prosecution for bribery – by far the worst fiasco of his career. He forfeited his law license in California, and returned to Chicago broke and dispirited.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clarence_Darrow_cph.3b31130.jpg

Clarence Darrow circa 1913

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Gray_Otis_(publisher)

Harry Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and self-proclaimed general of the movement to break the back of unions across the nation through the militant Merchants and Manufacturers Association. Otis was also on a mission to destroy businesses that dared to support unions.

The IWW bore many similarities to the radical coalition that supported Black Panther leader Huey Newton half a century later in his own highly politicized murder trial. Like the Black Panthers’ strident opposition to the Vietnam War, the IWW strongly opposed America’s entry into World War I as a rich man’s war fought with the blood of the poor. Urging tactics that the Weathermen would later emulate, the IWW advocated industrial sabotage to undermine American war efforts. Unlike the bitter national divide generated by the Vietnam War, however, when the country joined World War I patriotic fervor spread across America.

The IWW immediately began to feel the backlash as the federal government drafted harsh new laws blocking entry to revolutionaries and deporting radical immigrants. The war-time Espionage Act of 1917 included lengthy prison sentences for anyone whose speech or political activity encouraged draft resistance. In September of 1917, the Department of Justice raided four dozen IWW meeting halls and arrested 165 Wobblies for “conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes.”⁴³

The raids resulted in a mass trial with more than a hundred defendants. The only evidence needed to convict them was proof they disseminated inflammatory IWW literature. All were found guilty and each sentenced to varying prison sentences, with Haywood receiving the twenty-year maximum. The following year, Debs was convicted for making an anti-war speech the Wilson administration deemed treasonous for use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” in violation of the 1918 Sedition Act. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison; the perennial Socialist candidate for President was also disenfranchised. The United States Supreme Court later upheld Deb’s conviction as a war-time necessity, through a narrow interpretation of First Amendment guarantees that has since been discredited.

Despite the Wilson administration’s success in jailing radical labor leaders, strikes for increased wages and better working conditions escalated dramatically in 1919. Putting Haywood and Debs in prison made them into martyrs for a noble cause. Poet Carl Sandburg was then working as a journalist for a Socialist paper. He compared Haywood’s vision for a worldwide labor uprising to that of John Brown’s efforts to encourage slave rebellion before the Civil War. Sandburg wondered, “Will there be marching songs written to Bill Haywood someday as the same kind of a ‘traitor’ as the John Brown who was legally indicted, legally tried, legally shot?”⁴⁴

Government persecution only increased Haywood’s stature among laborers. By 1920, Haywood made bail pending appeal and was out fund-raising for fellow IWW inmates when America experienced the worst bomb attack so far in its history. The Wall Street bombing in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank at noon on September 16, 1920, killed nearly forty people and injured ten times that number. The date coincided with a special election to fill the seats of five New York City Socialists ousted from the state legislature on the ground that Socialism itself was a treasonous cause. Was this payback from militant radicals?

The horrific bombing on Wall Street added fuel to “a nationwide antiradical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent – a revolution that would destroy property, church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of life.”⁴⁵ Haywood immediately became a prime suspect. Though he had long since publicly renounced violence as a useless tactic, he realized his appeal was doomed. Soon afterward, Haywood made plans to jump bail and escape with a fake passport to Russia to join Lenin’s new government as a labor advisor.

Haywood remained in exile for the last seven years of his life. Once settled in Russia, his naïve vision of a workers’ utopia gave way as he observed the stark reality of the new Soviet dictatorship. He died utterly disillusioned, but the Soviets gave him a hero’s funeral, keeping half of his ashes in the Kremlin. They honored his request to have the remainder sent back to Chicago to be buried near the Haymarket Square martyrs who had inspired his lifelong battle for worker rights.

Pulitzer Prize winner J. Anthony Lukas’s epic history, Big Trouble, retells Haywood’s story and its context. Lukas notes the ironic difference in outcome of Haywood’s trial on charges he conspired to assassinate Governor Steunenberg from that of the accidental deaths caused by the McNamara brothers’ sabotage. Several Socialist journalists close to both the WFM leadership and the militant Ironworkers Union privately shared the view in the fall of 1911 that the main difference between the two political crimes was that the two brothers got caught red-handed.

A reporter who covered the McNamara trial for Appeal to Reason wrote his publisher that “The McNamara brothers are not one bit more guilty of the crime charged against them than were Myer, Haywood and Pettibone . . . Trickery and audacity liberated the miners’ officials.” But the Appeal to Reason refrained from publishing that story because of what it might do to the Socialist cause: to reveal the truth “would disgust hundreds of thousands of people” with their movement.⁴⁶ The rallying cry of innocence in each instance was a propaganda war fought against ruthless political adversaries. Neither the prosecutors nor the defense respected the law. These two high-stakes trials were merely cynical games in a deadly class struggle for power in which media on both sides were often complicit.

Ironically, at the same time Roosevelt had been applying heavy pressure in 1906 on the Supreme Court to let the constitutionally questionable Idaho trials go forward against three “undesirable citizens,” the president was waging an unprecedented battle in the South for respect for the Supreme Court’s authority. Just a month after the WFM leaders were kidnapped by Pinkerton agents, a lynch mob broke a black federal prisoner out of jail and hanged him to prevent Supreme Court review of his rape conviction. With President Roosevelt’s full support, what followed was the one and only contempt trial the United States Supreme Court ever conducted – one which would have lasting consequences for the criminal justice system of every state in the union.