“exceedingly fond of the rich among whom his select associations lie. No moth flies more industriously about the arc lights.”
Darrow admired Wood. They had met before the Haywood saga and worked together in the defense of a San Diego banker who was under investigation for fraud in Portland. In the course of that case, Darrow offered his philosophy about billing. “You are the one who prevented this indictment … it should stand a good fee,” Darrow wrote his friend. “Of course, the law is a con game and there is no way to tell what a thing is worth and yet this service has been valuable to him, and I feel that no one else could have done it.”
It was Darrow who forced Wood to confront his contradictions. In the spring of 1910, Mary Field’s brother-in-law, the Reverend Albert Ehrgott, was hired by a Baptist congregation in Portland, and her sister Sara and the couple’s two young children prepared to move from Cleveland to Oregon. Portland was a provincial burg—“a little town of little minds,” as Louise Bryant put it. Sara was near tears, and Darrow sought to console her. He agreed that, when it came to intellectual discourse, Portland was “pretty benighted,” but told her: “There is one man there of our stripe. He is a great liberal, a poet and an artist.”
One June day, as she was working in her garden, a taxi plowed through the mud of her unpaved road, and out got Darrow.
“I want you and your husband to come to dinner and meet my friend Wood that I’ve told you about,” he said.
“Oh, Darrow,” she said, still resisting. “I haven’t got any decent clothes.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can arrange it all right, and were going to dine in a very bohemian place. You can wear any old thing at all.” He smiled and drawled, “You know I have never been a fellow that dressed up very much.”
Wood had begged off too, saying he had promised to spend the evening with his wife. “Can’t you get out of it?” Darrow said. “Why don’t you just lie to her? I find that’s the easiest way.”
Wood was not enthralled with the notion of spending a night with a minister and his wife, but Darrow assured him, “Listen, she’s one of us.” They went to a restaurant called the Hofbrau, and Wood brought along his secretary, who, Sara would later discover, was then his mistress. After the dinner, the Reverend Ehrgott left for a meeting but the rest retired to Wood’s office, with its great solid desk and plush Oriental rug, where Darrow read to them from a book of Galsworthy short stories.
Sara had volunteered to work on the Oregon suffrage campaign. Its headquarters was convenient to Wood’s office, and he asked her to edit his poetry. There, he read to her from a book about free love. It was not “an advocate of a sort of merry-go-round of partners,” but a “philosophical” volume, which helped persuade her that “I was not doing the selfish thing in considering that I must be free, but was also preparing a freer and better life for the children,” she recalled. “Of course, the psychologist might think that this was wishful thinking.” After weeks of sexual tension, they began their affair. Sara was twenty-eight; Erskine, as she called him, was thirty years older.
Wood thought of himself as nobler than Darrow, and turned down his requests to join in the McNamara defense. Darrow was doing what good Chicago lawyers did: looking for alibis, massaging witnesses, trying to decipher the prosecution case, and concocting alternate causes for the explosion. Though the grand jury that investigated the bombing found not “a scintilla of evidence” to support the theory of a gas explosion, Darrow plunged ahead, hiring experts and paying for a detailed model of the Times building, which he hoped to blow up, to promote that explanation. Wood thought him “unscrupulous.”
“He is not making this fight for the cause of Labor—nor for the McNamaras—but for C. Darrow,” Wood told Sara. “And in this he is like the most of us lawyers. We prate of our fight for justice. We are fighting for our own glory and profit. Darrow’s glory and Darrow’s pocket is what he is fighting for.”
Wood had many contacts in the West, and had heard about Darrow’s tactics in Idaho. “He will use bribery where safe, perjury where safe,” Wood told Sara. “He will manipulate and marshal labor all over the United States at