Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,124

attorney and then reject them. His foes no doubt leaked the tale to further the perception of Darrow’s guilt. It was never a real possibility, he later insisted. “I had no information to give,” Darrow said, though he noted that this was “as much as Franklin or Harrington had.” He could have “told them any story that I saw fit,” he recalled. “I could have purchased my liberty at the price of my honor.” But he did not.

Honor did not keep Darrow from other intrigues. In April, with the start of the trial just a few weeks away, he and Ruby joined a gathering of friends in San Francisco. At one point, Johannsen pulled Wood aside and asked if he would help them kidnap Harrington. Both Darrow and Rogers had waylaid witnesses in their careers. While certainly illegal, it was—like stealing evidence or paying witnesses exorbitant amounts as “expenses”—a not-unheard-of tactic. “I am sure Darrow knows of it,” Wood wrote Sara.

Wood told Johannsen he would take no part in it. Anton was philosophical. He admired Wood’s strength, Johannsen said. Darrow, on the other hand, was a weak man—too soft to either stand by his principles or to prosper at wickedness. Darrow had “departed on a piratical course,” Johannsen said, but was, in the end, “too flabby to be a pirate.”18

THE TRIAL BEGAN on May 15. There was no apparent irony in the day’s Herald, which noted how Ruby had been accompanied up the hill to the courthouse by “Miss Mary Field of San Francisco, who is making a stay in this city and spending most of her time with Mrs. Darrow.” In the turbulent weeks at the end of the McNamara trial, Mary and Darrow had ended their affair. Mary was “widowed,” Wood decided. Sara concurred. Her sister had once seen Darrow “as a Napoleon who was changing the map of Labor’s world,” Sara wrote Wood. “So fade our dreams, so fall our ideals, so pass our stars.”

But Mary still had an emotional tie to Darrow, and he to her. She was in Los Angeles to cover the trial for Organized Labor, a union newspaper, and to stand by him, Ruby notwithstanding. “My heart aches … for him,” Mary wrote Sara. “He is such a sensitive man … it cuts him cruelly.”

Ruby smiled bravely as she greeted the reporters and vowed “to help my husband in any way I can.” But inside the courtroom she wiped at tears. She slipped into a chair inside the rail, behind her husband, whose “face was haggard,” the newspapers noted. The muscles of his cheeks “twitched unceasingly,” and the lines in his face “told of nights of sleeplessness and worry.”

Darrow could be grateful for one turn of events. He might be up against the same prosecutors who beat him in the McNamara case, but not the same judge. Judge George Hutton was nothing like the martinet Judge Bordwell. The young and earnest Hutton had just four years’ experience on the bench.

Jury selection went swiftly as Rogers, Frederick, and the assistant district attorney—Joseph Ford—identified the biases of the talesmen. By the end of the first week, Darrow joined the questioning—hoisting a leg upon a chair and leaning on his knee with folded arms, speaking soothingly as he “began to impress his subtle personality upon the jurymen.” Even the Times admitted that Darrow was “remarkably effective.”

“You realize that this is an important case to me and that all I want is a fair and impartial trial?” Darrow asked one candidate as the other talesmen looked on from the jury box.

“I do,” said the mesmerized man.

It took but ten days to select the jury, a time otherwise marked by news, illustrative of the passions gripping the state, of an assault on Emma Goldman and her lover, Ben Reitman. The two anarchists had been ridden out of San Diego by a reactionary mob that abducted Reitman, took him to the desert, stripped him and abused his rectum and testicles, soaked him in tar, and beat him as he ran their gauntlet.19

The selection of one juror proved especially significant. Young Fred Golding was a partner in a local lumber company and, as an up-and-coming businessman, likely to be challenged by the defense. He was also, however, a believer in conspiracies, which he detected in the way that Franklin was arrested. Rogers encouraged Golding, for this was a line of argument the defense would press during the trial. Franklin’s arrest was “like a stage play … with an orchestra playing,”