conspiracy to defeat the socialists in the mayoral election, and thus ensure that Otis and the others would get the Owens Valley water for their real estate.
“There are lots of people directly interested” in the fate of the aqueduct who were “interested also in the settlement of the McNamara case … Mr. Brand … Mr. Chandler. Mr. Otis,” Golding said helpfully. “Did this occurrence down at Third and Los Angeles, which might have probably been taken advantage of by some unscrupulous people … to their own advantage … lose you any votes?”
Yes. “The men involved in the negotiations, not excluding the District Attorney, saw that there was developing in this city a tremendous political power in opposition to them,” Harriman told the jury. “I am convinced that if the plea of guilty had not been made or entered until after the campaign was over, that we would have been elected.”29
DURING DARROW’S TESTIMONY, “the courtroom was filled by an eager crowd of spectators. Women largely predominated,” the Times reported. Johannsen called them “Darrow’s harem.”
Mary was among them, writing “as vindictively and heatedly as I could” as a journalist, and helping Darrow as a friend. But her position was awkward, and painful. Darrow had been moved by Ruby’s loyalty, and when he did feel “the need of physical nearness” he had other women to console him. There was one “young girl … warm and intense,” Mary reported in her journal, to whom Darrow could “tell secrets, troubles, joys … as one might pour the jewels and colored stones into the lap of a child.”
“When it’s all over, I skidoo,” Mary wrote Wood. “I hate to lose Darrow’s presence but I hate worse to be out of harmony with my environment.”
“They are planning big doings for Darrow when the verdict comes in,” Mary wrote. “But as for me—I don’t want the crowds … Success scares me—its vulgarity, its mediocrity, its unwillingness to be tested.” As the fickle crowd drifted back to Darrow, she believed her work was done. “The palms and hosannas are for the multitudes,” she told Wood. “Only a few, a very few go into the Gethsemanes.”
Darrow had one more night in the Garden before reaping the hosannas. On Monday, August 12, Joe Ford began the closing arguments with a savage assault. J. B. McNamara was not to blame for the carnage of the Times bombing, Ford said. Darrow was. “The unfortunate Brice, the poor deluded Brice, when he placed that bomb of dynamite that hurled twenty unsuspecting souls into eternity, knew that if he were caught that he could get a smart lawyer, like Clarence Darrow,” said Ford. The law provides that each man is entitled to a proper defense, the deputy district attorney said. But “to the disgrace of our civilization, many criminal lawyers have enlarged this privilege. They have extended it into an excuse for committing all sorts of chicanery and fraud,” he said. And Darrow was among the worst. “He has used it as an excuse for subornation of perjury on the part of witnesses, for the bribery of judges and juries.”
Darrow’s beliefs about crime and justice encouraged depraved behavior and turned innocent lads to fiends, said Ford.
“Picture in your mind … gentlemen … that fateful October morning … that fiery furnace at First and Broadway,” said Ford, turning to face Darrow. “Picture if you can the poor father … caught like a rat in a trap, praying upon his scorched knees.
“Ah well for that poor doomed wretch, that he could not lift the curtain from the future … and see that the man who had poisoned the mind of poor Brice would also some day poison the mind of his own little babbling boy, and that same … boy would be led into a life of crime and would some day dangle from the gallows,” said Ford. “Well for that father that he could not see his little innocent baby daughter, lured into a life of infamy and shame by some wretch who believed that there is no such thing as crime.”
Ford stretched out his arms toward Darrow, mimicking children pleading. “Ah well and truly may these little helpless children stretch forth their hands to this defendant and say, ‘Give, oh, give us back our murdered father.’ ”
Poor Brice? Give us back our murdered father? Darrow was furious and on his feet. “Is it the ruling of this court that counsel may say anything?” Darrow asked Hutton. But the judge declined to rein Ford in; it