say something to you twelve men.…
“I am a defendant charged with a serious crime. I have been looking into the penitentiary for six or seven months,” he said, “and now I am waiting for you twelve men to say whether I shall go there.…
“I am not on trial for having sought to bribe a man named Lockwood,” he told the jurors. “I am on trial because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I have stood by labor for all these years, and I have brought down upon my head the wrath of the criminal interests of this country.
“Whether guilty or innocent of the crime charged in the indictment, that is the reason I am here, and that is the reason that I have been pursued by as cruel a gang as ever followed a man,” he said. “If the district attorney of this county thought a crime had been committed, well and good, let him go ahead and prosecute. But has he done this? Has he prosecuted any of the bribe takers and givers? And who are the people back of him … who have been hot on my trail? Will you tell me, gentlemen of the jury, why the Erectors’ Association and the Steel Trust are interested in this case way out here in Los Angeles? …
“Are these people interested in bribery? Why, almost every dollar of their ill-gotten gains has come from bribery.…
“Suppose I am guilty of bribery—is that why I am prosecuted in this court? Is that why, by the most infamous methods known to the law and outside the law, these men, the real enemies of society, are trying to get me inside the penitentiary?
“No that isn’t it, and you twelve men know it,” he said, his voice breaking. “I have committed one crime, one crime which is like that against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. I have stood for the weak and the poor. I have stood for the men who toil. And therefore I have stood against them, and now is their chance. All right gentlemen, I am in your hands.”
It was a riveting start. Tears ran down his cheeks; the jurors were enthralled. “Darrow rose to the occasion,” the Examiner reported, “and summoning all of his old time fire and eloquence, made the supreme effort of his career.” He had not denied his crime—he would do so directly but once in his speech. As always, he was nudging the jury toward another place, toward questions of justice and fairness. He turned to the collateral accusations.
“I am going to be honest with you in this matter. The McNamara case was a hard fight.
“Here was the district attorney with his sleuths. Here was Burns with his hounds. Here was the Erectors’ Association with its gold,” he said. “We had to work fast and hard. We had to work the best we could.…
“I was doing exactly what they were doing, what Burns admitted he was doing … what Sam Browne says they did, when he testified that they filled our office with detectives.”
Darrow laughed at the claim, made by Ford, that the state had the right to pursue such tactics—but not the defense. “Isn’t that wonderful, gentlemen?” he asked. “The prosecution has a right to load us up with spies and detectives and informers and we cannot put anyone in their office?” But for all the district attorney’s advantages, he told the jury, the prosecution had a flimsy case. “They had detectives in our office. They had us surrounded by gumshoe and keyhole men at every step—and what did they secure? Nothing, nothing,” Darrow said.
“If you twelve men think that I, with thirty-five years experience, general attorney of a railroad company of the city of Chicago, attorney for the elevated railroad company, with all kinds of clients and important cases—if you think that I would pick out a place half a block from my office and send a man with money in his hand in broad daylight to go down on the street corner to pass $4,000, and then skip over to another street corner and pass $500—two of the most prominent streets in the city of Los Angeles; if you think I did that, gentlemen, then find me guilty. I certainly belong in some state institution.…
“I am as fitted for jury bribing as a Methodist preacher for tending bar,” Darrow said.
But if the barons of industry could dispatch their private armies to crush the unions,