urging them to attend the upcoming meeting of the Chicago Law Club. Before the assembled lawyers and judges of Chicago, he was going to confront Judge Gary.
When Altgeld was elected, hopes had soared in liberal circles that the governor would pardon the three remaining imprisoned anarchists. Many of those who had argued for clemency—Lloyd and Darrow and Schilling among them—were Altgeld’s allies. Darrow pushed Altgeld and was surprised by the cool response. “I am going over the record carefully and if I conclude these Anarchists ought to be freed I will free them,” the governor told his protégé. “But make no mistake—if I do it I will be a dead man politically.”19
“I expected that Altgeld would do something about the Anarchists right away,” Darrow recalled. “But six months went by and he had not done a thing. I was pretty much disgusted.”
Then fortune gave the anarchists a gift: Gary chose to publish a long defense of his conduct in the Century magazine. He had grown prickly over the years, as critics skewered his performance. The anarchists had been “rightly punished, not for opinions, but for horrid deeds,” Gary wrote. The dead men were motivated by base “envy” of “people whose condition in life was better than their own.”
Darrow knew that Gary’s brief would fan Altgeld’s anger. With all his other striking qualities, Altgeld was a hater, and “the truth was, he hated Gary,” Darrow said. And so Darrow drafted a counterargument that would serve as a prospectus for a pardon and got himself on an upcoming Law Club program. “My Dear Lloyd … I am to read a paper to the law club on Judge Gary’s article,” Darrow wrote his friend. “Judge Gary (high executioner) will be there and the debate will perhaps be lively.”20
Lively, yes. “The venerable judge himself sat upon Mr. Darrow’s left and listened to … the outspoken criticisms,” the Tribune reported.
“One day, when the fierce heat is dead and the public mind regains its poise, we will calmly look back upon the tragedy and wish it might be blotted out,” Darrow said. “Sometime, while we will deplore the methods of these men, we will recognize that not one of them would have inflicted pain on any one who lives, except they thought that they were lessening the sum of human sorrow by their act.”
“One day, let us hope ere long, we will call back to liberty” the three imprisoned anarchists, he said, “and wish that we might call the dead back from their graves as well.”
Gary was unrelenting. Darrow was “a young man of generous feeling,” but obviously “the victim of a dangerous sentimentalism,” the Journal reported. The “venerable judge … stood firm as a rock against the enemies of social order.”21
DARROW NOW RETURNED to work at City Hall for Mayor Carter Harrison, who had just won another term (his fifth) as mayor and needed a skilled litigant in the counsel’s office. Harrison had been lured from retirement by the opportunity to serve as the “World’s Fair Mayor” and preside over the Columbian Exposition and the lovely White City that had been built on the lakeshore. President Cleveland came to the May 1 dedication, among the first of the 27 million visitors who would walk the Court of Honor; visit the mammoth, electrically lit exhibition halls; ride the stunning new amusement—the Ferris wheel—on the Midway Plaisance; and enjoy performers like Harry Houdini, Buffalo Bill, and Scott Joplin. One of Darrow’s first assignments was to open the fair on Sundays. Darrow was a foe of Sabbath closing laws, and there were political considerations as well: laborers and factory hands worked a six-day week and would miss the fun if the fair were closed on their day off.
Darrow took part in the celebration, strolled the grounds, and spoke at a lakefront park during the “Labor Congress”—one of many thematic gatherings held at the exposition. He especially loved the circuslike atmosphere of the Midway. The Vincennes Avenue house was close by, and the Darrows often opened their home to out-of-town guests. He was busy that summer, finishing up some legal work for the railroad and working on the Sunday closings issue when Altgeld, without warning, pardoned the anarchists, igniting a volcanic reaction.22
On the evening of June 26, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab emerged from the stone portal of the penitentiary at Joliet, free men. Altgeld’s pardon message was no lofty treatise on justice: it was a scathing, eighteen-thousand-word attack on Judge Gary. “If he had done it