cap the hours in a workman’s day. The unsettled quarrel was over the union. Baer and his colleagues abhorred the thought of giving the miners a role in their business; it was why the operators had all those witnesses tell frightening tales of murder and riot, to portray the union as a lawless mob.
“It is well for them to say we are anarchists and criminals, that we are drunkards, that we are profligates, that we cannot speak the English language, that we are unruly boys,” Darrow responded. “But it would come with far better grace from them if they could show that ever once, ever once in all their administration of these lands and of these natural bounties which Mr. Baer thinks the Lord gave to him to administer, that ever once they have considered anyone but themselves.”
At times Darrow stood there, in his swallow-tailed coat, vest, and black tie, talking in conversational tones. But then he would crouch and stride across the floor, wheel toward the crowd, and thunder. He would pose, with his right hand in his pocket and his left arm raised, or wag his index finger like a rapier. As he built toward a climax he’d raise his voice, wave his right arm high, form a fist, and bring it crashing down. “In the vicinity of Scranton are at least twenty mills—silk mills, knitting mills, thread mills—where little girls from twelve to thirteen or fourteen years of age are working ten hours a day, twelve hours a day, and twelve hours at night as well,” he said. “Is there any man so blind that he does not know why that anthracite region is dotted with silk mills?
“They went there because the miners were there,” Darrow said. “They went there just as naturally as the wild beast goes to find its prey; they went there as the hunter goes where he can find game. Every mill in that region is a testimony to the fact that the wages that you pay are so low that you sell your boys to be slaves of the breaker and your girls to be slaves in the mills.
“I have no doubt the railroad president loves children,” Darrow said. “Neither have I any doubt that the wolf loves mutton.”
If it was an industrial war, if there was violence, then the operators must share the blame, Darrow said. Eight or nine men may have been killed, and “here and there dynamite was used, never once to destroy life, always to frighten,” he acknowledged. But what of the widows and children of the miners killed beneath the earth, and of the Coll family and others who suffered at the hands of the industry and its stooges?
“There are all kinds of violence in this world,” he said.
“I KNOW THAT we speak in a way against things that are. I believe that we dream of things that are yet to come,” Darrow said, as he neared the end of his plea.
“Judge us in the light of all the impossibilities that confronted us; in the light of the severe travail through which we passed; in the light of the material which we were bound to use; in the light of the fearful, appalling odds that we faced,” he asked.
“The blunders are theirs,” he said, referring to Baer and the other operators. “The blunders are theirs because, in this old, old strife, they are fighting for slavery, while we are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the rule of man over man, for despotism, for darkness, for the past. We are striving to build up man. We are working for democracy, for humanity, for the future.”
When he was done, the transcript says, there was “great and long continued applause.” The demonstration lasted five minutes or more, as folks crowded around Darrow to congratulate him. Mitchell was the first, grasping his lawyer’s hand in thanks and approval. And “many of the capitalist women,” Lloyd noted, “were quite carried away.”
Darrow “began the day before with … the commission … almost openly against him. He closed with their undivided interest and admiration,” said Lloyd. His friend was a man of “iron nerves and steel strength,” he wrote. “After making that day and a half speech … he went out to dinner.”12
The commission’s final report gave the UMW much of what it wanted. “A good, substantial victory,” Darrow told the press. “We didn’t get all we asked, but what we did get is better than what we agreed to take last