Poorer folk lost their lives in train accidents in which wealthier customers, traveling in safer cars, emerged unscathed. “The victims of our cruel greed, with maimed limbs and broken lives, are met at every corner of the street,” Darrow wrote, “and every graveyard is sown thick with the forgotten dead whose lives have been sold for gold.…
“Grievous are the sins of this commercial, money-getting age,” Darrow concluded. “It’s neither just nor humane to lay all the cruelty and sin of a generation upon the shoulders of a few men, who are no more responsible than any of the rest.”
Darrow had friends at City Hall and clients in the theater industry. But his sentiment was authentic. He had made similar appeals when the Harrison assassination and the Haymarket case caused comparable ferment. Eventually, the criminal charges against Harrison and most other city officials were dropped. In the civil litigation, Darrow’s law firm represented families of the fire’s victims. At one point, Nellie Carlin, who specialized in probate cases for the firm, “shattered all records” for a female attorney. The plaintiffs, however, received a cruel setback when federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled against them on a technicality. In the end, very few of the victims’ relatives received anything.7
HARRISON’S TROUBLES WERE good news, at least, for William Randolph Hearst, who was running for president and contending with the mayor’s own presidential ambitions.
Purists of the Left and Right detested Hearst. The forty-year-old congressman and publisher had used his newspapers to crusade against trusts and corruption and to advance progressive causes, earning him the enmity of the moneyed class. But Hearst’s raw opportunism and his role in starting the Spanish-American war alienated as many liberals. Darrow was a realist, and Hearst was a client. So he took the view of the publisher’s working-class supporters in New York—“Hoist, Hoist, he’s not the woist!”—and helped organize the William Randolph Hearst League in Chicago. “I cannot understand nor help regret his present political attitude,” said the appalled Eugene Debs, when asked about Darrow’s actions.
To curry support among midwestern Democrats, Hearst had opened the populist American in Chicago in 1900. The antics of those who worked in the “madhouse on Madison Street,” as the Hearst building became known, added spice to the city’s already formidable, fiercely competitive journalism, and not a few of Chicago’s famous gangsters learned their craft in the violence that marked the circulation wars. When a band of Hearst “sluggers”—most of them former prizefighters—were arrested after destroying a newsstand, beating its proprietor unconscious, and brazenly driving off in an American circulation wagon, Darrow defended them. Years later, after they graduated to bootlegging, murder, and other crimes, he remained their attorney.8
In one sensational case, Darrow, Masters & Wilson represented Hearst in a dispute involving the famous Wild West sharpshooter Annie Oakley, who claimed to have been libeled when a wire service reported that she had been caught stealing “the trousers of a Negro” to get money for her drug habit. In fact, it was a different Annie—a burlesque dancer named Maude Fontenella who sometimes performed as “Any Oak Lay”—and the genuine cowgirl spent years profitably suing the newspapers that had carried the story. Maude was brought to Chicago by Hearst’s private detectives to testify at the trial. After sizing her up, Masters got her to a doctor for a shot of cocaine before she took the stand. It invigorated the witness, but the jury found for Oakley.
In the “reign of horror” and generally chilly political climate that followed McKinley’s assassination, Darrow had a hankering for a good free-speech case, he told Whitlock, and Hearst and his editors supplied one.
The American was then crusading against the “gas trust” that, the newspaper said, was gouging Chicago consumers. The gas interests sued, and when Judge Elbridge Hanecy sided with them, the paper ripped him in its columns and cartoons. Hanecy charged Hearst and six employees with contempt, alleging that “scandalous matter was printed … to terrorize and intimidate this court.” The managing editor, Andrew Lawrence, and a reporter, H. S. Canfield, were sentenced to jail. There was bad blood between Hanecy and Darrow, and their exchanges in court were frequently hostile. So Darrow appealed to a more amenable jurist—his friend, the politically ambitious and liberal Judge Edward Dunne—who agreed to hear Darrow’s plea for a writ of habeas corpus.
“It is for the cause they represent that powerful interests desire to place these men in jail: this yellow journal must be suppressed for through its columns has been heard the