jail, and on one piece burned a motto: “So live that every day you can look every man in the face and tell him to go to hell.” Big Bill seemed bigger than ever. He had exercised regularly, dug a vegetable garden, and studied Marx. Haywood had lost an eye in an accident when young and to focus had to turn his head. It gave him, the Times reported, an “unfairly” furtive expression, since the truculent union leader was nothing if not blunt.
Haywood’s extended family joined him in the courtroom, and rare was the newsman who missed the tableau of blond, ten-year-old Henrietta sitting in her father’s lap. The actress Ethel Barrymore performed in Boise in a traveling theatrical trifle that summer and sat in on a session of the trial. She appreciated Darrow’s stagecraft: “He had all the props: an old mother in a wheelchair and a little girl with curls.”
The courtroom was plain and rectangular. Its most notable feature was its intimacy. Instead of sitting off to one side, the jurors were seated directly in front of and slightly below Judge Fremont Wood’s bench, looking out toward the room. From the chairs in which they softly rocked, they could gaze squarely at the witness, who sat in an armchair on a raised platform, facing them, some fifteen feet away. In the pit between the jury and the witness chair were tables for the press, court stenographers, and lawyers. It was crowded (the defense routinely had half a dozen lawyers besides Darrow at its table) and hot. At any one time the spectators would include gunmen, celebrities, or whiskered socialists. There were pitchers of water and inkwells, the jurors’ broad-brimmed cowboy hats hanging on pegs along the wall, and blue and white spittoons. Witnesses would raise their hands, swear to tell the truth, spit, and take the stand.
It took a month to select a jury. Four venires, with more than 250 potential jurors—“talesmen,” as they are called—had to be summoned. The prosecution and the defense hoarded their peremptory challenges, and grilled the candidates about their occupations, political and religious beliefs, union affiliations, newspaper subscriptions, and opinions of President Roosevelt. The prosecution labored to keep unionists off the jury; the defense to bar the suspiciously large number of bankers. By repeatedly asking about “probable cause” and “reasonable doubt” the defense began its work of indoctrinating the jurors.
Hawley and the other attorneys stayed in their seats when conducting the voir dire. Darrow, dressed in homely clothes, with baggy trousers and unshined shoes, chose to stroll around the courtroom or to drape himself over the back of a chair, or lean into the box to question a man. His soft drawl and relaxed approach irritated Hawley, who complained to the judge: “That is no way to examine a juror.” Hawley wanted Darrow to drop the “confidential exchange of views.” There was method in Darrow’s manner; he believed that a juror’s decision was inevitably based on emotion, not intellect. The more he could, in quiet conversation, weigh a man’s heart, the better. Watching Darrow at work picking jurors, Haywood said admiringly, was like watching a man “killing snakes.”
Even Darrow had a hard time with one sluggish serpent. Harmon Cox had a daughter who worked as a scab for the local telephone company when its operators went on strike. The defense didn’t want to waste a peremptory challenge, but old man Cox resisted Darrow’s attempts to portray him as biased. Darrow sat on the edge of the defense table, twirling his eyeglasses, launching question after question. “I challenge this juror for incompetency,” Darrow declared. “He is ignorant and no man should be tried for his life by such a man on the jury.” He looked plaintively, in appeal, to Borah, who sat on the edge of his own table, jauntily tapping his foot. “State your challenge,” Borah said. “And cut out your stump speeches.”
It cost the defense a peremptory challenge to rid themselves of Cox. But killing snakes is an inexact science, and all the lawyers had bad days. By the time the last two jurors were chosen both sides were out of challenges, and cattleman O. V. Sebern and builder J. A. Robertson joined the jury almost as an afterthought. At first glance, the state appeared to have won the opening skirmish. Sebern had sat on a jury that hanged a man. Lee Schrivener had once worked as a sheriff, and Samuel Russell as a justice of the peace. Robertson had leased a