Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,119

explaining the necessity of the plea. “There was no avoiding step taken today,” Darrow wrote. “When I see you I know you will be satisfied that all of us gave everything we had to accomplish the best.” But Gompers would never forgive Darrow. Labor needed a fall guy. “Angered and injured,” said Steffens, “it seeks somebody to blame and kill.”

His friend Peter Sissman later asked Darrow why he had not kept fighting in court, hoping, perhaps, for a hung jury. “Whose lawyer was I?” Darrow asked Sissman. “The McNamaras had the right to know the case looked bad and they would probably hang … I felt they had the right to choose to save their own lives.”

From the beginning, Darrow was candid with Gompers about the difficulties they faced in Los Angeles; the cost of the case, and his fear they would ultimately lose. He apparently thought these were winks enough. He never did tell Gompers that the McNamaras were guilty, Darrow said, “for Mr. Gompers never asked me.” Furthermore, he said, “as their attorney I could not have told Mr. Gompers without their consent.”

Which may not have been forthcoming. “I was fighting for my life … I would have been a fool to confide my guilt to anyone, and it would have been unfair to Gompers to make him carry around any secret confession of mine,” said James McNamara. At some point, as the evidence against them accumulated, the interests of the brothers ran counter to the interests of the labor movement. “I am sorry to have put [Gompers] in a fix by sticking to my defense for so long,” James said, but “I was working to help in my way, and I could not turn down the money for defense when it came without putting the noose around my neck.”27

The shock that Gompers showed at the news of the guilty plea seems genuine, but it is hard to believe he was so out of touch as to not suspect the McNamaras. The documents seized in Indianapolis show that the bombing campaign was a topic of correspondence among union leaders across the country. If Gompers did not know, it was because he didn’t want to know, and because others, like Darrow, were shielding him.

Franklin’s arrest had wreaked havoc in the McNamara defense and was, several critics maintained, the real motivating factor in Darrow’s eagerness to cut a deal. Bordwell said as much after sentencing the brothers to prison. “The public can rely on it that the developments of last week as to the … attempted bribery of jurors were the efficient causes of the change of pleas,” he announced.28

Some questioned whether Darrow pled the brothers guilty to save himself. “Darrow is very dangerously near the jury and witness corruption and he is very apprehensive that the connecting link exists,” Lawler told the attorney general. “He has induced the defendants to assume their present attitude for the purpose of using it as a bargain on his own behalf.” If so, Darrow played his cards badly. On January 29 he was indicted for bribery.29

Chapter 12

GETHSEMANE

So fade our dreams, so fall our ideals, so pass our stars.

On a dreary night in December 1911, cowed by shame and fear, Darrow showed up at Mary Field’s apartment and sat down at the kitchen table.

He pulled a bottle of whiskey from one overcoat pocket and a revolver from the other. Warily, she brought two glasses and he poured.

“I am going to kill myself,” Darrow said. “They are going to indict me for bribing the McNamara jury. I can’t stand the disgrace.”

Mary had to talk fast. Suicide would be wrong, she said. It would be an admission of guilt and cede victory to his enemies. He must fight on.

She persuaded her distraught lover to put the gun away. He slipped it in his pocket, picked up the bottle, and walked out into the rain.1

ON ELECTION DAY, Judge Bordwell had sentenced James McNamara to life imprisonment and given John McNamara a fifteen-year term in San Quentin. When the ballots were counted, Job Harriman had lost the mayor’s race by thirty-four thousand votes.2

Otis could not keep from crowing. “The confession of the McNamaras and the defeat of Harriman … saved our city from the disgrace and disaster of socialistic rule,” said the Times on New Year’s Day. “Boycotting, picketing, assaulting and dynamiting are at an end … Industrial freedom reigns supreme.”3

Attention now turned to the jury-bribing case. The McNamara defense team had paid Bert Franklin’s bail, but it