Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,130

that the verdict would rest on what the jurors thought of Darrow. As the trial neared its end, Darrow had two compelling forums—as a witness in his own defense, and as a lawyer pleading for liberty in his closing address—to persuade them of his innocence.

Darrow took the stand on July 29 and spent more than a week answering questions from Rogers, Ford, and Fredericks. The flush in his cheeks was his only sign of emotion, and the trial’s observers gave him high marks. From the first, leaning on an arm of the witness chair, his legs crossed, Darrow showed himself “a master hand of narration,” the Times said. “He used simple words and from time to time gazed directly at the jurors, challenging, as it were, their right to believe he would be guilty.” The paper noted how Darrow, conceding various points in the interest of fairness, seemed to rise above the squabbling duo of Rogers and Fredericks. “This attitude, whether natural or the result of studied art, is not without weight,” said the Times. “It was apparent that some of the jurors seemed considerably impressed.”

On November 28, Darrow said, he had arrived at his office at about eight thirty a.m. He was at his desk but a short time, he said, when he was summoned by Hawley’s phone call to Harriman’s campaign headquarters. It was then, as he walked along the street, that he saw Franklin. “I never had any conversation with him in reference to anything improper or unlawful or corrupt with Lockwood,” Darrow testified. “He never received any thousand dollars from me for any juror.” Darrow said he was “very much shocked” by Franklin’s arrest, and “at first I didn’t think what to do.” Dazed, he wandered back to the courthouse, where he ran into Browne.

“What does it mean?” Darrow said.

“We arrested Franklin for jury bribing,” Browne replied.

“That could not be possible,” Darrow said. “If I had ever dreamed of any such thing it could not possibly have been.”

The check he gave Tvietmoe, said Darrow, was to pay for legal expenses in San Francisco, where the city’s labor leaders had been hauled before the grand jury and both sides were scouring the city, trying to secure witnesses. And Harrington? “From the first time he opened his mouth he wanted money,” said Darrow. “About half what he said was about getting more money out of me while I was under indictment … threatening me.”

Finally, there was the question of motive.

“As we went on in the preparation of this case it kept growing on all of us that there was no possible chance to win,” Darrow said. “It grew on us from day to day and from week to week, the exact condition we were in and that our clients were in, which a lawyer never knows at once, the same as a doctor learns that the patient is going to die.”

As far as Darrow was concerned, the case had been settled on the weekend before Franklin’s arrest, when John McNamara agreed to accept a ten-year sentence. No documents had been signed, and they still had to persuade James McNamara to accept his brother’s decision. But it was over, said Darrow. He had no motive to bribe Lockwood.

Darrow had an uncomfortable moment when Ford produced a coded telegram that Darrow had sent to an ironworker’s lawyer in Indianapolis on November 29, authorizing the expenditure of $1,000 in the ongoing tussle to recover the evidence seized at the union headquarters there. If the McNamara case was all but settled, why did Darrow care about the Indianapolis evidence?

There was nothing, of course, to prevent Darrow from seeking insurance in case the deal fell apart. (Or, for that matter, to tamper with the jury. As Fredericks would later argue, “Clarence Darrow did not put all his bait on one hook.”) But Rogers had labored long to persuade the jurors that Darrow had no motive. So Darrow had to explain. “I was always interested in regaining the letters, telegrams and files,” he said. The U.S. authorities in Los Angeles and Indianapolis were building a federal case against the ironworkers’ union and organized labor. “It was up to me to do what I could to protect everybody else.”

All in all, Darrow had given a fine performance. And the rebuttal phase of the trial ended on a promising note when Golding, once more taking advantage of Hutton’s willingness to let jurors join in, asked Job Harriman if Franklin’s arrest had not been part of a