Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,20

nihilism, but which then described a utopian philosophy.

The anarchists saw the one-sided nature of the transaction between capital and labor, witnessed the great disparity in wealth that resulted, and recognized the awful toll that the industrial age took on workers. They believed that men would rise, seize power from the ruling class, and live without government or laws. The most aggressive formed paramilitary groups like the Irish Labor Guards or the Bohemian Sharpshooters, who, before the authorities banned such activities, drilled in the parks and paraded with rifles and uniforms.

The movement’s short-term goals were modest, however, and shared by mainstream labor groups. American wage earners, using strikes and boycotts, were demanding an end to ten- or twelve-hour shifts and agitating for an eight-hour day that spring. On May 3, 1886, in a clash at the McCormick works, the police opened fired, killing several men. A protest was called for the next night at an intersection called the Haymarket.

The rally was small and orderly, but as it drew to an end, an officious police captain ordered his men to clear the street. Someone threw a bomb at the advancing police column, and in the explosion and resultant gunfire, dozens of officers were wounded, eight fatally. “Goaded to madness, the police were … as dangerous as any mob, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between the peaceable citizen and the Nihilist assassin,” the Tribune reported.

“Excitement was at fever heat,” Darrow recalled. The public hysteria was not limited to Chicago. In an “acute outbreak of anarchy a Gatling gun … is the sovereign remedy,” the New York Times advised. “Later on hemp, in judicious doses, has an admirable effect.”

None of the anarchists was conclusively tied to the furtive bomber. Six of the defendants were not at the scene that night, and the two others were on the speakers’ platform, not down on the sidewalk from where the bomb was thrown. Their crime was incitement: they were alleged to have inspired the assassin with their ideas. “There is no evidence,” Albert Parsons wrote, “that I or any of us killed, or had anything to do with the killing … But it was proven clearly that we were, all of us, anarchists, socialists, communists … unionists. It was proven that three of us were editors of labor papers; that five of us were labor organizers and speakers at workingmen’s mass meetings … Of these crimes against the capitalist class they found us guilty.”

Judge Joseph Gary, conducting the trial as a public spectacle (he saved seats behind his bench for stylish young ladies who giggled and ate candy), gave wide latitude to the prosecution and, with his closing instructions to the jury, ushered the anarchists to their deaths. If the defendants “by print or speech” had encouraged a murderous act, Gary told the jurors, “then all such conspirators are guilty of such murder, whether the person who perpetrated such murder can be identified or not.”5

Darrow was outraged. He had arrived in Chicago in the period between the trial and the executions, and joined a group of prominent citizens urging clemency for the defendants. Those who did so paid a price. Lloyd, a leader in the movement, was disinherited by his wife’s wealthy family. William Black, the anarchists’ attorney, had earned the Medal of Honor in the Civil War but now was shunned. The trial “left me in debt, without a business and without a clientage, and in a community all of whose wealthy citizens were in active hostility to me,” he wrote.6 Nevertheless, Darrow enlisted. In August 1887, he wrote a letter to his friends at the Democratic Standard in Ashtabula, recounting a visit with the anarchists in jail.

“They are a good looking intelligent lot of men. At first they were not inclined to talk, but after assuring them that I was something of a crank myself … they entered freely into conversation,” Darrow reported. “They imagine that wealth is so strong that it controls legislation and elections and that we can only abolish present evils by wiping out capital and starting over new.

“It is very hard for one who, like me, believes that the injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system, to understand how intelligent men can believe that the repeal of all laws can better the world; but this is their doctrine.”

The real issue at stake in the Haymarket case, Darrow told the folks back in Ohio, was free speech: “Whether one who