Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,31

many hearts would be calloused, how many souls would be wrecked, how many blood stains would come upon the conscience of men.”

Now, as in March, he blamed the Maker, not the vessel. “Here is Prendergast, the product of the infinite God, not of his own making,” Darrow said. “He comes here for some inscrutable reason, the same as you and I, without his will, without his knowledge, because the infinite God of the infinite universe saw fit to make him as He willed. His fault is not the fault of Prendergast. It is the fault of the infinite power that made him the object you find today.

“I beseech of you, gentlemen, do not visit upon this poor boy the afflictions which God Almighty placed upon him for some inscrutable reason unknown to us.

“This poor, weak, misshapen vessel, I place in your protection and your hands,” Darrow said. “I beg of you gentlemen take it gently, tenderly, carefully. Do not, I beseech you, do not break the clay, for though weak and cracked and useless it is the handiwork of the infinite God.”13

The following morning, Judge Payne read his instructions to the jury. In less than two hours, it reached a verdict. Prendergast would die.

“Mr. Darrow’s closing argument would have swept us all off our feet,” said juror William Steinke, who admitted that some of his colleagues had been moved to tears. But the jury felt a duty to avenge the murdered mayor. “We felt that we could not be honest and still allow such an appeal to influence our decision.”

Now began the grim last dance of lawyers in a capital case. Darrow and Gregory offered a motion for a new trial; it was denied. On July 11, Darrow took the train to Springfield, accompanied by attorney James Harlan, to see Altgeld. All three men knew the visit was useless, but the governor welcomed the two lawyers, joined them at dinner, and rode with them in a carriage around town. There was no changing his mind.

Darrow and Gregory tried federal court, but the judge declined to intervene. “Yes, it is all over,” Darrow told the reporters as the courthouse emptied. “The country seems determined to hang an insane man and I guess we will have to allow it to do so.” Prendergast went meekly to his death on Friday, July 13. Gregory was there to offer what comfort he could to the condemned man, but Darrow was not. It was all too horrid, and disheartening, and sad.14

The editors at the Tribune should have been pleased. Yet something marred their joy. The Harrisons had taken the side of striking workers in that year’s industrial unrest and scored great circulation gains. The Tribune’s editor, Joseph Medill, viewed the mayor’s sons as ingrates.

“It was the Tribune that prevented the insanity inquiry from being tried before a judge selected by the murderer’s lawyers, and resulted in having the trial before a sterner and less sympathetic jurist. And it was the Tribune’s powerful special attorney who successfully prosecuted your father’s murderer to the gallows,” Medill wrote Carter Harrison Jr. “The assassin would never have been hung but for his work, supplemented by that of the Tribune.”15

It was a revealing glimpse of how things were, and the powers that Darrow defied, in Chicago. Yet the truth was as stark as fresh dirt on a grave. The defense of Patrick Prendergast had been Darrow’s first big criminal case. And he had lost the mad newsboy to the hangman’s rope.

Chapter 4

POPULIST

Ghosts of the wicked city, the gold-crushed hungry hell.

As Darrow toiled to rescue crazy Patrick Prendergast, events outside the courthouse supplied an apt backdrop. Chicago was rocked by rage and anarchy, as federal troops and marshals battled mobs of unemployed and striking laborers in the violent climax of a nationwide workers’ uprising. It was called the “Debs Rebellion,” after Eugene Debs, whose American Railway Union was crushed by President Cleveland for its audacity and its leaders seized and jailed after bringing commerce to a standstill throughout most of the country.

Darrow had been shaken by the state’s relentless insistence on killing Prendergast. Now he watched its army and its judges, deployed at the behest of corporations, quell the collective action of American workingmen. The experience left him angry and alienated. The idealist who had said, when he arrived in Chicago, that the “injustice of the world can only be remedied through law, and order and system” began to reconsider.

The Panic of 1893 had set events in motion by exposing the