Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,35

of Congress friendly to labor vouched for him, and the spectator pews of the old court chamber in the Capitol were filled with men and “magnificently-attired women, blazing with diamonds,” the newspapers noted, who were there to catch a glimpse of the “smooth-faced barrister” defending the notorious Debs.

“There isn’t much to tell about the matter,” Darrow told a Washington Post reporter who had asked how things stood in Chicago. “The poor people side with Debs and the rich are against him. There is the situation in a nutshell. The philosophers and dreamers are on our side too; but they haven’t much influence … The forces of the plutocracy are so strong as to be almost irresistible.”8

THE MARTYRDOM OF Eugene Debs moved on to its next stage: the criminal conspiracy trial before Judge Grosscup.

Woods was, as Altgeld once said, a captive of the corporations; but Grosscup, even more so. “It is an outrage that a creature like Grosscup should be permitted to sit on the bench,” Theodore Roosevelt would gripe after hearing one of the judge’s rulings. Grosscup would ultimately step down amid charges that he traded favors with the railroads. In a speech in the spring of 1894, he had offered a glimpse of his beliefs when he denounced labor leaders as revolutionaries, intent on imposing “tyranny.” The “higher laws of civilization and advanced manhood” demanded that “this shadow on independent individuality” should be “removed effectively and at once,” Grosscup said. If not, it would “destroy the basis on which business … can be successful.”

But in the criminal case Debs would face a jury, not just the judge. When the fight began in late January, Darrow strove to put the railroads, not Debs, on trial. It was not the union that met in secret or dispatched telegrams on a private wire, he told the jurors, it was the railroads. “The obstruction of the mails might have been the result of a conspiracy. But it is not the conspiracy of these men,” he said of the defendants. “If there was a conspiracy it was on the part of the General Managers’ Association, which desired to use the inconvenience of the public, and the feelings of sanctity for the mails, as a club to defeat the effort that was being made to better the condition of working men.”

Debs and his men “published to all the world what they were doing. And in the midst of the excitement of a widespread strike they were never so busy but that they found time to counsel against violence,” Darrow told the jury. “For this, they are brought into a court by an organization which uses the government as a cloak to its purpose.”

Grosscup, in his rulings, leaned toward the government. But in doing so, he added to the jury’s mounting sympathy for Darrow’s underdogs. So, too, did the furtive actions of George Pullman, who was subpoenaed to appear, but dodged the federal marshal sent to serve him. In the Chicago Post, the Irish barman Martin Dooley, the fictional creation of columnist Peter Finley Dunne, had delighted in Pullman’s skedaddling:

“Gintlemin,” says he, “I must be off,” he says. “Go an’ kill each other,” he says. “Fight it out,” he says. “Defind th’ constitution,” he says. “Me own is not of th’ best,” he says, “an’ I think I’ll help it be spindin’ th’ summer … on th’ shores iv th’ Atlantic ocean.”

The Tribune, however, offered excuses for Pullman. “It is not strange that he should be unwilling to go on the stand and be questioned by Mr. Darrow,” the editors sniffed. “It is not pleasant for a person who is at the head of a great corporation to be interrogated by persons unfriendly to him and who may put disagreeable inquiries to which he has to reply.”

Indeed, the railroad executives who did testify, with their haughty manners and patchy memories, left a poor impression. And Walker blundered when he insisted that the ARU produce the minutes of its 1894 convention, which had been open to the public and would yield him little. Darrow responded by demanding the same information from the managers. “That was the knockout,” said Theodore Debs, the defendant’s brother. “The minutes … would have shown who the conspirators were.” After Eugene Debs, in a trim gray suit, wearing gold spectacles and a boutonniere, made an effective appearance on the stand, the government folded. On February 12, Grosscup announced that he was stopping the trial because one of the jurors had taken sick. Darrow,