Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,36

confident of victory, urged Grosscup to appoint a substitute, but the judge refused. It was clear what the verdict would have been. When the jurors were discharged they gathered around Debs to shake his hand. “Debs, when this trial opened I was in favor of giving you five years,” said one. “Now I am anxious to set you free.”9

Debs did not have his freedom yet. The antagonists now trudged to Washington to argue the contempt case at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a rare appearance, Attorney General Olney himself took part, jousting with Darrow and the other defense lawyers in the oral arguments.

Darrow ended Debs’s case with a spirited appeal. “When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their own rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows,” he told the justices, “we have no right to say they are criminals.” But his remarks had little effect on justices so famous for their retrograde decisions. On May 27 the Court ruled unanimously against Debs. “No wrong,” it said, “carries with it legal warrant to invite as a means of redress the cooperation of a mob.”

Debs had done no such thing. And in the eyes of many Americans, in part because of the arguments and evidence presented at the trials, he and his men emerged as martyrs, Pullman as a buffoon, and Cleveland as Wall Street’s toady. The president was compelled to appoint the strike commission to investigate the events of the summer of 1894. It absolved Debs and placed much blame on industry.

A furious Edwin Walker schemed to recover. He had been humiliated in the criminal case, he told Olney, but had used his influence to secure a compliant judge for the retrial. “The government will never be better prepared to try this case,” he wrote. “Judge Bunn was especially assigned to this case, at my request.” But Cleveland had enough of Debs. A new U.S. attorney dropped the charges. “There is not a public sentiment at this time which would sustain prosecution,” he admitted.10

AS DARROW JOUSTED in court, prickly John Altgeld had gotten into a brawl with Cleveland. The governor had used the Illinois militia to maintain order in other strikes and dispatched detachments of the guard to trouble spots during the Debs crisis. He had things under control and the deployment of the army was “entirely unnecessary and … unjustifiable,” he told the president. “The Federal government has been applied to by men who had political and selfish motives.” He accused Cleveland of doing “violence to the Constitution.”

The press, again, denounced Altgeld. “This lying, hypocritical, demagogical sniveling governor of Illinois does not want the laws enforced. He is a sympathizer with riot, with violence, with lawlessness and anarchy,” the Tribune declared. “He should be impeached.”11

Altgeld held his ground. The president and his Wall Street allies, he declared, were a “small band of schemers … who have not a drop of Democratic blood in their veins, whose sympathies are entirely with the great corporations” which “treat the American republic as a foraging ground.” The governor declined an invitation to celebrate Jefferson’s birthday at the Iroquois Club because Olney was a guest. “Jeffersonism was the first-born of the new age of liberty and human progress,” said Altgeld, but “Clevelandism is the slimy off-spring of that unhallowed marriage between Standard Oil and Wall Street.” He set out to end such influence by allying the Democratic Party with the Populist movement. In doing so, Altgeld set the Democrats on a course that, over time, would transform American government and give liberalism its greatest triumphs. In this crusade, Darrow served as his lieutenant.12

Populism was rooted in the farms. Eastern financiers had sold Washington on a policy of tight money, based on the gold standard, that was especially tough on heavily mortgaged farmers. The railroad monopolies, meanwhile, had abused the growers by fixing shipping rates. Hard times fanned the movement, and in 1892 its presidential candidate carried six states, winning more than a million votes. Among other reforms, the Populists called for direct election of U.S. senators, a graduated income tax, and government regulation of railroads and utilities.

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress and touches even the ermine of the bench,” said their platform. “The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with