Free Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned by John A. Farrell Page B

ofPatrick 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.

     
    A s 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.
    ThePanic of 1893 had set events in motion by exposing the gap between the gilded lifestyles of the robber barons and the grinding, depersonalizing existence of the industrial workforce. The usually restrained labor leader, Sam Gompers, captured the militant mood in January 1894 at a rally in New York when he chanted: “Oh angels shut thine eyes / Let conflagration illumine the outraged skies! / Let red Nemesis burn the hellish clan / And chaos end the slavery of man!” There were strikes across the country, and spontaneous “armies of the Commonweal” comprised of out-of-work men, bankrupt farmers, and tramps marched on state capitals and Washington. On April 24, the Times broke away fromits coverage of the Prendergast case to report that Kelly’s Army was camping in Iowa, that Coxey’s Army was heading toward Washington, and that the financial markets were quaking: “A wave of panic swept over the exchange … Stocks tumbled … Moneybags shuddered and resolved to swell their contributions to the support of the militia on the morrow. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Huntingtons, the Pullmans and all the other plutocrats got home before dark, nor breathed they comfortably until they had double barred their doors and found refuge behind the solid masonry of their castles.” 1
    Debs was a native of Terre Haute, Indiana, where he met early success as a local politician and railway union officer. He was tall, thin, and balding, indefatigable and brave. “There may have lived some time, some where, a kindlier … more generous man … but I have never known him,” Darrow said. “He never felt fear. He had the courage of the babe who has no conception of the word.” The labor movement was fragmented at the time, which allowed the railroads to pit rival occupations—engineers, firemen, switchmen, and the like—against one another. To resolve the problem, Debs launched the ARU in Chicago in 1893. It grew rapidly, especially after a successful strike against the Great Northern Railway. 2
    The union was countered by the General Managers’ Association, headquartered in Chicago, through which two dozen railroads worked to cap wages and subdue their workers. A federal commission, charged with probing the causes of industrial unrest that summer, cited the GMA as an example of the “persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations” to “usurp” power in America. A strike at the Pullman works kindled the showdown. Its founder,George Pullman, had made his fortune designing, building, and operating commodious sleeping cars. Like many a self-made millionaire, he attributed his success to clean living and hard work; unlike many tycoons, he sought to give his employees an opportunity for both, by building a model town on the outskirts of Chicago.