WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

http://idahoptv.org/productions/specials/capitoloflight/tourgrounds.cfm.

       Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg

      After union men blew up a huge, non-union smelting plant in Wardner, Idaho, in April 1899, Steunenberg called in federal troops to enforce a new (unconstitutional) county ordinance requiring all mine workers to renounce membership in any militant union – squarely targeting the Western Federation of Miners that had supported his election. Union men denounced Steunenberg as a Benedict Arnold and forced his retirement from public life after one term.

      Source: “Idaho Meanderings” by Gov Steunenberg’s great grandson, http://steunenberg.blogspot.com/2011/12/12301905-today-in-history.html

       The newspaper caption reads: “Former Governor Frank Steunenberg killed by an explosion at his home in Coldwell, Idaho.”

      Source: http://idahoptv.org/trial/images/steunenberghouse.jpg.

      Retired Gov. Frank Steunenberg was killed by a bomb as he entered the gate at his Idaho home in December of 1905. Photo from “A Good Hanging Spoiled – The Verdict, July 28th, 1907” by John T. Richards, Jr.

      Source: http://pynchonclass.blogspot.com/2012/09/western-federation-of-miners.html

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood

       Defendants: three leaders of Western Federation of Miners. Big Bill Haywood (center) goes to trial first. 1907 photo. (WFM button reproduced above.)

      Source: Mother Jones photo 1902, U.S. Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division; digital ID cph.3a10320. Photo of Debs in 1897 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs

      Left: Labor activist Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) campaigned for funds to support the WFM leaders’ defense. Right: Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs sent his attorney Clarence Darrow to represent Haywood.

      Socialist Party of America leader Eugene Debs shot back, “If they don’t, the governors of Idaho and Colorado and their masters from Wall Street, New York, to the Rocky Mountains had better prepare to follow them.”¹²

      Irate WFM lawyers challenged the unorthodox arrests and extradition all the way to the United States Supreme Court. But the political pressure was so intense, they stood no chance. At the justices’ annual White House visit on the Monday when the high court began its 1906 fall term, Roosevelt weighed in by asserting his opinion that Moyer and Haywood were undesirable citizens – just three days before oral argument on the propriety of the labor leaders’ forcible abduction from Colorado. Roosevelt most likely assumed that the justices were already prepared to give short shrift to the radicals’ appeal, but could not resist a heavy-handed hint as to how he hoped they would rule. Two months later, the high court issued its opinion. With only one dissenter, the Supreme Court ruled that any challenge to the illegality of the kidnapping had to be lodged in Colorado. Once the men were transported to Idaho, Idaho had authority to try them for conspiracy to assassinate its ex-governor. It is often said that possession is nine-tenths of the law. In this case, possession was ten-tenths of the law. The men had been spirited out of state without having an opportunity to challenge their kidnapping in Colorado. WFM supporters considered the bootstrap Supreme Court ruling to be as odious and unsupportable as the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that helped precipitate the Civil War.

      Eugene Debs wasted no time excoriating McParland and the two governors, linking them with “the capitalist tyrants” who martyred the Haymarket speakers two decades before. Debs threatened all-out war by Socialists: “If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and their brothers, a million revolutionists will meet them with guns.”¹³ At the same time, Debs called for a broader national labor strike than the crippling railroad strike he had orchestrated in 1894. Colorado’s Socialist Party named Haywood its candidate for governor while he sat in his Idaho jail cell facing murder charges. Though he was not expected to win, Haywood amazed observers by quadrupling the party’s last gubernatorial vote count.¹⁴ In the meantime, radical union members and Socialists across the country angrily took to the streets with banners, torches and flags, proclaiming Haywood’s innocence. They were particularly incensed about the Pinkerton agency’s underhanded role in the matter.

      Labor had long considered Pinkerton men lowly spies for management and blamed the infamous May 4, 1886, Haymarket Square riots partly on the agency. The bloody riots had caused a severe setback to the growing eight-hour-day movement. The day before the bloodshed in Haymarket Square, Pinkerton detectives helped Chicago police end a violent confrontation between scabs and strikers locked out of the Cyrus McCormick Harvester Works by killing six strikers and wounding many more. The bombing of the local police that started the Haymarket riot appeared to be in retaliation.

      Though four of the speakers at the Haymarket rally had been hanged shortly afterward, three of the eight were still languishing in prison in 1898 when a new Democratic governor of Illinois pardoned them for lack of proof of their involvement in the bombing. The chief advocate of that pardon was Chicago labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, who had become Eugene Debs’ lawyer four years before when Debs faced criminal conspiracy charges for leading the 1894 railroad strike. Darrow had first made his mark as a corporate attorney for the city of Chicago and then as a railroad lawyer before he defected to the other side to defend Debs.

      By 1907, when Debs asked Darrow to join the team representing the three accused WFM leaders, the accomplished fifty-year-old defense lawyer was not yet a household name. He had, however, already earned a formidable reputation as a passionate opponent of the death penalty and champion of labor and underdog causes. Darrow liked to claim that he never lost a client to the death penalty, but that was only true if one didn’t count the time he argued a post-trial sanity motion in 1893 for the convicted assassin of Chicago’s mayor. It was impressive enough that Darrow could boast that he had never lost a capital case to a jury.

      Born in 1857 in rural northeastern Ohio, Clarence Seward Darrow was destined from the cradle for a life of passionate advocacy. The fifth of eight children of Amirus and Emily Eddy Darrow, Clarence inherited an insatiable appetite for knowledge from both parents. Their families had each migrated to Ohio from New England, where their ancestors had fought in the Revolution. Amirus Darrow first trained for the Unitarian ministry, then quit because he questioned his faith in God. Despite becoming an agnostic, Amirus retained firm convictions about right and wrong and a hide impervious to ridicule – traits he also passed on to his famous son. Clarence recalled his father fondly as the “village infidel.”¹⁵

      Amirus barely eked out a living as the town undertaker for the hamlet of Kinsman, Ohio, near the western border of Pennsylvania, just south of Lake Erie. He likely played a key role when Kinsman became a stop on the Underground Railroad. His wife Emily was more practical than Amirus, but shared her husband’s idealism and fondness for books. She was a passionate suffragette and advocate of other liberal causes, which her son Clarence would likewise embrace with fervor.

      Clarence grew up internalizing