WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

an early use of bugging devices, Darrow’s visits to his clients in jail were recorded without their knowledge. With the array of witnesses and physical evidence against them, Darrow was astounded at the McNamaras’ recklessness. Both were extremely remorseful. They said they had intended the bomb to go off at 4 a.m. when the building was empty. Yet as the two were privately confessing their guilt, the Socialist press kept promoting the McNamara brothers’ innocence. Big Bill Haywood called for a general national strike to coincide with the first day of the McNamaras’ trial.

      This time, Darrow expected his string of victories in keeping clients from execution to end in ignominious defeat. Darrow became so depressed that he also began acting recklessly. He renewed an affair with a woman reporter from New York who came out to cover the trial. If their trysts became public knowledge, it would have ruined his own reputation. Meanwhile, the police caught an investigator on Darrow’s staff approaching two different jurors with bribe offers. Darrow could see no way that he could pull off an acquittal or a hung jury.

      When muckraker Lincoln Steffens interviewed the McNamara brothers, their guilt was so manifest that Steffens strongly urged Darrow to have the brothers change their pleas. Darrow knew that labor leaders would vigorously oppose any such move. They would much rather claim the two men as martyrs. Yet Darrow told Steffens, “I can’t stand it to have a man I am defending hang.”⁴¹ Darrow convinced the two brothers to save their lives by pleading guilty and publicly repenting the innocent deaths they caused. Darrow saved them from execution – and avoided a crushing defeat – but at the price of having organized labor turn on him. Union members had contributed hard-earned money to raise Darrow’s legal fees only to watch the celebrated lawyer pocket the payment and eventually plead the brothers guilty.

      As a consequence of the plea bargain that dramatically ended the McNamaras’ trial, the labor movement suffered a huge blow to its credibility. The Los Angeles District Attorney then compounded Darrow’s personal woes by prosecuting the famed lawyer on bribery charges – by far the worst legal fiasco of his career. Darrow contemplated suicide, but hired another giant in criminal defense, Los Angeles attorney Earl Rogers, to defend him. When Rogers kept showing up to court drunk, Darrow took over his own defense. For the first and only time, Darrow’s emotional pleas asked jurors to salvage his own career. In one of the two attempted bribery trials, jury empathy won Darrow an acquittal; the other ended in a hung jury. To avoid a retrial, Darrow had to agree to forfeit his license to practice in California. Fed up with labor, he headed back to Chicago.

      So it was not Clarence Darrow that Bill Haywood asked to defend him in his next political trial in the spring of 1918, the longest criminal trial the United States had ever prosecuted. By then the coalition that had backed the WFM’s defense in the 1907 murder trial had long since collapsed. Haywood and the IWW split from WFM leadership shortly after the Boise cases ended. In 1911, the IWW parted ways from Eugene Debs and the Socialists. Yet Haywood remained a formidable labor leader, viewed by the business establishment as the “most hated and feared figure in America.”⁴² The “Wobblies” whom Haywood championed, ultimately attracted three million factory, mill and mine workers to their ranks, a coalition including non–English-speaking European immigrants, women, and African-Americans in an era when some unions expressly excluded blacks, while others took aggressive steps to block both African- and Asian-Americans from their own labor pools.

      Source: http://murderpedia.org/male.M/m/mcnamara-brothers.htm

      Labor activists James and John McNamara (above, left and right) were arrested for the murder of 21 people in the October 1, 1910, bombing of the Los Angeles Times. John McNamara was the national secretary of the AFL-affiliated Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. While in jail, the McNamara brothers confessed to a reporter friend of Darrow’s that they had intended the bomb to go off when the building was empty. Darrow feared losing his first clients to the death penalty. Police caught one of Darrow’s investigators attempting to bribe two jurors. Darrow then saved the brothers’ lives by pleading them guilty, alienating the union paying for their defense. Darrow then himself faced prosecution for bribery – by far the worst fiasco of his career. He forfeited his law license in California, and returned to Chicago broke and dispirited.

      Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clarence_Darrow_cph.3b31130.jpg

       Clarence Darrow circa 1913

      Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Gray_Otis_(publisher)

      Harry Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and self-proclaimed general of the movement to break the back of unions across the nation through the militant Merchants and Manufacturers Association. Otis was also on a mission to destroy businesses that dared to support unions.

      The IWW bore many similarities to the radical coalition that supported Black Panther leader Huey Newton half a century later in his own highly politicized murder trial. Like the Black Panthers’ strident opposition to the Vietnam War, the IWW strongly opposed America’s entry into World War I as a rich man’s war fought with the blood of the poor. Urging tactics that the Weathermen would later emulate, the IWW advocated industrial sabotage to undermine American war efforts. Unlike the bitter national divide generated by the Vietnam War, however, when the country joined World War I patriotic fervor spread across America.

      The IWW immediately began to feel the backlash as the federal government drafted harsh new laws blocking entry to revolutionaries and deporting radical immigrants. The war-time Espionage Act of 1917 included lengthy prison sentences for anyone whose speech or political activity encouraged draft resistance. In September of 1917, the Department of Justice raided four dozen IWW meeting halls and arrested 165 Wobblies for “conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes.”⁴³

      The raids resulted in a mass trial with more than a hundred defendants. The only evidence needed to convict them was proof they disseminated inflammatory IWW literature. All were found guilty and each sentenced to varying prison sentences, with Haywood receiving the twenty-year maximum. The following year, Debs was convicted for making an anti-war speech the Wilson administration deemed treasonous for use of “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” in violation of the 1918 Sedition Act. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison; the perennial Socialist candidate for President was also disenfranchised. The United States Supreme Court later upheld Deb’s conviction as a war-time necessity, through a narrow interpretation of First Amendment guarantees that has since been discredited.

      Despite the Wilson administration’s success in jailing radical labor leaders, strikes for increased wages and better working conditions escalated dramatically in 1919. Putting Haywood and Debs in prison made them into martyrs for a noble cause. Poet Carl Sandburg was then working as a journalist for a Socialist paper. He compared Haywood’s vision for a worldwide labor uprising to that of John Brown’s efforts to encourage slave rebellion before the Civil War. Sandburg wondered, “Will there be marching songs written to Bill Haywood someday as the same kind of a ‘traitor’ as the John Brown who was legally indicted, legally tried, legally shot?”⁴⁴

      Government persecution only increased Haywood’s stature among laborers. By 1920, Haywood made bail pending appeal and was out fund-raising for fellow IWW inmates when America experienced the worst bomb attack so far in its history. The Wall Street bombing in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank at noon on September 16, 1920, killed nearly forty people and injured ten times that number. The date coincided with a special election to fill the seats of five New York City Socialists ousted from the state legislature on the ground that Socialism