Before Scopes, Clarence Darrow fought another war. He was accused of bribing the jury

He was the Advocate of the Damned, the Great Defender, the champion of free thought who distorted biblical realism in the Scopes Ape Trial, and the master courtroom rhetorician whose three-day speech saved two notorious young murderers from execution. He was the terror of corporations and the fighting friend of labor.

The most famous trial lawyer of his time, Clarence Darrow inspired respected biographies, stage plays, and performances by some of the greatest actors of the 20th century. For generations of lawyers, he personified courage in the face of long odds and high-minded legal practice in service of the social good. Defense attorneys still study his speeches like sacred texts.

But the Chicago lawyer’s biggest cases awaited him more than a decade ago, when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1911 to handle the most high-profile criminal case in the country. With his career and his freedom, he narrowly escaped from what he called the City of Terrible Night. It’s not entirely clear whether he deserves to escape prison.

Darrow was in town to represent the union member McNamara brothers accused of dynamiting The downtown building of the anti-union Los Angeles Times in October 1910, killing 21 people. Labor leaders had pleaded with a reluctant Darrow to take the case. It was widely believed that it was set up as a plot by the brothers to denigrate the union’s cause.

Darrow knew better. The evidence against his clients was overwhelming. McNamara urged one of his brothers to plead guilty to the Times murders and the other to confess to a different bombing. Darrow would announce that he had solved the case to save his clients from being hanged.

The so-called Crime of the Century never took place. Instead, it was Darrow himself who appeared in court. Accusation: bribery. Chief jury examiner Bert Franklin had approached two potential jurors in the McNamara case and offered them cash to vote for acquittal.

Just before the plea deals were finalized, detectives caught Franklin trying to bribe money to juror George Lockwood, a retired Civil War veteran, at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Main Street. Darrow’s insistence that he knew nothing about this was foiled by his inexplicable appearance on the scene at that very moment.

Now Franklin was a key witness against Darrow. John Harrington, the lead investigator for McNamara’s defense team, also alleged that Darrow showed him $10,000 in cash (six figures in today’s dollars) in an attempt to bribe the jury. According to Harrington’s account, when Franklin was captured, Darrow nervously blurted out: “God, if he talks, I’ll be devastated.”

Darrow, who is in his mid-50s, appeared almost despondent during his three-month trial. One reporter described him as “Sulky and cruel.” “Ashamed and hurt, heartbroken and trapped.” People fanned themselves in the sweltering heat of the courtroom. The lawyers poured phlegm into the spittoon. Thousands of spectators raced to catch a glimpse.

To represent him, Darrow chose the flamboyant and intelligent Earl Rogers, who is believed to have inspired Perry Mason. Rogers harshly questioned the prosecution’s witnesses, portraying them as scoundrels who lied about Darrow to save themselves.

But there was also a damning statement from a detective named Sam Browne, who was reminded of Darrow’s words minutes after the failed bribery attempt. “If I had known it would turn out this way, I would never have let it happen,” Browne reportedly said.

Defense move: Darrow had no reason to bribe the jury since he had already planned for the McNamara brothers to plead guilty. The trial focused on whether Darrow had completed such a plan. (There was a good argument that the discovery of the bribery plot forced the brothers to defend themselves because, as the McNamara judge put it, it “revealed the desperation of the defense.”)

In his summary to jurors, prosecutor Joseph Ford essentially blamed Darrow for the dynamiting of The Times. “It was the example of men like Darrow that led poor, deluded JB McNamara to believe that he could safely commit the crimes he committed on his own,” Ford said.

It reminded me of the pain of people who lost their loved ones in the furnace of the burning Times building. He stretched out his arms towards Darrow and said: “The widowed mother turned to the defendant and said, ‘Give me back my son.’ Let him say.’ ”

When Darrow stood to make his own defense to jurors, he described Ford’s attack as “extremely cowardly and malicious.” It was not worthy of a man and did not come from a man.”

Darrow’s words to jurors seemed to indicate that even if they believed him guilty, they should understand that his goal was to level the playing field for his vulnerable clients. He claimed the system was heavily skewed in favor of the prosecution. “There was a grand jury. We didn’t. They had police forces. We didn’t. They had organized the government. “We didn’t.”

Could the greatest legal advocate of his time be so foolish as to approve such a clumsy bribery scheme? “I am as fit for jury bribery as a Methodist preacher,” Darrow said. “If you 12 men think I’m going to pick a spot a block from my office, send a man with money to the street corner in broad daylight and hand out four thousand dollars, find me guilty. I definitely belong to a government agency.”

Darrow insisted that he had been indicted for the views he espoused. “I’m not on trial for trying to bribe a man named Lockwood,” Darrow told jurors. “I am being tried for being the lover of the poor, the friend of the oppressed, for standing by labor for all these years and for incurring the wrath of the criminal interests in this country. “Whether guilty or innocent of the crime charged in the indictment, that is why I am here and why I am being pursued by the cruelest gang that has ever pursued a human being.”

Darrow cried. The audience cried. Jurors cried. One of the prosecutors even called it “one of the most magnificent speeches ever made in any courtroom” but added: “This has very little to do with his guilt and innocence.”

Jurors deliberated for less than 40 minutes before acquitting Darrow. But early the following year he was tried again, this time on charges of attempting to bribe a second juror, a carpenter named Robert Bain. This time, he did not defend the lack of justification because this attempt took place long before the settlement talks began.

In March 1913, the jury was deadlocked. Eight people voted to convict. Four people requested acquittal. Los Angeles prosecutors dropped the case, and two years after getting off the train in Los Angeles, the punished Darrow returned to Chicago.

“Everybody was sick of Darrow and wanted him to get on the train and get out of town,” said Nelson C. Johnson, author of “Darrow’s Nightmare: Los Angeles 1911-1913,” subtitled “The Forgotten.” The Story of America’s Most Famous Trial Lawyer.”

Johnson, a retired New Jersey judge, read Irving Stone’s “Clarence Darrow for the Defense” in his youth and was inspired by it in his pursuit of the law.

When asked why Darrow was important to him, Johnson replied: “The courage to believe. You will move me.” He added: “You stand by your client when things go bad and you know the prospects are pretty ugly, and you also know that you may not get paid at the end of the day. It’s a sacred trust when you get to represent a client. That person puts their life in your hands and says, ‘Please help me.’ “Every once in a while you have a client, you are their only friend.”

Even now, many lawyers talk this way about Clarence Darrow. It makes them emotional.

Nelson’s conclusion: Darrow “probably wasn’t guilty.” The four jurors who sided with him in the second trial saved him from historical obscurity.

“If he had been found guilty, you and I wouldn’t be talking about him and I wouldn’t be writing that book,” Johnson said. “Once you were a convicted felon, you were never going to be a lawyer in any state, even in those days.”

Darrow’s most famous cases came after Los Angeles. He was in his late 60s in 1924 when he represented Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two Chicago teenagers who murdered a 14-year-old boy to demonstrate their excellent ability to commit the crime. He convinced a judge to spare their lives.

The following year, he defended a Tennessee teacher named John Scopes who was accused of teaching evolution. The duel between the agnostic Darrow and the evangelist William Jennings Bryan inspired the play “The Inheritance of the Wind.” A year after that, Darrow won an acquittal for a Black man accused of opening fire on a white crowd surrounding his brother’s home in Detroit.

USC law professor Geoffrey Cowan had such high regard for Darrow that he helped establish the Clarence Darrow Foundation to fund public interest law. But while researching his 1993 book, “People vs. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Case of America’s Greatest Lawyer,” Cowan concluded that the evidence against Darrow in the jury bribery scheme was strong.

“I completely believed Darrow and was convinced that Darrow was innocent,” Cowan told The Times. “I thought the most fun thing to do would be to spend some time investigating why he was being framed. That was my assumption, but as I started to investigate, I became convinced he was guilty.”

Many of Darrow’s friends and confidants had no trouble believing that he was behind the bribes. Even famed smuggler Lincoln Steffens, who testified on his own behalf at the trial, wrote in a private letter: “Do I care if he’s guilty as hell?”

Cowan said he struggled with whether he was right to accuse Darrow, although he wasn’t exactly sure. “I concluded that the standard for the writer might be more like the civilian standard of ‘more likely than not’,” he said. “I wanted him to be a hero. But he was flawed. If you’re trying to empathize and say, ‘Okay, what was he feeling?’ “I think he thought (the McNamaras) weren’t going to get a fair shake, that everything was stacked against them.”

Los Angeles was a booming city in the early 1910s and a war zone between the forces of labor and capital.

“We no longer tend to imagine Los Angeles as the Wild West,” Cowan said. This did not justify the jury’s intervention, but “there were some very brutal fights. “Something was wrong.”

Sources include “Darrow’s Nightmare: Los Angeles 1911-1913” by Nelson C. Johnson, “The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer” by Geoffrey Cowan, and “Clarence Darrow” by Geoffrey Cowan : A One-Man Play”. David Rintels, adapted from “In Defense of Clarence Darrow” by Irving Stone.

Sign up for Essential California to get news, features and recommendations from the LA Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.

This story first appeared on: Los Angeles Times.