University Place

cc >> Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. Prior to 9/11, the terrorist act that caused the greatest loss of life for American policemen took place back in November 24, 1917. It happened in Milwaukee. It was a strange situation in many ways, and the legal ramifications and repercussions were just as strange and, in some ways, even today still mysterious. My guest is going to give us some idea as to what happened and how certain personalities got involved. He's Dean A Strang, adjunct professor at the UW Madison and also Marquette. He's a criminal defense lawyer in Madison and also the author of a book on the subject.

It's Worse Than the Devil

Anarchists, Clarence Darrow, and Justice in a Time of Terror. Welcome to University Place Presents. >> Thank you for having me. >> The largest act of terror in terms of loss of life for American policemen up until 9/11 and yet virtually forgotten. >> It is. It is virtually forgotten, but nine police officers died in the bombing of the Central Police Station in Milwaukee in November 1917. That's two more officers than died at Haymarket Square in Chicago back in 1886 when a bomb was tossed into the crowd there. >> Do we know what the purpose was? >> Of the bomb? >> Yes. >> It was not to blow up a police station. The bomb had been placed against the wall of an Italian Methodist church some blocks away. >> Italian Methodist church. Right away there's something a little different about this case. >> That's right. That's right. A Methodist church on the northern edges of what was then and is now known as the Third Ward in Milwaukee. The bomb was placed against the wall of the church there and clearly intended to blow up and kill people in addition to doing property damage at the church. >> What kind of enemies would an Italian Methodist church have in Milwaukee in 1917? >> Well, it wasn't the church. It was the man who founded the church. Reverend August Giuliani, an apostate Roman Catholic priest, met a Protestant missionary in Italy when he was a priest there. She was from America. They fell in love. He immigrated to America. They eventually married. He converted from Catholicism to Methodism and began working within Milwaukee's original Italian community, which largely had settled in and was centered still, in 1917, in the Third Ward. >> And, so, we have somebody who has a vendetta against this convert to Methodism, Giuliani. >> None of this is ever proven, but it's reasonable to suppose that the people who placed the bomb were upset about some events that had occurred down in Bay View in Milwaukee about three miles, as the crow flies, south of the Third Ward a couple of months before the November 1917 bomb disaster. >> So, give us a picture of Milwaukee at this time in 1917. Certainly a city of immigrants. >> Milwaukee very much is a city of immigrants. It's, I think, the 10th largest city in the United States at the time. It is a bustling, significant industrial center. And when we say it's a city of immigrants, Milwaukee, during this time, had the highest percentage of residents who either were foreign born themselves or whose parents were foreign born. Highest percentage of any American city. There were a lot of large immigrant centers in the United States, but as a percentage matter, Milwaukee was the city of freshest immigrants at the time. >> So, a place of considerable change and, you might say, ferment. >> Absolutely. And among these immigrant groups there had been two waves of Italian immigrants. Bay View, as distinct from the Third Ward, largely was peopled by Italians who had arrived in the later wave of Italian immigration. The Third Ward Italians, mostly had fled famine or privation, were from the southern part of the boot in Sicily. The Bay View Italians, who came in the early part of the 20th century as opposed to the waning decades in the 19th century, they were central and northern. And they weren't fleeing for food so much, but rather were, I think, discontent with the political situation in Italy if we're going to generalize. >> So they were relatively prosperous compared to the ones in the Third Ward? >> No, it was just the other way around. >> Other way around. >> The Italians in Bay View were much newer, not assimilated as well as many in the Third Ward had become, and, indeed, the Third Ward Italians had begun to move into other neighborhoods in the city, up toward Brady Street and west to some extent. The Bay View Italians were by and large unassimilated. Many of them not yet English speakers, and almost all of them at the lowest rungs of the employment ladder in this country, working in very dirty, hard, back-breaking, and often dangerous mill work. >> Was Milwaukee at this time, as so many other places seem to have been, a city of labor unrest? >> It certainly was becoming that. It was participating, I guess, in the labor turmoil that was spreading across America in the late 19th century and the first two, three decades of the 20 century. And certainly the Bay View Italians, I think many of them were discontent with an America that didn't match the dreams or the illusions they might have had of it when they boarded a ship in Italy and set sail for here. >> Well, let's go back to Reverend Giuliani, and here's another image of him in a more familial context. Any threats against him before this bomb is found beside his church? >> Well, Giuliani has, back in the late days of summer 1917, has led three successive trips, if you will, by his congregation from the Third Ward down to Bay View. They hope on the streetcar, they get down to Bay View on Sunday afternoons beginning in late August 1917. There to speak with the Italians who clustered in what was called the Italian Colony of Bay View. His motives, his purposes, of these trips for this congregation are murky at this remove. He insisted, and his congregants supported him on this, he insisted that his purpose was really patriotic in a sense, to come down and talk to the Bay View Italians in their own language about their obligation as new Americans to support America's war effort. >> America had just joined the war in April 1917. >> President Wilson had led us into World War I in April 1917, so this is four or five months into the war effort. There's a draft on, and he describes his purpose as rallying support for the American cause and the allied cause in World War I. At least some of the Italians in the neighborhood, in the colony, took his purposes differently, took them as evangelistic, took them as a Protestant lecturing to them about the mistakes of Catholicism. Now, it may have been a mix or this may have been a situation where it was all in the eye of the beholder. But, for whatever reason, Giuliani's message didn't sit well with many in the Italian Colony. And there was hooting and cat calling and sort of threats to toss the minister and his congregation into the lake on the first Sunday. The following Sunday there's an escalation of this sort of tension. On the third Sunday, Giuliani had the idea that maybe he ought to approach the police department before going back down to Bay View, and he sought and was granted accompaniment by four plain clothed police officers who mixed in and mingled among the crowd on the street corner where Giuliani held his rally. And on that third Sunday, again the shouting, the threats escalated, becomes very tense, and when one of the plain clothed officers moves in and handles one of the local Italians a little more roughly than those in the neighborhood thought appropriate, shooting and a general riot breaks out. >> Had there been any bombings in Milwaukee before this? >> Sure. There had been bombings in Milwaukee. The Black Hand, a form of organized crime associated, at least in the media, with Italians, was thought to have placed bombs here and there related to disputes private or more public. So bombs were not uncommon. Dynamite was readily available and people were learning how to use it for really injurious purposes. >> The Italians, many of the ones that we would associate with the Third Ward, would be factory workers? Laborers, certainly, as you mentioned. >> In the Third Ward, the earlier wave of Italian immigrants, actually many of them were involved in the fresh produce business. >> Sure. Being grocers. >> Or green grocers, as you say, brokerage of produce, they're becoming a merchant class, if you will. Clerks, merchants, shop owners, sort of a petite bourgeoisie to resort to an old fashioned term. The Italian immigrants down in Bay View still very much are in the manual day labor occupations of the day. >> Would this be a factory where some of them would have worked that we're seeing here? Or typical for many of those? >> We're looking at the factory. >> The factory. >> That supported the Italian colony. And, indeed, what was described then as the Italian colony, that sort of northern part of Bay View near the lake, really was sustained by this steel rolling mill. It was a facility of the Illinois Steel Company. Vast rolling mill. And it owned some company housing in the Italian Colony, so many of the Italians living there at the time in 1917 were both working in the mill and then paying part of their meager wages back to the mill as rent on the rooming house or the small cottage in which they might have lived. Others were maybe working in dry good store or grocery stores. Just small businesses, taverns, that supported the neighborhood and its primary industry. >> And here's a look at the neighborhood from where the factory would be on the map of Milwaukee. >> Right. This is map from about 1916. So it's, essentially, a contemporaneous map of, as I say, sort of the northeast corner of the neighborhood known now and then as Bay View. And you can see in the scope, I don't know that this is to scale, but you get a sense of the size of the rolling mill there on the lake. It sits, there's been some land fill in the intervening decades, but it sits approximately where the foot of the Hoan Bridge empties on to the surface streets and where the offices of the Port Authority of Milwaukee are today. >> So, we see, in 1917, a Milwaukee that has considerable flux in its population. A very large population of first or brand new generation Americans. We have difficult life for a lot of these Italians in particular, and then we have this convert to Methodism, this fellow Italian who is raising some animosity. That brings us to this bomb beside this Italian Methodist church in Milwaukee. What happens? >> Well, as I say, the third Sunday ended disastrously. Shooting, fighting, and then people fleeing the shooting. And when the smoke cleared after a couple of minutes, it really was a very quick episode, one Italian was dead in the street, another was mortally wounded and would die several days later. Two police officers had been grazed by bullets. And so the police, of course, descend on the neighborhood, and for about the next 24 hours, a large number of police officers are going door to door, knocking doors down, arresting now, asking questions later. They're really sort of swarming the neighborhood. >> This is like, what, 50 years before Miranda rights. >> Absolutely. And niceties like search warrants were dispensed with. So the police arrests dozens of denizens in the neighborhood. Then that number eventually shakes down to 11 who are charged with assault with intent to kill the police officers. Those 11 are in jail awaiting trial right across the street, actually, from the Central Police Station when, on Saturday, November 24, 1917, the bomb is discovered at the church. So, the connection was clearly drawn by the mainstream press immediately, the police, and the broader public that since the bomb seems to have been targeted against August Giuliani, the minister, and he was the protagonist in the events in Bay View back on September 9, it must have been supporters of the 11 accused who placed the bomb. Now, of course, the 11 themselves couldn't have. >> Because they were already in jail. >> They were in jail. >> You use the word "when the bomb was discovered" at the church. It didn't blow up at the church. >> It did not blow up at the church. The nine-year-old daughter of the cleaning woman discovers it on Saturday morning, alerts her mom. The cleaning woman and the settlement worker who's in charge of the church that day, Giuliani actually is out of town, he's up in Markesan, Wisconsin, to deliver a guest sermon at a church there, but when the settlement worker and the cleaning woman pick up the package which they thought looked suspicious and assumed was a bomb, they drag it down into the basement of the church and spend, literally, hours sort of looking at it and poking at it. >> Oh, it looks like a bomb. >> Absolutely. And trying to figure out what to do with this thing. And late in the afternoon, somebody gets the bright idea, maybe we ought to call the police. The church doesn't have a phone, but the YWCA, right behind to the west, does have a phone. Somebody scampers to the YWCA, calls the police, and I think it's probably shift change. It's late in the afternoon, but for whatever reason a police officer does not quickly appear at the church to take charge of the bomb. So the settlement worker decides, well, I've got some teenage boys among our congregation here, maybe what I'll do is dispatch a couple of them to carry the suspicious package up to the police station since the police haven't come for it. And that's exactly what happens. Two 17-year-old boys make the seven- or eight-block trek up to the Central Police Station, literally walk in, hand the package to the desk sergeant. He recognizes it as a bomb, or at least probably a bomb, but thinks that the handiwork looks different and better, more sophisticated than some of the other bombs the police have seen. So he figures the detectives really ought to take a look at the bomb. It gets taken into the detectives assembly room, they huddle around to examine the handiwork of the bomb, and it explodes. >> It's just remarkable to think of that today, isn't it? >> It is remarkable. And tragic. But, so far as you can assemble the story from the contemporary accounts in the newspapers, only the lieutenant, who was the shift commander in charge of the station that Saturday night, only he has the bright idea that they ought to get the bomb out of the police station. What they should have done at the time was drop it in a pail of water, but nobody suggested that, nobody thinks to do it, and it's too late. >> Loss of life is? >> Nine police officers and a very unfortunate woman, civilian who had just ducked into the detectives assembly room because she didn't want to see an acquaintance of hers who was walking into the police department at the time. She was truly in the wrong place at the wrong moment. >> And this is a look here of, well, the first person you would recognize, perhaps the only one most people would recognize, would be Theodore Roosevelt. >> There he is, in the center of the picture. This photograph's taken in 1912. >> The date of another big crime in Milwaukee. >> A crime that will happen several hours after this photograph is taken. Theodore Roosevelt has just arrived at the rail depot in Milwaukee. As I say, it's 1912 and the presidential campaign season is on. This is autumn 1912. Roosevelt had served as president from 1901 to early 1909. >> 1909, right. >> After the 1908 election. Taft had replaced him, initially with Roosevelt's blessings. By the end of Taft's first term, and only term, Roosevelt's not very happy with the direction of the Republican party, and he gets in and runs. >> On this Bull Moose ticket, a third party ticket. >> As a third party candidate in 1912. So he's visiting Milwaukee on a campaign stop. I included the picture in the book more because of the gentleman who's to the left as we're looking at the picture. The tall, barrel-chested police officer there is Lieutenant Robert Flood, the man who would be, some five years later, the shift commander the night the bomb explodes in the Central Police Station, and the man who at least had the sense to say get that thing out of here. >> So, he was in a couple of key places, because in 1912, to finish that story, Teddy Roosevelt's giving a speech in Milwaukee and he's shot. >> He's shot shortly before he's to give the speech. The speech is to be at the Hotel Gilpatrick, I think essentially over the dinner hour. Today we would say that Roosevelt was being stalked by a gentleman who was a couple bubbles off plum, wasn't a Milwaukeean, John Flammang Schrank, who's been following the ex-president around the country believing that he's been commissioned by God, or some voice, to kill the ex-president, and he tries to exactly that in the crowd outside the Hotel Gilpatrick. He shoots the president, the ex-president, once before he's tackled by part of Roosevelt's retinue and bystanders. The bullet hits Roosevelt essentially in his chest but happens to hit both a silver cigarette case and the folded speech. >> A nice, long speech, fortunately for Roosevelt. >> Fortunately for Roosevelt. It was probably a real stem-winder. The pages are folded in the pocket behind the cigarette case, and, although the bullet drew blood, essentially the speech and the cigarette case prevent it from being a fatal wound. This is when Roosevelt, who really is stunned and, I think, in shock, nonetheless is able to gather himself back up by the time that his speech is scheduled and very famously delivers the speech, roaring at the audience that it takes more than one bullet to stop a Bull Moose. >> So, Milwaukee is a place that already is used to this kind of, I'll just say excitement for lack of a better word, and so in 1917 this bomb has gone off, has killed nine policemen and two civilians. >> One civilian. >> One civilian. And there's an investigation, but what can you investigate? What evidence was there to go on? >> Of the bomb explosion? Not much in that day. The law enforcement community really didn't have its own forensic scientists at the time, so the police drew on the services of a chemist over at a large local factory who was able to tell them the basic materials used in the construction of the bomb. They were able to tell that the bomb had been packed with screws and bolts and heavy metal slugs, nails, that kind of thing. It was intended to kill people. Not at all unlike the Boston Marathon bombs of our own very recent day. >> But where do they go from there? >> Almost nowhere. There's very little federal law enforcement presence at that time. The federal law enforcement apparatus really isn't very developed in 1917, and then you have the Milwaukee Police Department. The interconnectivity, if you will, of law enforcement is nothing like it is today. And although in the day or two or three after the bomb exploded, the police round up what we can assume are sort of usual suspects. They do round up a number of people, bring them in for questioning, hold them incommunicado for a time. In the end, no one is charged, ever. >> And these suspects would be, what? Anarchists? >> Well, they certainly would have been Italian. >> Italians. >> And they would have been suspected of anarchist leanings. They would have been radicals of their day, which often meant anarchists. Also could mean socialists or labor activists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, so-called Wobblies for example. And the lines were blurry, at least down at the street level. I think the lines got blurred between some of these distinct ideologies. But they all would have been viewed as radicals or malcontents of their day. As they say though, no one confesses and no one's prosecuted for the bomb in the end. >> Is anyone held? >> Held for a few days. Ultimately everyone is released. >> All right, so we have a bombing, fatal bombing, no suspects. >> That's right, but we have someone to blame. >> But where do you go with that legally? >> We have at hand, we have at hand the 11 Italians who are being held. >> Who clearly didn't do it. >> No, but whose supporters were assumed to have done it, and may well have done it for all I know. The linkage to Giuliani is unmistakeable. And those 11 are set to go on trial just five days after the police station bomb. >> For this other altercation. >> For the September melee down in Bay View. So they are ready and available surrogates for the public anger and, I think, the police frustration and anger and grief over the loss of their colleagues. >> So, let's look at the cast of characters as the courtroom drama shapes up, the presiding judge? >> A man named August Backus. Progenitor, actually, of a long and prominent line in Milwaukee lawyers, some of whom are still practicing today. Backus had been district attorney himself as a young man, went from there to the bench in what is still a popular path, and was a relatively young man at the time of this trial in 1917. He's credited locally in Wisconsin with being the father, if you will, of juvenile probation. But he presides over the trial of the 11. >> And the district attorney? >> Fascinating. Fascinating guy by the name of Winfred Zabel. Purely local character or a character of purely local interest in many ways, statewide interest, but a very, very ambitious, grasping young prosecutor who clearly also drifted a great deal from the idealism of his socialist leanings when he's first elected. He runs as a member of the socialist party. >> A lot of socialism in Milwaukee at that time. >> When he's first elected in 1910, later becomes a Republican after World War I, but most importantly becomes a really very corrupt and dark and troubling figure who was quite quick to abuse the power of his office. >> So, this is largely viewed, I think, as a political crime. Does that mean that the defense and the prosecution tend to have political themes to their careers? If we look at the defense attorney, for example, does he tend to do labor cases or immigrant cases? >> Well, the lead defense lawyer for the 11 certainly was someone who was liberal. He had left-leaning views and, specifically, was a real sympathizer with organized labor. Very much a supporter of organized labor, and his passion as a lawyer was labor work. Now, Bill Rubin, the man about whom we're speaking, William Benjamin Rubin, is not a radical. He is by no stretch of the imagination a radical, but he is a left-leaning man who's got a strong sympathy for working people and their efforts to organize at the time. He's a bit more than just a local figure. Bill Rubin deserves at least a national footnote in labor history. He is the first outside chief counsel to the American Federation of Labor. Serves in that outside capacity for about 25 years as a close adviser to Samuel Gompers and the leadership of other unions that comprised the American Federation of Labor. >> We can see him with Gompers here, I think a couple years after the trial. >> Right. This is a photo taken in June of 1919 on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Rubin is in the straw boater hat on our left, and that's the very diminutive Samuel Gompers, labor leader, on the right in the sunglasses. >> And there's another character who's not actually part of the legal proceedings but is a celebrity associated with these causes, and that's Emma Goldman. >> And she very much is interested in the plight of the 11 Milwaukee Italians. She follows it really from the outset. When I say follows it, she's writing about it in Mother Earth News and then later in the Mother Earth. >> So, she's a prominent socialist? >> She's a prominent anarchist. She's probably America's most famous anarchist. Now, she's Russian born, but she came to the United States as a teenage girl, politically was sort of forged in the events of the Haymarket... >> Riots. >> Riots or disaster, and becomes a leaning anarchist thinker and advocate in America. She's really very interested in the case involving these 11, whom she regards as by and large apolitical, having no discernible political ideology, but recognizes that they're being painted as anarchists in the mainstream press. The public is fired up that not only are these unwelcome immigrants, but they're radicals. >> So, they have an advocate in the press, a well-known advocate in the press. >> They have at least one out in New York in Emma Goldman. >> And, before the trial proceeds here, we have a couple of views of city hall, which would have been a focus of attention back in 1917 when this was happening. >> City hall is where the case of the 11 was tried. In that day, and actually up until the very early 1960s, there was a court called the Milwaukee Municipal Court which is very different than the municipal courts we think of today. Milwaukee Municipal Court had principle felony jurisdiction in Milwaukee at the time, and it sat on the fourth floor of the city hall. The courtroom was there. Here's another view of Milwaukee's beautiful Romanesque city hall. This one is taken from the east looking west, and it's taken from the roof, I think, either of the Central Police Station or of the armory that sat immediately to the east of the Central Police Station. >> The Central Police Station somehow survived this blast? >> Oh, it didn't fall. No, the building didn't fall. It was largely destroyed on the first floor. The interior was largely destroyed on the first floor, at least at the corner of the public entrance. All of the windows on the first floor were blown out, but the building did not come down. It was taken down later, but it didn't come down at the time. >> All right, so this trial we have, we have this bomb that's blown up in Milwaukee, planted next to a church but taken to the police station, Central Police Station, blows up, kills 10 people, nine of whom are policemen, police detectives, and we have 11 Italians who are already in jail at the time that it happens who are going on trial for what's considered to be a related event or crime. >> Well, legally, of course, they're completely unrelated crimes. >> Completely unrelated. >> Completely. >> There seems to be some understanding that there's a connection there that we can't get anybody for this bombing but we can get these guys for this crime and that will do. >> We've got surrogates at hand. And, indeed, the bombing really infects the entire trial of the 11. The trial, as I say, was scheduled to begin just five days after the bombing, a little more than a block away from the smoldering wreckage. >> No change of venue for this one. >> The judge denied a change of venue on the first day of trial. The defense certainly sought it. That was denied. The prosecution was allowed to change the charges that it was pursuing on the morning of trial. An adjournment is denied. Next best to a change of venue from the defense perspective would be an adjournment to at least allows passions to cool a bit. >> Right. >> Some time to pass between burying nine police officers and trying the people whose supporters were thought to have killed the police officers. All of that's denied by the judge. And Zabel, who, as the elected district attorney, took the lead in this high profile case prosecuting the 11, Zabel repeatedly injected the bombing into this trial and really sought to try these 11 on the notion that they were dangerous, violent anarchists who needed to be convicted of some crime. >> Something. >> Lest they place a bomb outside your window if they go free. >> And did the jury buy it? What happened? >> The jury bought it but fast. The trial went about three weeks, just under three weeks of testimony, and the jury deliberated for exactly 17 minutes before returning guilty verdicts against all 11 defendants. >> And what would the punishments be then? What would be the sentences? >> Well, that turns out to be sort of thematic in a sense here. One of the things that was clear, one of the feelings from a lawyer's vantage point of this trial was that these 11 people never were viewed as individuals with possibly different levels of culpability, different motives, different life stories. They weren't viewed that way by their own lawyer, who represented 10 of them. They certainly weren't viewed that way by the prosecutors, by the court system, the media. The media couldn't bother to get the spellings of their names correct or even to spell them consistently from day to day. So they're really treated as an indistinguishable mass. And that's exactly how Judge Backus treated them at sentencing as well. Made no effort to differentiate responsibility among the 11 or different life circumstances, but sentenced all 11 to the same 25 years at hard labor in the only state prison at the time, Waupun. >> So, there was recourse to appeal. Sounds as if things were pretty sketchy in terms of the legal proceedings. Did the appeal become a story too? >> It does. The appeal becomes a fascinating story, for all kinds of reasons I think. Emma Goldman plays a key role in the early days of the appeal. She makes the same mistake. As interested as she is, and in some ways as sophisticated as she is, she makes the same mistake families and clients make today, which is not focusing on the trial in the first instance but viewing that as sort of a dress rehearsal to an appeal and finally sort of bringing resources to bear on the appeal. If you win the trial, you don't have to take an appeal.

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It's Worse Than the Devil

>> That's right. >> But Goldman spearheads a nationwide drive to raise a defense fund for the appeal. And she probably, I can't prove this, the record doesn't establish this conclusively, but it's reasonable to speculate that she probably is the one who reaches out to a casual acquaintance of hers in Chicago, where she's staying in early 1918 as this appeal is in its early days. She reaches out to another Chicagoan named Clarence Darrow. >> Even then, this is seven years before the notorious Scopes trial, he's still one of the most famous attorneys in America. >> He's the most famous lawyer in America in 1917 and has been for several years, both as a labor lawyer and, in the years after 1912, primarily as a criminal defense lawyer. So Darrow takes the appeal. That's interesting in itself in that Darrow is, rightly remember, primarily is a trial lawyer. He is not someone who's much given to writing briefs and plowing through law books and pouring over transcripts of a trial. But he takes this appeal and is the lead lawyer. I think he delegates much of the brief writing to a younger partner named Peter Sissman, but it is Darrow's appeal, thanks in part to the nickels and dimes that people all over the country have sent in response to Emma Goldman's appeal for money. >> And, so, he's presenting this appeal. Is this also, I assume there's a variety of written briefs on this, but I assume he's also giving an oral argument? >> Right. Right. Appeals proceeded much then as they do now. Each side files briefs, and then if it's in the state supreme court, as this one was, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, there's typically a oral argument and there was. In this case, we don't know much about the oral argument, but what we do know is that in early April 1919, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reverses nine of the 11 convictions. >> Simply, you mean, overturns them? In other words, frees these nine? >> Seven of the nine are freed, are freed altogether. Two have their cases remanded or sent back to the trial court for a possible retrial. And then two have their convictions affirmed. The remaining two of the 11. >> Twenty-five years of hard labor? >> Yep. Yep. Although, it doesn't play out that way. It doesn't turn out that way in the end. The seven, of course, who were freed, euphemistically go free. In fact, they go into the arms of the Federal Labor Department and are deported in relatively short order. The two who could have been retried weren't. Winfred Zabel never sought to retry the remaining two. The two who had their convictions affirmed remained in prison for another three years. And, in 1922, Darrow, still working for those two, secures from Governor Blaine a commutation of the sentences of those remaining two. >> When commutations were fairly common. >> Were not at all uncommon back then. They, too, get hardly a gulp of air as free men because their transferred right from the state authorities in Waupun to the Labor Department and deported as well. >> So, nine deports and two hard labors? Or we just end up with everybody out? >> I think everybody is out, or at least the federal government, I think, tried to deport everybody. I'm not sure they got all 11. What I do know is that at least three who were deported came back to the United States later, years later. They came back, they appear to have come back legally, and died in the United States. >> So we consider this a victory for Clarence Darrow? >> It certainly was a victory for Darrow, and, in a sense, a victory for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which comported itself really very well in this appeal and was the first judicial institution, the first institution in our criminal justice system to look at each of these 11 people as individuals. What was the evidence against this one and then this one and then this one, and really gave them the dignity of individual treatment. And, as I say, freed seven of them rightly. There clearly was no evidence that seven of these people had committed any crime at all. Darrow and Winfred Zabel, the prosecutor stayed with the appeal, not so clear. After the commutations in 1922, there's a grand jury proceeding going in Milwaukee that really only tangentially touches on this case, but where it does intersect with this case is fascinating because the assistant district attorney who had tried the case for the state at Zabel's elbow back in 1917, had some very interesting sworn testimony to offer the grand jury in the early 1920s about this case. What he said was that in the months after the convictions and the sentence, so in the early months of the appellate process, that he and his boss Winfred Zabel were so afraid by the death threats and some overt attempts that had been made against them that the two of them, Zabel and this assistant DA, decided why don't we go down to Chicago on the train from Milwaukee. You, Mr. Zabel, know Clarence Darrow who's just agreed to take the appeal. Why don't we take the train down and visit Mr. Darrow and suggest to him that if he will reach out to his clients or their friends and call off the attempts on our lives and the threats against us, that we will be willing to help falsify the record on appeal to raise the ads, at least, that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will perceive error where there was none and reverse the convictions of his 11 clients. We're worth more to your clients, Mr. Darrow, alive than we are dead. And that's what Zabel and the assistant prosecutor, according to the testimony of the assistant, that's what they decide to do and that's what they do. They go down, they visit Darrow, they have this meeting, and we don't know in the end whether, in fact, the trial record was altered corruptly on appeal. Why? Because the assistant prosecutor who's giving this damning testimony himself leaves office before the appeal is completed. He quits. Leaves the district attorneys office. So, he at least claims not to know whether Zabel and Darrow ever followed through on the agreement to falsify the record on appeal. At least there's sworn testimony that there was an agreement to do that. >> So, clearly, there were some irregularities in this case. >> There may have been. There may have been. And the coda, if you will, the delicious irony of this is that if, in fact, Darrow and Zabel, with the judge's complicity, falsified this trial record to create the appearance of error, if, in fact, they did that, that's not what won the appeal. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in fact, reversed on grounds that could not have been falsified by corrupt lawyers. So, if, in fact, these folks agreed to corrupt the appellate process and then took steps to do so, if they did that, it was for naught. They were trying to fix an appeal that the defense was destined to win on the merits. >> So, in that sense, you could say the justice system was the winner despite some attempts to short circuit it here and there. >> Well, you could say that a happy accident cured an unhappy accident of the wrongful convictions. >> But the overriding, I guess, oversight in this whole thing is that the actual bombing, the perpetrators remain mysterious. >> They go unpunished. In much more recent years, in the 1980s, a professor out in New York at the city University of New York named Paul Avrich, who was professor of Russian history and really the leading American scholar on anarchist history, floated the view that he had identified the two men who made the Milwaukee bomb. But his citation and his explanation of the reasons for his conclusions are pretty sketchy. In the end, he may have been right, he may have correctly identified the makers of the bomb, but I don't know. It's just not as well documented as one might have hoped. >> So, it will remain like something of a mystery, but a fascinating look into the legal system as it was in Wisconsin in that year of 1917 and years following. >> I think so anyway. >> Well, it's certainly been a fascinating conversation with you, Dean Strang. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Norman Gilliland, and I hope you can join me next time around for University Place Presents.