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137 8 Darrow L ate the day of sentencing, after he had returned to the office from court, Bill Rubin dictated a short note to a friend in New York City. “As you know, I lost the Italian Case,” he admitted. “With no chance on earth to get justice, we did not get it. The bomb explosion excited so much hatred and prejudice, and to be compelled to go to trial a couple of days after the burial of eleven [sic; the correct number was nine] policemen, made the whole thing a foregone conclusion. However, I expect to take the case to the Supreme Court, and hope for better results.”1 His letter included not a word about the sentences. Rubin was looking forward. And he was not alone in thinking immediately about an appeal to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. By Emma Goldman’s reckoning, the Milwaukee jury had convicted only two real anarchists. “The others are radicals of different shades,” she reported, “whose main offense consisted in fighting the Catholic Church.” Maria Nardini and her son drew Goldman’s special sympathy. Maria “is a woman without any ideas whatever, but evidently a fine brave spirit.” After the state wrested Areno from the Nardini relatives, “the whole situation seems too terrible to contemplate and will need competent hands to handle.”2 Goldman was America’s most prominent anarchist at the time, so her assessment carries some weight. But she also was sentimental and demonstrably wrong about some of her facts (she thought, for example, that the jury had convicted twelve defendants).3 As with so much else about the individual defendants, their true politics remained obscure even after their convictions. Locked away in the state prison in Waupun, the eleven had lost what little ability they ever had to seek a lawyer or pursue freedom. They could not help themselves. Their days passed in the tedium of manual labor and standing in line for food or head counts. They were lost to the world, and it was lost to them. 138 Darrow At a distance, though, Goldman and others remained keenly interested in their plight. Before trial, a sympathetic few had taken up the practical task of raising funds for a legal defense. As early as October 14, a man in Chicago wrote to Goldman ’s Mother Earth Bulletin to alert readers to the plight of the eleven Italians in Milwaukee. After urging the unjustness of the arrests, the writer came to his pitch. “There is another big job on hand. The lawyer wants $3,000 to take up their defense, $1,500 before the trial and the remainder afterwards. To tell the truth I have lost faith even in the lawyer, for I have found out it is just as bad to trust him as it is to trust bankers, in fact the lawyers are nothing but blood-suckers.”4 Sincere, but otherwise a clumsy appeal for contributions to the defense fund. Then as now, even the most charitably minded may not donate willingly to benefit a lawyer, let alone one portrayed as a human wood tick. The effort to raise money for the defense took on a more polished look only after the trial. Not a week after sentencing, Emma Goldman penned a letter to her own lawyer, the eminent Harry Weinberger of New York City, from a train en route to Chicago. She had met with William Judin, “one of our most active fellows,” who was arranging a Sunday meeting to take up the means of paying for an appeal for the Milwaukee eleven. Judin was to call on Weinberger in his office on Monday, January 7. Although Goldman clearly hoped that Weinberger would take the appeal, she assured Weinberger that she understood that he would need at least $200 for his time just to look into the case and that he then would assess what further fee he might require. “You can be blunt about it” with Judin, she closed.5 Just more than two weeks after she wrote to Weinberger, Goldman published a scathing article titled “The Milwaukee Frame-Up” in the January 1918 edition of Mother Earth Bulletin. She accused the police of framing the eleven and called the scheme “so cruel, deliberate and revolting as to arouse even the sluggish minds and hearts of those who never care what happens to others just so they are allowed to exist.”6 Continuing the gentle handling of lawyers’ egos that she had demonstrated in her...

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