Frick's Assailant Railroaded to the Penitentiary—The Iams Trial—Hanging by the Thumbs Approved by a Jury—The Mills Filling Up—Sermons to Non-Unionists—Strikers Go Through the Plant—The Relief Fund—Gompers Arrives and Makes an Incendiary Speech—Pittsburgh and Mahoning Manufacturers Capitulate—William and Robert Pinkerton on the Defensive.
ANARCHIST Berkman received but a short shrift. He was placed on trial before Judge McClung on September 19, appearing at the bar without an attorney and without witnesses. His demeanor was cool and indifferent. District Attorney Burleigh presented six indictments, charging the prisoner with offenses ranging from felonious assault and battery down to carrying concealed weapons.
Mr. Frick was placed on the stand and told the story of the shooting, and the blood-stained garments worn by the Carnegie chairman at the time of the attack were put in evidence. Corroborative testimony was furnished by Mr. Leishman and others.
The prosecution having closed its case, Berkman asked to be permitted to testify in his own behalf. "I am not guilty," he said. "I have a defense." A German interpreter was assigned to assist him. The Anarchist's defense consisted of an inflammatory address covering forty pages of closely written foolscap. As rendered into English by the interpreter, sentence by sentence, it was almost unintelligible. It proved, however, to be a review of the "blood-stained register of America," beginning with the "murder" of John Brown, cropping out again in the execution of the Chicago Anarchists who were concerned in the Haymarket massacre, and culminating in the descent of the Pinkertons upon Homestead. The statement bristled with denunciations of capitalists as tyrants who oppress the workingmen, and the inference which it finally conveyed was that Berkman considered himself a martyr of the Chicago type whose exploits would serve to rivet the world's attention on the enormity of the Carnegie Company's crimes against labor. Strangely enough, it seemed not to dawn upon the mind of this young fanatic that he and his fellow preachers of anarchy could not possibly be mistaken as representing the element that toils for a subsistence, and that a martyr to the cause of beer, blood and idleness must necessarily be an object of contempt in the estimation alike of the classes and the masses.
THE CONDEMNATION OF IAMS.
Judge McClung confined his charge to a few perfunctory remarks and the jury, without leaving the box, rendered a verdict of guilty on all six indictments. Sentence was then imposed on each indictment, the penalties aggregating 22 years imprisonment, twenty-one in the penitentiary and one in the work-house.
The trial occupied just four hours, attesting that in this case at all events, justice ceased to travel with a leaden heel.
The Iams episode was not so easily disposed of. Prosecutions were entered against Colonels Hawkins and Streator and Surgeon Grim on the charge of aggravated assault and battery, and the defendants were held under bonds for trial at the September term of court. The trial began on October 27, before Judge W. D. Porter, and continued for ten days. The proceedings were watched with special interest by military men, owing to the issue involved between civil and military law and the prospective establishment of important precedents. Colonel J. R. Braddocks, of the Pittsburgh bar, State Senator Edward E. Robbins, of Greensburg, and J. M. Braden and Albert Sprowls, of Washington, Pa., appeared as counsel for the defendants; and Frank P. Iams, a cousin of the disgraced militiaman, and John D. Watson, both of the Pittsburgh bar, conducted the prosecution.
The defense opened the proceedings by demanding that the indictment be quashed on the ground that the punishment of Iams was commensurate with the enormity of his offense against good order and military discipline, that it conformed to military law, and that jurisdiction in the case properly belonged to a military tribunal. After some intricate controversy, Judge Porter denied the plea and ordered the trial to go on.