High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

by Jim Rasenberger

  What followed, as related in McManigal’s breast-beating apologia, was his gradual descent into pyrotechnical perdition. Under Hockin’s direction, he blew up a non-union construction site in Detroit, then went on to perform other demolition jobs on behalf of the union, including a bridge in Clinton, Iowa, and another in Buffalo, New York. McManigal traveled the country by train, staying in hotels under aliases, slipping onto construction sites in the dead of night, then scurrying away as the 50-foot fuse burned toward its resolution under a steel girder.

  At first McManigal’s orders came from Hockin, but he soon came to understand that the man calling the shots stood higher in the union’s chain of command: it was John McNamara, the handsome and popular secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers. Still in his twenties at the time, John McNamara was an intelligent, charismatic, and extremely industrious young man. While carrying out his duties as secretary-treasurer, he managed to study law and gain admittance to the Indiana bar and to edit The Bridgemen’s Magazine, in which he combined helpful tips for ironworkers’ wives (“If a piece of lard about the size of a walnut be dropped into the cabbage pot it will not boil over”) with union business and anti-scab polemics. Between these other obligations, he also found time to oversee one of the most extensive industrial sabotage campaigns in the country’s history.

  The ironworkers were not the first group of disenchanted laborers to avail themselves of dynamite to settle a grievance. Indeed, the beady-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchist was already a stock caricature by the turn of the century. No one, though, had ever used dynamite with such deliberation and abandon as the ironworkers now proceeded to do. Between 1907 and 1911, the union would dynamite at least seventy structural steel jobs, including steel mills, factories, bridges, and buildings.

  In early December, at a hotel in Muncie, Indiana, Harry Hockin introduced Ortie McManigal to another of the union’s professional dynamiters, a tall and reedy man named J. B. Brice. McManigal thought Brice looked familiar; he bore an anemic likeness to John McNamara, the secretary-treasurer of the union. There was a good reason for this. J. B. Brice was the alias of James McNamara, John’s older brother. The elder McNamara was an alcoholic who had turned to dynamiting after losing his job as a printer. He had never succeeded at much of anything until he found his calling in blowing things up. He’d recently invented (or at least appropriated and improved) a new incendiary device called an “infernal machine.” Instead of a fuse, which gave the dynamiter about half an hour to escape, the infernal machine was triggered by a fulminating cap wired to an alarm clock. The dynamiters could set the explosion for a precise time and be hundreds of miles away when it went off.

  The day after they met, McManigal and McNamara drove into the country near Muncie to purchase some nitroglycerine from a well shooter. A far more powerful and dangerous explosive than dynamite, nitroglycerine—“the soup,” as the men called it—now became the ironworkers’ explosive of choice. One of the benefits of nitroglycerine was that it detonated with such force it left no evidence behind, not so much as a clock spring. The downside of nitroglycerine was its extreme volatility. Traveling the country by rail with their suitcases of “soup” beside them, the men were always one big bump or lurch away from vaporizing themselves and anyone who happened to be nearby.

  McManigal and McNamara crisscrossed the country for much of 1910, occasionally teaming up for big jobs. In mid-July, they parted ways. McNamara left for the West Coast on an important though secretive mission. McManigal continued to travel at a furious pace, setting off bombs in Omaha, then Duluth, then Kansas City. In late August, he arrived in Peoria, Illinois, and on a rainy evening in early September he planted four infernal machines, two under a crane at an iron foundry, two others in a railroad yard under some bridge girders stored there by the McClintic-Marshall steel erection company. Later that evening, three of the four bombs exploded. The fourth failed to detonate. This is the bomb that fell into the hands of William Burns.

  Detective William J. Burns was already moderately famous by the summer of 1910, having carved out a reputation as a brilliant U.S. Agent in several high-profile cases. Now he’d left government service for the more lucrative private sector. Burns counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Teddy Roosevelt among his friends. Conan Doyle called him “America’s Sherlock Holmes,” a description that must have pleased Burns greatly. He’d badly wanted to pursue acting as a young man and still had a flair for self-dramatizing affectations, like the sword cane he frequently carried. With his jowly face and small prissy mouth, Burns did not look quite the part of dashing hero, but he was lucky to live in an age when newspapers still favored lithographic depictions over photographs. Artists of the time gave him a lean, flinty countenance that fit agreeably with his image as America’s No. 1 Crime Stopper.

  Burns signed a contract with McClintic-Marshall, a company that had been harder hit than most by the dynamiting and had a special interest in hunting down the perpetrators. Burns suspected ironworkers from the start—no great deductive leap there—but had little hard evidence until Peoria. Ortie McManigal’s unexploded bomb led Burns and his detectives to a nitroglycerine wholesaler in Portland, Indiana. Clerks there recalled a customer named “J. W. McGraw,” a short, florid-faced man who wore a cap. It was a pretty good description of Ortie McManigal.

  At the end of September, Burns boarded a westbound train to attend a convention of his largest client, the American Bank Association. As fate would have it, the Great Detective was racing to Los Angeles at the very moment a massive explosion lit the skies over the dark city.

  OTISTOWN EXPLODES

  Trade unionists didn’t call the booming new city on the coast Los Angeles. They called it Otistown or, more completely, Otistown of the Open Shop. General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, held no political office but he effectively ruled the city with his money and influence. He was an odd and cantankerous old man who had served in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, and who continued to live in a perpetual state of combat readiness, dressing for work in uniform and mounting a small cannon on the hood of his car. He designed the headquarters of his newspaper to look like a medieval castle and named it “the Fortress,” while his new mansion on Wilshire Boulevard was “Bivouac” and his staff of reporters and editors were “the Phalanx.” General Otis occasionally drilled the Phalanx in the use of the fifty or so rifles he kept on hand in case of attack. Attack by whom? Why, his archenemy, of course: Organized Labor.

  Otis had almost singlehandedly made Los Angeles the least unionized city in the country. He despised unions. Since he knew the feeling was mutual, he fully expected union anarchists to target him and his empire. He became increasingly obsessed with self-defense over the summer of 1910, when laborites from San Francisco descended upon Los Angeles to make one last push to unionize the city. Otis may have been an eccentric but he was no paranoid. He had a good handle on how much some people wanted him dead.

  Early in the morning of October 1, 1910, just a few minutes past 1 A.M., as the night staff prepared the next day’s edition, an enormous blast rocked the Los Angeles Times headquarters. It tore through the south wall of the Fortress and blew out supports for the second floor, which collapsed under the burden of the linotype machines, which then fell through to the gas mains in the basement and severed them. Several more explosions occurred. The Fortress burned furiously. By the time the fire was extinquished the next morning, 21 people were dead and news of the explosion had raced around the country.

  Otis was in Mexico at the time of the explosion, but he immediately returned to Los Angeles. He managed to put out an abbreviated paper the same day, using printing presses in his auxiliary plant. “UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE TIMES,” exclaimed the paper’s headline. There was as yet no evidence to implicate anyone, but Otis didn’t hold back from shaking his fists and pointing his fingers. “O you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers,” he wrote, “you leeches upon ho
nest labor, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims….” Otis immediately headlined the explosion “The Crime of the Century.”

  Detective Burns was still aboard his westbound train when a porter woke him in his sleeping berth to hand him a telegram from the mayor of Los Angeles. The mayor informed Burns of the explosion and asked him to investigate on behalf of the city. Arriving in Los Angeles later the same morning, Burns immediately went to work. He caught a lucky break that first day when police discovered two unexploded bombs, one outside a window at Otis’s home, another at the home of a local anti-labor business leader. The police accidentally detonated the Otis bomb, but they successfully disarmed and examined the other. The explosive agent on this device was dynamite rather than nitroglycerine, but otherwise the contraption bore a marked similarity to the infernal machine that Burns had recovered and examined in Peoria a month earlier. The detective wasted no time in announcing the perpetrators of this national outrage. It was, he was sure, the ironworkers.

  Ortie McManigal was in Indianapolis at the time of the Los Angeles bombing. He first learned of it from a newspaper the following morning, or so he claimed. He paid a visit to union headquarters that same morning, where he found John McNamara “cheerfully” reading the news. The secretary-treasurer admitted that his older brother might have had something to do with the explosion. He then told McManigal that he wanted to follow up the blast in the west with “an immediate echo in the east.” He instructed McManigal to take eight quarts of nitroglycerin and board a train to Worcester, Massachusetts, to blow up a depot under construction by the Phoenix Bridge Company. McManigal promptly set out to do as told.

  As for James McNamara, McManigal did not see him again until early November. James had returned from the West Coast and was traveling under a new alias. He needed to lie low for a while, and McManigal, back from Worcester, wanted a vacation. The two men set off for a month-long hunting trip in the woods of northern Wisconsin. McNamara had gone a little “queer” since his Los Angeles venture. He was drinking heavily and looking even more anemic and ghoulish than usual. He told McManigal the story of his trip to Los Angeles: how he’d lent out his dynamiting services to a group of San Francisco radicals; that he never meant to kill so many people and was now terrified of getting caught; that he was haunted, certain that he was being watched wherever he went.

  He had good reason to feel haunted. William Burns and company had been shadowing Ortie McManigal for weeks, ever since the Peoria bombing. Indeed, at the very moment that James was spilling his guts to Ortie, two detectives from the Burns Agency were camped nearby in the woods, posing as friendly fellow hunters. One Sunday afternoon near the end of the trip, McNamara made the mistake of posing for a photograph with these men. That photograph would soon become a key tool in Burns’ investigation. Operatives would spread out across Los Angeles showing it to hotel and store clerks, asking questions and establishing McNamara’s presence in the city before the explosion.

  In the meantime, incredibly, both McManigal and McNamara returned to dynamiting. McManigal even carried out a Christmas Eve bombing in Los Angeles at the Llewellyn Iron Works. Burns detectives were hot on their trails the whole time but allowed the explosions to occur for the sake of evidence each crime generated. Finally, the detectives moved in.

  On April 12, 1911, McManigal and McNamara arrived together in Detroit and registered at the Oxford Hotel under assumed names. The hotel lobby was packed with a theater troupe and no rooms were immediately available, so the men checked their suitcases—each loaded with explosives and guns—and started out for the street, planning to return a few hours later to retrieve their luggage and claim their room. They were suddenly surrounded by several Burns detectives. The detectives, who had no warrants, no jurisdiction, and no right of extradition, hustled them to a train station and whisked them out of town, effectively kidnapping them in the name of the law. Ortie McManigal, whose flair for confession was as advanced as his knack for dynamiting, cracked the moment Burns’ men began to interrogate him.

  Detective Burns had everything he needed now. With McManigal’s confession in hand, he traveled to Indianapolis. There, on the evening of April 22, accompanied by local police and over a dozen of his own men, he burst in on a meeting of the executive board of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers and arrested John McNamara. While several of Burns’s men spirited the secretary-treasurer away, Burns and local police searched union headquarters through the night. They discovered, among other items, 100 pounds of dynamite in the basement. At a nearby barn rented by McNamara, they found a piano box packed with 17 sticks of dynamite and a couple of quarts of nitroglycerine.

  Meanwhile, Burns’s operatives drove McNamara by automobile to Terre Haute, Indiana, where they boarded a westbound Pennsylvania Flyer. In Dodge City, Kansas, the group changed trains to the California Limited. Already aboard that train, in another Pullman car, were McNamara’s brother, James, and Ortie McManigal. Prevented from reading newspapers or talking to fellow passengers, John was probably the only person in the country who didn’t know his brother was on the train with him. The arrest of all three men had been made public by now and their cross-country trip was causing a huge stir in the press, the New York Times calling it “one of the most remarkable trips ever made by officers with prisoners.” By the time the three men arrived at the Los Angeles County jail in separate automobiles on the afternoon of April 26, 1911, an enormous crowd had gathered to glimpse them. Nothing as extraordinary or as exciting as this had ever happened in Los Angeles.

  A few weeks after the McNamaras’ arrest, a tall, stooped, unkempt figure walked into their prison cells and introduced himself. The man did not look much like a beacon of salvation, but to the McNamaras he must have seemed exactly that, for he was none other than the “Great Defender” himself, Clarence Darrow. Today, Darrow is best remembered for defending the science of evolution in the landmark Scopes Trial of 1925, but in 1911 he was America’s favorite protector of the underdog and friend of the underclass. When union officials first approached him, Darrow was reluctant to take on the McNamara case; perhaps he had an inkling of the grief it would bring him. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (of which the ironworkers union was a member), implored him to reconsider, and he eventually did. He would have many opportunities to regret the decision.

  Gompers and virtually every high official in the labor movement treated the McNamaras’ arrest as a frame-up. They noted that the Fortress had been having problems with its gas system for weeks before October 1 and suggested this as the probable cause of the explosion. Some even hinted darkly that Otis himself planted a bomb as a ruse to defame unionists. Otis was a monster, Burns was a stooge, McManigal was a stool pigeon, the McNamaras were martyrs—this was the party line, and it wasn’t just unionists who bought it. The McNamaras’ arrest occurred at a moment when progressive ideas were taking root in an American public fed up with enormous corporations that treated workers like chattel, and the arrest of “the boys” struck a chord among many in the middle class. Progressives throughout the country rallied to the cause, holding fund-raisers and purchasing McNamara buttons and McNamara stamps. The highlight of many of these fund-raisers was a feature film about the McNamaras, in which two handsome young actors played the brothers. (Their bereaved mother and several union officials appeared as themselves.) In Los Angeles, marchers took to the streets by the tens of thousands. A Socialist, Job Harriman, ran for mayor and looked like a winner, thanks largely to pro-McNamara/anti-Otis fervor. A socialist mayor of Otistown? It must have seemed like a cruel joke—no, a demonic hallucination—to the General.

  And then, just as the trial was about to get under way, the pro-McNamara machine came to a crashing halt. Clarence Darrow had come to realize, thanks largely to information provided by his spies on the prosecution team, that the evidence against the McNamaras was overwhelming. The brothers’ only hope, h
e believed, was to make a deal with prosecutors and save themselves from the death penalty. On the afternoon of December 1, James pled guilty to the Times bombing. As for John, there was little evidence to connect him directly to the Times explosion, but there was plenty to prove he’d ordered McManigal’s Christmas Eve dynamiting of the Llewellyn Iron Works. John pled guilty to this lesser charge.

  “Please say to the papers that I am guilty, but I did what I did for principle, and that I did not intend to murder a man,” James told reporters from his cell in the county jail that night. “When I set that bomb, I only meant to scare those fellows who owned the Times.”

  For the millions of Americans who had supported the McNamaras and contributed to their defense, the guilty plea was a kick in the stomach—a knife in the back. A reporter found Samuel Gompers looking “depressed and haggard” in a New York hotel lobby the day after the plea. Some conservatives suspected that Gompers had known of the McNamaras’ guilt from the start—may even have had a hand in it—but Gompers insisted he was as shocked as the rest of the true believers. “We, who were willing to give our encouragement, our pennies, our faith, why were we not told all from the beginning? We had a right to know.” In Los Angeles, Job Harriman, the Socialist candidate for mayor who had seemed such a sure bet only weeks earlier, was easily defeated by the incumbent. The labor movement in Otistown was finished.

  James McNamara died in San Quentin prison in 1941 at the age of 59. John McNamara, released 20 years earlier, died two months later while attending a mine workers’ rally in Montana. He was 57.