by Howard Blum
D.W. Griffith—the man who invented Hollywood, and in the process transformed American life. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-34047
Clarence Darrow, the champion of populist (and often lost) causes was reluctantly recruited to defend the two brothers accused in the Times bombing. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-06468
All the rage and anger in the era fed Griffith’s imagination and led to his making A Corner in Wheat. “No editorial writer . . . could so strongly and effectively present the thoughts conveyed in this picture.” Courtesy of the Paper Print Collection of The Library of Congress
The ornate Alexandria Hotel was the place to stay in Los Angeles at the turn of the century. It was at the Alex, in the aftermath of the bombing, that the unique and complicated lives of Burns, Griffith, and Darrow intersected. Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
A cache of “soup”—dynamite—had been hidden by the conspirators in a locked piano box in the Jones barn. Billy Burns, a master showman, led police and reporters on a midnight raid to uncover the evidence. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-09156 and 09157
As the trial approached, the public relations war raged. In this flyer, labor trumpeted Darrow’s charge that habeas corpus had been suspended: The McNamaras had been kidnapped by Burns! Courtesy Archives & Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati
The entire case against the McNamara brothers was a “frame-up” insisted Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor. “Burns has lied.” (Left to right: Jim McNamara, Gompers, J.J. McNamara.) Courtesy Brown Brothers USA
Working with D.W., Mary Pickford became the nation’s first movie star. She looked young enough to be the direc-tor’s daughter, but Mary was the embodiment of D.W.’s deeper desires. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-57952
Ortie McManigal had been an active participant in the nationwide terror-ist attacks. But after he was caught, he testified against the McNamaras. Here he’s explaining to jurors how “the machine” used in more than a hundred bombings, including that of the Times Building, worked. Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, arrived in Los Angeles championing an argument for “justifiable dynamiting.” Steffens hoped it would make him “the McNamara of my profession.” He’d “blow-up” the trial. Courtesy Brown Brothers USA
Juror Robert Bain chases away an inquisitive reporter with a broom. But Bain hadn’t run off the member of the Darrow team who had offered him $4,000 to vote for acquittal. He took the money. Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
“And this is the truth,” Jim McNamara wrote in his confession, “. . . I placed in Ink Alley, a portion of the Times Building, a suitcase containing sixteen sticks of 80 per cent dynamite . . .” When the brothers changed their pleas to “guilty,” pandemonium filled the courtroom. Courtesy Archives & Rare Books Library, University of Cincinnati
Darrow was tried twice for bribing jurors in the McNamara case. He escaped conviction each time. “I know my life,” Darrow told the jury in an emo-tional summation at the first trial. “I know what I have done. My life has not been perfect. It has been human, too human.” Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
Frank Wolfe, a member of the McNamara defense team and a student of D.W.’s films, directed a commercially successful epic inspired by the case. Darrow, an instinctive actor, played himself—and stole the movie. The Moving Picture World (20 September 1913: volume 17, issue 12)
Energized by the politics swirling around him, Griffith looked back into history and created his master-piece, The Birth of a Nation. Birth was history as melodrama, flawed, and yet as Woodrow Wilson observed, “written with lightning.”
And so for over an hour things came to a halt. After all the charging about, the sudden inactivity seemed strange, even a bit absurd. But no one left. The crowd remained in the cellar, milling about in the dim light as if during the intermission of a play. Impatiently, they waited for the next act.
Around two A.M. the superintendent returned with the warrant. On Billy’s command, the heavy vault doors were pried down. The officers stood back, and Billy stepped into the vault. He shined his flashlight about the deep dark space and at once felt as elated as any archaeologist discovering a priceless hidden tomb. Seven packages of dynamite lay on the shelves—nearly two hundred pounds of explosives. He also found percussion caps and large coils of fuses. Even more incriminating, there was a box of fourteen alarm clocks. The clocks were identical to the ones recovered in Los Angeles and the Peoria train yard.
But the detective was not finished. As the first light of dawn broke outside, Billy’s relentless search continued into the new day. The locksmith had arrived. Still accompanied by a tired but not weary crowd, Billy hurried upstairs to the union offices.
Only now there was a new problem. The locksmith refused to drill the safe. It was quite possible that there was dynamite inside. If the drill bit nudged a stick, the explosion would be devastating.
Billy turned to Ryan and demanded the combination.
“McNamara is the only one who knows it,” the union president said. “And you’ve carried him off, God knows where.”
But Billy would not walk away. The night had been filled with too many victories for him to let it end in a defeat. Beside, he still had his audience.
“Well, the safe’s got to come open,” he announced. “I guess I’ll have to tackle it myself.”
On his knees in front of the safe, Billy aligned the drill with the lock.
He paused for a moment and looked up to see if the spectators were safely hidden behind a shield of desks and bookcases.
Satisfied, he started. The grinding noise of the drill was the only sound in the room. Each moment was unique, a lifetime. Then Billy stopped. Had his nerve slipped? Or did he feel a tension in the drill? Had it touched something? Billy bit his mustache, and then with a new resolve, he continued.
At last he could hear the tumblers fall back. He rose to his feet. With a single emphatic tug, he opened the safe door.
A tall pile of ledgers was revealed.
Billy nodded, and police officers began to carry away the union books.
“Have we no rights?” Rappaport, the union lawyer shouted.
“Not under the circumstance,” Billy shot back.
The lawyer was enraged. He charged at Billy but was blocked by an indignant lawyer from the National Erectors’ Association who had been observing the night’s activities. Rappaport swung at him, and the other lawyer retaliated with a powerful roundhouse. The two lawyers were still going at it, the police trying with some difficulty to pull them apart, as Billy, taking advantage of the confusion, quietly left the union office.
Billy raced downstairs. Raymond had been waiting in a car outside the American Central Life Building, and as the sun came up, they drove quickly west. If all had gone according to his plan, earlier that morning at 1:45 J.J. McNamara and his armed guards had arrived in Terre Haute. They had boarded the Pennsylvania Flyer. In St. Louis, Billy had instructed the guards to lead McNamara off the train.
Let people see what you’re up to, the detective had told the guards. Make sure you breakfast in a very public spot. Then make a big production of buying tickets on the Missouri Pacific. Destination—Pueblo, Colorado. We want any union men who might have followed you to know where you’re heading.
At least, let ’em think they know, he had continued. They were to sneak back onto the Pennsylvania Flyer and get off at Holsington, Kansas. There’d be a car waiting. They’d take a quick ride over rutted dirt roads to Great Bend, Kansas, then a local train to Dodge City. They were to hole up in a hotel until the California Limited pulled into town. Then they’d dash on board—guns blazing, if necessary. Jim McNamara and Ortie McManigal, if Billy’s plan
and luck held, would’ve gotten on in Joliet, Illinois. And Billy, too, would’ve caught up with the Limited as it crossed Missouri.
It was a complicated plan, filled with many details that could go wrong. A car could get a flat tire or even crash. A train could be delayed. And—Billy’s great fear—there could be an attack. Once the press published the news of McManigal’s confession, the union, he believed, would be determined to kill the rat. And they’d try at any cost to free the McNamaras. It was crucial, Billy believed, that the union not know the route his three prisoners would take to Los Angeles.
Now the plan was beyond Billy’s control. He had given the orders, and all he could do was hope they would be carried out. Raymond drove. Although exhausted to the point of despair, Billy was too tense to sleep. He wanted desperately to know where McManigal and the McNamara brothers were, but communication with his men was impossible. The frantic, high-speed ride could not go fast enough for Billy.
Finally, in Missouri, Raymond caught up with the Limited. Waving his derby like a madman, Billy flagged it down. On board Billy was greeted by his men. They led him to Jim McNamara and Ortie McManigal, both shackled and manacled. “This train will either be wrecked or blown up before we reach Los Angeles,” Jim snarled at the detective. “I have eluded my captors enough to get word to my friends to see that we do not get to the coast alive.”
Billy tried to ignore him. A small army of armed guards roamed the train. Nevertheless the detective could not help worrying that men with rifles would be ineffective if cars were attacked with dynamite. More distressing, he had still not heard from Guy Biddinger, the police officer in charge of transporting J.J. Had they arrived in Dodge City? Or had they been stopped?
As soon as the Limited pulled into the Dodge City station, Billy hurried from the train. He looked around the platform, but there was no sign of J.J. McNamara. Then he saw Biddinger. Followed by McNamara. He was handcuffed, but he walked with his head held high. The other officer followed, a rifle cradled in his arms. It was with an immense feeling of relief that Billy joined the small procession and, taking the lead, directed his prisoner up the steps and into the train.
TWENTY-NINE
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AS THE LIMITED sped to California, the arrest of the three men and McManigal’s confession were announced in banner headlines. The nation was startled.
The Los Angeles Times’s front page declared: “Dynamiters of the Times Building Caught. Crimes Traced Directly to High Union Officials. Red-Handed Union Chiefs Implicated in Conspiracy.” An editorial congratulated “Detective Burns who has unearthed the most tremendous criminal conspiracy in the history of America.”
Eugene Debs rushed to issue a statement: “Sound the alarm to the working class! There is to be a repetition of the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone outrage upon the labor movement. The secret arrest of John McNamara, by a corporation detective agency, has all the earmarks of another conspiracy to fasten the crime of murder on the labor union officials to discredit and destroy organized labor in the United States.”
Samuel Gompers, head of the conservative American Federation of Labor, sent a telegram to his executive committee: “We know that these men have been arrested on charges that are absolutely false. I have investigated the whole case. Burns has lied!”
The announcement of the arrests had little effect on people’s notions of the truth. Facts, an excited America discovered, could be twisted and wedged to fit into any preconceived theory, the intrigue of any conspiracy.
On board the Limited the mood was tense. At each new town crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the prisoners. They were charged with committing the crime of the century—but notoriety, the nation also discovered, carried its own intractable celebrity. In other circumstances Billy would have appreciated the attention, but now he could only worry. He scanned the faces lining the tracks looking for a sign, a telltale gesture, a warning that a bomb was about to be hurled, the train suddenly stormed.
As a precaution, McManigal and Jim were kept in one car, J.J. in another. The brothers, in fact, did not even know that they were traveling on the same train.
The trip seemed to calm J.J. His dress remained that of a gentlemen—black derby, brown suit, black shoes, wing collar, and a wellpressed white shirt. Guy Biddinger remained at his side, and despite all his instincts, his admiration for the union man grew throughout the journey. “He was a model prisoner,” Biddinger said. “And it would have been hard to find a better companion.”
Billy, mindful both of the nation’s curiosity about the accused and of the opportunity to get his own name into the papers, had shrewdly agreed to allow one reporter onto the Limited. The Los Angeles Examiner’s John Alexander Gray was picked, and he turned out candid portraits, compelling in their contrasts, of the two brothers.
J.J., the reporter wrote about the union official, “may be the most amazing criminal of the age, or a just and unjustly accused man. He has a splendid, upright physique and a clarity of complexion that indicate perfect health and habits that know no excess.”
He found the younger brother, Jim, an entirely different and far less attractive sort. He was gaunt, a dingy, anemic-looking man whose fingertips were singed yellow by cigarette smoke. His eyes glared at his interviewer with “a light of amusement mixed with insolence.” Only twenty-nine, he appeared downtrodden, and at least a hard-lived decade older.
Throughout the interview Jim lay stretched out on his seat, a deck of cards nearby. He had been playing solitaire.
The reporter asked, “Can you beat it?”
“No,” said Jim flatly. “It’s been my experience that you can’t beat any game in this life.”
For three days the train continued west, crossing America. Billy stared out the window as the Limited’s big iron wheels clanked against tracks laid over prairies, deserts, and mountain passes. At night, unable to sleep, still on guard, Billy imagined the locomotive’s front light shining into the darkness like a beacon lighting the way to the Pacific. He felt deep in his heart that he was a passenger on a remarkable journey. With the arrival of the Limited in California, a new chapter in the nation’s history would be written. His manhunt had put an end to the terrorists’ war.
But even as the train rumbled into California, the detective was still careful. Precautions, he insisted, must be observed. It had been announced that the train would arrive in Los Angeles with the prisoners at three o’clock on the afternoon of April 25. But all along Billy had been making other plans.
When the Limited stopped at Pasadena at 2:05, two of Billy’s men hurried McManigal to a car parked by the station. Moments later guards emerged with Jim McNamara. Another car was waiting, but they did not rush him. Oddly, they seemed to be taking their time. It was as if they were parading him along the station platform.
Which was precisely what Billy had instructed. Seated in a sheriff’s car parked adjacent to the platform was a woman, her face covered by a long veil. As an unsuspecting Jim approached, she abruptly lifted her veil. She took a long look at the prisoner.
“That’s Bryce!” shouted Lena Ingersoll. She was the owner of the San Francisco boardinghouse where, using the alias J. B. Bryce, Jim had finalized the plans with Caplan and Schmitty.
Instinctively Jim turned when he heard her shout. His recognition was immediate, too. He covered his face with his hands and hurried to the car that would take him to Los Angeles.
J.J., with little formal ceremony or even precaution, came off the train a stop later accompanied by Raymond. Reporter John Gray was an awed witness: “His manner was so dignified and impressive that the officers were at pain to assure him that the exigencies of the situation compelled the sort of treatment they were giving him. Nothing more strange, more amazing has ever been known since there was law and the ability of the law to conjure force to execute its dictates, for here, practically unguarded and treated with all courtesy, was the man accused of having told his brother to bomb the Los Angeles Times.”
PART III
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“THE LAST BIG FIGHT”
THIRTY
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BILLY’S BOLD PLAN had worked. He had succeeded in making his way across the country without incident. He had feared writs and ambushes, but now his three prisoners were safely locked in the Los Angeles County Jail. His job was finished. His pride of accomplishment swelled further when he found waiting for him at the Alexandria Hotel a wire from former president Theodore Roosevelt: ALL GOOD AMERICAN CITIZENS FEEL THAT THEY OWE YOU A DEBT OF GRATITUDE FOR YOUR SIGNAL SERVICE TO AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP. He went to his room looking forward to a night’s sleep in a comfortable bed rather than a narrow, rolling train berth and, in the new morning, a leisurely breakfast in the Alex’s dining room. It would take a few days to tie up the bureaucratic loose ends necessary to collect the much-needed reward money; then he’d be on his way back to Chicago. And on to his next investigation.
But the reward money was not forthcoming, and even his victory was short-lived. In the clutter of the days that followed, any sense of having come to the conclusion of his efforts, any lightness of heart, any swagger, quickly vanished. Billy realized that the case had entered a new, more combative stage. The arrests had not resolved the mystery but rather had provided two living symbols to polarize the nation further; doubts and suspicions about the circumstances that had led to the apprehension of the McNamara brothers now dueled with the incriminating logic of their guilt. A courtroom in Los Angeles would be the republic’s next—possibly final—battleground in the fierce war between labor and capital.