American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  He tried flattery. From all over the country, Gompers began, his voice at rally pitch, union men had sent letters and telegrams to the AFL urging that Darrow, and Darrow alone, handle the defense. Only the man who had saved Bill Haywood from the hangman’s noose could rescue the McNamaras from a similarly unjust end. Only Darrow could expose the high-powered conspiracy that had manufactured evidence and coerced a confession. Only Darrow could prevent the inevitable triumph of the open shop if the McNamaras were convicted. “No force except you, Clarence,” Gompers insisted, nearly begging.

  Darrow remained collapsed in his wicker chair, mute and full of a sullen indifference.

  So Gompers tried money. The AFL would guarantee his fee. They would go to their two million members and raise whatever was necessary to defend the McNamaras.

  “No!” said Darrow. He did not want to leave his home, his orderly life. There were twenty-one counts in the indictment. Each would have to be defended. He’d be in Los Angeles for a year, perhaps longer. A decade ago that would not have mattered. He would have seized the opportunity. He would have relished the challenges, the national forum. But he could no longer find in his heart the wild force that in the face of reason still makes daring and momentous decisions. “No!” he repeated.

  For a week Darrow sulked, but he did not waver. Ruby told him he had acted wisely; it’d be suicidal to return to Los Angeles. His law partners, Masters and Wilson, agreed that he had made the correct choice. Their practice was finally succeeding; if Darrow left for a year or longer, all they had struggled so conscientiously to build up would fall into ruin. And when Ernest Stout, a reporter from the United Press, cornered him and asked about the rumor that he would be taking charge of the McNamaras’ case, Darrow did not equivocate. He would not be involved in the brothers’ defense, Darrow stated emphatically. He had turned the unions down.

  But on Sunday afternoon Gompers returned to Darrow’s apartment. And—a canny touch—he brought a crowd of labor leaders with him.

  This time Gompers tried another tack: he threatened. “You will go down in history as a traitor to the great cause you have so faithfully championed and defended if now, in their greatest hour of need, you refuse to take charge of the McNamara case,” he said.

  Ed Nockles, a Chicago union official who over the years had been side by side with Darrow in some rough situations, plowed another tract. “The whole world is expecting you to defend the boys,” he said. “If you refuse, you convict them before they come to trial.”

  The two men had spoken evenly, no raised voices, no snarling bitterness. But Darrow could not fail to recognize the warning beneath their apparent calm. They were telling him that it wasn’t only the McNamaras who had something to lose. At stake was Darrow’s most valued possession: his carefully groomed reputation. If he did not come to labor’s aid, he would forever be inscribed in history as a traitor to the cause. He would be remembered as the man who had condemned the McNamaras to death. And as the man who had destroyed trade unionism in America.

  Darrow sighed. He had been in enough courtrooms and grappled with enough prosecutors to realize that he had been outmaneuvered. He had no choice. Either he could lose the only reward he had reaped from a grueling life’s work, or he could reclaim center stage to serve as the voice of the defense in the trial of the century.

  “There is no way to try this case with a chance of winning without a great deal of money,” he finally told Gompers.

  At that moment Gompers realized a shift had taken place in Darrow’s mind. Darrow would take the case. Nevertheless Gompers did not press things to the inevitable conclusion. He allowed the discussion to meander on for hours. He wanted Darrow to feel he was in control, that he had not been coerced. Pride, Gompers knew, must be respected.

  He listened patiently to Darrow’s demands. The attorney insisted on a $200,000 defense fund, money to be spent as he alone determined. He would choose his co-counsels, and he would set the legal strategy. His fee, after expenses, would be $50,000. Many of the labor leaders felt this was outrageous, Darrow was asking for a fortune. Gompers did not disagree. But he needed Darrow. With only a small hesitation, he accepted the terms.

  Yet still Darrow did not sign on. It was as if he were trying to delay the concluding formalities for as long as possible. Perhaps he also hoped the exasperated union men would decide that they no longer wanted to deal with him.

  At last, a beaten man, Darrow asked Gompers and the others to excuse him. If they would be kind enough to wait in the library, he hoped to return shortly with his decision. But first he needed to talk to his wife.

  With great trepidation Darrow went to the bedroom in the rear of the apartment to confront Ruby. She was seated on the bed, and he sat down next to her. He took her hand and with infinite sadness looked into her eyes.

  He waited a moment; the man whose speeches had stirred crowds and juries was reduced in his own bedroom to someone struggling to find the proper words. Then he asked her for permission to break his pledge. He told her the men in the front room had said he would go down in history as a traitor to the cause if he did not defend the McNamaras.

  Come with me to Los Angeles, he begged.

  Ruby understood how difficult this decision had been for her husband. She knew he had been manipulated. She understood he had little choice. She worried about him, his health, his peace of mind. And she loved him.

  “If you think it best,” she agreed.

  Darrow returned to the library and shook hands with Gompers. He would take the case.

  “It was with heavy hearts that Mrs. Darrow and I drove to the Chicago and North Western stations and boarded the train for Los Angeles,” Darrow would write about the morning nearly three weeks later, in May 1911, when he had headed west.

  Ruby, too, recalled that they had departed filled with “dread and distress.”

  Despite his misgivings Darrow had already been busy shaping the defense. A case of this magnitude, he realized, must be tried both in and out of the courtroom. He needed to take attention away from the piles of damning evidence and focus it instead on something else. He wanted the newspapers to move on from their teary-eyed accounts of the twenty-one dead. He had to shape the way people thought about the McNamaras. Before a jury could believe the brothers were not guilty, the nation had to believe they were victims. So just as he had done in the Kankakee Manufacturing case, he created an ancillary issue, a contrivance designed to distract attention from the damning charges in the indictment.

  The law, Darrow had defiantly announced to the swarm of reporters who now flocked around him each day, was quite clear. Since J.J. McNamara had not been in California when the explosion occurred, he could not be extradited. “He was,” Darrow boomed, “kidnapped!”

  It was a masterstroke. Headlines dutifully repeated the charge. Across the country people began wearing buttons showing J.J.’s handsome, sincere face with a single word emblazoned like a lightning bolt across his granite jaw—“Kidnapped!” And Darrow kept trumpeting the charge with mischievous delight. He was determined not to stop until Burns was indicted for his excesses.

  But another motive was also driving Darrow’s strategy. After only a cursory look at the evidence against the two brothers, he had reached a conclusion. He had not shared it with Gompers or any of the union men. But as he rode the train out west, Darrow found himself wondering if his only victories would be in the court of public opinion. He had little doubt that the McNamaras were guilty. They would hang.

  Already haunted by old ghosts—Gompers, Haywood, Los Angeles—Darrow soon saw another surface. Full of excitement, Mary Field had written to him to share the news that American Magazine had asked her to cover the trial.

  Do not come to Los Angeles, Darrow immediately wrote back. He told her he would be watched by detectives. Her presence would “expose or divert” him. He would not be able to spend time with her. “Any, even purely friendly intercourse of a formal nature would be out of the question.” Don’t come,
he reiterated.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ______________________

  IT WAS GOMPERS’S idea, or so he would later claim. And he had indeed authorized the AFL’s McNamara Legal Defense Committee to pay $2,577 to the W.H. Seeley Company of Dayton, Ohio. But even Gompers had to concede that he had drawn the inspiration for his breakthrough concept from others.

  From Darrow, for one. The term public relations had been coyly bandied about since before the turn of the century. In 1897, to cite one early example, the anonymous writers of the Year Book of Railway Literature had decided on that euphemistic term to describe the railroads’ cutthroat campaign to pressure municipalities and state legislatures to let them bully their way into new territories. But it was Darrow, Gompers recognized, who had first thought to bring the manipulative gimmickry of public relations to the McNamara case.

  From the outset Darrow had grasped that the arguments should not be made only in the courthouse. Justice, he liked to say, was one thing, but a trial was something else entirely. It was a drama, and the accused were the principal players, its stars. No happy ending in the final act was possible unless the audience—the jury—genuinely cared about the unfortunate victims standing in the dock.

  Yes, Gompers found himself agreeing. The McNamara trial would be a bit of theater—with the whole nation watching. And with the future of labor riding on the reviews.

  Darrow also emphasized that the cost of the trial would be enormous. “The other side is spending in every direction,” the attorney reminded in what had become a thudding and constant refrain. “Then they have all the organized channels of society, the state’s attorney, grand jury, police force, mayor, manufacturers’ association . . . No one will do anything without money and I want you to understand it.”

  Gompers understood too well. “The great need of the hour is money,” he told his flock. “In the name of justice and humanity,” he appealed to them “to contribute as liberally as their abilities will permit.” The AFL had nearly 2.3 million members. If each man contributed a quarter, he reasoned, the defense’s war chest would be bulging; it would certainly be sufficient to match the prosecution dollar for dollar. Yes, the mathematics was reassuring, even providential—if Gompers could find a way to entice his workingman membership to part with their quarters.

  Burns was another inspiration. With rare objectivity, Gompers sourly credited his adversary for helping to focus in his mind the need for public relations. Every day, or so it seemed to him, the Hearst and Pulitzer papers, as well as Otis’s always vitriolic Times, would carry another story portraying the McNamaras as low and evil—terrorists, high-living philanderers, or even socialists and anarchists. All the “scoops” had been eagerly provided to the reporters by the same nimble and persistent polemicist—William J. Burns.

  “My purpose,” Billy would too glibly explain, “was to leave nothing of their lives covered.” The more complicated truth was that like Darrow, he understood the value of a pretrial public relations strategy. So he set out to demonize the two brothers, to disclose “step by step, the downward career of each.”

  His portrait of Jim was dismal and unforgiving: “Physically he was weak and of the tubercular type. He could not stand dissipation and went down under it, lower and lower . . . Immediately following the destruction of the Times Building and the killing of the twenty-one people who perished through his act, he left Los Angeles for San Francisco and celebrated his terrible act by scattering money about in the lowest of drinking dives, spending it on women of the streets, negro singers, and café musicians. He had no conscience, no trace of it.”

  Billy’s portrait of J.J. was no less venomous: “The brains of the dynamiting crew . . . might have led a useful life.” Instead, he “managed to fatten on the hard-earned money of those structural ironworkers who did the actual work.” Worse, according to the grumbling, moralistic tales Billy spun, there was a “list of women on whom he spent good money of the union.” J.J., he claimed, had taken up with “Katherine Kent who was not only a courtesan, but also turned out to be crooked in other ways, and left Indianapolis after being charged with robbing one of her male admirers.”

  J.J. had then moved on to another “very interesting creature of the gentle sex”; she was “Katherine II,” as Billy, with gentlemanly discretion, identified her. It wasn’t just that she “had no visible means of support,” was “full of life and vim,” and wantonly “made a number of trips around the country with McNamara.” With only scraps of evidence, and those of obscure provenance at best, Billy further charged that “McNamara was putting her to good use in the masked warfare, for she could get information at times without creating any suspicion where a man would have had no chance at all.”

  Billy also gave a damning twist to the story of J.J.’s doomed relationship with Mary Dye, the union’s stenographer. “The heartbreaking dynamiter,” as Billy relished calling J.J., had grown frightened that Mary, full of fury because another woman was “hanging at his heels,” would reveal the union’s illegal activities. “There was only one safe way,” according to the fanciful story Billy rushed to share, “and that was to kill her.” Therefore, “McNamara gave her the Christmas week holiday and then tried to get his brother . . . to put a bomb under her seat in the train and blow her to fragments.” The bomb was never planted, nor was there ever any convincing proof that such a plot had been contemplated. But that did not stop the story, Gompers noted with glum exasperation, from exploding across the country. He needed a way to set the nation straight.

  And finally, although certainly not least, Gompers paid close attention to another voice—D.W. Griffith’s.

  The labor leader had noted the lure that the new moving pictures had on his constituency. The nickel price of admission—the cost of a glass of beer—was naturally part of the appeal. And your nickel got you a seat anywhere in the house. There was none of the undemocratic division between cheap and expensive seats that was the elitist practice in vaudeville houses and burlesque shows. Canny old Edison, Gompers fully agreed, had been on to something when he dubbed moving pictures “the entertainment of the working man.”

  By watching D.W. Griffith’s Biograph one-reelers, an excited Gompers began to understand what films could do. Gompers had been thirteen when his family immigrated to America. He had grown up in a crowded tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. There was a slaughterhouse next door, and he had to live with the squeal of animals and the reek of death. As a young man, he had written a series of articles in the New Yorker Volks-Zeitung exposing how cigars were manufactured in the tenements. For the workers, it was a brutally hard life: “little children with old-young faces and work-weary figures.” He became active in the union because he thought it gave workingmen the collective power to effect change in their lives, to improve the conditions in which they had been forced to live and work. And now in Griffith’s films he was convinced he had found a fellow reformer exposing the grinding and heartless injustices of urban capitalist life.

  Inspired by the era’s celebrated muckrakers, D.W. had refused to stay sequestered with his crew in the brownstone on Fourteenth Street. Time after time he left the film studio, headed downtown, and with a crusader’s zeal aimed his camera at the crowds and tumult of the tenement streets. “Rivington Street,” the director would explain, “never appeared as a melting pot to me, but more like a boiling pot.”

  A Child of the Ghetto and Simple Charity were melodramas, but they also might have been documentaries, so vividly did the shots reveal the harshness of life in the city. The Lily of the Tenements as well as A Corner in Wheat were plaintive editorials calling for fairer prices and better working conditions. One Is Business, the Other Crime challenged American justice: one set of laws for the rich, and another far less equitable or objective for the poor. And in the union leader’s favorite film, the 1908 The Song of the Shirt, Griffith had made a call to join labor’s battles against unjust management.

  The plot in Song, Gompers could only shrug
in uncritical agreement, was nothing more than a heart-tugging melodrama. A sweet-looking sewing machine girl conscientiously works to buy food and medicine for her bed-ridden sister. A small imperfection, however, is found in one of the shirts she has sewn. The factory owner and the manager ignore her pleas. They refuse to pay for work that they capriciously decide is slipshod. So the girl trudges home. And her sister, without the life-saving medicine, dies.

  But despite the dank predictability of its narrative, Griffith’s artistry gave the film a power of advocacy that Gompers couldn’t help but admire. The director had repeatedly cut back and forth between scenes of management and labor, and each of the contrasts fell like an indictment. The seamstress hovers over her sick sister’s bed, while the factory owner menaces his underlings; the factory owner frolics with a showgirl in a restaurant, while the seamstress dutifully sews in her wretched apartment and her sister writhes in pain; the factory owner drinks champagne, dances, and kisses showgirls, while in the seamstress’s arms, the sister dies a wrenching painful death. It was all there in pictures on the screen, Gompers rejoiced. It was what the struggle was all about.

  And so it came to him, with Darrow, Burns, and Griffith all helpfully nudging the idea along. It would rally people to labor’s side; trump the malicious stories the opposition was gleefully spreading; and get workers to reach readily into their pockets to contribute to the cause. Gompers decided to have a film made about J.J. McNamara.