American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Billy didn’t answer. He showed him.

  The detective hunched his broad shoulders, clenched his fists, brought his arms up high, and let loose with a flurry of punches.

  Full of mischief, D.W. joined in. The director shot his long arms into the air in a very precise and elegant left-jab, right-cross combination.

  It was all done with smiles, and people in the lobby stopped and watched with amusement. They realized they were fortunate to be witnessing a unique performance, and caught up in the high-spirited moment, they applauded the two celebrities.

  Darrow heard the commotion and, curious, turned. He found himself staring at the spectacle of D.W. Griffith and William J. Burns trading mock punches in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel.

  D.W. called to him. “Got to fight for what you believe in. Right, Mr. Darrow?”

  “Indeed you do, Mr. Griffith,” the attorney called out.

  “I’ll second the sentiment,” said Billy. “Sometimes fighting is the only way.”

  And then as abruptly as it had begun, the exhibition stopped. Darrow went off to meet Steffens in the bar. Billy went on to the dining room. And D.W. returned to the studio.

  The three fighters never met again. After the McNamara case their lives took different paths.

  Darrow was forced to remain in Los Angeles despite his acquittal in the bribing of George Lockwood. The district attorney wanted a second chance, and this time he indicted Darrow for bribing Robert Bain. The second bribery trial was fought by both sides without much conviction. By now everyone was drained, even the jury. On March 8, 1913, they voted eight to four for conviction—still not the unanimous verdict needed to find Darrow guilty. The district attorney considered trying the case again, but in the end he didn’t have the will. He extracted a promise from Darrow that he would never again practice law in California. Then Darrow and Ruby left for Chicago.

  Darrow had made his peace with the settlement of the McNamara case. Jim would spend his life in San Quentin. J.J. would be released in fifteen years. But Darrow felt he had made the right decision. He had saved their lives. If he had taken the case to the jury, he knew, both of the brothers would have hanged.

  Darrow would never discuss his bribery trials in any meaningful way. In The Story of My Life, his chatty autobiography, he recounted a conversation with Lincoln Steffens. It offered, at best, an opaque denial of the charge: “I told him that if any one thought I had done anything in connection with the jury or any other matter he should be left free to prosecute.”

  Yet Darrow found the philosophy to live with his guilt. The bribery trial—the entire McNamara case—had transformed him. He had traveled without enthusiasm to Los Angeles, a man reluctantly pressed into service. But in the course of the trial, in the intensity of the fight to save two men’s lives and to validate Labor’s mission, the crusader’s passion had retaken hold of his spirit. He had been reckless; he had privately acknowledged his deep shame to Mary. He had come perilously close to ending his life. But in the final, struggling moments of decision, he had recovered a deeper understanding of his purpose. He now saw the wasteful foolishness in trying to step aside, in immersing himself in the suffocatingly banal intricacies of corporate law. The country was rumbling into a new century, and Darrow knew he had a duty and a responsibility to help lead the way.

  His summation to the jury was genuine: a plea for the opportunity to be allowed to live his own important future. When he spoke with earnest poignancy about the need to create “fundamental changes” in the nation, he was sharing his own redemptive plan for the rest of his life. The statement he released after his acquittal in the first trial was no less of a vow: “I shall spend the rest of my life as I have that which has passed, in doing the best I can to serve the cause of the poor.”

  Darrow returned to Chicago and to a life that used the law as a weapon and as a conscience to transform the world around him. He went on to fight for John Thomas Scopes’s right to teach evolution, to crusade against the death penalty in the Leopold and Loeb case, to work for tolerance and justice. By the time he died on March 14, 1938, his excesses in Los Angeles had become a distant episode in another man’s life.

  Billy moved on to take new cases and make new headlines. He grew rich and opened offices in Montreal, London, Brussels, and Paris. But even after he finally collected $80,000 in reward money (only the city of Los Angeles, at Earl Rogers’s urging, still refused to pay the $20,000 it had promised for the arrest of the men responsible for the Times bombing), the McNamara case stayed with him. He personally brought McManigal to testify at the federal trial in Indianapolis, and when the jury in 1913 found that thirty-eight union officials shared guilt for the bombings, he celebrated. But Billy could still not close the case. Caplan and Schmitty, the two anarchists who had helped Jim McNamara obtain the dynamite for his bomb, the two men Billy had hunted in the Home Colony, were still at large. He pledged that they would “be made to answer to the charge of murder.”

  Only they had vanished. Then in 1915 a bomb exploded in an Upper West Side apartment in New York City. When police arrived, they discovered a bomb factory. The man who had been killed died when the device he was making blew up. Several unexploded bombs, however, were recovered, and Billy, working on a hunch, went to New York to inspect them. Their alarm clock and circuit design, he saw, was very similar to that of the suitcase bombs that McNamara and McManigal had planted. The next day he distributed photographs of Caplan and Schmitty to his operatives and sent them out to patrol the streets near the bomb factory. On February 13, 1915, Matthew Schmidt left his furnished room at Broadway and West 66th Street and was surrounded by Burns’s men.

  Letters found in Schmitty’s room provided another clue. Two Burns operatives left that night for Chicago. From there they continued on to Seattle. They rented a boat, crossed Rolling Bay on a dark, starless night, and docked on Bainbridge Island. They found David Caplan asleep in his bed in a cabin deep in the woods. They arrested him before he could extract the revolver hidden under his pillow.

  Schmitty and Caplan went on trial in Los Angeles. When they were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, Billy felt his work on the McNamara case was finished.

  He turned to other cases, murders and even another terrorist bombing. In September 1920 a driverless wagon exploded on Wall Street across from the offices of J. P. Morgan. Billy tracked the bomber to Russia but lost him in the vastness of a strange land. There was never an arrest. Disappointed, feeling he had accomplished all he could as a private detective, Billy turned to politics. President Warren G. Harding appointed the nation’s most famous sleuth as the first director of the Bureau of Investigation, the agency that would later become known as the FBI.

  His tenure was a disaster. He became embroiled in the charges and countercharges swirling around the Teapot Dome oil scandal and was called before the Senate in April 1924 to testify. The New York Times described him as “ashen-faced” as he responded to the senators’ pointed and often accusatory questions. Two weeks later he resigned. His young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, became director.

  Billy retired to Sarasota, Florida. He spent his days writing about old cases and trying, with varying success, to sell his stories to the motion pictures. When he died in 1932, he left behind a corporation that bore his name. But it was an enterprise that Billy would have found unfamiliar, a business with little of the spirit and sense of historical duty that its founding father had always brought to an era of significant, challenging cases.

  D.W. threw himself into his great gamble. In making The Birth of a Nation he risked his entire career. If the picture failed, he would never again have the opportunity to make a “big” movie and would spend his life churning out one-reelers. But only halfway through production, he had already spent the studio’s $40,000 and needed, he estimated, at least another $40,000 to finish. He contributed all his salary and all his previous earnings and lived on credit at the Alexandria. Still he needed more. He sought out financiers, and
when the banks offered only part of what he needed, he went looking for small investors, anyone who would put in a few hundred dollars. One afternoon he marched through the newsroom at the Los Angeles Times with his hat literally in his hand, begging people to buy shares in the production. He thought the newsmen would understand his vision; after all, the story he was filming was in many large ways indebted to what had happened at the paper on the night of October 1, 1910. D.W. was relentless. And he finally succeeded in raising the $100,000 he ultimately needed.

  By the time he was finished making his movie, D.W. had harnessed all he had discovered during the experimental Biograph years, all his previously untapped grand cinematic visions, all the ferocity in the war between capital and labor. With exhaustive energy, an intensity of focus, and true art, he created the first American movie masterpiece. It was in many ways a flawed work, a product of the era’s narrow southern prejudices. But there was no denying either its power or its inventiveness. It was the first movie to be shown at the White House, and afterward President Woodrow Wilson said, “It is like writing history with lightning.”

  Birth was an unprecedented hit. In New York alone it played to an estimated 825,000 people during its initial eleven-month run. The film was such a success that it is impossible to estimate accurately how many people throughout the country—the world, in fact—ultimately saw it. Or how much money it grossed. It can, however, be documented that during its first run Birth did more than $60 million in box office business—at a time when a film that sold $10,000 in tickets was considered a roaring success. D.W. had revealed a dazzling mathematics; and with dreams of such treasure, the Hollywood movie industry was born.

  But D.W. could not sustain his own success. In many large and unfortunate ways, the rest of his life was a struggle to recover the vision and relevance of his early accomplishments. By the time D.W. died on July 23, 1948, the originality and miracle in his art seemed to many out of step with the advancing times, and his life was dismissed as simply a small episode in the adventure that became Hollywood.

  This judgment was a mistake; just as it would be an error to categorize Darrow and Billy as distant, historical figures. For at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation had been struggling to find its way. Terror had raged, a second civil war had threatened to split the nation into new feuding armies, and the inequities of industrial life had brutalized too many lives. Three men who were caught up in those traumatic times, shaped by them, found with their talents, energy, and ideals a way out of it, both for themselves and for the nation. Darrow, Billy, D.W. were all flawed—egotists, temperamental, and too often morally complacent. But as their careers and lives intersected in Los Angeles at the tail end of the first decade of the twentieth century, each in his own way helped to move America into the modern world. They were individuals willing to fight for their beliefs; and the legacy of their battles, their cultural and political brawls, remains part of our national consciousness.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  ____________________

  I’D BEEN RESEARCHING this book for more than a year when I found myself standing for the first time in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel. I’d hoped to find the approximate spot where my story’s three principal characters—Billy, D.W., and Darrow—stood together for a few brief moments nearly a century ago, but it was impossible. The Alex was a muddle of Dumpsters, scaffolding, and scurrying construction workers in hard hats. The booming echo of demolition pounded through the high-ceilinged space, and a swirling blizzard of noxious gray soot fell from above. A large, brightly lettered sign explained that a $14 million “face-lift” was in progress.

  I walked across the lobby toward a makeshift office, my footprints leaving a trail in the thick dust, and was handed a promotional brochure for the “new Alex.” It grudgingly acknowledged the hotel’s “amazing history,” but the decision had been made to bring the Alex into “a new era.” The building’s 463 rooms will become “micro lofts.” The once grand dining room will be partitioned into an “eclectic restaurant” and a “hip bar.” The hotel will be transformed to keep up with the times.

  Discouraged, I quickly left. More than two years before, I’d set out to tell a story that was in many ways anchored by the formidable edifice of the old Alex. I was writing a true-life tale of intersecting lives caught up in transforming political and cultural events, but I also hoped to capture the energy of the turn of the century—a spirit that, to my mind, was in part personified by the bustle of daily life in the Alex. And now this history, this spirit, was undergoing a “face-lift.”

  For most of my professional life I’d been a reporter. It’s an occupation that lives in the present. Yet I was pursuing a story set in the early 1900s. In my mind, however, there was no large discrepancy between these two ambitions. I’d originally become intrigued by the bombing of the Los Angeles Times because the attack so clearly resonated across the intervening decades. I became transfixed by the intersecting lives of my three principals because they helped to shed light on the way we think and act today. I’d set out to write an account that demonstrated the past was never past. I had no ambitions to be a historian. I was still a reporter with notebook in hand chasing down a story, still tracking down “sources.” It was only a minor investigative inconvenience that everyone involved in my story was long dead.

  Yet, after leaving the Alex I began to have second thoughts. Was the story I was researching, the lives of the men I’d been living with for so long now, merely a curiosity? Something that possessed no immediacy for a “new era” of “hip bars” and “micro lofts”? Was it simply an excursion into the past?

  Doubts, of course, are an author’s constant companion. The prospect of a new Alex, however, seemed to fuel my uncertainty about the relevance of the trail I’d set out on.

  But I plowed on. And as the days passed and I continued my research, as I excavated new material from archives and libraries, I grew reassured. The image of the renovated Alex began to have less prominence in my thoughts. Instead I found myself mulling one of Darrow’s sly wisdoms: “History repeats itself. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.”

  And I realized that my original reporter’s inspiration was correct. The McNamara case, with all its complexities and paradoxes, was relevant. The events defied time. They continued to engage and shape the national narrative. For in this century there is a new Age of Terror. And the legacy carried forward from the destruction in Los Angeles was uncanny. Consider this shared searing image: people jumping in panicked desperation from flaming buildings to their death; a terrorist attack on a building in Los Angeles, and nearly a century later another on towers in New York.

  But the connections, I found as I continued my research, were more substantial than pictures. In one era, the precious commodity of water stirred intrigue. In another, oil helped to drive the plot. One century’s detectives sought out dynamite caches, another’s hunted downs WMDs.

  Then there was the debate over the nation’s moral and legal responsibilities to those suspected of using terror to further their cause. At the turn of twentieth century, kidnapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, and covert detentions were justifiable. Today some urge torture, rationalize “water boarding,” and establish secret prisons while disregarding laws designed to protect the accused.

  There were other parallels of dubious, disturbing logic. Scripps and his cohorts, for example, believed that the employees killed in the Times bombing “should be considered what they really were—soldiers under a capitalist employer whose main purpose in life was warfare against the unions.” Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda preached a similar reckless argument, branding the workers in the Twin Towers “combatants” and justifying the killing of the innocents. And both eras looked to the cinema to help make sense of the confusion; there were films about and inspired by the McNamara case just as there is a growing inventory of 9/11 movies.

  Encouraged, convinced I was engaged with contemporary events even though my
story was set in the past, I kept at it. In the end, the book I’ve written is more a narrative, an expansive and hopefully dramatic and resonating story about the past, than a historian’s narrow, fact-laden tome. It’s a reporter’s story. And it is, therefore, a true story.

  I was often frustrated by the paucity of historical specifics that could be unearthed (for example, what was said at the initial meeting between Billy and D.W. at the Biograph Studios). I was often troubled by the elusive nature of emotional truths from another era (is it possible for anyone today to know why D.W.’s marriage fell apart, or why Darrow’s bond with Ruby prevailed despite all the strains?). And considering the politicized and partisan fervor surrounding the McNamara case, it was no surprise when I found there were very often two—or more—conflicting versions of events (even the number of the dead from the blast differed in book and newspaper accounts; I settled on the total of twenty-one that was cited in the indictments). The more I delved into the past, I came to realize that finding the “true story” was often difficult, if not impossible. Yet, the reader should know that there were no inventions in my account. I have tried to re-create events as accurately and objectively as possible. I have searched for intersecting circumstances and ideas, and then presented them without conjecture, and in a way that made informed sense to me.

  To accomplish that, I (with the help of my indefatigable researchers Mark Wind and Andrea Scharf) went through government, union, university, and private archives, as well as newspaper morgues. I read voluminous trial transcripts, memoirs, periodicals, and compiled a stack of 172 books on the era and its principals. These were my sources. And in using this deluge of material—to reach my desk each day, I had to navigate through the tall piles of books, periodicals, and notes that filled my small office—I adhered to a reporter’s standards.