Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (37 page)

The newsroom of the
Times
was on the third floor. Most of the staff
had left for the night, but a small crew was on duty to update later editions and cover breaking news. “My God, they have got us at last,” said
C. Harvey Elder, the assistant city editor, as he and his colleague
Charles Lovelace felt the pulse of an “instantaneous blast” of light through the windows along Broadway. Plaster fell from the ceilings, and the arc lights swung wildly above them.

Otis was a despised figure among union men, and the
Times
had been leading the Los Angeles business community in a fierce, violent struggle against labor that summer. There were racks of rifles in the tower rooms and shotguns in the newsroom. San Francisco’s unions had been warned by Bay Area companies that they could not compete with the southland’s nonunion shops, and a
General Campaign Strike Committee, led by
Olaf Tvietmoe of the building trades council and Darrow’s old friend
Anton Johannsen, was assembled. Tvietmoe, known as “the Old Man” or “the Viking,” was “a leader among men of his ilk, unscrupulous, defiant of law and audacious in execution,” said
James Noel, a city prosecutor. Sluggers sent nonunion workers to the hospitals with broken limbs and fractured skulls. The local ironworkers wrote and asked
John J. McNamara, treasurer of the national ironworkers’ union, to dispatch “a good live one … not a kid glove man” to organize a campaign to sabotage the city’s nonunion iron and structural steel works.

“It was war from the jump,” the
Times
said. The newspaper and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, an anti-union lobby, led the forces of capital. The M&M hired detectives, spied on the strike’s leaders, and pressured local politicians and judges. Its attorney,
Earl Rogers, prepared a new law banning protests and picketing, and pushed it through the city council in mid-July. When union men defied the ordinance, dozens were arrested.

California was just one front in the struggle in the steel industry—more than a hundred explosions had torn up nonunion job sites in New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the Midwest in the two years preceding the
Times
disaster. “Never before … has there been the same kind or class of insurrection,” wrote the press lord
E. W. Scripps. “Both sides have adopted … tactics of warfare.”

Elder and Lovelace rushed from stairwell to window, looking in vain for a fire escape, and wound up in a room adjoining the corner tower. As the flames burst from openings on either side of them they joined Harry
Crane, a telegraph operator, on a windowsill. A group of passing sailors, out on a night’s liberty, tore down an awning from the building across the street and offered it as a net. Lovelace leaped and shattered his hip, but the awning saved him. He would live, and have the unique experience of reading his name, mistakenly listed among the dead, in the newspapers. Crane turned back from the window just as a section of the burning structure came crashing down; he vanished into a plume of sparks and flame.

Finally, Elder—who had been horribly burned—crawled out on the ledge, hung by his hands until the heat seared his skin, and dropped. He struck the end of the canvas awning, which tore, and his leg broke as he hit the street. “His back and front were seared and scarred, the skin and flesh hanging like ribbons,”
John Beckwith, a reporter, recalled, but Elder urged his rescuers to leave him be, and try to save others. “There is a lot of boys in there yet,” he told them. His colleagues carried him to a nearby hospital, where he remained conscious and talked with friends for a time before dying that morning.
²

My God, they have got us at last
. Like poor, doomed C. Harvey Elder, many in Los Angeles instantly blamed the unions for the blast. The paper’s grieving employees, rallied by Chandler, gathered at an auxiliary plant that had been readied for just such a day and put a one-page edition on the street that Saturday morning, placing the death toll at twenty-one, with a headline that read
UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE TIMES
.

In the next day’s paper, the seventy-three-year-old Otis, a great fierce walrus of a man who had hurried back from a trip to Mexico, denounced the bombers with characteristic vitriol: “O you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims, you against whom the wails of poor widows and the cries of fatherless children are ascending to the Great White Throne, go look at the ruins wherein are buried the calcined remains of those whom you murdered.”

As a young man, Otis had worked as a union printer, but his military service during the Civil and Spanish-American wars, and life as a pioneer, entrepreneur, and Republican Party functionary, had made him one of labor’s most outspoken foes. He named his staff his “phalanx” and designed the
Times
building as a fortress, with a statue of a screaming eagle on the highest battlement. Otis was for the “open shop.” He “preached that the right to work for whom you please is an inalienable right,” said Noel, “and
that the right to employ whom you please on such terms as you may agree upon with him, is also an inalienable right.”

As the champion of southern California conservatives, and chieftain of a small group of rapacious local business leaders, Otis skewered socialists, Democrats, and liberal Republicans in his choleric screeds and provoked equally vivid responses. Otis “sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy,” said
Hiram Johnson, on his way to election as governor as a progressive Republican that fall. “Disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked and putrescent—that is Harrison Gray Otis.”
³

The hunt for the killers moved swiftly, on skilled police work, luck, and the blunders of the bombers.

Around noon on Saturday, a suitcase was discovered on the grounds of “The Bivouac,” the Wilshire Boulevard home of General Otis. While opening it the police heard a whirring sound and ran. They were sixty feet away when the bomb went off, digging a crater and breaking windows in the neighborhood. Another ominous package was discovered by members of the household staff and family at the home of
Felix Zeehandelaar, the secretary of the M&M association. This bomb did not explode. A passing motorman carried the bundle to the street, where he carefully unwrapped the newspaper and found sixteen sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock. Stamped on the dynamite were the date and place of its manufacture: “Giant Powder Co., Giant, Calif., Sept. 20, 1910.”
⁴

Within hours, employees at the Giant powder works, across the bay from San Francisco, were interviewed. The company’s clerks instantly recalled the three furtive gentlemen who had purchased ten fifty-pound cases of 80 percent dynamite in late September—a far too powerful concentration for their purported purpose, to blow up tree stumps.
Thomas Branson, a secretary at Giant, had not liked the looks of the men. “Take a good look at that bugger,” he had told a colleague, nodding at one of the trio. “You will probably have to identify him some day.” The Giant clerks had demanded references from the three strangers, and saved their names and addresses.
⁵

On October 15, the investigators got another break when a landlord stopped in to check on the tenants who were renting a house he owned
in San Francisco. The building was deserted, except for a stack of crated dynamite. Chemists matched the explosives with that used in the Zeehandelaar bomb.

By mid-October, then, the police had acquired the descriptions of three fugitives who had plotted to bomb the
Times
and other West Coast targets. Two of the men were identified as Bay Area radicals
David Caplan and
Matthew Schmidt. They were friends of Johannsen, Tvietmoe, and other union officials. As they searched for Caplan and Schmidt and hauled Tvietmoe and others before a grand jury, the authorities worked to identify the mysterious third suspect, a thin-faced man who had gone by the name of “Brice” or “Bryson.”

The Zeehandelaar bomb was again the key. On the day of the
Times
disaster, William Burns, the head of a nationally known detective agency, happened to be in Los Angeles to speak at a banking convention. Mayor
George Alexander called on Burns at his hotel and pleaded with him to find the bombers. The detective, a burly, red-haired sleuth with a talent for self-promotion, examined the “infernal device” found at Zeehandelaar’s house, and recognized its features. For months, Burns’s agents had been working for the industrialists back east, where “open shop” construction sites—skyscrapers and bridges being built by nonunion workers—were being bombed. The device Burns saw in Los Angeles looked just like an unexploded bomb that was recovered from an Illinois bridge site.

It took no imaginative leap to suspect that officials in the
International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, headquartered in Indianapolis, were behind the bombing campaign.
Herbert Hockin, a member of the union’s executive board and planner of the bombings, had quarreled with his brethren over money and become an industry informant. By mid-October, he had identified “Brice” as
James B. McNamara—an out-of-work printer whose brother was
John J. McNamara, the popular treasurer of the ironworkers union. The brothers were a study in contrasts. James, twenty-eight, with his narrow face and ragged mustache, seemed feral, surly, haggard with nervous energy. John, thirty-four, was the natural politician—clean-shaven with a ruddy complexion; handsome, bluff, and intelligent, and blessed with apparent kindness.

James McNamara had arrived in Los Angeles from San Francisco with a suitcase of dynamite on Thursday, September 29. The following
evening, at around five thirty p.m., he planted his infernal device in Ink Alley, about thirty-five or forty feet in from Broadway, among a dozen or more five-hundred-pound wooden barrels of ink. He then bought passage on the
Lark
, the overnight train to San Francisco, and was leagues away when the bomb went off. “The strikes I witnessed … and the rank injustice that grew out of them made a deep impression on me, and when the opportunity presented itself I was more than willing to respond,” James McNamara recalled. “I saw real war on the industrial field.” Tvietmoe, he said, was “instrumental” in his West Coast assignments. As they searched for James, detectives put his brother John and
Ortie McManigal, another union saboteur, under surveillance. But the sleuths lost track of them and the “wrecking crew” launched eight more attacks, including a Christmas Day bombing of the Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles.

Finally, on Saturday, April 22, 1911, police and industry detectives seized John McNamara at union headquarters in Indianapolis and yanked him before a local police court, where a compliant judge okayed an illegal extradition order. The union’s officers were outraged to discover Burns and
Walter Drew—the steel industry’s union-busting lobbyist and security cop—among those searching their offices. The authorities carted away boxes of incriminating correspondence, eighty-six sticks of dynamite, and bomb-making materials, including a collection of alarm clocks. Both sides believed their worthy ends justified illegal means. The kidnapping of John McNamara was an “unlawful thing,” Drew acknowledged, in a letter to Burns. But “this we did in the interests of justice, and personally I would do it over again.”

McNamara was taken on the
California Limited
, a high-speed train, to Los Angeles. On board were his brother James and McManigal, who had been seized with a suitcase of dynamite on their way to their next job and held without counsel for ten days in a house near Chicago. McManigal made a full confession, but James tried to bribe his guards, offering them $5,000, then $10,000 and ultimately $30,000 for his freedom.

They might as well take it, he told them, or the money would go to Clarence Darrow.
⁶

F
ROM THE MOMENT
the leaders of organized labor asked him to take charge of the McNamara defense, Darrow feared that the case would be
a debacle. He knew about union slugging and had high regard for the Burns agency. In an off-the-record conversation, Darrow told a newsman,
Ernest Stout, there was “absolute proof” of the brothers’ guilt, and that he was “sure they were going to be hung.” Darrow would never take the case, Stout informed his editors, because “he felt he had no chance in the world of winning.”

“Let them get a younger man,” Darrow told another reporter. But he seemed to be conducting a debate with himself. “I have enough money,” he said. “Of course, I am not rich, but I am getting to a point in life where I do not wish to undertake such a task … I want rest. Of course the fee attached to a case like the Los Angeles affair is a big one.”

Darrow had just celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday when he heard of the McNamara arrests. He had promised Ruby not to risk his health in another ordeal like the Haywood case. And he knew that if he left Chicago again for trials that could last years, it would destroy his law firm. “You don’t know how I dread to undertake this case with all the responsibility and trouble,” he wrote
Caro Lloyd, the sister of his late friend Henry. Yet Darrow’s faith in labor was still strong. He had been an informal adviser to Gompers and the unions for more than a decade. The McNamaras may have been flawed representatives of the cause, but there was this: representing bad guys is what defense lawyers do. And Darrow had seen too much of the robber barons, their tactics, and the way they corrupted American government to nurse any illusions. As in Idaho, the state would align with industry and take industry’s money, and bend every standard of ethical behavior to put a rope around the brothers’ necks.