American Lightning Read online

  AMERICAN

  LIGHTNING

  ______________________

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue: Three Lives

  Part I: “Direct Action”

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part II: Manhunt

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part III: “The Last Big Fight”

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Part IV: Revolvers

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Epilogue: The Alex

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Howard Blum

  Copyright

  For Ivana,

  with love.

  And for

  Sarah and Bill, Susan and David—

  good friends.

  “It’s like writing history with lightning.”

  —PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON AFTER VIEWING THE BIRTH OF A NATION, THE FIRST MOVIE EVER SHOWN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  “I know it’s risky, but I still write history

  out of my engagement with the present.”

  —RICHARD HOFSTADTER

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ______________________

  Detectives

  Billy Burns: The country’s greatest detective, often called “the American Sherlock Holmes.”

  Raymond Burns: A son trying to win his father’s love—and catch the bombers.

  Guy Biddinger: Policeman, detective—and mole in the enemy’s camp.

  Bert Franklin: Former U.S. Marshal. His job for the defense: to ensure the jury votes for acquittal.

  Suspects

  J. W. McGraw: A sawdust trail feeds speculation that he is the elusive Peoria, Illinois, bomb-maker.

  J. B. Bryce: Purchaser of 80 percent dynamite from the Giant Powder company in San Francisco, explosives that are perhaps being used for more than “uprooting tree trunks.”

  David Caplan (a.k.a. William Capp): Anarchist with his own interest in purchasing dynamite.

  M. A. Schmidt: Another anarchist, who pilots a boat at the center of the case.

  J.J. McNamara: Engaging, handsome, lady’s man, union official, and “a martyr to his cause.”

  Jim McNamara: Brother of J.J., on the run and potentially dangerous.

  Ortie McManigal: Friend to the McNamaras. Out of work, yet not out of money.

  Harrison Gray Otis: Cantankerous owner of the Los Angeles Times and a schemer determined to make a fortune.

  Lawyers

  Clarence Darrow: Legendary defense attorney, drawn against his will into “the crime of the century”—only to be put on trial himself.

  Earl Rogers: Defender of Darrow in the courtroom, and trader of punches with Billy Burns outside.

  Job Harriman: Socialist candidate for mayor, Darrow’s co-counsel, and, in time, Darrow’s victim.

  John Fredericks: A district attorney willing to make a deal—but only on his terms.

  Movie-Makers

  D.W. Griffith: The most innovative filmmaker of his time, creatively energized by his unfolding connections with the trial’s major players.

  Linda Arvidson: D.W.’s actress wife, who is informed by her husband: “Don’t think there is some other woman . . . It is not one, but many.”

  Mary Pickford: The first movie star and the focus of D.W.’s tormented thoughts.

  Sam Gompers: Influential union leader, savvy to the connection between politics and theater, and authorizer of $2,577 to make “the greatest moving picture of the twentieth century.”

  Journalists

  Mary Field: Against Darrow’s plea and despite his wife, she came to report on the trial—and share his life.

  Lincoln Steffens: A muckraker intent on framing the trial in his terms: “justifiable dynamiting.”

  E. W. Scripps: Wealthy publisher and proponent of the view that the men killed “should be considered what they really were—soldiers enlisted under a capitalist employer.”

  PROLOGUE

  _______________________

  THREE LIVES

  PROLOGUE

  _______________________

  AS THE DETECTIVE made his way along a bustling Fourteenth Street in New York City on that late December day in 1910, he was confident that, after a frustrating month in Los Angeles, he was at least closing in on one murderer. “Every criminal leaves a track,” Billy Burns was fond of telling his operatives, “that many times Providence interferes to uncover.” Only in this grim case—the sordid murder of ten-year-old Marie Smith—an impatient Burns had decided he had no choice but to give Providence an inventive nudge. He walked toward his appointment at 11 East Fourteenth Street with great hopes for his plan.

  The detective was also curious about the man he was going to meet. There had been a time, after all, when but for his father’s misgivings, their lives might have followed similar paths. In high school in Columbus, Ohio, Billy Burns, the red-haired, freckle-faced immigrant Irish tailor’s son, had performed in the Shakespeare Society’s productions. He had won cheers and laughter—his first small thrill of celebrity—as a clog-dancing, thick-brogued Emerald Isle rascal in a comic routine he wrote for the school show. He had dreamed of a career on stage. But when his father insisted he get a job with a steady income, a government job, perhaps, Billy obeyed. He found work as an assistant operative in the United States Secret Service.

  Tenacious, flamboyant, ingenious, and when the opportunity allowed, still theatrical, Billy Burns threw himself into each new puzzle. He rounded up the counterfeiters who had manufactured a hundred-dollar bill so nearly perfect it had fooled bank tellers throughout the country. He solved the mystery of how, despite a detachment of guards and meticulous security precautions, bags of Double Eagle twenty-dollar gold coins had been stolen from the San Francisco Mint. He foiled a plot to assassinate Julian, Lord Pauncefote, the British ambassador to the United States. Posing as an insurance salesman, he spent months undercover in Indiana to identify and then track down the vigilantes who had broken into a small-town jail, abducted five gangsters, and left them hanging by their necks from the branches of an oak tree. On special assignment from President Theodore Roosevelt, Billy Burns had gone off to Oregon to build a case against a network of well-connected swindlers who were selling off large tracts of public land. And with the news of the Oregon indictments still echoing through the stunned corridors of p
ower, the president sent his special operative off on another dangerous mission: Billy Burns was to put an end to the cabal of mobsters and politicians who, backed up by bribes, beatings, arson, kidnapping, and murder, ran the city of San Francisco as their own fiefdom. It took several years, but once again, despite the risks, despite the ruthlessness and the institutionalized power of his opponents, Burns succeeded. Law and order were restored in San Francisco.

  A twenty-two-year government career heralded in front-page stories had made Billy Burns famous. He was, the New York Times would soon declare, “the greatest detective certainly, and perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius whom the country has produced.” Comparable rivals, the London Spectator would concede, existed only in fiction: Burns was the “American Sherlock Holmes.”

  And now at forty-nine, Billy Burns was becoming rich. In September 1909 he had resigned from the Secret Service and joined longtime private detective William P. Sheridan in setting up the Burns & Sheridan Detective Agency based in Chicago. The agency, striving for both respectability and lucrative commissions, announced a policy of handling neither divorce nor strikebreaking cases. Still, jobs poured in; so many, that an overwhelmed Sheridan sold his interest, and on March 11, 1910, the firm became the William J. Burns National Detective Agency. Headquartered in New York, with regional offices throughout the country, the agency employed nearly twelve hundred operatives. Little more than two months ago, he and his firm had taken on the most monumental case of his career. “The crime of the century,” the newspapers called it. But today he had returned to New York to help identify the murderer of a ten-year-old girl.

  Short and rather stocky, a bit of a dandy with a fondness for three-piece suits and bowler hats, his hair and bristly mustache still crimson, a man with a banker’s staid demeanor and a bartender’s ready smile, at a glance an improbable detective, Billy headed up the wide stone steps of the Fourteenth Street brownstone that winter’s day. He walked through the unlocked black entrance door and then crossed a narrow marble-floored vestibule to ring the buzzer affixed to the right of a pair of well-polished mahogany interior doors.

  A door opened, and he was directed up a graceful, curving staircase to the top floor. He entered a large, open space illuminated by a harsh, white glow emanating from the banks of yard-long mercury vapor tubes suspended in orderly rows from the ceiling. Billy Burns walked across a ballroom that was now being used as the stage of the Biograph Film Studio and proceeded toward an oak roll-top desk in the corner. Near a small hill of rolled-up carpets and a pile of folded scenery was a tall, lithe man, dressed with meticulous care in a suit, tie, and, although indoors, a wide-brimmed hat. He held himself very erect, as if posing, his demeanor stern, somber, and imperial. His face was long and hollow-cheeked, and he had a tendency to stare; it was this habit, along with his prominent nose, that made him seem menacing, like a bird of prey. This was the man whose help the detective had come to ask—D. W. Griffith.

  ______

  D.W., too, had once been a detective. Five years earlier on a stage in San Francisco, David Wark Griffith had been Warburton, a cigarchomping private eye. And like his visitor, he had been relentless. To get his man, he had donned a variety of farcical disguises—grizzly bear, drunkard, even society dowager.

  But D.W.’s days of playing detective, of scrambling for journeyman roles in itinerant stock companies, of pursuing his more heartfelt ambition of writing stage plays, were now forever part of his past. Growing up in rural Kentucky, he had had fantasies, he would concede, “of fame and glory.” By the time of his first meeting with the celebrated detective, D.W. was on his way to achieving these ambitions—and more. Still, the shape and circumstances of his sudden success had taken D.W. by surprise and no doubt would have struck even Burns, with his greater capacity for skepticism, as nothing less than further proof of an “interfering Providence.”

  It had been only two years earlier that a thirty-three-year-old D.W., driven more by desperation than desire, had found his way into the fledgling business of making movies. Full of high hopes, he had come to New York with his new actress bride, Linda Arvidson, in the summer to 1906 to be a playwright. But the farce he had written had run for just days in Washington and Baltimore. More dispiriting, another recently completed play about the American Revolution had failed to attract a producer. It would be months before companies would be hiring actors for summer stock productions. And he was broke. He worried to a friend, “I’d lose standing as an actor with theater people if they see me in a movie,” but he didn’t know where else to turn. Resigned, he took the subway line up to the Bronx to the Edison Studio.

  His intention, however, was not to be cast in a film but rather to sell a script. He had worked it all out: Since there was no on-screen dialogue, he’d block out a scenario in hours; writers were never credited and therefore his playwright’s reputation would not be tarnished; and the best incentive, a script could be sold for as much as thirty dollars. But no one at Edison was interested in his adaptation of Tosca.

  Instead, he was offered a part. He was cast as the intrepid hero who climbs a formidable mountain to rescue a baby from the talons of an inert, and very obviously stuffed, eagle. He got an explanation about “foreground” and instructions to “keep in the lines” that marked the stage, and then without further preliminaries, the camera began shooting. After four days of shooting scenes both outdoors in NewJersey and in the Bronx studio, the one-reel film—905 feet—was completed. His week’s pay was twenty dollars. “No one will ever see me,” he rationalized to his wife Linda. In hopes of finding more easy paydays until the couple went off to summer stock, he joined the other actors who gathered at the nine A.M. casting calls at film studios around New York.

  It was a good time to break into movies. The first large-screen movie theater had opened on Herald Square in New York City twelve years earlier. But much of the energy of the pioneers in the film business had been dissipated in bitter legal wrangling over patents on cameras and projectors. It was not until the end of 1908 that the major, feuding production companies had pragmatically banded together in the Motion Picture Patents Company. The MPPC members agreed that Thomas Edison—who had played only a small role in the actual inventions—would receive a royalty for his film equipment patents and that movies would be leased (not sold!) to exchanges that would distribute them to nickelodeons and the newer picture palaces. With that legal arrangement signed, the companies could now concentrate on making money and making movies.

  And business boomed. For only a nickel, people discovered that they could buy nearly an hour of fun. They could watch three short reels of silent film and then sing along to the lyrics of a popular song that flashed onto the screen. By 1910 nearly 30 percent of the nation—an audience of 30 million people—went each week to one of the nearly nine thousand nickelodeons scattered around the country.

  As people made this new form of entertainment part of their lives, entrepreneurs discovered that movies were a get-rich-quick scheme that really worked. For an investment of about two hundred dollars, and with little more effort than it took to hang a white sheet from the rafters, they could transform a storefront into a nickelodeon. Harry Warner was selling clothing in Pittsburgh near Davis’s Nickelodeon when he presciently decided to change his line of work. “I looked across the street and saw the nickels rolling in,” said the future movie studio mogul.

  A constant problem, however, was the shortage of new films. The seven MPPC production companies were releasing between eighteen and twenty-one films each week, nearly two thousand a year. And audiences were still eager for more.

  It was this small community of filmmakers, a fraternity of hustling businessmen and down-on-their-luck talent, an enterprise focused on churning out brief escapist bits of amusement, that D.W. reluctantly joined. He worked steadily during the spring of 1908 as an actor in Biograph productions and even succeeded in selling the company several scenarios. As he became part of the Biograph tr
oupe, D.W., to his surprise, began to feel that there was something compelling, even intellectually exciting, about the world into which he had stumbled. “It’s not so bad, you know,” he told his wife, “five dollars for simply riding a horse in the wilds of Fort Lee [New Jersey] on a cool spring day.” He suggested to Linda that she try to be cast in a film. But, he warned, “don’t tell them you’re my wife. I think it’s better business not to.”

  When the time came to sign on for summer stock in Maine, D.W. was reluctant to go. “If this movie thing is going to amount to anything . . . we could afford to take chances,” he reasoned to his wife. Linda agreed. “You don’t know what’s going to happen down at the Biograph . . . Let’s stick the summer out.”

  So they stayed in the hot city, and events unfolded with all the rapid improbability and melodrama of a silent film plot line. “Old Man” McCutcheon, the director of the Biograph films, suddenly took ill; drink was the rumored cause. The company needed someone to take his place. In the early days of one-reel movies, a director’s responsibilities were neither demanding nor creative. He’d choose the actors, make sure they stood within the marked lines on the set, and then step aside as the cameraman shot the film. Nevertheless, like a stage manager in the theater, a director’s authority was necessary to move a production forward; and Biograph was contracted to release two new one-reelers each week. When none of the regular players wanted the job, it was suggested that D.W. seemed “to have a lot of sense and some good ideas.”

  After some hesitation, D.W. agreed to try to replace “the Old Man,” but just temporarily. He was given a scenario about a child who was stolen by Gypsies, then rescued after tumbling over a falls in a barrel. The Adventures of Dollie was shot in four days, the whitewater exteriors in Hackensack in New Jersey, and Sound Beach in Connecticut. Piano wire steadied the floating barrel so the cameraman could get his shot. Linda played the distraught mother. The night the film was finished, D.W. would recall, his memory perhaps more accurate as metaphor than as fact, “I went up on the roof of my cheap hotel to watch Halley’s comet flash through the sky. Down in the street Gypsy fortune-tellers were predicting a new era.”