American Lightning Read online

  ______

  By the fall afternoon nearly two years later when D.W. met with Billy Burns, the “new era” had begun to take shape. With a storyteller’s instinctive gift and an innovator’s technical talent, D.W. had by that time directed nearly two hundred short films. Many of the works were remarkable: perfectly executed, affecting, and fully realized stories. He was starting out on a great and transforming cultural adventure, a man in the process of creating a new art form and a new industry. And now the country’s most celebrated detective had come to D.W. to ask for his assistance.

  It was Billy Burns who did most of the talking that afternoon. He made his proposal to D.W., and the director did not take long to consider it. Like the detective, he prided himself on being an intuitive psychologist; “I know how people think,” he would say in an attempt to explain a bit of his talent. He believed film was “a universal language,” that it had “a power” and could “strike hearts.” Yes, he quickly decided, it was a plan that could work. D.W. told the detective that he would help him catch the murderer.

  As they baited their trap, halfway across the country Clarence Darrow, the country’s famous crusading attorney, the champion of populist (and often lost) causes, was trying to reinvent his life. Three years earlier he had charged into battle in defense of William “Big Bill” Haywood, a union official accused of murdering Frank Steunenberg, the fiercely antilabor former governor of Idaho. Full of Old Testament fervor, Darrow had raised his voice until it grew hoarse, pleading with the jury in the sweltering Boise courtroom, “Thousands of men, and of women and children—men who labor, men who suffer, women and children weary with care and toil—these men and these women and these children . . . are stretching out their helpless hands to this jury in a mute appeal for Bill Haywood’s life.” Haywood was acquitted. But Darrow nearly died.

  Exhausted from the Haywood trial, Darrow had plunged into preparations to defend two of the union official’s associates, when he took sick. At first he was diagnosed with the flu. Then he developed a violent pain in his left ear. “Excruciating,” “unbearable,” “a continuous orgy of pain” was how Darrow described his condition.

  Doctors in Idaho, however, could not diagnose the cause. The only treatment was the codeine shots administered by his wife Ruby. The filing of the hypodermic needle points with emery paper, the boiling of the needle, the measuring of the liquid—it started as a nighttime ritual. As the months passed, as the doctors remained puzzled, the doses of codeine and the frequency of the injections increased.

  Unable to continue with the trial, Darrow decided to seek help from specialists. “Los Angeles,” he decided, “looked beautiful from Boise . . . its sunshine and warmth, its flowers and palms . . . there I might recover.” But he barely survived the sixty-hour train ride. And the physicians at California Hospital were baffled. They suggested it might be a case of badly overwrought nerves and the pain largely imaginary. In agony, Darrow was convinced he would die in Los Angeles.

  The weeks passed, grim and hopeless, and Darrow decided that he might as well return to his home in Chicago to live out his last days. Resigned, he bought tickets for the train leaving at eleven that night. He returned from the ticket office when all at once he felt a new sensation in his ear. It was swelling. The next day the doctors operated. He had been suffering from a freak case of mastoiditis. If he had boarded the train, the cyst would have broken and he would have died on the way to Chicago.

  But as he recovered, Darrow discovered more disconcerting news: He was broke. The stock market had plunged, and his wife, wary about exacerbating his illness, had not gotten him to sign the documents necessary for the sale of his investments. “Now I’ll have to begin all over again,” he moaned to Ruby.

  And so at fifty-three, he started over. Once tall and hulking, his illness had left him weary and diminished. His face was etched with wrinkles, transfigured by his many battles. Yet like both Burns and Griffith, he believed in “the controlling power of fate in the affairs of life.” As he saw it, instead of death, he had been granted “a continuance.” Now he would change his life.

  He would no longer champion causes. He would no longer cast himself as an avenging courtroom hero. He would make money handling corporate clients and grow old with Ruby. And he would never again return to Los Angeles. The city provoked too many memories of a time when he had settled into despair.

  Yet before the next year was over, Darrow would return to Los Angeles. All his self-surrendering promises would be broken. All his reasonable plans would be demolished. And he would be brought lower than he had ever been brought before.

  By then the detective and the director had moved on from their brief collaboration.

  D.W., as requested, had provided Billy with a one-reel film about a kidnapped girl. The specific title has long been forgotten, but then there were many to choose from; villains terrorized helpless young women with a disturbing frequency in the director’s work. With the can of film under his arm, Billy hurried down the block to the Fourteenth Street nickelodeon. He persuaded the owner to substitute the film for one of the reels in the scheduled program.

  That evening Billy tailed the man he suspected of murdering Marie Smith. It was a night full of routine, a copy of the previous one. Dinner at Luchow’s and then on to the nickelodeon. Only tonight the suspect didn’t enjoy the show. The detective sat directly behind him, watching his target squirm in his seat. The suspect raised his head and stared at the ceiling, unable to watch the screen. And Billy knew he had his man. The movie had reached out to him, frayed his defenses, left him on edge. Within days Billy Burns would get the killer to confess.

  But this case would be only a footnote to more momentous historic events when the lives and careers of William J. Burns, D.W. Griffith, and Clarence Darrow would intersect within months in Los Angeles. All three men would be caught up in “the crime of the century,” the mystery, and the trial that followed. And in that swirl of events, three men, each deeply flawed, each goaded by a powerful ego, each in his way a practitioner of the actor’s craft, each possessing a unique genius, would not only reshape their own lives and that of the times in which they lived, but they would help permanently transform the nature of American thought, politics, celebrity, and culture.

  But first came the terrorist attack. The explosion. The twenty-one deaths. And the manhunt that would lead like a trail of bloody footprints back and forth across America.

  PART I

  _______________________

  “DIRECT ACTION”

  ONE

  _______________________

  IT WAS NEARLY midnight on September 4, 1910, in Peoria, Illinois, when the dark sky above the train yard opened and a pelting rain suddenly poured down. Surprised, the night watchman ran to a boxcar for shelter. That decision saved his life. He was safely inside when the bomb exploded. It was a clock bomb, rather crudely made but fueled by ten gallons of nitroglycerin. It had been placed under a nearby railway car transporting an eighty-ton girder.

  The force of the blast knocked the watchman to the boxcar’s wooden floor. Outside, the girder shot high into the sky. Shards of metal showered down, spears falling like iron lightning bolts amid the hard, hammering rain.

  Within hours the president of the McClintic-Marshall Iron Works, the company that had fabricated the girder for a bridge being built across the Illinois River, hired the Burns Detective Agency to investigate the blast. A local Burns operative left his bed and hurried to the scene. Under a freight car carrying a second huge girder, he discovered a clock bomb that had failed to explode; the battery had lost its voltage. The clock had also been set for 11 hours and 59 minutes and 59 seconds. This would’ve allowed sufficient time for any escape. The culprits would be long gone, and, he anticipated, difficult to trace.

  Outside the yard he found an empty nitroglycerin can and a small, neatly piled hill of sawdust. He brought the can and the unexploded bomb to the attention of the Peoria police captain at the scene. The capta
in glanced at the device, shook his head in a gesture of disgust at the criminals who had planted it, and then walked off to interview the night watchman.

  Later, after the police had left, the Burns man retrieved the can and the bomb. He also gathered up the sawdust particles. He put all the evidence—the nitroglycerin can, the unexploded bomb, and the sawdust—into a large box and sent it to the agency’s headquarters in Chicago.

  For weeks the box sat on a shelf in the evidence room, ignored and unopened. It was only after the events in Los Angeles that Billy Burns began to suspect its significance.

  TWO

  ______________________

  CALIFORNIA, HERE WE come! Over the hills and across the valleys of America, from the icy, windswept prairies and the snowbound farmlands of the Midwest, people flocked to Los Angeles. As the twentieth century began, the city’s chamber of commerce spread the word that sunshine would cure any illness, that ripe oranges hung from trees ready for the taking, and that fortunes could be made buying and selling parcels of land. The California Dream captured people’s imagination, and day after day Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroad cars filled with newcomers arrived at the Los Angeles station. In just a generation, this pueblo village dozing in the sunshine began to take shape as a city. By 1910 its population approached 900,000, and people were still pouring in. And as the city grew, as its inhabitants prospered, Los Angeles became a battleground.

  It was a battle that was being fought all across America. In western mines, in New England mills, in New York sweatshops, in railroad cars traversing the nation, labor raged against capital. The nation was locked in a class struggle that threatened to erupt into the next civil war.

  At one noncompromising extreme were unions such as the IndustrialWorkers of theWorld (IWW). They urged “direct action.” Sabotage, violence—these were acceptable, even necessary, political weapons. The goal was to place “the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.” For these radical unionists, “there can be no harmony between employer and employee.”

  In opposition, capitalists formed militant associations, organizations that were empowered by immense wealth, reinforced by private armies of goons, corrupt police, and hired detectives. They were led by men certain that material success was tangible proof of moral superiority. The associations held that profit must be maximized regardless of the human cost or suffering, and that no union man should be employed.

  The nation was locked in an intense struggle over its future and over the quality of American life and justice. But nowhere in the country did the opposing armies of unions and employers collide with greater frequency than in Los Angeles. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the city had become “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.”

  This long-running confrontation was largely provoked by the sentiments, leadership, and intransigence of one belligerent and selfconfident individual—Harrison Gray Otis.

  Otis’s was, in its meandering, unpredictable way, a typical California success story. He had come to California in 1880, at the age of forty-two, with no more specific ambition than to start over in the bright sunshine. He had been a hero in the Civil War, enlisting in his native Ohio as a Union private, and had risen, after fifteen battles and several wounds, to the rank of captain. But he had had no success in civilian life. His warrior’s temperament had difficulty adjusting to the succession of menial jobs that came his way—clerk in the Ohio House of Representatives, and then a compositor, later a foreman, in the Government Printing Office. In desperation, he found a position as treasury agent of the Seal Islands in the Bering Sea. With only his wife Eliza for company, he endured a period of detachment and exile. A mountain of a man with a walrus mustache and a wild goatee, bristling with an instinctive aggressiveness, even his speaking voice a thunderous boom, Otis felt caged, his vitality drained, by his life in these bleak, barren islands. He served his three years and then headed to southern California, eager to pursue the vague yet restorative promise in endless blue skies and warm days.

  At first Otis maneuvered to become collector of the Port of San Diego, but when this did not come to fruition, he tried something else. He raised Angora goats. A shepherd’s life, however, did not suit the personality of a man who needed a more responsive audience. Once again he soon found himself grasping after something new. As a teenager he had worked in an Ohio printer’s shop, and the experience was sufficient qualification to land him the editor’s position at the Santa Barbara Press. Santa Barbara was a bucolic coastal village of two thousand, and the weekly published a folksy brand of neighborhood journalism. Otis enjoyed the work, but when Los Angeles’s newest paper, the Daily Times, offered him a job writing editorials for a comparatively bountiful fifteen dollars a week, Otis, in his restless way, decided to accept.

  He had not been at the Times very long before it became apparent that the paper was on the verge of bankruptcy. Unless investors could be found, it would cease publication. Otis was forty-four years old, and as he confided to his wife, he had come to the realization that he was running out of chances. Other considerations also had him thinking: His ego had taken to the power and posturing that comes with newspapering; and his instinct alerted him to a day when Los Angeles, although only a drab mud and adobe town of 11,000, would glisten with the shine of opportunity. Otis set out to raise the money needed to keep the Times going. When he succeeded, he was rewarded with a quarter interest in the struggling paper. Four years later, in 1886, he acquired total control. Otis was now sole owner, publisher, and editor in chief. He could run the Times as he saw fit, and unencumbered by either doubts or hesitations, he did. As the city boomed, Otis transformed the Times not only into a commercial success but also into a fiercely conservative, anti-union journal.

  From the start, Otis came out fighting. The Times, like the city’s three other dailies, the Herald, the Express, and the Tribune, was a union shop, and in the spring of 1890 he decided to do something about that. Under Otis’s leadership, the dailies banded together and announced that they wanted the typographers to accept a 20 percent wage cut. The outraged typographers shot back with their own ultimatum: The owners had twenty-four hours to sign an agreement extending the existing pay scale for another year, or they would go on strike.

  The owners refused to accept the terms—at first. After only a day, the Tribune signed. The Express held out for three days. The Herald stood firm for three long and bitter months before it acquiesced. But Otis would not settle. The union men who had walked away from their jobs, he announced, would never return. Their positions would be taken by nonunion workers. Which, after all, had been his objective from the start.

  The Times’s pressroom became a combat zone. Union workers fought with “scab” typographers brought in from Kansas City. Otis, convinced of both the moral and the economic necessity of his position, was relentless. News articles and vituperative editorials in the Times kept up a continuous assault on the printers’ union and closed-shop unionism.

  The dispute spilled out of the Times Building and spread across the city. Pickets blocked the entrances of stores that advertised in the Times, urging customers not to enter. Merchants who withdrew their advertising were attacked by name in the paper as “cowards and cravens.” Unions throughout the country announced their support for the printers, and capitalist associations hailed Otis as a hero.

  Within months a pressroom labor dispute had taken on a galvanizing momentum. The city was on edge, bristling with a combative politics. It was as if all of Los Angeles had chosen sides. When Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader, announced a national railroad strike, 100,000 Pullman workers around the country walked off their jobs. Los Angeles was immobilized. On June 27, 1894, cargo trains sat abandoned on the tracks. Nothing could come in or go out of the city on rail; and these new frustrations and deprivations ignited the already incendiary mood
. Rioting broke out in the streets. The Times Building, a rallying symbol for both labor and capital, became the center of the conflict.

  Blood spilled for an entire week. Union men and sympathizers attacked “scabs,” ambushed paper carriers, and destroyed press runs before the issues could be distributed. Wielding ax handles, paid strikebreakers sought out union members and went after them with a professional, methodical violence. The fighting was hand to hand and unforgiving. Six armed U.S. infantry companies had to be deployed on the streets before the bloodshed could be stopped.

  Otis was not deterred. The riots were, he firmly believed, only the opening salvo in a war that would not be over until the unions were driven out of Los Angeles. Compromise would be surrender. Rather than negotiate, he prepared for new battles. He now called himself “General.” He christened his sprawling home “the Bivouac.” He mounted a cannon on the hood of his limousine and made sure his chauffeur was prepared to repel, at his command, any enemy attacks. He modeled the paper’s new printing plant on a fanciful vision of an impregnable fortress, complete with battlements, sentry boxes, and firing holes offering protected lines of fire at any mob that dared to storm his citadel. Impatient, full of a warrior’s gusto, he waited for the conflict he was certain would come.

  His greatest supporter was his son-in-law, Harry Chandler. With unquestioning devotion, Chandler played the roles of ally, confidant, military aide-de-camp, and assistant publisher. He had quit Dartmouth at eighteen and headed west in the hope of curing himself of tuberculosis. Arriving in Los Angeles, he had found work in the Times’s circulation department. His rise was meteoric. As Time magazine glibly recounted it, “Young Chandler did his job so well that he attracted the General’s eye, got a promotion, married the General’s daughter.” The two men were now a team, determined to bring Los Angeles into the new century as a bustling, nonunion metropolis.