American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Shrewdly, they recruited supporters. Otis gathered a well-heeled clique of bankers, merchants, and manufacturers into their own anti-union organization—the Merchants and Manufacturers Association or, as it became widely known, the M&M.

  From its inception, the M&M was uncompromising. Either employers ran an open shop, or they would suffer consequences. Banks would summarily cut off the credit of offending businesses. Customers would be “persuaded” to go elsewhere. Organizers from the Citizens’ Alliance, a national open-shop group, arrived to help theM&Mattract members. Within weeks six thousand dues-paying, militant, anti-union employers joined up. TheM&Mbecame a powerhouse, and Otis, to his great satisfaction, was its guiding eminence.

  The San Francisco Bulletin accurately captured the organization’s spirit and tactics: “The Merchants and Manufacturers Association has one confession of faith, one creed: ‘We will employ no union man.’ The M&M also has one command: ‘You shall employ no union man.’ The penalty for disobedience to this command is financial coercion, boycott, and ruin.” Otis did not disagree with this analysis. In fact, it filled him with pride.

  Meanwhile the unions took anxious measure of the threat aimed at them, and they responded. In 1903 Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor (AFL) decided that an active and muscular central union organization was needed to confront the M&M. A Central Labor Council representing every labor group in Los Angeles was formed under the leadership of Patrick McCarthy, a San Francisco labor boss (and later mayor). McCarthy swore to recreate in Los Angeles what he had accomplished up north. San Francisco was a union town; its wages were on the average 30 percent higher than in Los Angeles. He vowed to go head to head against the M&Muntil workers’ earnings in the two cities were equal.

  Dozens of strikes broke out. There was a laundry strike, a brewers’ strike, a bakers’ strike, a butchers’ strike. Each unfolded with its own bitter drama. Throughout the city buying a loaf of bread or a pint of beer became an earnest political decision. A customer’s sympathies were revealed in nearly every purchase; he was showing either solidarity with labor or support for capital.

  The Times’s editorials were shrill and unyielding, each one another hurled epithet. “Friends of industrial freedom,” went one typically fervent manifesto, “must stand together and back the employers who are at present being assaulted by the henchmen of the corrupt San Francisco labor bosses. All decent people must rally around the flag of industrial liberty in this crisis when the welfare of the whole city is at stake. If the San Francisco gorillas succeed, then the brilliant future of Los Angeles will end, business will stagnate; Los Angeles will be another San Francisco—dead!”

  The opposition shot back, aiming their most bombastic volleys at the target who, in their strident minds, personified all the unrestrained evils of capital—Otis. From the stage of the Simpson Auditorium in Los Angeles, Senator Hiram Johnson addressed a huge crowd:

  “But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia, with gangrened heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent; frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister upon your escutcheon; my friends, he is the one thing that all California looks at when in looking at southern California they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked and putrescent—that is Harrison Gray Otis.”

  At the American Federation of Labor convention in Virginia in 1907, representatives from the typographers’ union stood at the podium and declared that the many attempts to break the unions in Los Angeles had national significance. The M&M was the spearhead of an orchestrated campaign to destroy the entire American union movement. Otis, they alleged, had “unlimited financial backing” from capitalist organizations throughout the country. And his own personal wealth was considerable: He had earned a net profit of $463,000 in the past year from the paper. Otis had to be stopped—to protect unionism throughout the country. The typographers appealed for help.

  The AFL passed a secret resolution: “A war fund for use in attacking the Los Angeles Times” was established.

  THREE

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  D.W. JOINED THE BATTLE. As opposing forces smashed into each other on the streets of Los Angeles, across the country on Fourteenth Street in New York City, D.W. offered up his own challenge. He, too, was concerned about the course of the nation’s future.

  A Corner in Wheat had only thirty-two frames, yet the argument made in the nearly 950 feet of film was more effective than any of Otis’s dehumanizing editorials, more of a provocation than any picket line. D.W. Griffith had made an intellectual connection between the uproar in the world around him and the fanciful world that he was busily inventing in the former ballroom of a Fourteenth Street brownstone; and the result was a new, expansive way to communicate. With A Corner in Wheat, D.W. had created a succinct yet transfiguring masterpiece about the workingman’s struggle to put a loaf of bread on his dinner table that struck deeply at the country’s economic injustices. And he had marched the engaging and manipulative power of movies—a new cultural weapon—into the rough chaos of American politics.

  “How can a movie be made without a chase? How can there be suspense? A movie without a chase is not a movie,” people at the studio challenged when they heard D.W.’s plan.

  D.W. heard them out. He was, by nature and southern breeding, a polite man. Besides, he didn’t like to play the deep thinker. He wouldn’t talk about art. “Art,” he would say, making his point by joking about one of the leading men in his troupe, “in those days merely meant Johnson’s given name.” But even as a fledgling director, he was determined to make movies his way.

  When D.W. suggested consecutive scenes in After Many Years showing the husband stranded on a deserted island, then a cut to the dutiful wife waiting in their home for his return, the actors and even Billy Bitzer, his cameraman, were incredulous.

  “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about.”

  “Well,” said D.W., “doesn’t Dickens write that way?”

  “Yes, but that’s Dickens. That’s novel writing. That’s different.”

  “Oh, not so much,” argued D.W. “These are picture stories. Not so different.”

  D.W. would not be deterred. His vision was intuitive and visceral, and his confidence in his ability to tell a story was unshakable. Besides, Biograph was under contract to produce two films each week. Every day was a race to a new deadline, and there was little time for discussions. Moreover audiences liked what D.W. was doing. People, as one early moviegoer observed, “sensed Biograph pictures were ‘different.’ ” D.W.’s name was not on the screen, but on Mondays and Thursdays, the days when his films were released, nickelodeons and theaters put up signs reminding the public that it was “Biograph day.” Nickels in hand, customers flocked to see the new story the studio had filmed.

  So D.W. was allowed, as his wife Linda put it, “to go his lonely way . . . contrary to all the old established rules of the game.” At night in New York he would lie in bed in his tiny apartment in Murray Hill unable to sleep, excited by all the connections he was rapidly making, by all the possibilities he was envisioning. The studio had told him to shoot pictures so that full-sized figures appeared on the screen. This instruction troubled D.W. One afternoon he went uptown to the Metropolitan Museum and studied how Rembrandt and other great painters did it. “All painted pictures,” he observed, “show only the face.” D.W. decided the day would come when he’d have close shots of the actors’ faces in his films, too. He was like an explorer who had no map, only his instincts to lead him into this new territory. In two busy and fertile years, D.W. came to understand that film had a previously untapped power. A movie, he had begun to realize with his uncanny insight, could be
more than just a well-told tale. “I believe,” he said, “in the motion picture not only as a means of amusement, but as a moral and educational force.”

  At the tail end of 1909, the film he decided to make, A Corner in Wheat, was (like most of his early Biograph releases) a melodrama. But D.W. had deliberately shaped it with an distinctive ideological point of view. The country’s many strikes, the muckraking journalists’ attacks on greedy financial titans, William Jennings Bryan’s passionate “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention with its contrast between “the farmer who . . . toils all day” and “the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain”—all the anger and rage of the era had seeped into D.W.’s nerves and now fed his imagination.

  A Corner in Wheat was loosely based on a Frank Norris short story, although the author was never formally credited or, for that matter, paid. “We never bothered about ‘rights,’ ” D.W.’s wife breezily conceded. “Authors and publishers were quite unaware of our existence.” And Norris, in turn, had been inspired by the actual turn-of-the-century manipulations of Joe Leitner to control the Chicago Board of Trade wheat market.

  The real-life scheme was cunningly complex, and Norris’s fictive adaptation was part of a planned sprawling trilogy of novels. D.W.’s storyteller’s gift compressed the sweeping scope of events into just three sparse and distinct strands. Each was controlled, unmannered, and very affecting. Audiences were introduced to farmers stoically working in a field; the Wheat King hatching his plot to control the market; and the city’s downtrodden poor hoping to buy bread to feed their families.

  During the course of the short film, no character from any of these settings journeyed outside his carefully delineated world. They did not speak to one another. They remained independent and self-contained. Yet D.W.’s deft parallel editing among the three strands was not just a technological innovation but an inspired act of storytelling. With subtlety and control, he succeeded in capturing the essence of the early-twentieth-century marketplace. His technique, his cutting between well-crafted and realistic scenes, created an uncanny feel both for the alienation in the American social experience and for the inescapable connections, the bread on the table, that bound the nation together.

  D.W. did all this with poise and reserve, without histrionics. Still, the film brimmed with energy and a consistent point of view. The story built like a calm, well-reasoned argument, its discipline adding to the suspense, until at its end the audience was presented with three haunting images: The Wheat King, after receiving a telegram stating that he now controls the world’s market in wheat, suddenly slips and falls into a grain elevator, the wheat enveloping him until only a single desperately grasping hand is visible, and then it too is engulfed and disappears; police, brandishing revolvers and clubs, charge at the enraged poor who, because the price of flour has doubled, can no longer afford to buy bread; and a solitary farmer, a pastiche of Millet’s The Sower, working in a lonely field as night falls.

  The unique and overflowing power in the film, its compassion and anger, did not go unnoticed. The reviewer in the New York Dramatic Mirror wrote: “This picture is not a picture drama, although it is presented with dramatic force. It is an argument, an editorial, an essay on a vital subject of deep interest to all . . . No orator, no editorial writer, no essayist could so strongly and effectively present the thoughts conveyed in this picture. It is another demonstration of the force and power of motion pictures as a means of conveying ideas. It is a daring step for the Biograph producers to take.”

  This “daring step” had one immediate consequence. D.W. had suggested to Henry Marvin, the president of the Biograph Company, that he be allowed to take the troupe to sunny California to shoot during the winter months. With the success of A Corner in Wheat, the front office agreed. Reservations were booked for the Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

  FOUR

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  AS D.W. WAS shooting A Corner in Wheat, a new union offensive began in Los Angeles. The opening target was Hamburger’s, the city’s largest department store, with over thirty acres of floor space and two hundred employees. It was also the Times’s biggest advertiser.

  The union tactics this time were mischievous, not violent. Telephone sales were shipped to homes whose residents insisted they had never placed the orders. Customers strolled through the store and made expensive selections, but after the goods were wrapped, they would inquire, “By the way, you don’t advertise in the Times, do you?” When the salesperson answered yes, they would walk out in an indignant huff, without their packages and without paying.

  Hamburger’s response was inspired. The store announced a sale: “At Extremely Low Prices: A Large Supply of Strictly Non-Union-Made Clothing, Scab Overalls, and Women’s Apparel.” It was a huge success, and the store sent a list of all the names and addresses of the bargain-hunters to the Times. The paper gleefully reported that many of the customers were union men or their wives. A good deal, it observed with malicious relish, was apparently more important than supporting the cause.

  The M&M countered the Hamburger’s boycott with one of their own. Their target was the McCan Mechanical Works, one of the state’s busiest foundries. David McCan, the independent-minded owner, had declared he would hire both union and nonunion men, asking “no questions other than whether the man is competent to do the work.” The M&M decided that such a sentiment was reason enough to ruin him. And with a diligent campaign to persuade McCan’s clients to take their business elsewhere, they came close to succeeding.

  With grim inevitability, both sides within months escalated their activities. A new series of strikes rolled out. Carpenters, plumbers, plasterers, laundry workers, brewers—they all walked off. Life in Los Angeles was a nasty, politicized struggle. Then it got worse.

  In the spring of 1910 a determined group of hard-edged San Francisco labor leaders—Olaf A. Tveitmoe, Anton Johannsen, Tom Mooney, and A. J. Gallagher—traveled south. They were the men who had transformed San Francisco into a city where the unions made their demands and employers had little choice but to accept or go out of business. Tveitmoe, called “the Viking,” was as fierce and formidable as his nickname. He was six feet tall, weighed over three hundred pounds, and used a heavy cane to get about. He was also an intellectual, reading Greek, playing the violin, and translating plays from his native Norwegian into English. But above all else he was a dedicated union man, prepared to do whatever was required to help the cause. He arrived in Los Angeles with his associates, as Tveitmoe ominously promised, to give the Labor Council “some backbone.” Their first strategic move was to bring the Structural Iron Workers into the conflict.

  The ironworkers were tough men, familiar with danger. Their workday was spent on narrow girders hundreds of feet above the ground. They would not run or back down if attacked by scab armies. The council was certain it could count on them.

  A letter, drafted by the council, was delivered to foundries throughout Los Angeles: On June 1, 1910, the ironworkers would walk off their jobs unless wages were increased. The Times gleefully reported the owners’ response: They had thrown the letter into the trash. And so as promised, fifteen hundred ironworkers went out on strike.

  A half-dozen other unions immediately left their jobs to show their support. Within hours, all over the city crowds of union pickets led by chanting ironworkers marched around factories.

  Each protest was a taunting, menacing parade. The crowds dared the employers’ goons to attack. It did not take long for the challenges to be accepted. Hired thugs and imported scabs charged at the workers. Stones were hurled, blackjacks swung, clubs slammed—each mean blow delivered with an ardent, powerful animosity. The city’s streets were taken over by battling crusaders.

  The Superior Court issued seven injunctions prohibiting the unions from demonstrating. The Los Angeles City Council passed a nonpicketing ordinance. The strikers ignored the injunctions and the ordinance, and charged the
police who tried to disperse them. More than three hundred strikers were arrested, but the unions paid their fines, and they raced back to the streets. The violence grew more brutal; six deaths were reported. “Hate was in the air,” observed a journalist covering the Los Angeles strikes for Collier’s.

  Then in the summer of 1910 the terror campaign began.

  The first bomb was a fake. It was found at the Fourth Street construction site of the twelve-story annex to the Alexandria Hotel. Two developers, A. C. Bilicke and R. A. Rowen, had invested more than $3 million in this ornate five-hundred-room downtown showplace. Their investment was testimony to their faith in the city’s future, to their belief that Los Angeles would continue to grow and that affluent visitors would come wanting a place to stay that rivaled the great hotels in New York, London, and Paris. Tapestries and rugs were shipped at outrageous expense from Europe to decorate the block-long lobby. A large glass chandelier that was rumored to have hung in a Bavarian palace now shimmered in the Alex’s dining room. The hotel was an immediate success. It was the place to stay in Los Angeles. Its dining room was celebrated, liveried waiters pouring champagne into crystal glasses, presenting trays of briny oysters, and carving huge roasts from silver trolleys. And now Bilicke and Rowen had decided to add a new wing with rooms that would provide an uncommon luxury—private baths. But as the construction progressed, workers began to die.