American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  A hoisting derrick suddenly toppled and came crashing to the ground. One worker was crushed to death; two were severely injured. The foremen could not understand how the accident had happened. Yet the next day the derrick fell again. Another worker was killed, and two more were injured. And now a possible explanation began to take shape: The dead workers were nonunion. “The scabs [were] killing each other through their own incompetency,” insisted labor organizers.

  As mournful workers carried the body of their dead friend, the second in as many days, out of the construction site, a fight broke out with the union pickets. The two sides traded punches, and the corpse fell to the ground. It was trampled. “CORPSE DEFACERS!” the Times screamed in ninety-six-point type on its front page the next day.

  And now a bomb had been found at the Alex. When the police arrived to defuse it, they discovered after a cautious examination that the device was a hoax. A gas pipe had been filled with manure. A rusty dollar watch had been tied to it for effect.

  The next bomb, however, was real. It had been placed at the block-long construction site for the city’s new Hall of Records. Still, there was never any danger. The police were informed of its location hours before it had been set to explode. It was defused without incident.

  The unions insisted that the bomb had been placed by minions of the M&M, a tactic to villainize labor. Capitalist organizations denied the accusation. An attack by “the labor-union wolves,” the Times cheered, had been averted.

  Yet throughout the city people trembled with a new fear. The possibility of a bomb exploding in Los Angeles had become very real.

  FIVE

  ______________________

  THE INDIANAPOLIS ORPHEUM was that midwestern city’s premier vaudeville house. It had been built at the turn of the century, a time when the discoveries of daring archaeologists in sandy deserts stirred the country’s imagination. Life-size stone pharaohs wearing headdresses flanked the entrance. A gold-leaf frieze of invented symbols, a sort of hieroglyphics, ran across the top of the lobby walls. Throne chairs with carved serpent arms filled the reserved boxes. It was all meant to suggest that exotic adventures did not take place only in faraway lands. For the price of a ticket, customers could enter the Orpheum on Illinois Street in downtown Indianapolis and escape their dreary lives.

  With the growing success of the nickelodeons, the Orpheum started “movie days.” During the winter of 1910 A Corner in Wheat played at the Orpheum for several months. It was so popular that the film ran as a finale after the live vaudeville performances, too. Audiences came to be entertained, then found themselves sitting through an experience with an unexpected potency.

  As it happened, one of the many customers to see the film at the Orpheum was John J. McNamara, secretary-treasurer of the Structural Iron Workers. The union’s national office was on the fifth floor of the American Central Life Building in downtown Indianapolis, only a few blocks from the theater.

  Still, J.J.’s taking time to go a movie was something extraordinary. His was a busy, accomplished life. He had quit school as a teenager and went looking for a job to support his widowed mother and younger brother. Ignoring the danger, he signed on as an ironworker and spent a decade helping to erect scaffoldings for bridges and skyscrapers. Popular and easygoing, a ready smile bursting from his handsome boyish face, J.J. was elected as a delegate to the national union convention and then at twenty-eight was appointed to the full-time secretary-treasurer position. He went back to night school, taking business courses, and then for two years he studied at the Indiana School of Law. Now thirty-four, he juggled his union job with other new ambitions—law, editing the union’s Bridgeman’s Magazine, writing essays about economics and sociology, and trying his hand at poetry. So perhaps it was J.J.’s expanding interest in the arts that led him to the Orpheum. Or perhaps he was attracted by what he had heard about the film’s radical message. But whatever the reason, that winter he saw Griffith’s film. “A call to arms” was how he described it.

  A few months later a letter addressed to John J. McNamara arrived at the union’s downtown Indianapolis office. It had been sent from Los Angeles, and the writer was Eugene Clancy, the head of the Structural Iron Workers union in San Francisco.

  “I have been here five days now,” he wrote excitedly to J.J., “and they have started here the greatest strike any part of the country has had in a long time . . . All the shop men of the Union Iron Works and Bakers Iron Works and Llewellyn Iron Works are quitting.

  “Send Hockin at once,” Clancy urged, requesting the presence of veteran union organizer Herbert Hockin. “He will make his salary—if not in money, in goodwill for the Iron Workers.”

  J.J., however, did not dispatch Hockin to Los Angeles. Instead, he sent his younger brother Jim. His talents would be more appropriate. The letter, J.J. decided, was a call to arms, too.

  _____

  Billy Burns had also been summoned to Los Angeles—his biggest client wanted him there. The Burns Detective Agency had been hired by the American Bankers Association, winning the contract away from the more established Pinkerton Agency. The association had 11,000 member banks, and now the Burns Agency was responsible for protecting all of them. It was a tremendous coup for Billy’s new business, and he believed it would make him rich. The Pinkertons had accused Billy of underbidding, but he simply dismissed their complaints with a coy rejoinder: He promised to be too busy guarding banks to go after their racetrack business.

  Billy booked his own train ticket. He needed to be in Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon, October 1, 1910, and he wanted to be certain there were no mistakes. He was to be the keynote speaker at the Bankers Association’s annual convention luncheon.

  Before leaving, he put his son Raymond in charge of the investigation of the explosion at the Peoria train yard. He was confident that a destroyed girder was not a major act of sabotage, certainly not the sort of case that needed his personal attention.

  SIX

  ______________________

  CLARENCE DARROW DETESTED automobiles. He had returned to Chicago to begin what he hoped would be a new, lucrative phase in his legal career and was both surprised and annoyed by what he encountered. A parade of Model T’s was motoring down Michigan Avenue. At the sight of all the noisy machines, all the backfiring traffic, the attorney’s populist instincts failed him, and a curmudgeon’s anger flared.

  “No one can even guess at the cost of this new invention to the country or the change that it brings to life,” he complained with the mixture of outrage and cynicism that was typical of how he increasingly looked at the world around him. “New roads have been built at great expense so men may ride quickly to some point so they can ride back more quickly if possible. Finance companies have helped the poor to get further into debt; an automobile complex demanding haste, change, and going and coming, has taken possession of mankind. With all the rest, it has furnished an extra harvest of unfortunates for our prisons.”

  But Darrow’s was a singular crotchety voice. And as he conceded, it was too late to be a corrective. America’s fascination with the automobile had taken firm hold. The Vanderbilt Cup auto race, in fact, had quickly become the country’s largest spectator event.

  Willie K. Vanderbilt, heir to his family’s industrial fortune, had established the race in 1904 to encourage the country’s emerging automobile industry. It was his hope that America would produce cars capable of competing with the sleek, fast European vehicles. In 1909 an American, Henry Grant, driving a big-wheeled Alco, won for the first time. The following year a half-million people would crowd the forty-eight-mile Long Island Motor Parkway to see if Grant would win the silver Tiffany trophy for a second time. Hoping to get a spot near the starting line, spectators on Saturday, October 1, 1910, began arriving in the chilly predawn mist, hours before the cars were in position.

  The Edison Studios had filmed the 1908 Vanderbilt Cup race. Cameras had been set up along the route to maximize the opportunities for good shots, but
the film was surprisingly dull. It did not capture the speed, the danger, or the excitement of the contest. It also didn’t help that much of the footage was out of focus.

  Willie Vanderbilt was very disappointed, but he still believed that a well-made film could help create even greater enthusiasm for his competition. He met with Henry Marvin, the former college teacher who was president of the Biograph Studio, and tried to persuade him to produce a movie about the 1910 race.

  Marvin was intrigued with the idea, and he knew D.W. had a fondness for cars. The studio had bought a convertible for the director to drive to location shoots in upstate New York, and the filmmaker was so delighted that he had his initials painted in a discreet yet proprietary script on its door. Marvin did not wait long to tell D.W. about his conversation with the young heir.

  D.W. mulled it over. A car race in a film was one thing. A film consisting of only a car race was decidedly another. D.W. wanted his movies to tell stories. The narrative could be suspenseful, heartwrenching, or politically instructive, but above all it must tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He would schematize these elements on paper for each scenario, and he would not begin shooting until the outline was clear in his mind. A self-contained narrative was the fulfillment of what D.W. believed movies should be all about.

  D.W., of course, was shrewd enough to understand the journalistic potentials in the medium. He often talked about how the movie camera could be used to report on significant events. He anticipated the day when theaters would show newsreels. He simply didn’t want to be part of it.

  D.W. was adamant. He told Marvin he did not want to film the 1910 Vanderbilt Cup race. Anyway, he explained to his boss, there was no need for him to make a movie. The race will get plenty of play in all the newspapers.

  D.W. was right. Six New York papers sent their reporters to Long Island to cover the race, and at least twice that number represented newspapers from around the country. The Los Angeles Times had even dispatched a reporter across the continent to witness the event.

  At 12:30 A.M. on the morning of October 1, 1910, an anxious Times editor dictated a telegraph message to be sent to his race correspondent waiting in Mineola, Long Island. It was three hours later in the East, and the mechanics would already have begun fueling the cars.

  “Send us a good account of the race,” the editor instructed. “At the crack of the pistol, begin sending the actual scenes on the track.”

  Cy Sawyer was the night-shift telegraph operator, thirty-four years old, and fluent in Morse code. He quickly tapped the message in dots and dashes to New York.

  At one A.M. Sawyer began sending a new message. On the opposite side of the continent, the New York operator started transcribing—when abruptly the line clicked, then fell silent. The connection between the country’s two coasts had been broken.

  TS, the New York operator, tapped anxiously, keying in the call letters for “Times Station,” the code for the Los Angeles Times.

  There was no response, and he continued to tap TS, TS. It was very frustrating. What if the line were still out at the start of the race?

  At last the New York operator got a reply. It was from the chief of the Los Angeles Western Union office.

  POOR OLD SAWYER WILL ANSWER NO MORE CALLS, it read. TS had been destroyed.

  SEVEN

  ______________________

  THERE WERE A series of explosions, six in all, and they erupted in a rapid, booming, and terrifying succession. The first occurred at seven minutes after one A.M., and the noise was tremendous. A sixfloor wing of the stone Times Building was thrown free of its foundation as if shoved by a malicious force. In the next horrifying moments, the building’s south wall, the Broadway Street side, cracked. Deep fissures gouged the plaster, spread rapidly up the wall; and then all at once the entire south wall cascaded to the ground. Bricks and stone tumbled in a loud, crashing free fall. As the wall collapsed, five new explosions—sudden, deep, and intense—pounded through what remained of the two-winged structure. And fire raged.

  The second-floor composing room burned like kindling. The wooden floor buckled, cracked, and then gave way. Huge linotype machines, heavy as railroad cars, rained down on the office floor below, smashed through the planks, and continued their descent until they landed with a tremendous thud on the basement gas mains. Rivers of gas gushed out, coursing in all directions, feeding flames and causing them to burn with a new intensity.

  A firestorm shot up from the basement. Columns of intense red heat pierced floorboards, ignited ink barrels, and devoured huge rolls of newsprint paper. In less than four minutes the building had become a cauldron of smoke, heat, and flames.

  At the time of the first blast, about one hundred people had been at work. On the upper floors, a thin late-night editorial and composing crew was hurrying to put the paper “to bed.” Down below in the pressroom, the printers prepared the machinery; the first edition would have rolled off the presses at four A.M. Now they were all trapped. And escape would be a battle.

  The first person to rush to the scene was a man wearing a woman’s floral dress and a blond wig. Los Angeles police detective Eddie King had been working an undercover detail that night trying to catch the Boyle Heights rapist. Throughout the summer the rapist had been targeting women in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, and the police, with no clues and conflicting descriptions of the assailant, had decided to bait a trap with a decoy. But King, a hulking six-footer crammed into a tentlike dress and wearing a garish straw blond wig that barely covered his thick neck, had attracted only incredulous stares. Frustrated, his mood worked raw by the snide teasing that the backup officers had aimed at him throughout the night, King had been returning at one A.M. to the First Street police station. As he crossed Spring Street, the ground seemed to give way beneath his feet. He steadied himself, and all at once a catastrophic boom broke through the nighttime quiet. In the distance the sky lit up with a diffused glow. An earthquake, King decided. He ran full speed toward the eerie, unnatural light.

  The Times Building was an inferno. King was overwhelmed. Instinctively he rushed toward the structure with the vague plan of saving someone. But the flames and the heat quickly stopped his advance; it was as if he were held back by an impenetrable wall. He had no choice but to remain on the street. He could stare at the galloping, uncontrolled fire, feel the scalding intensity of its heat, and listen to the miserable screams, the keening wails, of the people trapped inside. But there was nothing he could do. They were beyond his help.

  Alerted by shouts, he looked upward. A crowd of confused, desperate faces appeared at the third-floor windows. The flames were moving toward them, getting closer. The heat was unbearable. So people started to jump.

  It was a long way down. King watched men land on the hard concrete sidewalk. How must it feel, he thought, to have your entire existence come down to a single impossible choice: either you burn or you jump to your death. Tears in his eyes, he picked up one inert body after another and carried it across the street. He thought the corpses should be removed as far as possible from the fire’s path. He didn’t want them to be burned beyond recognition. He wanted relatives to be able to recognize their loved ones. He wanted families to be reunited one last time. He stacked the corpses in a pile like firewood. It was all he could do.

  Inside, the exit doors had jammed. Perhaps the heat had melted the locks. Perhaps the doors had not functioned for years. Whatever the cause, there seemed to be no way out. Still, a group of engravers on the sixth floor refused to give up. There was nowhere else to go, so they headed for the roof. It was rough going, a journey through smoke and flames, but they kept at it and in time succeeded in reaching the rooftop. Only now they were trapped.

  Opposite the roof, across an alley, was a rooming house. They could see the adjacent building’s roof, but it was too far to jump. The engravers yelled for help. They hoped someone would hear them and rescue them before the fire climbed higher.

  They yelled, their v
oices shrill pleas above the noise and tumult and confusion of the blaze. And finally they were heard. Residents at the rooming house hurried to the roof. But they didn’t know what to do. They stared across at the men trapped on the other side. They could feel the heat of the fire, and their eyes burned from the smoke. They saw what it was like to be in the Times Building. But they had no way of helping the engravers. All they could do was look at the trapped men across the alleyway.

  At last, a ladder was found. It was carried to the rooming-house roof. Only it was too short. It almost reached across the alleyway but not quite. So one man lay down on the rooming-house roof and leaned over the edge, his arms dangling in the air as he grasped the ladder. Behind him several men held his legs in place. The ladder now stretched across the alleyway. The man holding the ladder had powerful forearms, but it still required all his will, all his concentration, to keep the ladder steady. It seemed impossible that he would be able to hold the ladder in place for long. But there was no alternative. It was the only way.

  One by one the engravers crawled on their hands and knees across the ladder. They tried not to rush. They tried not to panic as the smoke intensified. When the ladder started to shake, they kept going. They knew they could not stop. There was no other escape. All six men made it across the alleyway to the rooming house.

  Harry Chandler was also fortunate. The assistant publisher had left the building only moments before the first explosion. His father-in-law, Harrison Gray Otis, had not been in the building either. He was in Mexico, sent by President William Howard Taft to represent the United States at the Centennial of American Independence.

  Churchill Harvey-Elder was the last man to jump from the building. Recently promoted to assistant night editor, he had earlier returned from dinner at Tony’s Spanish Kitchen on North Broadway to find his mother in the newsroom. Proud of her son, she wanted to see him working at his new, important job. She watched him with a beaming pride for a while, and then he walked her to the door.