American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  And after all the front-page headlines, the dramatic accounts of his uncovering caches of dynamite and the furtive train journey, Billy, too, had become a symbol. When Ortie McManigal’s confession was published in a pamphlet as a first-person account of “the national dynamite plot,” it was a stern photograph of Billy, not the narrator, that greeted the readers. The detective had become as famous as the mystery he had solved.

  For labor and its supporters, Billy replaced Otis as the personification of the enemy. They had no doubts about why he had been hired. The cocky, publicity-seeking detective was the unscrupulous agent of the deep-pocketed capitalists. In the Haywood case, the ruthless Pinkertons had manufactured evidence and kidnapped union officials. Four years later the McNamaras were the unfortunate victims of another corrupt private detective, another bought-and-paid-for thug willing to do whatever his masters ordered to help destroy the labor movement.

  For Billy, prideful and vain, the personal attacks were a torment. He could not find the coldbloodedness to ignore the impugning of his honor, to dismiss the wild slurs as simply a strategy. He had spent seven difficult months building his case, painstakingly collecting his evidence. It had been a time of hardship and sacrifice. How could anyone believe that the results—his triumph—were a fabrication? Each new accusation about his conduct served only to solidify his determination to see the McNamaras hanged. Their execution would be his own vindication. He made up his mind to do whatever was necessary to ensure their convictions. A battler, Billy closed his heavy fists, dropped his shoulders, and prepared to fight back.

  The reality, he silently complained, was that by both instinct and principle, he had always been sympathetic to organized labor. The immigrant tailor’s son still believed that unions offered workers their best chance to achieve a fair wage. He was a detective for hire, but he was no toady of the rich and powerful. Hadn’t he proved that in the Oregon land graft investigation and in the San Francisco corruption cases? Each new charge that he was antilabor was mystifying and tapped at the same sore spot. His resentment hardened.

  The threats were another matter: a real danger. Bags of letters, signed and anonymous, postmarked from cities all over the country, arrived at his office in the months after the arrests. Most contained pledges to kill the man who had framed the McNamaras. He tried to ignore them, but then the police discovered a plot to place a suitcase filled with nitro in the room next to his at the Alex. And when Billy read that labor leaders in San Francisco routinely told crowds that “only the withdrawal of Burns could save the accused men,” he had no doubts. Their words might just as well have been a command: Get rid of Burns. He knew he had to respond.

  Billy sent his men to San Francisco to deliver a message to the union heads: If anything happens to Burns, then the same thing will happen to you.

  “But my God!” protested one of the union men. “Some crank might kill him! I would not be responsible.”

  When this response was reported to Billy, he hesitated for only a moment. Then he sent his operative back to San Francisco with another message.

  “Mr. Burns asks me to tell you,” the detective matter-of-factly explained, “that if he is killed by a crank, another crank will kill you.”

  After that, Billy noted with a measure of relief, there was no more fiery talk at rallies about the benefits of the detective’s sudden “withdrawal” from the case.

  Still, Billy understood that he couldn’t be too careful. As a precaution, he had duplicates made of all the McNamara files, all the investigators’ surveillance and evidence reports, and he arranged for them to be delivered in secret to an address in Pueblo, Colorado. Frank Heney, the prosecutor who had been shot in the San Francisco courtroom, had retired to a ranch in that mountain town. Heney was instructed that should Billy die, whether by assassination or as the result of an accident or an illness, he was immediately to bring the files to the Los Angeles district attorney. The case against the McNamaras, Billy made certain, would continue even if he was no longer alive.

  So in the months before trial Billy labored on.With a measure of resignation, he came to accept that only “the detective story of fiction would end with the arrests of the guilty men in the case.” Instead, Billy entered what was, he would decide, “the hardest stretch.”

  It was a busy time. Billy was determined to bolster the prosecutors’ case against the McNamaras. And he also had a new agenda. McManigal’s confession had left him stunned. He had not previously grasped either the number or the scope of the dynamite attacks. This was not, he now understood, a “one-man conspiracy.” There had been more than one hundred bombings at nonunion sites on both coasts and throughout the Midwest. It was inconceivable that J.J. McNamara could have single-handedly conceived, financed, and orchestrated such a long-running nationwide campaign. Union officials from across the country had undoubtedly suggested targets, and then given their approval to the strategy of terror. To Billy’s mind, they were all culpable. They all must be brought to justice. A search warrant was secured, and his operatives swarmed through the McNamara house on Quarry Street in Cincinnati. In a dresser drawer a pile of letters was discovered. Written by J.J. to his brother Jim, they were handwritten orders to attack sites throughout the nation. Many of the letters also contained thinly veiled references to the union’s executive committee. Billy saw this as proof the union officials were intricately involved in the plot. The union’s record books taken on the night of the arrests also confirmed their complicity: The executive committee had approved J.J.’s receiving a thousand dollars each month to finance the bombing campaign.

  Billy made sure copies of the letters and the union ledgers were sent on to Los Angeles; that evidence would solidify the city’s case against the McNamaras. And Billy also had copies of the documents delivered to federal prosecutors in Indianapolis, where the Structural IronWorkers union had its headquarters. The explosion at the Times was only one of hundreds of bombings throughout the country, he lectured the government lawyers, yet only two men would be on trial in Los Angeles. Act boldly, Billy urged the Indianapolis U.S. attorney. The entire union leadership must be indicted.

  Money, meanwhile, remained a problem. Billy had come to accept that the reward would not be paid until the McNamaras were convicted. But a courtroom victory would be problematic unless Billy could keep his small, expensive army of operatives digging into the case; dozens of leads in McManigal’s lengthy confession alone needed to be explored. So Billy improvised.

  In Muncie, Indiana, for example, his men went to a house rented by the union that, according to McManigal, had been used to store nitroglycerin. The cans of the explosive were gone; apparently they had been used in bombings. However, the pile of leaking nitro cans had left a pattern of deep, clearly identifiable stains on the wooden floor. Here was evidence, Billy realized, that would support the veracity of McManigal’s confession and would also implicate the union officials who had rented the property. He needed that floor.

  The house, however, was about to be sold. Billy’s first instinct was to offer a higher bid and buy the property. Except he couldn’t afford it. He was already in debt, and he had no immediate prospect of new funds. His only alternative was, as he put it, “to dicker.” Improvising, he offered the owner a new floor if he could have the old stained one. Why not? decided the bemused owner. So each incriminating floorboard was photographed, numbered, carefully removed, and then sent on to Los Angeles—a new series of exhibits to be used at the trial.

  Unfortunately, not all of Billy’s efforts were so productive. A team of his investigators went to a vacant lot on the corner of Morgan and Van Buren streets in Chicago to dig for a cache of explosives that McManigal claimed to have buried. It was slow, tense work. Each time a shovel was thrust into the ground, there was the genuine fear it would set off a thunderous explosion. Yet they kept at it for hours. Finally, with a metallic echo, the tip of a shovel nudged an iron box. They had located the cache. Elated, an agent ran to a telephone to inform the
Chicago office. Raymond ordered the detectives not remove anything until he arrived. He wanted to witness the discovery and then be the one to report the details to his father.

  A half hour later Raymond arrived. Under his supervision, the dense brown earth was cleared with great care from around the box. Two detectives lifted the box with slow precision from its underground hiding place. Open it, Raymond instructed.

  The crowd of men stood back. A detective pushed open a latch and gingerly lifted the top.

  Inside was a dead dog.

  After that the prospect of continuing to dig for the dynamite seemed too daunting. No one wanted to go through a repetition of similar unnerving moments. The detectives decided to move on to other matters. There still remained, after all, a good deal for them to do.

  And all the while, as his operatives kept adding to the already impressive collection of evidence against the brothers, the attacks on Billy continued. Appeal to Reason, the weekly paper of Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party, had a 400,000 circulation and vowed to throw “all its resources into the fight for the Iron Workers arrested on palpably trumped up charges.” The McNamara case was, Debs told his readers, “the last big fight.” The cause of the explosion at the Times, an investigation by the paper revealed, was gas, not dynamite. The two accused brothers were “as innocent as new-born babes.”

  Samuel Gompers, the head of the nationwide American Federation of Labor, in the past had often been a conciliatory, pragmatic voice in the disputes between labor and capital. He appreciated that it was businessmen who employed the workers; for practical reasons an accord between the two factions was a necessity. He also had grown uncomfortable with the radical excesses, both real and imagined, of the Socialists. He feared they ultimately wanted to replace traditional family life with more open and experimental unions. As a matter of principle, he publicly dissociated himself from the party: “I want to tell you Socialists that I am entirely at variance with your philosophy . . . Economically, you are unsound; socially, you are wrong; industrially, you are an impossibility.” Yet like Debs, he, too, realized that the McNamara trial would be labor’s “last big fight.” So he put aside his misgivings and stood side by side with the Socialists in Los Angeles. And with unwavering fury and conviction, he tore into Billy.

  “Burns has lied,” he announced. The entire case was a “frame-up.” Billy had “planted” the dynamite he had recovered from the barn and the union vault. Gompers had no doubts. His certainty was unshakable. He insisted that Billy “is well known to have no hesitancy or scruples in manufacturing evidence.” He was confident the McNamaras were victims and that their innocence would be established by the courts.

  Billy raged. Gompers’s words, he felt, were not just a slander but also a threat. They were “calculated to inflame the minds of some irresponsible persons who might seek to revenge themselves on me personally.” Full of self-protective anger, he shot back to a hastily convened assembly of reporters, “What has become of Gompers’s conscience? We’ve got the goods on the prisoners, and Gompers knows so better than anyone else.” Billy could not understand how a reasonable person could reach any conclusion other than that the McNamaras were murderers.

  And there was a further annoyance. Billy soon noticed that the man wearing the distinctive brown fedora was once again trailing him about Los Angeles. This was the final straw, and Billy, eager for a showdown, set a trap. He led his tail away from the Alexandria Hotel, turned a quick corner, and then lay in wait. When his shadow followed, Billy pounced. One punch, and the man went down. Billy hoped he’d get up and fight. The detective was ready to give somebody a beating. But the man produced a badge. He had been assigned by the district attorney to keep tabs on the detective.

  Embarrassed, feeling besieged on all sides, Billy skulked off.

  But all the personal attacks were, Billy was soon to find, simply a small nasty introduction to larger, more consequential intrigues. As the McNamaras moved closer to trial, the accusations became more vituperative, and the machinations more underhanded. The stakes in the outcome had intensified. Everything changed once Clarence Darrow agreed to represent the two brothers.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ______________________

  SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Darrow knew it the moment he walked into the apartment and saw the troubled look on his wife’s face.

  What? he asked.

  Ruby responded with a heavy, accusatory silence.

  At last she pointed toward the library. You have a visitor, she explained tersely. Without another word, she headed off in an angry march toward the bedroom, her heels clicking against the wooden floor with a martial intensity. Darrow walked up the long hallway toward the sunlit red room, curious about whom he would find. Who, he wondered, could have provoked such an intense reaction from his wife?

  Standing by the fireplace was a short, squat man dressed in a mournful black suit. He had impressively broad shoulders and held himself very erect, as if to compensate for his diminutive stature. A thin cover of graying hair was combed over the dome of a large noble head. Through wire-rimmed glasses, dark determined eyes glowed at Darrow.

  “Hello, Clarence,” said Sam Gompers.

  At once the lawyer understood the reason for Ruby’s agitated mood. And why Gompers had come to see him.

  “No!” said Darrow.

  For the past week Darrow had been defending the board of directors of the Kankakee Manufacturing Company in suburban Chicago. Charles Myerhoff, an elderly CivilWar veteran, had lost the bulk of his life savings by investing in the company and had sued for fraud. Myerhoff contended that Kankakee’s brochures and advertisements were filled with deliberately false statements to attract investors. Darrow did not attempt to defend the rosy promises made by the board. His strategy was to attack the naïveté of the nearly bankrupt old man. Myerhoff, he declared with as much indignation as he could summon, had a legal responsibility to research the company’s claims. His clients could not be blamed for Myerhoff’s imprudent failure to perform the necessary due diligence.

  The logic, cruel and specious, would have left even many Wall Street attorneys uneasy. Once “the people’s champion,” Darrow felt demeaned, his energies and talents misplaced. Yet he carried on, resolute in his defense. He had, he constantly reminded himself, made a vow.

  Darrow had sworn first to Ruby, and then with equal conviction to himself, that he would no longer fill his life with causes. The many battles had taken their toll—on his health, on his finances, and on his will. At fifty-four, he was weary. All he now wanted from the law was to be able to earn sufficient money to remove the burden of his debts and then save enough to retire. He looked forward to spending his unencumbered days in his book-lined library writing the novel that had taken shape in his mind over too many harried decades. If this case, with its contrived defense, its tacit endorsement of the bilking of elderly veterans, was what his life by necessity had become, Darrow, with a listless philosophical shrug, accepted its terms.

  But although he had made up his mind to move away from all that he once was, it was, of course, impossible to prevent the past—his proud legacy—from intruding. He had read the headlines about the arrests of the McNamara brothers and the sly dash across state lines to California. The parallels to the Haywood case were clear and distinct. But so, too, were the memories of how the trial had left him drained. At its end, exhausted, despairing, wracked with an intolerable physical pain, he had escaped to Los Angeles—only to settle into a lingering sickness that had seemed a certain prelude to death. Fate, however, had intervened to save him; and now he looked back at his earlier days with a critical detachment that left him astonished by the bravado of his crusades. He was glad the McNamaras were not his concern. Wars, he had learned through hard experience, should be fought by the young and the strong. He was neither. Besides, he would never return to Los Angeles. The city held too many memories of a time when he had inhabited his own internal hell. All things considered, Darrow decided, Kankakee, Illi
nois, suited him just fine.

  If he felt the necessity to champion a cause, Darrow reminded himself, his pen still had bite and power. Just months before the explosion at the Times Building, he had written “The Open Shop.” This carefully crafted essay had stated that “in reality the open shop only means the open door through which the union man goes out and the non-union man comes in to take his place . . . The closed shops are the only sure protection for the trade agreements and the defense of the individual.” For Darrow, this argument, a nonnegotiable belief that only union members should be employed in the workplace, was at the crux of the bitter dispute between capital and labor. With this pamphlet he had shown what side he was on. “The Open Shop” had been widely circulated throughout the country; 20,000 copies, in fact, had been distributed in Los Angeles. He didn’t need to go into the courtroom to make his case.

  Still, it was not unexpected when, only days after the McNama-ras’ arrest, a telegram from Gompers arrived at Darrow’s Chicago office: “There is no other advocate in the whole United States who holds such a commanding post before the people and in whom labor has such confidence. You owe it to yourself and to the cause of labor to appear as the advocate of these men so unjustly accused.”

  Darrow ignored the telegram. He refused to think about what, if anything, he “owed” labor. He remained focused instead on what he owed his wife and himself. He had made a promise, and he was determined to keep it. Besides, protecting the board of the Kankakee Manufacturing Company from the consequences of their blatantly deceptive advertisements was enough of a challenge.

  Still, Darrow could not deny that he was surprised to find Gompers in his apartment. And flattered, too.

  Darrow sank wearily into the wicker chair by the fireplace, while Gompers paced and talked. The labor leader seemed unable to stop moving about the room, unsettled by nervous energy. And who could blame him? Gompers understood his predicament. He needed to persuade an attorney whose skill in convincing skeptical juries had made him famous. Darrow was shrewd; he wouldn’t be susceptible to any verbal tricks. But Gompers also knew that he had made his own reputation as a pugnacious union negotiator. His tenacity was legendary. “My legs are so short I can never run away from a fight,” he often boasted. Gompers told himself that he could win Darrow over.