American Lightning

by Howard Blum

  Joe Scott, the co-counsel who had been brought into the case because of his ties to the Catholic community, interrupted him. “But when J.J. pleads guilty, it may save you from the gallows.”

  Jim was unpersuaded. He no longer cared if he died. All he cared about was protecting his older brother’s reputation. He would not cooperate if J.J. had to plead guilty. There were principles worth dying for, he told Darrow.

  With the voice of an old man, the lawyer answered, “I understand.”

  LeCompte Davis made the three o’clock call to the district attorney.

  “The big man” cannot be convinced, he said referring to Jim. Could he call back at nine?

  “If you get the consent of both men,” Fredericks insisted. “If you do not, don’t call me up. It is useless to waste time under any circumstances.”

  There had been a break for a Thanksgiving meal, but the food brought Darrow no enjoyment. He ate listlessly, as if each swallow were a concession. He returned to the prison but could barely find the strength to talk to his clients. He knew they were making a mistake, yet he respected Jim’s resolve. Tomorrow the trial would resume, and he could not bear the prospect. Or the inevitability of its conclusion.

  As Darrow brooded, Davis had a go at persuading the brothers. Reason had failed, so he tried psychology.

  “Jim,” he began, “I think you’re right, and we’ve been wrong. It’s best that you hang. It’ll be better for labor.”

  Jim did not respond. Perhaps he agreed, or perhaps he was simply beyond listening to further arguments.

  But Davis would not stop. “It’s better your brother hangs too,” he said. “Then labor will have two martyrs.”

  Suddenly Jim was incredulous. “They’ll hang him, too?”

  “That’s the way it looks to me,” said Davis evenly.

  The words slammed into Jim. He fell facedown onto his cot as if poleaxed and began to sob.

  Darrow looked away, but still the wild animal sound of Jim’s desperate tears filled the small cell.

  At last Jim raised his head. “All right. I’m licked.”

  Darrow quietly told Davis to call the district attorney.

  The next morning when court convened, Fredericks acted with coy drama. The bewildered reporters listened as he requested a continuance until after lunch. There were, he said portentously, “certain grave matters to be considered.”

  Like most grave matters, they were played out behind closed doors.

  First, Darrow and Davis met with Judge Bordwell. The McNamaras had agreed to the district attorney’s terms, Darrow announced. Both would plead guilty. Jim would receive a life sentence. J.J. would do ten years.

  “Ten years isn’t enough for John J. McNamara,” ruled the judge. “He’ll have to take fifteen.”

  It was not the deal that had been negotiated, but J.J. did not argue. Things had gotten to the hopeless point where an additional five years in prison loomed as just one more vindictive lash of the whip; there was no choice but to suffer.

  After that, Jim wrote his confession. He sat down in his bunk, as both Darrow and Fredericks stood like silent sentinels above him:

  “And this is the truth, on the night of September 30, 1910, at 5:45 P.M. I placed in Ink Alley, a portion of the Times Building, a suitcase containing sixteen sticks of 80 per cent dynamite, set to explode at one o’clock the next morning. It was my intention to injure the building and scare the owners. I did not intend to take the life of anyone.”

  And suddenly it was two P.M.

  The afternoon sunlight streamed radiantly through the courtroom windows. With a sense of appropriateness, a bailiff drew the heavy brown curtains. The brothers entered a lugubrious room.

  Jim went first, walking briskly like a man in a hurry. J.J. followed. He was as neatly dressed as someone going to church.

  Fredericks rose from his seat. “J.B. McNamara,” he said in a booming voice, “you have withdrawn your plea of not guilty. Do you wish to plead at this time?”

  Jim somehow couldn’t find the words. Davis spoke for him. “Yes, sir.”

  “To this indictment, charging you with the crime of murder, do you plead guilty or not guilty?”

  “Guilty,” said Jim. A single word, and it was over.

  J.J. was told to come forward to the defense table. Fredericks asked his question, and the entire room waited for J.J.’s response.

  “Guilty,” J.J. said in a loud, clear voice.

  The moment was too large, too inconceivable to be fully grasped by those caught up in it. Pandemonium filled the courtroom. Reporters raced to file stories. Tears of utter disbelief fell. Shouts erupted that labor had been hoodwinked, betrayed. And all the while Darrow remained slumped in his seat, old and ruined. Another victim.

  Job Harriman was a co-counsel on the defense team. Still, he learned about the settlement for the first time that afternoon when he heard a newsboy hawking, EXTRA! MCNAMARAS PLEAD GUILTY.

  The words reverberated through his head with a funereal cadence.

  He had been betrayed by Darrow.

  The election would be lost.

  And Otis had triumphed.

  The next morning street sweepers gathered up thousands and thousands of McNamara buttons that had been tossed away like so many bad memories. It was difficult not to feel deceived. By the cause. And by the two brothers who had sworn they were innocent.

  On election day Alexander defeated Harriman 85,739 votes to 51,796.

  Steffens was a hero. He was the one, he was quick to point out, who had initiated the settlement talks. “I’m famous again,” he boasted to his sister. “I’ll use it to make people think. They’ll listen again now.”

  Billy, in his self-involved way, saw the settlement of the case as “a great personal vindication.” He railed at all the union officials who had criticized him. But he saved his sharpest knives for Gompers, that “discredited leader,” that “shifty, false-hearted demagogue.”

  Gompers, for his part, was hurt and embarrassed. Like a jilted lover, he whined, “We have been cruelly deceived.”

  As for Darrow, he was a beaten man. “I am very tired. I am very worn out and very sorrowful,” he admitted to a reporter.

  And he might have added that he was very worried. He suspected that Fredericks, always the crusader, would decide to prosecute him on the bribery charge. He had survived “the trial of the century.” He had saved his clients’ lives. But he feared that the next time he was in a courtroom, it would be to defend his own soiled reputation.

  _____

  Meanwhile in New York D.W. read the news. Out of curiosity, he had seen A Martyr to His Cause and had dismissed it as tripe. Now that the brothers had pleaded guilty, he thought even less of the film. He did, however, find the news reports about the Los Angeles aqueduct project to be of particular interest. For he, too, knew there was money to be made from water. With his cousin Woodson Oglesby, he had recently purchased a controlling interest in the Cascadian Spring Water Company. He had high hopes for the venture. But at the same time he knew his opportunity for genuine wealth and success would lie in California. And fortunately in just weeks he would be back at the Alexandria Hotel.

  PART IV

  ____________________

  REVOLVERS

  FORTY-TWO

  ____________________

  DARROW TOOK THE revolver from his raincoat pocket and set it down on the kitchen table next to the bottle of whiskey.

  It was late on a rainy night in December 1911, and Darrow had appeared without warning at the Ingraham Street apartment. He knew Mary would be leaving in the morning for San Francisco; days ago she had finally ended their affair. Still, he had to see her one last time. She was the only person in whom he could confide.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” he told Mary.

  They were sitting opposite each other at the table, and Mary had no doubt he was serious. He spoke with the flat conviction of a resigned man.

  “They’re going to indict me for
bribing the McNamara jury. I can’t stand the disgrace.”

  Tears fell from his eyes. He could not find a hope to latch on to. Reason, too, was beyond his grasp. His only possession was a vast sadness.

  Mary tried to offer him something else. She talked of God, of his reputation, of his legacy. But her words could not reach him, for he had moved on to a distant, inhospitable place. From there all he could see was the splendid comfort in escape.

  Yet the hours passed.

  And with time, and soothed by the tenderness of Mary’s words, the prospect of a new reality started to take hold over Darrow’s mind. Despite his deep shame, he was beginning to find intimations of the will to fight back. There were other, more prideful choices he could make than surrender.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said to Mary.

  He rose from the chair. In one pocket of his raincoat, he shoved the nearly drained whiskey bottle. In the other he hid the revolver.

  Outside it was still raining, but he trudged along oblivious. He was locked deep into the intensity of his own new thoughts. His mind was reengaged, alert, and once more combative.

  Billy, too, had taken to carrying a revolver in his suit pocket. He also carried a cane that, with a twist of the silver handle and a quick pull, revealed a sword. He suspected his enemies would be coming after him, and he was prepared to fight back.

  After the guilty pleas were announced, the New York Times published an applauding editorial entitled “Apologies Due a Detective”:

  “Among the minor but highly satisfactory and far from unimportant consequences of the McNamara confessions is the brilliant vindication they give to William J. Burns . . . who for months was violently assailed as conspirator, who, for hire, had manufactured an elaborate case against innocent men.”

  But encomiums from the press were only small and fleeting balms. Labor could never forgive Billy. And a drumbeat of newly perceived outrages would not allow his enemies to forget.

  The federal grand jury in Indianapolis had used the cartons of evidence that Billy had painstakingly gathered to indict forty-five leaders of the Structural Iron Workers union both from that city and from the West Coast. Nearly the entire executive committee faced long jail sentences for their complicity in planning the dynamite attacks. They blamed Billy.

  No less disconcerting, in the winter of 1912 Billy found himself once again preparing to head for Los Angeles. He was to fight a new vituperative battle in, irony of sad ironies, a war he already fought and had convincingly won. On January 29, 1912, Clarence Darrow was indicted for bribing a juror. In his defense, Billy was certain that the entire McNamara case would be replayed. Darrow would deny, deny—and when that failed, he would argue that he had had no choice. He had been up against the unscrupulous Burns and his minions. In fact, the entire bribery scheme, Billy was certain the defense would disingenuously contend, had been invented by Burns to embarrass Darrow and to undermine labor.

  Billy had been subpoenaed and was looking with anticipation to taking the stand. He never had his moment during the McNamara trial; the courtroom spectacle had abruptly ended with the settlement. But now he would have his chance to testify in public.

  Billy had entered the McNamara case not simply to solve a mystery. From the start, he had viewed his role as more than that of an intrepid detective. He had hunted for clues, followed a meandering trial across the country, and made the arrests, driven by a larger motivation. Beliefs had driven America to violence. But Billy hoped that with the apprehension and conviction of the criminal plotters, the nation could move on from the dangerous idea that dynamiting was a valid form of political expression. The real value of solving the crime of the century was ultimately not to identify the conspirators or even to get a measure of retribution for the twenty-one deaths. Rather, it was to put a declarative end to a savage and outmoded way of thinking and at last propel the country forward into the complexities and challenges of the twentieth century. With Darrow’s trial, the past, Billy realized, could finally be made past. With this final validation, with Justice’s victory, America’s great new era could truly begin.

  But Billy also knew this last confrontation would be the most dangerous one. His enemies were desperate. He arrived in Los Angeles and went directly to the Alexandria Hotel, a gun in his pocket, a cane with an ominous silver handle clutched in his hand.

  D.W. also had a revolver. And now he suddenly pulled the gun from his pocket, waved the weapon with a frantic menace at the teenage sisters, and began firing. It was madness, and yet it had begun innocently enough.

  The troupe had only recently returned from Los Angeles, and on this humid summer’s morning the two Gish sisters, Lillian, fifteen, and Dorothy, fourteen, had arrived at the Fourteenth Street brownstone for a surprise reunion with Mary Pickford. The three girls had often appeared on stage together before Mary had gone off to work in the movies. But now the sisters were in between stage engagements and were hoping their old friend would be able to help them get interim work at Biograph.

  Mary approached, and the girls rushed to her with hugs. Mary, too, was glad to see her old friends and did not hesitate to offer her assistance. In fact, she said she would introduce them to her director.

  At that moment, like a king strolling with regal authority through his domain, D.W. appeared. A wide-brimmed straw hat on his head, he had been absently singing a bit of opera in his clear baritone, but he stopped when Mary called to him. He turned toward her and saw the two sisters.

  D.W. found himself staring; a disquieting intensity of feeling rose up within him. “Suddenly,” he would later recall, “all the gloom seemed to disappear. The change of atmosphere was caused by the presence of two young girls sitting side by side on a half bench. They were blondish and were sitting affectionately close together. I am certain I have never seen a prettier picture.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to bring such pretty girls to the studio?” D.W. baited Mary.

  Mary, playing out their feisty dialectic, bit right back: If they could win her job, well then, she didn’t deserve it.

  But today D.W. paid Mary no mind. He was captivated by the two young girls. Without allowing them a chance to refuse, he insisted on giving them a screen test.

  Have Lionel Barrymore and Elmer Booth come upstairs immediately! he yelled to no one in particular as he led the startled youngsters to the upstairs studio. The two actors quickly appeared, and D.W. started barking instructions. First, he ordered the bewildered girls to remove their black hair bows. To replace them, he gave a blue bow to Dorothy, a red one to Lillian. He couldn’t be bothered remembering their names; Blue and Red would have to do.

  Then he sketched the scene that had come into his director’s mind:

  “We will rehearse the story of two girls trapped in an isolated house while thieves are trying to get in and rob the safe . . . Now, Red, you hear a strange noise. Run to your sister. Blue, you’re seated, too . . .

  “Show your fear. You’re two frightened children trapped in a lonely house by these brutes. They’re in the next room.”

  “Elmer,” he ordered the actor, “pry open a window. Climb into the house. Kick down the door to the room that holds the safe. You are mean!

  “Blue, you hear the door breaking. You run in a panic to bolt it—”

  Lillian was confused. She didn’t understand. “What door?” she nearly screamed.

  D.W.’s voice was stern, insistent, demanding. “Right in front of you! I know there’s no door, but pretend there is. Run to the telephone. Start to use it. No one answers. You realize the wires have been cut. Tell the camera what you feel. Fear—more fear! Look into the lens! Now you see a gun come through the hole as he knocks the stovepipe to the floor. Look scared, I tell you!”

  The girls were squirming, trembling. Their victimization seemed very real to them. The director was pushing them beyond acting. Their terror was genuine. They were quivering. And still unsatisfied, D.W. could not stop.

  “No, that’s not enough
! Girls, hold each other. Cower in the corner.”

  That was when D.W., as if in a frenzy, pulled the gun from his pocket. Whipping the gun about in the air, he jumped on the set and began chasing the girls. They were crying, screaming, and all the while he raced after them shooting blanks up into the ceiling. Each shot was a loud, violent explosion, but it could not cover up the wild, full-throated yelps of their panic.

  When D.W. finally put the gun back into his pocket, he was smiling.

  “You have expressive bodies. I can use you,” he said. “Do you want to work for me? Would you like to make the picture we just rehearsed?”

  The Unseen Enemy was shot a few weeks later. And when the troupe went to California, the Gishes came along, too. As the company left Fourteenth Street that winter, they knew they would not be returning. A new studio was being built on 174th Street in the Bronx, modern, more functional. A structure specifically designed for making moving pictures. A home for the art and industry that D.W., almost single-handedly, had created. For many in the company, leaving the brownstone was like moving on from a childhood home. But D.W. had no time for nostalgia. He looked forward. His spirits were soaring. New, large ideas were taking hold in his imagination; and his reckless attachment to young Lillian was so irrepressible that it filled him with a genuine happiness.

  And so all three men—Darrow, Billy, D.W.—found themselves in California fortified by an intuitive awareness that they were playing out a last act, and that the future was only just beyond their knowing and extended grasp.

  FORTY-THREE

  ____________________

  THOSE WERE DIFFICULT days,” Darrow would concede. “But I settled down . . . to fight.” And as if to demonstrate his newfound stoicism, he quickly made a decision that was as curious as it was unexpected. Darrow hired Earl Rogers to lead his defense.