Book summary “American lightning”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where terrorism, high-stakes investigations, and mass media constantly shape your daily reality. In the early twentieth century, this volatile modern landscape was forged through a bloody clash between capital and labor.

Howard Blum reveals how the catastrophic 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times sparked the nation's first great manhunt and gave rise to modern detective work. You will discover how this historic terror plot intersected with the birth of Hollywood cinema, transforming American society forever.

• How did bitter labor disputes escalate into industrial terrorism?
• What forensic breakthroughs allowed detectives to track fugitive bombers across the country?
• How did a sensational trial reshape politics and birth the movie industry?

1. Capital, Labor, and Terror in Los Angeles

The Iron Wall of Capital

You see a city transformed into a bloody battleground by unyielding union opposition and corporate warfare. Harrison Gray Otis shaped this environment by taking total control of the Daily Times in 1886. He waged relentless warfare against trade unions through his paper and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association.

Unyielding union opposition and corporate warfare transformed Los Angeles into a violent battleground.

Otis fought 15 battles during his Civil War service as a Union captain. He started his career at the Daily Times earning 15 dollars a week. By 1910, the population of Los Angeles reached approximately 900000. Otis earned 463000 dollars in net profit from his newspaper in a single recent year.

Otis mounted a cannon on his limousine and fortified his printing plant like a military citadel. He called his home the Bivouac and fired any union typographer who went on strike.

The Escalation of Terrorism

Radical labor organizations and militant union leaders challenged corporate power across the American West. Groups like the Industrial Workers of the World organized aggressive strikes and boycotts. These members viewed sabotage and violence as legitimate political weapons through direct action.

Eugene Debs called a national railroad strike where 100000 Pullman workers walked off their jobs. Union organizers led by Olaf Tveitmoe traveled from San Francisco to Los Angeles to bolster local unions. This effort led to a massive strike by 1500 ironworkers who went out on strike in Los Angeles on June 1, 1910.

A campaign of intimidation and real and fake bombings struck major construction projects in the city. Developers A.C. Bilicke and R.A. Rowen made a 3 million dollars investment into the Alexandria Hotel, known locally as the Alex.

Police discovered a fake bomb consisting of a gas pipe filled with manure and attached to a rusty dollar watch at the Alexandria Hotel construction site. This followed non-union construction fatalities and protests at the Alexandria Hotel annex and the Hall of Records.

2. The Crime of the Century and Billy Burns

A catastrophic explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times, prompting legendary detective Billy Burns to hunt the bombers.

The escalating class war and terrorism in Los Angeles reached its climax when a massive explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times building. At 12:30 A.M. on October 1, 1910, an anxious Times editor dictated a message to his race correspondent. While reporters and telegraph operators transmitted news of distant events like the Vanderbilt Cup race, a catastrophic explosion silenced the Times telegraph station and killed twenty-one people.

The Destruction of the Times Building

A series of explosions and a massive fire completely destroyed the Los Angeles Times building, resulting in twenty-one deaths and seventeen injuries. Six explosions occurred in rapid succession starting just after one in the morning, blowing out foundations, causing the south wall to collapse, and sending heavy linotype machines crashing down onto basement gas mains which fueled a massive firestorm. About one hundred people were at work at the time of the first blast, and a 100000 dollars insurance policy was taken out on the Times Building.

Cy Sawyer, a night-shift telegraph operator in the Los Angeles Times office, was killed instantly when the building's communications and structure were blown apart. Assistant night editor Churchill Harvey-Elder tried to escape down the stairs, retreated to a window ledge, and jumped after missing a small net held by rescuers, dying at the hospital hours later.

The Secret Investigation

Detective William J. Burns agreed to investigate the Times bombing only under strict conditions of absolute secrecy and independence. Fearing interference from powerful local enemies like Harrison Gray Otis and political allies who wanted Earl Rogers involved, Burns demanded to report to no one until the case was successfully resolved.

Mayor George Alexander frantically recruited Billy Burns at the Alexandria Hotel, eventually granting his terms despite political pressures from the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. Burns arrived at the Los Angeles station at eight o'clock, shortly after Harvey-Elder died at seven-thirty that morning.

Billy Burns theorized that Harrison Gray Otis bombed his own building to collect insurance money and protect a lucrative real estate and water scheme in the San Fernando Valley. Otis and his associates secretly acquired cheap desert land in the San Fernando Valley, intending to use the city aqueduct to irrigate it and turn a massive profit, a plan threatened by rising Socialist political power.

Fred Eaton and William Mulholland acted as front men to acquire Owens Valley water rights under the guise of a federal reclamation project before revealing the true aqueduct plan. The Owens Valley lay 250 miles northeast of Los Angeles and measured nearly ten miles wide and one hundred miles long. Conspirators purchased land at a 23 dollars an acre purchase price, backed by 22.5 million dollars in bonds, targeting 150,000 acres in the San Fernando Valley to turn 47,500 acres of desert into a sprawling subdivision.

3. Forensics, Anarchists, and Political Pressure

Meticulous forensic work connected distant bomb attacks and led investigators deep into radical utopian communities.

Unmasking the Bomb Mechanisms

You can trace terrorist networks by inspecting unexploded devices. Billy Burns compares an unexploded bomb from a Peoria train yard with one from the home of the M&M secretary in Los Angeles. Despite one using nitroglycerin and the other 80 percent dynamite, the alarm clocks, batteries, wiring, soldering, and grooved brass plates are identical.

Burns inspects a New Haven Clock Company alarm clock and a No. 5 Columbia dry battery in both devices, noting a tiny grooved brass piece soldered to the alarm key.

Harold Greaves tracks an explosive purchase to Fred Morehart in Portland, Indiana. A man using the alias J.W. McGraw bought several crates of nitro. Greaves finds wrapping papers containing coarse sawdust that matches a sample from the Peoria railyard.

Greaves collects coarse sawdust in two glass vials from roadside wrapping papers left behind after a wagon transfer between Morehart and McGraw.

The Trail to the Home Colony

Suspects attempting to conceal their tracks often leave traces in rental records and repainted watercraft. Billy checks boat rental agencies in the San Francisco Bay area for a launch named the Pastime. At an Oakland rental dock, he finds a boat called the Peerless whose bow and stern have been freshly painted over.

Billy Burns scrapes away fresh paint on a rental boat at an Oakland dock to reveal the faint palimpsest of the name Pastime.

Billy traces suspects David Caplan and M.A. Schmidt to the Home Colony in Washington. This utopian communitarian settlement was established in 1898 where residents oppose private ownership and the state.

Billy Burns attempts to infiltrate the Home Colony wearing a peaked hat with earflaps and a red and black plaid jacket, feeling like a plaid tea cozy.

General Otis and attorney Earl Rogers accuse Billy Burns of pocketing taxpayer money without producing results. Mayor Alexander caves to political demands and stops all further payments to the Burns Detective Agency.

Thieves break into the L.A. office of the Burns Agency and rifle through desks, but find no files because Billy has already shipped them to a safe deposit box at the First National Bank in Chicago.

4. Surveillance, Traps, and Confessions

Raymond Burns successfully identified and tracked Ortie McManigal to his home in Chicago after staking out the union offices in Indianapolis. Raymond utilized a local office view of the American Central Life Building to spot McManigal meeting with union leader J.J. McNamara.

Raymond staked out the union offices for days before spotting McManigal, followed him through an Indianapolis theater showing a D.W. Griffith film, and trailed him to his Chicago home. He shadowed McManigal to a theater showing D.W. Griffith's The Lonedale Operator and followed him by train back to his home at 414 South Sangamon Street in Chicago.

Billy Burns broke suspects' morale by orchestrating psychological warfare involving manipulated fortunes and rigged playing cards.

Billy had a local bartender deal a deck consisting entirely of fifty-two aces of spades to a superstitious Ortie McManigal to make him feel doomed and vulnerable. To weaken Ortie McManigal's resolve, Billy bribed a local fortune-teller named Madame Q fifty dollars to plant the idea in McManigal's wife's mind that the M brothers were plotting against him.

Raymond Burns executed a sudden arrest of Ortie McManigal and Jim McNamara in a Detroit hotel lobby after discovering dynamite in their luggage. Tracking McManigal and Jim McNamara to the Oxford Hotel in Detroit, Raymond realized they stored their suitcases containing bomb-making equipment in the lobby rather than their rooms.

Raymond and detective sergeants Biddinger and Reed ambushed McManigal and McNamara at the Oxford Hotel elevators in Detroit, arresting them under a false charge of safecracking. Backed by Chicago police detectives, Raymond drew his revolver and arrested them under the pretext of investigating a safe-blowing job in Chicago. The suitcases contained 12 clock devices.

The Confession of Ortie McManigal

Billy Burns secured a full confession from Ortie McManigal by confronting him with detailed personal surveillance data and psychological traps. Billy visited McManigal in the secret suburban prison, calmly recounting intimate details of his movements, shoe purchases, and his wife's dreams.

Billy surprised McManigal by telling him the exact store on State Street where he bought his shoes and repeating his wife's specific nightmare, causing him to collapse in defeat. Confronted with this omniscient display of evidence and the realization of his betrayal by co-conspirators, McManigal broke down and agreed to confess. The shoe purchase took place at 117 State Street where McManigal bought his Walkover shoes.

Ortie McManigal confessed to a nationwide campaign of union-sponsored bombings directed by J.J. McNamara to retaliate against the National Erectors' Association. Recruited by Herbert Hockin and directed by J.J. McNamara, McManigal carried out numerous dynamite attacks using alarm-clock-and-battery detonators invented by Jim McNamara.

McManigal detailed bombings across the Midwest and East, including the Peoria train yard, the Llewellyn Iron Works, and sites in Springfield, Milwaukee, French Lick, Omaha, and Columbus. The operation was designed to destroy property at nonunion sites rather than cause deaths, acting as a political weapon against the open-shop movement.

The campaign operated on specific financial and operational terms:

• 37 years old was Ortie McManigal's age when he confessed;
• 75 dollars was McManigal's initial pay to blow up a nonunion office building;
• 200 dollars was McManigal's raised pay per job;
• 25,000 dollars in damages was caused to the Llewellyn Iron Works on Christmas Day 1910;
• 80 percent was the concentration of nitroglycerin stored by the conspirators;
• more than one hundred bombs were estimated as planted by the union between the summer of 1905 and McManigal's arrest;
• 300 to 400 quarts of nitroglycerin were used in the campaign;
• more than 2,000 pounds of dynamite were used in the campaign;
• well over one million dollars in total property damage was caused;
• 21 lives were lost in total from the bombings, including the Los Angeles Times Building.

5. The Trial, Bribery, and Cultural Aftermath

Samuel Gompers successfully pressured a reluctant Clarence Darrow into leading the defense team for the McNamara brothers by appealing to his legacy and threatening his reputation. Darrow was 54 years old at the time and initially wished to retire from high-profile crusades to focus on writing and debt relief. Gompers and union officials confronted him in his apartment, warning that refusing to defend the boys would brand him a traitor to the labor movement.

Recognizing the overwhelming evidence of his clients' guilt, Clarence Darrow formulated a diversionary public relations strategy centered on the claim that J.J. McNamara was illegally kidnapped.

Darrow demanded a defense fund of 200,000 dollars and a personal fee of 50,000 dollars after expenses. He launched a nationwide campaign centered on the assertion that J.J. McNamara's extradition was legally invalid, branding the arrest as kidnapping. You could see "Kidnapped!" buttons featuring J.J.'s face plastered across cities nationwide.

Clarence Darrow and the Defense Strategy

An expensive, highly detailed scale model of the downtown newspaper block was constructed to demonstrate that escaping gas, rather than dynamite, catalyzed the blast. Repeated gas charges detonated inside the miniature model resulted in only localized damage. This physical test proved to Darrow that only massive dynamite could have caused the catastrophic destruction.

The Bribery Scandal and Guilty Pleas

Driven by despair over the weakness of their legal case, Darrow's investigator resorted to bribing potential jurors to secure votes for an acquittal. Bert Franklin systematically approached potential jurors from the wheel containing 1,600 names.

Franklin approached prospective jurors Robert Bain and George Lockwood with substantial cash offers:

• 1,600 potential jurors in the wheel;
• 125 slips initially withdrawn;
• 43 men reduced by Judge Walter Bordwell;
• 500 dollars down and 4,000 total offered to Robert Bain;
• 400 dollars initially paid to Bain in twenties.

Potential juror George Lockwood alerted the district attorney and cooperated in setting up a sting operation. Bert Franklin handed 500 dollars in cash to George Lockwood as a down payment toward a 4,000 dollar bribe at an intersection while police detectives watched. Facing overwhelming evidence and the refusal of the prosecution to spare Jim unless both brothers confessed, the McNamaras entered guilty pleas. Jim McNamara sat down in his prison bunk and wrote a formal confession admitting that he placed sixteen sticks of 80 per cent dynamite in Ink Alley of the Times Building at 5:45 P.M. on September 30, 1910, set to explode at 1:00 P.M. Jim received a life sentence, while John J. McNamara received fifteen years.

The Birth of Modern Cinema

D.W. Griffith broke away from Biograph to produce The Birth of a Nation, an unprecedented cinematic epic inspired by the racial mythologies of The Clansman and the intense class warfare of the Los Angeles labor conflicts. Griffith marched through the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times with his hat in hand to beg employees to buy shares in the production. He paid 25,000 dollars to acquire the rights to The Clansman and raised 100,000 dollars in total funds needed to finish the film. The innovative ride-to-the-rescue film drew an initial New York audience of 825,000 people during its eleven-month run and earned an estimated 60 million dollars in box office business during its first run.

10 Key Ideas

1. Unyielding union opposition and corporate warfare transformed Los Angeles into a violent battleground.
2. A catastrophic explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times, prompting legendary detective Billy Burns to hunt the bombers.
3. Meticulous forensic work connected distant bomb attacks and led investigators deep into radical utopian communities.
4. Billy Burns broke suspects' morale by orchestrating psychological warfare involving manipulated fortunes and rigged playing cards.
5. Ortie McManigal confessed to a nationwide campaign of union-sponsored bombings directed by J.J. McNamara to retaliate against the National Erectors' Association.
6. Recognizing the overwhelming evidence of his clients' guilt, Clarence Darrow formulated a diversionary public relations strategy centered on the claim that J.J. McNamara was illegally kidnapped.
7. An expensive, highly detailed scale model of the downtown newspaper block was constructed to demonstrate that escaping gas, rather than dynamite, catalyzed the blast.
8. Bert Franklin systematically approached potential jurors from the wheel containing 1,600 names.
9. Jim McNamara received a life sentence, while John J. McNamara received fifteen years.
10. D.W. Griffith broke away from Biograph to produce The Birth of a Nation, an unprecedented cinematic epic inspired by the racial mythologies of The Clansman and the intense class warfare of the Los Angeles labor conflicts.