Among the many things tossed too carelessly on the ash heap of history was the war of Capital and Labor. Their violent, turn-of-the-20th-century battles are not even half remembered now. But the glum slab of the Los Angeles Times building on Spring Street does.
The antiunion rallying cry of “True Industrial Freedom,” is still carved into the Times building’s red granite façade. Dedicated in 1935, the Times building is more than an office building. It’s a memorial cenotaph for the 21 non-union pressmen, linotype operators, and editors who were blown up on an early October morning in 1910 and flung into fire and collapsing masonry.
The dynamiting of the Times was the war’s decisive engagement. After it, the emerging political force of American Socialism was mostly wrecked, and not just in California.
Los Angeles in 1910 was a boomtown possessed by one man’s vision of a city that would profitably embody the triumph of his Anglo-Saxon values. For Harrison Gray Otis, the pugnacious owner of the Times, that meant a city free of unions.
Otis preached the antiunion “open shop” with such vehemence – and made allegiance to the “open shop” his test of membership in the city’s business elite – that Otis was branded “the most notorious, most persistent, and most unfair enemy of trades unionism on the North American continent.” His antiunion allies were the members of the city’s Merchants & Manufacturers Association.
In the savage labor climate of the time, it seems inevitable that Otis would become the target of a “dynamite plot” that had already struck nearly a hundred other businesses in other parts of the nation in the previous three years.
The plot unraveled in Los Angeles. One bomb had blasted the Times, but another bomb planted at the home of the secretary of the Merchants & Manufacturers Association failed to explode. It matched another unexploded bomb picked up by detectives in a Peoria rail yard a month earlier. That device was tied to a campaign of intimidation against the National Erectors Association, a union-busting alliance of builders in the Midwest. The builders’ association had aimed to break the Structural Iron Workers Union.
John J. McNamara was the union’s secretary-treasurer. His brother James was a union agent. The McNamaras’ weapons against the National Erectors Association were nitroglycerine and 80% dynamite. And in October 1910, they turned them on Otis and the Times with disastrous results for labor politics.
In the months after the bombing, the manhunt for the perpetrators crisscrossed the country until their dramatic “arrest” in the spring of 1911 (actually, a kidnapping by private detectives in the pay of Otis). Although others were soon implicated, the McNamara brothers were the rallying point for union activists and supporters of Socialist causes. To defend the brothers, union organizer Samuel Gompers turned to Clarence Darrow, famed for his eloquence and his labor sympathies.
Gompers pledged $200,000 to the McNamaras’ defense (and offered a reluctant Darrow $50,000 plus expenses). Darrow would have two million union members behind him, Gompers promised, along with Socialists like Eugene Debs and the working-class press. Gompers even made a two-reel movie to be shown in the working-class nickelodeons to help raise defense money.
The effort was wasted. Because of the circumstances of the investigation, Darrow knew almost from the moment he accepted Gompers’ plea that the McNamara brothers were guilty of the “crime of the century.”
Still, it might have been possible for Darrow’s eloquence and passion to have saved the brothers. But Darrow never got the chance. When another member of the bomb plot confessed during interrogation, either Darrow or members of the defense team tried to bribe two of the McNamara jurors to hold out for acquittal. Except one of the jurors turned out to be a police informant.
There was nothing left for Darrow or the McNamaras but a vague promise from the prosecution that that neither of the brothers would hang. Broken, the brothers confessed.
Otis was satisfied. Hanging, he feared, would widen the war between Capitol and Labor and worsen public opinion about Los Angeles. That would be unprofitable.
The confessions ended the trial in chaos, precipitated Darrow’s own trial for attempted bribery (at which he won a hung jury), and led to the defeat of the Socialist candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Darrow would go on to argue memorable cases (among them the Scopes “monkey” trial). His lapses in the McNamara case are all but forgotten.
As is the role that Los Angeles played in ending the aspirations of American Socialism.
The image on this page was made by Flickr user AkumAPRIME. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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It was Harry Chandler, Otis's son-in-law and General Manager of the Times, who pushed for a plea bargain. Otis, too hot-headed to clearly assess the ramifications of his actions, actually wanted nothing more than to see the McNamaras executed:
"General Otis, as expected, became furious with the plan. He stormed about declaring, 'I want those sons-of-bitches to hang'. It was some time before he could be placated by the argument that it would be much better for his own cause if the trial were ended this way." -Harry Chandler
On the surface, one might look at the outcome of the trial as at least a partial win for labor. Capital did not completely squash the relatively powerless unionists who struck out against the corporation. But as Waldie points out, the outcome of the trial (or lack thereof) was exactly what Chandler had wanted. The McNamaras were punished for their crimes, but not enough to be a call-to-arms for American workers. Union sympathizers continued to be sympathizers but were not outraged into mobilization. Chandler and his Los Angeles Times had won. The power of capital is in its ability to control while giving the illusion that it does not control (at least not to the extent that it in fact does). The most successful corporations and governments are those that citizens do not see as networks that must be overthrown.
The fact that the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building was declared "the crime of the century" is almost comical considering the century was only a decade old. But then again, it may not be such a hyperbolic claim. It was a defining moment in California's history. The aftermath of the crime would either exacerbated or mitigated capital-labor relations. Who knows what would have been had the outcome been different?
The bombing was in response to the Times' opposition to the unions, and not the other way around.
Harrison Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler had invested in a syndicate, the California-Mexican Land and Cattle company, with thousands of acres of farmland on both sides of the Baja-Imperial County border, along with enormous landholdings elsewhere. They were determined to keep the unions out of Los Angeles and Mexico to guarantee a steady supply of cheap labor.
The syndicate investors made tremendous profits while courting the favor of President Porfirio Diaz in the Times. Under President Diaz, foreign capitalists had acquired millions of acres of Mexican farm land, factories, banks, oil rights (Doheny), mines, public utilities, and most of the country's railroads. The Diaz regime was also marked by increasing poverty and violent political repression.
In 1910, the world's first full-scale social revolution of the 20th century took place in Baja California, led by the Partido Liberal Mexicano, which had been based in Los Angeles. Their sole objective was the return of stolen land to the peasants. Over 78 percent of Mexican land was in the hand in Baja California was owned by foreigners.
This was a direct threat to Otis and Chandler, who immediately saw the connections between the Mexican Revolution and Los Angeles union activity.
Read more about all this in William Estrada's recent book: The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space, Texas U. Press, 2008.