After union activists bombed The Los Angeles Times, killing 21, the labor movement was ruined
Two brothers and 16 sticks of dynamite hobbled unions for a generation
Just after a thin, mustached man slipped into the alley beside The Los Angeles Times building on the evening of September 30, 1910, he hid 16 sticks of dynamite attached to a ticking alarm clock. At 1 a.m., the device exploded, igniting ink barrels for the printing presses and gas lines beneath the building. Mayhem ensued: flames devoured the building, people screamed for fire ladders, others staggered through the smoke filled streets covering their faces with handkerchiefs. A wing of the Times was leveled, becoming what the paper called, “a pit of death.” Over the next few days “charred and blackened corpses” were removed from the rubble. In total, 21 people were killed.
The Times borrowed printing presses from a rival paper and quickly named the culprits in a headline that spread across the full front page: “Unionist Bombs Wreck the Times.” The paper’s managing editor wrote that the union activists were “enemies of industrial freedom.” The bombing would be called “the crime of the century,” forever changing the public’s view of the American labor movement.
The turn of the century was a brutal time in the fight to organize labor. San Francisco was by then heavily unionized, but the battle for Los Angeles was heated and ongoing. There were rowdy rallies and workers clashed violently with police. A few months before the bombing, the Iron Workers Union went on strike, which resulted in the city creating an anti-picketing ordinance. Workers with union ties were not hired and replaced with non-union workers. Businesses that did this were frequently bombed. The failure to unionize Los Angeles was often attributed to one man: Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Gray Otis, who used the paper to trumpet his anti-union views. Otis, a Civil War captain, was hellbent on ridding the city of unions, and was known to pay strikebreakers. He drove around town with a cannon mounted on the hood of his limousine. Labor supporters considered him, “depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent.”
People were swift to condemn organized labor. Two days after the bombing, the Times quoted the president of a large employers association as saying, “The country’s welfare demands strong official disapproval of the abuses of modern unionism.” A preacher presciently declared that if it was true that the unions had anything to do with the bombing, “it will have received a blow from which it can never recover in this city.”
Two brothers, James and John McNamara were quickly arrested. John, the elder, was the head of the Iron Workers union. The brothers were whisked out of town by police in what pro-union groups would repeatedly refer to as a kidnapping, “in Russian style.” Pro-union groups argued that the brothers had been set-up. Clarence Darrow, the famous defense lawyer, was hired by the labor leader and founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, and paid what was at the time a shocking sum of $50,000 to defend the brothers.
During the trial, Darrow was accused of trying to bribe jurors. Not long after, whether it was because of the bribery accusations or, as some would say, in an effort to avoid the death penalty, the brothers pleaded guilty. The evidence against them was irrefutable. The older brother, John, remained unrepentant, but James would lament the loss of life in his confession: “It was my intention to injure the building and scare the owner. I did not intend to take the life of any one. I sincerely regret that these unfortunate men lost their lives.” Darrow was acquitted of bribery charges, while John, who was considered the main organizer and had sent his brother to plant the bombs, was sentenced to fifteen years. James, who was seen more as his brother’s loyal aid “an idealist, half in love with martyrdom,” was sentenced to life in prison.
In his book The People vs. Clarence Darrow, Geoffrey Cowan argues that the excessiveness of the bombing was the result of ineptitude. The ink barrels and gas lines turned what had been intended as “a modest warning” into carnage.
Regardless of the intention, the unions wouldn’t recover from the blow. The bombing horrified Americans, and the connection between union activists and lawless carnage proved a hard one to break. The city had been on the verge of electing a socialist mayor, Job Harriman, who was Darrow’s co-counsel in the brothers defense. But after the trial, Harriman’s campaign was dashed. When Gompers, who had believed the brothers innocent, had signaled his support for the brothers, a staunchly divided left rallied together: the conservative-leaning AFL, the radical Wobblies led by Euegene Debbs, anarchists led by Emma Goldman, and socialists alike. But when the brothers turned out to be guilty, this burgeoning unity dissolved and leftist infighting ensued. One hundred years after the bombing, The Los Angeles Times would argue that the event “set labor back a generation,” though it’s easy to imagine that it was much more than just a generation. It’s tempting to wonder what may have been for organized labor were it not for 16 sticks of dynamite.
