American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (31 page)

“ ‘Workingmen should have the same belligerent rights in labor controversies that nations have in warfare . . . The war is over now; the defeated side should be granted the rights of a belligerent under international law.’ ”

When Darrow finished reading, he bowed his head and held it in his two hands as if he were supporting a heavy weight. He knew that all was lost.

Slowly he raised his head and stared up into the clear starry night as if searching for an inspiration. But he found only the counterfeit comfort of wishful thinking.

“I just wish they would see that it’s in the best interest of the community to settle the case without shedding any human blood,” he told the two men.

A moment; and then even this small hope slipped away. “But they never will,” he said.

_____

On the sleeper that night returning to Los Angeles, Steffens lay in his bunk and replayed the after-dinner conversation back in his mind. Steffens made his living and his reputation with words. He understood their power. Darrow, he realized with excitement, had spoken what had previously been unspeakable. However tentatively, however abstractly, the attorney had indicated that he would like to settle the case.

Over an early breakfast at the Van Nuys Hotel near the train station, Steffens pounced. “Did you really mean it when you said you wanted to make a settlement?” he asked.

“Yes,” Darrow agreed with little conviction. “But it’s impossible, of course. The feeling is too bitter. The people are not in a reasonable state of mind.”

“But why not try it?” urged Steffens. And with an egotist’s unwavering certainty, he declared, “I think I can convince the businessmen of Los Angeles that it would be better all around to avoid the passion of a trial.”

Darrow smirked at this absurdity. Otis and the M&M wanted a trial. They wanted a very public victory. And they wanted to claim their spoils—the corpses of the McNamara brothers.

But Steffens’s belief in his own power was boundless. He kept pressing the attorney. And Darrow no longer had either the calm or the will to hold up against such a persistent assault.

“I am perfectly willing,” Darrow finally agreed. Steffens could meet with “your crowd,” as Darrow sneeringly referred to the journalist’s contacts in the business community. He could raise the possibility of a settlement.

But the attorney insisted that two nonnegotiable conditions must be attached to his surrender. One, all charges against J.J. must be dropped. And two, Jim must not be hanged.

Suddenly Darrow paled. It was as if the significance of what he was conceding, of what he was embarking on, had now become real. He started to shake. With great emotion, he begged Steffens to proceed as if he had not discussed the proposal with anyone in the defense. The journalist should present it as his own idea. “If it should get out to the community that we are making overtures it will make it that much more difficult to defend the men and save their lives,” Darrow warned.

“Any proposition will come
to
you, not
from
you,” Steffens promised.

And so it began. What once had seemed utterly impossible now struggled to become a reality. A settlement in the case against the two brothers accused of “the crime of the century” was under discussion.

Steffens started by approaching Meyer Lissner, a prosperous lawyer and businessman. Lissner knew all the town leaders. Even better, they saw him as one of their own. But Steffens’s own friendship with Lissner had revealed him to be a reasonable man, more civic-minded and generous of spirit than the vengeful M&M ideologues. Lissner listened to Steffens and, with an insider’s shrewd knowledge, suggested they bring Tom Gibbon into the discussion. If this was going to work, Lissner explained, the
Times
ownership would need to endorse the plan. And Tommy was Harry Chandler’s buddy; he could bring any proposal directly to the man who was not only the paper’s assistant publisher but also, no less significantly, Otis’s son-in-law.

When Gibbon arrived, he needed to hear only the opening of Steffens’s argument before he interrupted. I agree, he said. How can I be of assistance?

Steffens explained. Eager to move his plan forward, he dictated a memo, and Lissner’s secretary typed it:

“Party on trial”—the case against Jim was to be prosecuted first—“to plead guilty and receive such sentence as the court might administer (except capital punishment). All other prosecutions with the affair to be dropped.”

Gibbon took a copy of the memo and hurried off to deliver it to Harry Chandler. Hours later Gibbon reported back to an anxious Steffens and Lissner.

Chandler had agreed, Gibbon revealed. He’d support the settlement as it was outlined.

Steffens was elated. He had done it! His impossible plan was going to succeed! He would broker the peace between capital and labor!

The talks had been secret, but secrets involving many people rarely remain so for long. When Darrow’s co-counsel LeCompte Davis walked into the courtroom the next morning, District Attorney Fredericks charged toward him.

“Why don’t you get those boys to plead guilty and quit your horseplay?” thundered Fredericks.

Davis was taken aback. What was the district attorney talking about?

“You know you’re going to do it,” Fredericks stormed on. “A committee has been consulted about it, and I have been approached.” He found Davis’s disingenuousness infuriating.

But Davis had not been acting. He had no idea that a settlement had been discussed. Furious, he went off to confront Darrow.

The two men were friends as well as partners, and as they talked, rage turned into resignation. They both agreed that the two brothers had no chance. Quickly they decided what needed to be done, and then with a lawyerly pragmatism they went about doing it.

Darrow wired Fremont Older, the crusading editor of the
San Francisco Bulletin,
and asked him to come “to an important conference at Hotel Alexandria here tomorrow.”

Over lunch at the hotel, Darrow asked for the editor’s help in persuading labor leaders to accept a settlement.

A settlement? Fremont was astonished. But after listening to Darrow’s pained recitation of the evidence Burns had collected, he came around. “I’ll do what I can to make them understand,” he said without enthusiasm.

Next, Darrow sent a wire to Gompers. He needed to speak with someone in authority in the AFL’s heirarchy. The union was paying his fee, bankrolling the defense. It was only proper that he inform them of his intentions. But the union was conducting its annual meeting in Atlanta; and the telegram, if it ever found its way to Gompers, was ignored.

Regardless, the time had come for Darrow to speak to his two clients. It was a very difficult meeting. But Darrow knew from long experience that hedging would not dull the blow; and swiftness had its own mercy. So he came out with it: He wanted Jim to plead guilty.

Without waiting for a response, Darrow plowed on. He wanted the brothers to appreciate what they’d be getting—winning!—if Jim admitted his guilt. He recited a carefully rehearsed list: Jim would escape the hangman; he’d avoid having to make the sort of detailed confession that would implicate other union leaders; the state could be convinced, Darrow felt assured, to give up its pursuit of the two anarchists still at large, Caplan and Schmitty; and J.J., after pleading guilty, would probably receive only a light sentence.

Jim interrupted: J.J. would also have to plead guilty?

Yes, said Darrow.

And serve some time? Jim asked.

Perhaps, Darrow conceded.

Then no deal, said Jim with authority.

At the same time as Darrow’s meeting with the two brothers was collapsing, LeCompte Davis was sitting down with Harrison Otis. Otis was an unpleasant mountain of a man, by nature and habit both rude and aggressive. But Davis paid no attention, or he was too much a southern gentleman and too good a lawyer to show his dismay. Which was why, of course, he rather than Darrow had been chosen for this delicate mission.

“Take the bird while you’ve got it in your hand, General,” he told the
Times
owner. “By his plea of guilty McNamara will give you a complete victory and prove that everything you have been claiming is right.”

Otis stared at Davis with a stony belligerence. It was as if he wanted to reach across the table and wring the audacious lawyer’s neck.

But Davis simply continued on with a smooth cordiality. “If you take a chance and force them into trial,” he blithely suggested, “lightning might strike . . . An accident might happen. They might get off.”

Otis had heard enough. “I want those sons of bitches to hang!” he bellowed.

And with that declaration, the possibility for a settlement was smashed into pieces. But then again, after Jim rejected Darrow’s terms, there really hadn’t been much of a chance left anyway.

Billy knew nothing about these talks. If he had, it’s doubtful that he would have let them play out even as far as they went.

On the day that Darrow met with the McNamaras, Billy was in New Orleans. He had come to the city to make a speech about the case, and he delivered it with such heated passion that he might as well have been preaching from an evangelical pulpit.

“I will tell you,” the detective roared to the overflowing crowd, “they have the money and have endeavored to buy our witness. They have offered some of the prosecution witnesses their own price. And when these witnesses refused to accept the offers, they have been threatened with death.”

It would’ve been impossible for Billy to support a settlement. In fact, after the way the defense had been skulking about, he didn’t just want the two brothers executed. He wanted to see their lawyers hanging from ropes, too.

FORTY

____________________

Y
ET JUST WHEN
it seemed a settlement of the case was an impossibility, three unexpected and seemingly unrelated events conspired to move the discussions rapidly forward. The first was an attempt on the president’s life.

There are many rolling rivers and rushing streams in southern California, clear fresh water perfect for trout fishing, swimming, or simply skimming stones on a pleasant day. The El Capitan Creek did not suggest this sort of diversion. It was a flat brown muddy stream that twisted through the countryside near Santa Barbara. Its only significance was that it lay directly in the coastal route that the Southern Pacific Railroad had staked out. So the railroad engineers had constructed a sturdy gray steel bridge across the forlorn creek.

On the morning of October 16, 1911, a railroad watchman was out walking across the El Capitan Bridge, on duty, eyes alert. In the bright sunshine, something caught his attention. A brown package stood near the base of a heavy steel girder. He hurried over to inspect.

It was not a package. It was a bomb. Thirty-nine sticks of dynamite, fuses attached, had been tied into a bundle.

The watchman’s instinct was to run, but he restrained himself. He knew he had to work quickly. There was not much time. In his mind he was already hearing the tooting whistle of the approaching Southern Pacific. With great caution and a silent prayer, he began to detach the fuses from the explosives. The work was agonizing. But he managed to get it done.

Not long after that the train carrying President William Howard Taft crossed the El Capitan Bridge, then continued on without incident toward Los Angeles.

It was never determined who had planted the dynamite. Was it the work of anarchists? Perhaps embittered railroad workers hoping to dramatize their grievances? Some even speculated that capitalist goons had left the device: The death of a president would be a small sacrifice for a grieving nation’s unrestrained backlash against labor.

But although the identity of the would-be assassins remained unknown, the consequences of the dynamite plot to kill the president were both swift and definitive. The next day an angry President Taft conferred with Attorney General George Wickersham and issued an order: The federal government would join the legal fight against the Structural Iron Workers union. Two weeks later an Indianapolis federal criminal grand jury began to investigate the charge that officials connected to the union had unlawfully conspired to transport dynamite across state lines. The evidence that Billy had gathered against the leadership would finally be put to use.

While in Los Angeles, there was a growing anxiety. If forces lurking nearby were prepared to initiate a dynamite attack on the President of the United States, it seemed only a matter of time before they would target the McNamara trial. Perhaps a bomb would go off on the day a key prosecution witness was scheduled to testify. Or maybe a slew of bombs, a tattoo of fiery explosions, would detonate if there was a guilty verdict, the resulting deaths dwarfing the
Times
Building disaster.

Either way many people throughout the city—largely the middle class and the rich; they had the most to lose—found themselves coming to the earnest conclusion that the bitter war between capital and labor in Los Angeles had to end. Now that the U.S. government was going after the Structural Iron Workers, the bombing of the
Times
Building would be avenged, and the city of Los Angeles should discreetly remove itself from the line of fire.

The second mobilizing event was no less influential to the course of the settlement and in its public way was even more dramatic. It began, however, with a small moment. After still another group of potential jurors failed to satisfy either Darrow or the district attorney, the court clerk went down his list and matter-of-factly began filling in the names on service papers for new jury candidates. One of the names he wrote that Friday, November 24, was George Lockwood.

Two days later Bert Franklin showed up at Lockwood’s ranch. Now that Lockwood had been selected as a jury candidate, Franklin told his old friend, he needed an answer: Would he accept the $4,000 and vote for acquittal?