WITH JUSTICE FOR SOME. Lise Pearlman

counted on his surviving the agonizing train trip to Los Angeles. A few weeks later a surgeon performed a life-saving operation, draining a swollen mastoid behind his ear, after which Darrow still faced a long, uphill recovery. For months, Darrow did not speak and barely ate. Ruby kept all visitors at bay and shielded her husband from any business decisions, including frantic letters urging him to sell his investments. Darrow’s convalescence in Los Angeles coincided with an economic depression that wound up bankrupting the successful lawyer from prolonged inattention to his affairs.

      When Ruby finally told her husband all his savings were gone, he threatened never to forgive her for forcing him to go back into law practice and start all over building up a retirement fund. They barely scraped the train fare together to return to Chicago. Darrow rejoined his old law firm, vowing to concentrate on high-paying cases to quickly put together enough money to retire again. He had never even received all the fees promised him for disrupting his practice and jeopardizing his health to defend Haywood and Pettibone in Idaho. But Darrow did receive a solemn vow from grateful labor leaders after the unexpected victories in Boise – they would never ask him to defend a political murder trial again.

      Samuel Gompers remembered that promise well when he showed up on Darrow’s door step to beg Darrow to come West again in 1911 for an even bigger class confrontation than the Haywood murder trial. Darrow told the head of the American Federation of Labor (“AFL”) an emphatic no. The circumstances were dreadful. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building at one o’clock on Saturday morning, October 1, 1910, had shocked the nation. The building collapsed in flames. Twenty-one non-union employees died trying to escape. Somehow, on borrowed presses, key employees of the Times published the news in a one-page special edition the same day, placing the blame squarely on union men.

      The attack on the newspaper and an undetonated bomb found outside the owner’s home had followed four months of escalating labor-capital confrontations. Harry Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, was the self-proclaimed general of the movement to break the back of the unions, not only in Los Angeles but across the nation, through the militant Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M). Otis was also on a mission to destroy businesses that dared to support unions. Labor retaliated with equal fervor against non-unionized businesses. In June of 1910, union members, strikebreakers and police had come to blows. Local judges sided with management, issuing multiple restraining orders and jailing hundreds of strikers. To many labor supporters, the accusation that militant men were behind a retaliatory terrorist attack on the Times seemed too pat. The mass murder drew so much outrage that it dwarfed concerns over abusive labor practices and anti-union businesses. Why would union men be that short-sighted?

      Coincidentally on the day of the bombing, William Burns, the celebrated sleuth who had already eclipsed Pinkerton as this generation’s “Great Detective,” arrived in Los Angeles to make a speech. Burns had rocketed to fame when President Theodore Roosevelt sent him to expose rampant political corruption in San Francisco after the city received unprecedented funds for rebuilding following the Great Earthquake and fire of April 1906. That investigation had prompted stunning indictments for graft and bribery against the mayor and entire board of supervisors, as well as political boss Abraham Ruef, the chief of police, and officers of major utilities and of a local railroad. Mayor Schmidt was forced to resign; Ruef alone went to prison.

      Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Photo-los-angeles-times-building-post-bombing.jpg

      Photo of bombed out headquarters of the Los Angeles Times October 1, 1910

      Source of newspaper image: L. .A. Times, Oct. 1, 1910, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, HONNOLDMUDD LIBRARY OF THE CLAREMONT COLLEGES CONSORTIUM

      Newspaper headline story put out by the staff on borrowed presses the same day of the explosion. Los Angeles had already developed a reputation as “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.” Just four months before the bombing, a major confrontation between union members and strikebreakers prompted local judges to issue multiple restraining orders and jail hundreds of strikers. Labor supporters were suspicious that the terrorist attack on the Times was actually meant to hurt the labor movement. The mass murder dwarfed concerns over abusive labor practices and anti-union businesses. Why would union men be that short-sighted?

      Harry Otis immediately asked Burns to head the investigation into the bombing of the Times. Burns soon realized that it bore similarities to suspicious bombings of non-union work sites his agency had investigated across the country. After six months of intensive national effort, detectives zeroed in on two brothers, James and John McNamara, as the key suspects. John McNamara was the national secretary of the AFL-affiliated Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. Like the Pinkerton men who illegally kidnapped the WFM leaders in Colorado in 1906 and whisked them to Idaho for trial, Burns’ agents kidnapped the McNamara brothers in the Midwest and transported them to Los Angeles before anyone could challenge their extradition.

      Labor leaders smelled a frame-up and wanted to provide the McNamara brothers with their biggest legal guns. (It was, in any event, still more than two years before the city would be the first in the nation to employ a public defender.) AFL President Gompers joined Bill Haywood and Eugene Debs in rallying millions of union supporters nationwide – far broader support than for the Haywood trial – with charges that the McNamara brothers were being railroaded for murder.

      Gompers tried to convince Darrow that he was the only lawyer in the country with the skills to save the lives of the McNamara brothers and prevent labor from losing its war against closed shops. Darrow still declined. Back when Darrow had been recuperating in Los Angeles, he and Ruby had seen the polarized city first hand. Customers at local stores had to choose between union and “open” shops and expect to suffer retaliation for their partisanship. In its relatively short history, Los Angeles had developed a reputation as “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.”⁴⁰

      Business leaders in Los Angeles attributed the city’s rapid rise to the much lower pay scale compared to the unionized city of San Francisco. In the Southern California city, there seemed to be an unending supply of new job-seekers willing to work when management fired employees lobbying for higher pay and better working conditions. Even in San Francisco organized labor faced stiff opposition from owners bringing in replacement workers. A failed San Francisco Streetcar strike in 1907 for an eight-hour day had made national news when it left 31 people dead and 1100 injured, mostly passengers.

      L.A. employers took note of other major strikes across the country, particularly the 1909 “Uprising of 20,000” in Manhattan’s garment district. Harry Otis figured that by executing the McNamara brothers he might deter similar uprisings across the country. Darrow dreaded being thrust back into the center of the labor wars, but he did not want the McNamara brothers’ deaths on his conscience. Against his better judgment, Darrow ultimately yielded to Gompers’ entreaties. He would live to regret that decision.

      To counter the extraordinarily negative publicity, the union arranged for a movie biography to be filmed of John McNamara, proclaiming his innocence. The popular nickelodeon galvanized workers nationwide. Meanwhile, in March of 1911 at the very same factory where the 1909 garment district uprising had occurred, a great fire broke out. Nearly 150 garment workers lost their lives as panicked young seamstresses vainly tried to escape the flames only to find the exit doors locked. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was the worst disaster in New York City before September 11, 2001.

      While headlines generated sympathy for exploited factory girls in the East, “Great Detective” William Burns was systematically building a strong case to execute the McNamara brothers and break the back of organized labor. Burns’ agency uncovered irrefutable evidence from secret files in the Iron Workers’ Union that the bombing was the end result of a five-year sabotage campaign carried out at the direction of union leaders on non-union sites. John McNamara even bragged of the Los Angeles