AMERICAN LIGHTNING: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
Howard Blum
Crown
True Crime
ISBN: 9780307346940
Superlatives are cast with great ease. How many times have sportswriters told us we are watching the game of the season or perhaps the decade? How often are political events described as the most monumental of our generation? How many legal battles have been labeled the “crime of the century?” This is not to be critical of Howard Blum’s AMERICAN LIGHTNING but instead to place the engaging historical narrative of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910 and the ensuing trial of the alleged participants in a more appropriate context.
Los Angeles in 1910 was a far different community than the entertainment center of the world that it is today. Its population of 319,000 placed the city behind Baltimore, Milwaukee and Newark. The movie industry was in its infant stage. California was the hotbed of American socialism, and the union movement was struggling to gain a foothold in California life industry. The battle between union and management would be shattered by an explosion on the morning of October 1st that decimated the Times building and left 20 men dead. Perhaps because the attack was on the newspaper industry, the media treated the event as a crime of enormous magnitude.
AMERICAN LIGHTNING is far more than the story of the bombing and the subsequent trial of brothers J.J. and Jim McNamara. The investigation, arrest and trial of the McNamaras represented another battle in the war being waged in the early 20th century between business and labor. Similar battles across the land involved union leaders Eugene Debs and William Hayward.
Blum is not content to simply describe the events surrounding the bombing. He has expanded the narrative by examining the lives of three men, two who played a major role in the bombing and one who helped create the modern cinema industry. William J. Burns, recognized in 1910 as “the greatest detective of perhaps that or any era,” and Attorney Clarence Darrow would be prominent actors in the case. Director D. W. Griffith would play no actual role here, but in 1913 he released From Dusk to Dawn, a film loosely based on the case. Griffith actually had assisted Burns in a prior investigation by arranging for the showing of a movie that encouraged a confession from a suspect Burns was investigating.
Burns investigated the crime by techniques that did not and could not rely on the scientific methods that exist today. He worked diligently gathering evidence across the nation. Looking back on his investigation through the lens of the modern criminal law framework of defendants’ rights, many of Burns’s methods would not be tolerated in contemporary courtrooms. But Burns and Otis Chandler, who employed him to find the perpetrators of the bombing, could not be bothered by legal niceties. This was a war between labor and owners, and in war anything goes.
Darrow, of course one of America’s prominent attorneys, had already earned a reputation in representing labor defendants in criminal cases. In later years he would gain fame for his defense of John Scopes and Leopold and Loeb. Defending the McNamara brothers was not the finest hour of his legal career. His clients both went to prison, and charges of jury tampering ultimately put Darrow in the defendant’s chair in a Los Angeles courtroom.
Throughout the story, Blum paints a vivid and detailed account of an important case in American legal history. What makes AMERICAN LIGHTNING a compelling work is the author’s placing of the crime in its historical context. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building and the resulting trial can only be understood in the panoply of events occurring across the nation in the early decades of the 20th century. By his portrayal, Blum has aided readers in better understanding the events of that era and their impact on America.
--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
