1910 bombing by trade union activists
The "Los Angeles Times" bombing was the purposeful dynamiting of the "Los Angeles Times" Building in Los Angeles, California, United States, on October 1, 1910, by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IW). The explosion started a fire which killed 21 occupants and injured 100 more. It was termed the "crime of the century" by the "Los Angeles Times" newspaper, which occupied the building.
Brothers John J. ("J.J.") and James Barnabas ("J.B.") McNamara were arrested in April 1911 for the bombing. Their trial became a "cause célèbre" for the American labor movement. J.B. admitted to setting the explosive, and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. J.J. was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for bombing a local iron manufacturing plant, and returned to the IW as an organizer.
The "Times" bombing shocked Americans and remains both one of the deadliest criminal acts in U.S. history and the deadliest crime to go to trial in California.
Background.
The International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (IW) was formed in 1896. As the work was seasonal and most iron workers were unskilled, the union remained weak and much of the industry remained unorganized until 1902. That year, the IW won a strike against the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of the newly formed U.S. Steel corporation. American Bridge was the dominant company in the iron industry, and within a year the IW had not only organized almost every U.S. iron manufacturer, but had also won signed contracts including union shop clauses. The McNamara brothers were Irish American unionists. John (known as J.J.) and his younger brother James (known as J.B.) were both active in the IW.
Strike against American Bridge Co..
In 1903, officials of U.S. Steel and the American Bridge founded the National Erectors' Association (NEA), a coalition of steel and iron industry employers. The primary goal of the NEA was to promote the open shop and assist employers in busting the unions in their industries. Employers used labor spies, agents provocateur, private detective agencies, and strike breakers to engage in a campaign against the unions. Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies generally cooperated in this campaign, which often used violence against union members.
Hard pressed by the open shop campaign, the IW reacted by electing the militant Frank M. Ryan president and J.J. McNamara the secretary-treasurer in 1905. In 1906, the IW struck at American Bridge in an attempt to retain their contract. However, the open shop campaign was a significant success. By 1910, U.S. Steel had almost succeeded in driving all unions out of its plants. Unions in other iron manufacturing companies also vanished. Only the IW held on (though the strike at American Bridge continued).
Dynamite campaign.
Union officials used violence to counter the setbacks they had suffered. Beginning in late 1906, national and local officials of the IW launched a dynamiting campaign. Between 1906 and 1911, the union blew up 110 iron works, though only a few thousand dollars in damages was done. The NEA was well aware who was responsible for the bombings, since Herbert S. Hockin, a member of the IW's executive board, was their paid spy. These hundreds of bombings were later described as perhaps the largest domestic terrorism campaign in U.S. history.
Los Angeles strike.
Employers in Los Angeles had been successfully resisting unionization for nearly half a century. Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the "Los Angeles Times", was vehemently anti-union. Otis first joined and then seized control of the local Merchants Association in 1896, renaming it the Merchants and Manufacturers' Association (colloquially known as the M&amp;M), and used it and his newspaper's large circulation to spearhead a twenty-year campaign to end the city's few remaining unions. Without unions to keep wages high, open shop employers in Los Angeles were able to undermine the wage standards set in heavily unionized San Francisco. Unions in San Francisco feared that employers in their city would also soon begin pressing for wage cuts and start an open shop drive of their own. The only solution they saw was to re-unionize Los Angeles.
The San Francisco unions relied heavily on the IW, one of the few strong unions remaining in Los Angeles. The unionization campaign began in the spring of 1910. On June 1, 1910, 1,500 union members struck iron manufacturers in the city to win a $0.50 an hour minimum wage ($ an hour in 2023 dollars) and overtime pay. The M&amp;M raised $350,000 ($ in 2023 dollars) to break the strike. A superior court judge issued a series of injunctions which all but banned picketing. On July 15, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously enacted an ordinance banning picketing and "speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone", with a penalty of fifty days in jail, a $100 fine, or both. Most union members refused to obey the injunctions or ordinance, and 472 strikers were arrested. The strike, however, proved effective: by September, 13 new unions had formed, increasing union membership in the city by almost 60 percent.
Leading up to the explosion.
On June 3, 1910, two days after the start of the strike, Eugene Clancy, the top IW official on the West Coast, wrote to J.J.: "Now, Joe, what I want here is Hockin," referring to Herbert Hockin, the union official in charge of the dynamite bombings. However, Hockin had been caught taking money earmarked for bombing jobs, and McNamara no longer trusted him. He asked another dynamiter, Jack Barry of St. Louis, to go to California, but Barry turned down the job when he learned of the targets. McNamara finally sent his younger brother, J.B., to California on the bombing mission.
Bombing.
On the evening of September 30, 1910, J.B. left a suitcase full of dynamite in the narrow alley between the "Los Angeles Times" Building and the "Times" annex, known as "Ink Alley", which contained the paper's printing press. The suitcase was left near barrels of flammable printer's ink. The dynamite had a detonator connected to a mechanical windup clock, set to close an electric battery circuit at 1:00am, and set off the explosion. J.B. left similar bombs, also set to explode at 1:00am, next to the homes of both "Times" publisher Otis and Felix Zeehandelaar, secretary of the M&amp;M. He then boarded a train to San Francisco, and was out of town when the bomb at the "Times" building went off.
This was an escalation of the bombing campaign. Previously, only non-union workplaces had been targeted. Now the IW was expanding the targets to the homes of anti-union leaders, and a newspaper noted for its anti-union editorial policy.
At 1:07 a.m. on October 1, 1910, the bomb went off in the alley outside the three-story "Times" building, located at First Street and Broadway. The sixteen sticks of dynamite in the suitcase bomb were not enough to level the whole structure, but the bomb ignited natural gas piped into the building. The "Times" was a morning paper, and so had employees working during the late-night early-morning hours. The bombers were unaware that a number of "Times" employees were working overnight to produce an extra edition the next afternoon which would carry the results of the Vanderbilt Cup auto race. The bomb collapsed the side of the building, and the ensuing fire destroyed both the "Times" building and Ink Alley. Of the 115 people still in the building, 21 died (most of them in the fire). The "Times" called the bombing the "crime of the century", and Otis excoriated unions as "anarchic scum," "cowardly murderers," "leeches upon honest labor," and "midnight assassins."
An unresolved contradiction was J.B.'s knowledge of the gas pipes in the "Times" building. After he confessed to the bombing, he insisted that he had not known of the gas pipes. However, Ortie McManigal testified that before their arrest, J.B. had told him that he had gone into the "Times" building – he was challenged twice, but each time passed by saying he was on his way to the composing room – went into the basement and wrenched off a gas valve to maximize the destruction.
Other bombs.
On the morning of October 1, Zeehandelaar's maid found a package behind a bush beneath a bedroom window. Police were called, and opened and disarmed the bomb. The spring of the mechanical clock had apparently been wound too tightly, slowing the clock, and preventing the bomb from exploding on time. The unexploded bomb contained valuable clues as to the bombers' method. In addition, investigators were able to trace the dynamite back to its source.
The caretaker at the Otis home heard of the Zeehandelaar bomb, and decided to search around the estate. He found a leather suitcase behind some bushes under a bay window. Again the police arrived, and carried the suitcase away from the house and out in the open. However, while they were cutting open the suitcase, the clockwork alarm went off inside the suitcase. The police ran to safety just before the bomb exploded. Investigators speculated that, like the Zeehandelaar bomb, the clock mechanism at the Otis house had been wound too tightly, delaying the explosion.
On the same night as the "Times" explosion, there was a reported attempted break-in at the "Times" auxiliary building, in which two men were chased off by a security guard. The incident was at first assumed to be another bombing attempt.
The IW strike committee in Los Angeles and Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), immediately condemned the bombing and claimed no labor union or individual could have been responsible.
Bombing returns to L.A..
After several months, it appeared that the "Times" bombers had escaped arrest and gone to ground. The IW decided it was time for more bombings in Los Angeles and sent McManigal with a list of five bombing targets, including the "Times" auxiliary printing plant, the Llewellyn Iron Works, the Baker Iron Works, and two non-union construction sites: the Los Angeles County Hall of Records and the Hotel Alexandria. J.J. told McManigal that he had promised the "coast bunch" a Christmas present, and wanted the explosions to take place on Christmas Day. McManigal set off a dynamite bomb at the Llewellyn Iron Works, partially wrecking the plant with the damage costing $25,000, but he found two of the other sites too closely guarded, and never visited the remaining two. J.J. was angry that only one of the sites was bombed, but McManigal told him that security was too tight.
Tracking down the bombers.
The "Times" and law enforcement authorities announced that the perpetrators would be caught immediately, but weeks passed and no arrests were made. The City of Los Angeles posted a $25,000 reward for the capture of the bombers, and the M&amp;M raised another $50,000.
On October 2, 1910, Mayor George Alexander hired private detective William J. Burns to catch the guilty parties. Burns had been investigating the nationwide wave of iron manufacturing plant bombings for the past four years on behalf of the NEA, and took the City job as part of his investigation. From Hockin, his paid IW spy, Burns learned that McManigal had been handling the union's bombing campaign on orders from union president Frank Ryan and secretary-treasurer J.J. McNamara. McManigal and J.J. were borderline alcoholics who liked to drink and hunt at the same time. Burns infiltrated one of their late-winter hunting trips with a spy, and during the trip J.J. boasted of having blown up the "Times" building. The undercover private eye also surreptitiously took a photo of J.J. that Burns presented to a hotel clerk in Los Angeles, who recognized him as a "Mr. J. B. Bryce" who had checked in the day before the bombing and hurriedly checked out the following morning.
Arrest of J. B. McNamara and Ortie McManigal.
On April 14, 1911, Burns, Burns' son Raymond, and police officers from Detroit and Chicago went to the Oxford Hotel in Detroit and arrested McManigal and J.B. McNamara. Dynamite, blasting caps and alarm clocks were found in their suitcases. The men were told they were being arrested for robbing a bank in Chicago. Since they had watertight alibis for that alleged crime, both men agreed to accompany Burns and the police officers back to Chicago.
In Chicago, McManigal and J.B. were not taken to a police station, but to the private home of Chicago Police Sergeant William Reed and held from