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'Lightning' Strikes At Hearts Of Neocons

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 21, 2008

"American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century," by Howard Blum (Crown, $24.95)

Today's neocons would love it: Terrorists disturbing the peace and security of the United States are hunted down, not at taxpayer expense, but by a private agency for personal gain. The marketplace rules!

It worked, sort of, a century ago when enterprise was not so much private as it was wild and woolly and concern for such legal fripperies as individual rights was even less rigorous than it has become in our day.

Eventually the government stepped in to arrest the bad guys and put them on trial - and when it did, the attendant early 20th century corruption sounds as modern as in a John Grisham novel.

"Novel" is not an inappropriate word to use in connection with "American Lightning," Howard Blum's fast-moving, skillfully constructed account of the hunt for the perpetrators of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building on Oct. 1, 1910, that killed 21 people and injured many more. Journalist and author Blum ("The Brigade") makes the facts work for him and upon the reader in much the same way the nascent motion pictures he describes worked upon audiences of the period.

The private investigation agency was that of William J. Burns, famed for his investigatory exploits. Burns acceded to the pleading of Los Angeles' mayor to take the case, even though the owner of the Times, Harrison Gray Otis, despised Burns.

The Times accused trade unionists of planting the bombs. Dozens of bombings across the country had also been blamed on unionists. Otis was the sparkplug of a national movement to bust unions.

However, it was not that black and white. Otis was quietly involved in an egregious land and water fraud. So there was an undercurrent of contention that Otis might have blown up his own building to divert attention away from his clandestine shenanigans and onto labor and its socialist supporters.

Burns is primus inter pares of three men in "American Lightning," the other two being lawyer Clarence Darrow and moviemaker D.W. Griffith. Burns acted on his personal, self-serving concept of justice, which did not always accord with the Bill of Rights or any state's code of laws.

Through persistence, solid investigation and more than a little chicanery, he finally nabbed brothers J.J. and James McNamara of the Structural Iron Workers union. They were extradited to California and charged in the bombings - J.J. specifically with 21 murders.

Darrow took on the McNamaras' defense, despite privately being sure they were guilty (he never asked) and would hang. Ultimately there was a settlement.

All of which leaves Griffith dangling, rather superfluous. True, Blum's style is cinematic, and he shows Griffith's rapidly growing career as running along parallel tracks with the Burns-bombing narrative. But scarcely do they meet, save in an abstract, conceptual sense.

Roger K. Miller, a freelance writer and editor, is the author of the novel "Invisible Hero."

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