California : Metaphysical Anarchy and Conspiring Events -- American Lightning by Howard Blum

Blum weaves the lives and personalities of three famous American men at the beginning of the Twentieth Century: Clarence Darrow, noted defense attorney; D. W. Griffith, father of modern cinema; and William J. Burns, founder of a detective agency and predecessor to J. Edgar Hoover before the FBI was the FBI. Their lives come together over the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. Burns, then known as America's Sherlock Holmes, is engaged by the City to track down the bombers. Darrow eventually comes to defend the men who are affiliated with the Iron Workers Union. And Griffith's cinematic inspiration feeds off the themes of labor versus capital, as being the Second Civil War. They all converge sooner or later in LA, a town whose officials are profiting not only from keeping it a closed shop but also from their speculative irrigation projects ... think Chinatown.

Driving to work with my son this morning, I described the book to him using buzz words and names from high school history: Gompers, AFL, CIO. But then told him that this book was much more interesting because of the interconnecting stories. Because this period of history was taught so dryly to me, it took me over 275 pages to get familiar with the players and their parts.

No one's motives are 100% "pure." Money, ego and "cause" run rife on both the side of wealth and that of want, but are reported with equal objectivity by Blum. Burns is out of Chicago like Morris Fishbein, the AMA investigator in Charlatan; but his motivation goes beyond wanting the success of his business/industry. He wants to solve the crime and punish the perpetrators to conclude a period of violence by Socialist terrorists, to move the Nation past an outmoded political philosophy and propel it into the complexity of modern industrial production.

Darrow, portrayed as a reluctant defense attorney, recognizes the guilt of the McNamara brothers. While he plans to argue their case within the larger context of class warfare, he knows they would be found guilty of this explosion as their association with a nationwide network of dynamiters is made public. But the more interesting, contrasting conspiracy related in the book is that of a series of events that lead to them pleading guilty rather than going to trial: a bomb is discovered just in time before the President's train crosses a bridge on its way to California; a primary for Mayor of Los Angeles where the Socialist candidate makes it to the run-off election, scheduled within a week of the start of the trial; and the bribe of a potential juror by the defense team, itself an act that eventually leads to Darrow being accused and brought to trial. Serving as his own attorney, his defense arguments, like those of the McNamaras, are that he is captive of his time and place, acting in a rational, if illegal manner. Blum uses actual testimony; Darrow is surely a moving orator.

Griffith, the last in this triumvirate, is the first to recognize the propagandist potential of film. His early work often focused on the plight of the exploited working man and the underlying poverty that compelled certain actions, sometimes violent, often ennobling. Griffith films many of his works in Queens, but is drawn west, at a time when LA smells of oranges and everyone coming to town stays at the same first class hotel, where eventually the three characters meet in passing. When Birth of a Nation is shown at the White House, the first movie ever shown there, Woodrow Wilson compares it to writing history with lightning, a nice quote that pulls together the sound and fury from the storm of explosions of the young labor movement.

Finally, the context of American Lightning within the blog list of books: There are similar story lines with crime and corruption found in turn of the century ruckus towns like Los Angeles and Chicago and the more modern Atlantic City. There are recurring heroes who fight for the American way. But it was Blum's insight as he describes researching and writing the book that best connects it to my last review of Falling Man. He hints at this through Darrow's summary statement to the jurors: "... you may hang these men from the highest tree ... send me to the penitentiary .. but until you go down to the fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again ... as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air." He concludes, placing an image of the burning LA Times building against that of the World Trade Center, drawing parallels with the underlying motivations of the terrorists and the reaction across the country.

But where were the contemporary American giants to interpret the New Age of Terror and to inspire average citizens to move beyond ideological bloodshed?