Excerpt from City of Quartz by Mike Davis (1990, New Left Books, New York)
The City of Los Angeles was somewhat unique, in that it had lower levels of unionization prior to the revolution. This is largely due the active efforts by the Merchants & Manufacturers Association to dilute the power of unions across the country. In Los Angeles, the three most prominent members of the M&MA was the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, self-proclaimed General Harrison Gray Otis, Felix Zeehandelaar, and Pacific Electric Railway owner Henry Huntington. The M&MA was not opposed to unions per se, they just opposed strikes, boycotts, picket lines, collective bargaining, or anything that would make a union actually effective.
Otis in particular was vehement in his anti-union beliefs, and forced the Los Angeles Times to print story after story about the evils of unions.
At one o’clock in the morning on October 1st, 1910, three bombs exploded n Los Angeles. One exploded at the Los Angeles Times’ office, killing approximately 20 workers, one exploded at the home of the Times’ publisher, the self-proclaimed General Harrison Gray Otis, and one at the home of M&MA secretary Felix Zeehandelaar. Otis survived the blast by sheer luck and quickly pinned the responsibility for the attack on the city’s labor movement. Two brothers, James and John MacNamara, were arrested and dragged out a meeting of the Iron Workers Union in Indianapolis, and without even allowing them to see a lawyer, extradited them back to California.
While many in Los Angeles had been sympathetic to the plight of the 20 workers who had died in the bombing, the face of a relentless propaganda campaign by the Times and Otis, along with his support for the “open-shop” movement, convoked many residents that the bombing had been a frame-up. Eugene V. Debs even privately speculated that Otis himself had planted the bomb to discredit the labor movement.
Job Harriman, the Socialist Candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, had agreed to represent the brothers, convinced of their innocence.
The resulting show trial for the MacNamara brothers was one of the most shamelessly naked attempts at suppressing the city’s burgeoning labor movement. Anything and everything that had ever happened in Los Angeles up until that point was pinned on the two brothers and subsequently on the labor movement as a whole.
AFL president Samuel Gompers, fearing that this trial might encourage more workers to take up arms against the state, asked his friend Clarence Darrow to assist in the defense of the MacNamara brothers.
After arriving in Los Angeles, Darrow met with the prosecutors prior to speaking to Harriman or the MacNamara brothers. While the contents of that meeting might never become known, what happened next was that Darrow held a closed-door meeting with the brothers, excluding Harriman.
At the next hearing, the MacNamara brothers surprised everybody, including Job Harriman, by changing their plea to guilty. They were sentenced to life in the then-notorious San Quentin prison.
Convinced that a long trial would irreparably damage the labor movement, Darrow had secretly arranged for a plea bargain, if he could get the brothers to plead guilty, the prosecutor and judge would not give them the death penalty.
The rest of the newspapers had rallied behind Otis. The General, now even more righteous in his anti-socialist beliefs, turned the Los Angeles Times into his own propaganda mill, turning many in the city against their fellow workers.
Job Harriman’s mayoral campaign had been sunk by the outcome of the trial. For most in Los Angeles, this had created a deep scar against the labor movement. Those who still believed that the brothers were innocent had placed the blame squarely on the AFL for sending two innocent men to prison.
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Most of this is taken directly from OTL, except that OTL only the bomb at the Times office went off, the other two were overwound and didn’t go off at the right time, causing them to be found before they went off.
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