Read American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century for Free Online

Angeles: On June 1, 1910, the ironworkers would walk off their jobs unless wages were increased. The Times gleefully reported the owners’ response: They had thrown the letter into the trash. And so as promised, fifteen hundred ironworkers went out on strike.
    A half-dozen other unions immediately left their jobs to show their support. Within hours, all over the city crowds of union pickets led by chanting ironworkers marched around factories.
    Each protest was a taunting, menacing parade. The crowds dared the employers’ goons to attack. It did not take long for the challenges to be accepted. Hired thugs and imported scabs charged at the workers. Stones were hurled, blackjacks swung, clubs slammed—each mean blow delivered with an ardent, powerful animosity. The city’s streets were taken over by battling crusaders.
    The Superior Court issued seven injunctions prohibiting the unions from demonstrating. The Los Angeles City Council passed a nonpicketing ordinance. The strikers ignored the injunctions and the ordinance, and charged the police who tried to disperse them. More than three hundred strikers were arrested, but the unions paid their fines, and they raced back to the streets. The violence grew more brutal; six deaths were reported. “Hate was in the air,” observed a journalist covering the Los Angeles strikes for Collier’s.
    Then in the summer of 1910 the terror campaign began.
     
    The first bomb was a fake. It was found at the Fourth Street construction site of the twelve-story annex to the Alexandria Hotel. Two developers, A. C. Bilicke and R. A. Rowen, had invested more than $3 million in this ornate five-hundred-room downtown showplace. Their investment was testimony to their faith in the city’s future, to their belief that Los Angeles would continue to grow and that affluent visitors would come wanting a place to stay that rivaled the great hotels in New York, London, and Paris. Tapestries and rugs were shipped at outrageous expense from Europe to decorate the block-long lobby. A large glass chandelier that was rumored to have hung in a Bavarian palace now shimmered in the Alex’s dining room. The hotel was an immediate success. It was the place to stay in Los Angeles. Its dining room was celebrated, liveried waiters pouring champagne into crystal glasses, presenting trays of briny oysters, and carving huge roasts from silver trolleys. And now Bilicke and Rowen had decided to add a new wing with rooms that would provide an uncommon luxury—private baths. But as the construction progressed, workers began to die.
    A hoisting derrick suddenly toppled and came crashing to the ground. One worker was crushed to death; two were severely injured. The foremen could not understand how the accident had happened. Yet the next day the derrick fell again. Another worker was killed, and two more were injured. And now a possible explanation began to take shape: The dead workers were nonunion. “The scabs [were] killing each other through their own incompetency,” insisted labor organizers.
    As mournful workers carried the body of their dead friend, the second in as many days, out of the construction site, a fight broke out with the union pickets. The two sides traded punches, and the corpse fell to the ground. It was trampled. “CORPSE DEFACERS!” the Times screamed in ninety-six-point type on its front page the next day.
    And now a bomb had been found at the Alex. When the police arrived to defuse it, they discovered after a cautious examination that the device was a hoax. A gas pipe had been filled with manure. A rusty dollar watch had been tied to it for effect.
    The next bomb, however, was real. It had been placed at the block-long construction site for the city’s new Hall of Records. Still, there was never any danger. The police were informed of its location hours before it had been set to explode. It was defused without incident.
    The unions insisted that the bomb had been placed by minions of the M&M, a