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

tactic to villainize labor. Capitalist organizations denied the accusation. An attack by “the labor-union wolves,” the Times cheered, had been averted.
    Yet throughout the city people trembled with a new fear. The possibility of a bomb exploding in Los Angeles had become very real.

FIVE
    ______________________
     
    T HE INDIANAPOLIS ORPHEUM was that midwestern city’s premier vaudeville house. It had been built at the turn of the century, a time when the discoveries of daring archaeologists in sandy deserts stirred the country’s imagination. Life-size stone pharaohs wearing headdresses flanked the entrance. A gold-leaf frieze of invented symbols, a sort of hieroglyphics, ran across the top of the lobby walls. Throne chairs with carved serpent arms filled the reserved boxes. It was all meant to suggest that exotic adventures did not take place only in faraway lands. For the price of a ticket, customers could enter the Orpheum on Illinois Street in downtown Indianapolis and escape their dreary lives.
    With the growing success of the nickelodeons, the Orpheum started “movie days.” During the winter of 1910 A Corner in Wheat played at the Orpheum for several months. It was so popular that the film ran as a finale after the live vaudeville performances, too. Audiences came to be entertained, then found themselves sitting through an experience with an unexpected potency.
     
    As it happened, one of the many customers to see the film at the Orpheum was John J. McNamara, secretary-treasurer of the Structural Iron Workers. The union’s national office was on the fifth floor of the American Central Life Building in downtown Indianapolis, only a few blocks from the theater.
    Still, J.J.’s taking time to go a movie was something extraordinary. His was a busy, accomplished life. He had quit school as a teenager and went looking for a job to support his widowed mother and younger brother. Ignoring the danger, he signed on as an ironworker and spent a decade helping to erect scaffoldings for bridges and skyscrapers. Popular and easygoing, a ready smile bursting from his handsome boyish face, J.J. was elected as a delegate to the national union convention and then at twenty-eight was appointed to the full-time secretary-treasurer position. He went back to night school, taking business courses, and then for two years he studied at the Indiana School of Law. Now thirty-four, he juggled his union job with other new ambitions—law, editing the union’s Bridgeman’s Magazine, writing essays about economics and sociology, and trying his hand at poetry. So perhaps it was J.J.’s expanding interest in the arts that led him to the Orpheum. Or perhaps he was attracted by what he had heard about the film’s radical message. But whatever the reason, that winter he saw Griffith’s film. “A call to arms” was how he described it.
     
    A few months later a letter addressed to John J. McNamara arrived at the union’s downtown Indianapolis office. It had been sent from Los Angeles, and the writer was Eugene Clancy, the head of the Structural Iron Workers union in San Francisco.
    “I have been here five days now,” he wrote excitedly to J.J., “and they have started here the greatest strike any part of the country has had in a long time . . . All the shop men of the Union Iron Works and Bakers Iron Works and Llewellyn Iron Works are quitting.
    “Send Hockin at once,” Clancy urged, requesting the presence of veteran union organizer Herbert Hockin. “He will make his salary—if not in money, in goodwill for the Iron Workers.”
    J.J., however, did not dispatch Hockin to Los Angeles. Instead, he sent his younger brother Jim. His talents would be more appropriate. The letter, J.J. decided, was a call to arms, too.
    _____
    Billy Burns had also been summoned to Los Angeles—his biggest client wanted him there. The Burns Detective Agency had been hired by the American Bankers Association, winning the contract away from the more