American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
Authors: Howard Blum
Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Performing Arts, #Film & Video, #History & Criticism
AMERICAN
LIGHTNING
______________________
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Part III: “The Last Big Fight”
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
For Ivana,
with love.
And for
Sarah and Bill, Susan and David—
good friends.
“It’s like writing history with lightning.”
—P
RESIDENT
W
OODROW
W
ILSON AFTER VIEWING
T
HE
B
IRTH OF A
N
ATION
,
THE FIRST MOVIE EVER SHOWN IN THE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
“I know it’s risky, but I still write history
out of my engagement with the present.”
—R
ICHARD
H
OFSTADTER
CAST OF CHARACTERS
______________________
Detectives
Billy Burns:
The country’s greatest detective, often called “the American Sherlock Holmes.”
Raymond Burns:
A son trying to win his father’s love—and catch the bombers.
Guy Biddinger:
Policeman, detective—and mole in the enemy’s camp.
Bert Franklin:
Former U.S. Marshal. His job for the defense: to ensure the jury votes for acquittal.
Suspects
J. W. McGraw:
A sawdust trail feeds speculation that he is the elusive Peoria, Illinois, bomb-maker.
J. B. Bryce:
Purchaser of 80 percent dynamite from the Giant Powder company in San Francisco, explosives that are perhaps being used for more than “uprooting tree trunks.”
David Caplan (a.k.a. William Capp):
Anarchist with his own interest in purchasing dynamite.
M. A. Schmidt:
Another anarchist, who pilots a boat at the center of the case.
J.J. McNamara:
Engaging, handsome, lady’s man, union official, and “a martyr to his cause.”
Jim McNamara:
Brother of J.J., on the run and potentially dangerous.
Ortie McManigal:
Friend to the McNamaras. Out of work, yet not out of money.
Harrison Gray Otis:
Cantankerous owner of the
Los Angeles Times
and a schemer determined to make a fortune.
Lawyers
Clarence Darrow:
Legendary defense attorney, drawn against his will into “the crime of the century”—only to be put on trial himself.
Earl Rogers:
Defender of Darrow in the courtroom, and trader of punches with Billy Burns outside.
Job Harriman:
Socialist candidate for mayor, Darrow’s co-counsel, and, in time, Darrow’s victim.
John Fredericks:
A district attorney willing to make a deal—but only on his terms.
Movie-Makers
D.W. Griffith:
The most innovative filmmaker of his time, creatively energized by his unfolding connections with the trial’s major players.
Linda Arvidson:
D.W.’s actress wife, who is informed by her husband: “Don’t think there is some other woman . . . It is not one, but many.”
Mary Pickford:
The first movie star and the focus of D.W.’s tormented thoughts.
Sam Gompers:
Influential union leader, savvy to the connection between politics and theater, and authorizer of $2,577 to make “the greatest moving picture of the twentieth century.”
Journalists
Mary Field:
Against Darrow’s plea and despite his wife, she came to report on the trial—and share his life.
Lincoln Steffens:
A muckraker intent on framing the trial in his terms: “justifiable dynamiting.”
E. W. Scripps:
Wealthy publisher and proponent of the view that the men killed “should be considered what they really were—soldiers enlisted under a capitalist employer.”
PROLOGUE
_______________________
THREE LIVES
PROLOGUE
_______________________
A
S THE DETECTIVE
made his way along a bustling Fourteenth Street in New York City on that late December day in 1910, he was confident that, after a frustrating month in Los Angeles, he was at least closing in on one murderer. “Every criminal leaves a track,” Billy Burns was fond of telling his operatives, “that many times Providence interferes to uncover.” Only in this grim case—the sordid murder of ten-year-old Marie Smith—an impatient Burns had decided he had no choice but to give Providence an inventive nudge. He walked toward his appointment at 11 East Fourteenth Street with great hopes for his plan.
The detective was also curious about the man he was going to meet. There had been a time, after all, when but for his father’s misgivings, their lives might have followed similar paths. In high school in Columbus, Ohio, Billy Burns, the red-haired, freckle-faced immigrant Irish tailor’s son, had performed in the Shakespeare Society’s productions. He had won cheers and laughter—his first small thrill of celebrity—as a clog-dancing, thick-brogued Emerald Isle rascal in a comic routine he wrote for the school show. He had dreamed of a career on stage. But when his father insisted he get a job with a steady income, a government job, perhaps, Billy obeyed. He found work as an assistant operative in the United States Secret Service.
Tenacious, flamboyant, ingenious, and when the opportunity allowed, still theatrical, Billy Burns threw himself into each new puzzle. He rounded up the counterfeiters who had manufactured a hundred-dollar bill so nearly perfect it had fooled bank tellers throughout the country. He solved the mystery of how, despite a detachment of guards and meticulous security precautions, bags of Double Eagle twenty-dollar gold coins had been stolen from the San Francisco Mint. He foiled a plot to assassinate Julian, Lord Pauncefote, the British ambassador to the United States. Posing as an insurance salesman, he spent months undercover in Indiana to identify and then track down the vigilantes who had broken into a small-town jail, abducted five gangsters, and left them hanging by their necks from the branches of an oak tree. On special assignment from President Theodore Roosevelt, Billy Burns had gone off to Oregon to build a case against a network of well-connected swindlers who were selling off large tracts of public land. And with the news of the Oregon indictments still echoing through the stunned corridors of power, the president sent his special operative off on another dangerous mission: Billy Burns was to put an end to the cabal of mobsters and politicians who, backed up by bribes, beatings, arson, kidnapping, and murder, ran the city of San Francisco as their own fiefdom. It took several years, but once again, despite the risks, despite the ruthlessness and the institutionalized power of his opponents, Burns succeeded. Law and order were restored in San Francisco.
A twenty-two-year government career heralded in front-page stories had made Billy Burns famous. He was, the
New York Times
would soon declare, “the greatest detective certainly, and perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius whom the country has produced.” Comparable rivals, the London
Spectator
would concede, existed only in fiction: Burns was the “American Sherlock Holmes.”
And now at forty-nine, Billy Burns was becoming rich. In September 1909 he had resigned from the Secret Service and joined longtime private detective William P. Sheridan in setting up the Burns & Sheridan Detective Agency based in Chicago. The agency, striving for both respectability and lucrative commissions, announced a policy of handling neither divorce nor strikebreaking cases. Still, jobs poured in; so many, that an overwhelmed Sheridan sold his interest, and on March 11, 1910, the firm became the William J. Burns National Detective Agency. Headquartered in New York, with regional offices throughout the country, the agency employed nearly twelve hundred operatives. Little more than two months ago, he and his firm had taken on the most monumental case of his career. “The crime of the century,” the newspapers called it. But today he had returned to New York to help identify the murderer of a ten-year-old girl.
Short and rather stocky, a bit of a dandy with a fondness for three-piece suits and bowler hats, his hair and bristly mustache still crimson, a man with a banker’s staid demeanor and a bartender’s ready smile, at a glance an improbable detective, Billy headed up the wide stone steps of the Fourteenth Street brownstone that winter’s day. He walked through the unlocked black entrance door and then crossed a narrow marble-floored vestibule to ring the buzzer affixed to the right of a pair of well-polished mahogany interior doors.
A door opened, and he was directed up a graceful, curving staircase to the top floor. He entered a large, open space illuminated by a harsh, white glow emanating from the banks of yard-long mercury vapor tubes suspended in orderly rows from the ceiling. Billy Burns walked across a ballroom that was now being used as the stage of the Biograph Film Studio and proceeded toward an oak roll-top desk in the corner. Near a small hill of rolled-up carpets and a pile of folded scenery was a tall, lithe man, dressed with meticulous care in a suit, tie, and, although indoors, a wide-brimmed hat. He held himself very erect, as if posing, his demeanor stern, somber, and imperial. His face was long and hollow-cheeked, and he had a tendency to stare; it was this habit, along with his prominent nose, that made him seem menacing, like a bird of prey. This was the man whose help the detective had come to ask—D. W. Griffith.
______
D.W., too, had once been a detective. Five years earlier on a stage in San Francisco, David Wark Griffith had been Warburton, a cigarchomping private eye. And like his visitor, he had been relentless. To get his man, he had donned a variety of farcical disguises—grizzly bear, drunkard, even society dowager.