Dead Girls by alice bolin

Author:alice bolin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

I was wandering Hollywood Forever again when I discovered the corner of the park dedicated to the Otis-Chandler family, the legendary owners of the Los Angeles Times. Harrison Gray Otis, the first successful publisher of the paper, is buried beneath a mammoth obelisk. His son-in-law and heir, Harry Chandler, gets a curving marble slab flanked with urns and a pair of bald eagles. And among the rosebushes and religious statues shading the Otis-Chandler graves, I found a disconcerting monument, another marble structure topped with a bronze sculpture of an eagle perched on its aerie, preparing for flight. our martyred men reads the adorning plaque, in memory of the men who “fell at their posts in The Times Building on the awful morning of October first, 1910—victims of conspiracy, dynamite and fire—The Crime of the Century.”

The what?

I had never heard about the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910, in which twenty-one of the paper’s employees, “defenders of Industrial Freedom under Law,” as the plaque puts it, were killed by a bomb planted by the Structural Iron Workers Union. Neither had anyone I informally surveyed after my discovery: my mother, brothers, or boyfriend. I was perplexed that my entire education, which includes, for what it’s worth, a bachelor’s degree in history, had neglected a terrorist attack on a major U.S. newspaper, an attack so traumatic that it had once been considered “the crime of the century.” But it is starting to seem fitting to me that I found evidence of this trauma only in a graveyard. Monuments do not serve only to help us remember. They also allow us to forget and move on.

Howard Blum wrote about the attack in his 2008 book American Lightning, tracking three American icons as they converged at downtown Los Angeles’s Alexandria Hotel at the time of the bombing: Billy Burns, the “American Sherlock Holmes,” whose agency tracked down the bombers; Clarence Darrow, the great populist attorney, who defended the bombers; and D. W. Griffith, the father of American cinema. The most interesting parts of the book are the chronicles of Burns’s and his operatives’ remarkable (and for Burns, characteristically illegal) detective work. Burns connected bomb sites in Los Angeles and Illinois, tracked a suspect using a pile of sawdust, trailed anarchists for months in a colony on Puget Sound, used the first bugged microphone to listen in on jailhouse conversations, kidnapped and tortured witnesses, and extrajudicially extradited the bombers, J. J. McNamara and his brother J. B., to California.

Despite these compelling details, American Lightning draws shallow conclusions from the events it re-creates so vividly. The Times attack was the most dramatic in the Structural Iron Workers’ massive bombing campaign, in which they dynamited over a hundred scab sites all over the United States. They sought to economically devastate Harrison Gray Otis, the paper’s fervently anti-union publisher. Blum asserts that the McNamara trial ended the war between capital and labor and “helped move America into the modern world.” “Entrepreneurial opportunities took shape,” he writes breezily, “and they

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