McNamara Case

McNAMARA CASE. On 1 October 1910, two explosions tore into the downtown printing plant of the Los Angeles Times. The blasts and a fire they touched off killed twenty-one men. The following April, after an investigation led by private detective William J. Burns, two brothers active in the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (BSIW)—Secretary-Treasurer John J. McNamara and his younger brother James B. McNamara—were arrested in the Midwest, brought to Los Angeles, and indicted for murder. Thus began one of the most important legal cases in US labor history.

Unionists of all political persuasions portrayed the McNamaras as victims of a frame-up by their corporate enemies. There was a good deal of circumstantial evidence to support this view. Since 1906, the very existence of the BSIW had been under attack from the National Erectors Association, a management group in which United States Steel, the nation’s most powerful open-shop corporation, was a major influence. At the same time, organizers from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had been engaged, since 1910, in a full-scale and partially successful effort to recruit Los Angeles workers into unions. Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Times, was a determined foe of organized labor. Convicting the McNamaras for bombing his plant would ruin the local union drive and humble the AFL nationally.

In its breadth and commitment, labor’s campaign for the brothers was unprecedented. Samuel Gompers, who Burns hinted had aided the bombers, declared the McNamaras “innocent victims of capitalist greed,” vowed to raise $350,000 for the defense team, and hired celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow to lead it. William D. Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World called for a nationwide general strike on the first day of the trial; unionists throughout California contributed a full day’s wages to the cause; and on Labor Day, 1911 (which the AFL renamed “McNamara Day”), huge crowds in every major American city outside the South gathered to proclaim the brothers’ innocence. Across the United States, Socialists and business unionists worked together on the defense. In Los Angeles, they also campaigned to elect as mayor Job Harriman, leader of the local Socialist Party. Harriman won a plurality of the vote in a November primary and was favored to win the runoff election a month later.

However, the entire effort rested on quicksand: the McNamaras were guilty. The testimony of a state’s witness named Ortie McManigal and Burns’s skillful sleuthing revealed that the Times explosion was the crowning blow to a series of eighty-seven bombings that top officers of the BSIW, including John J. McNamara, had carried out since 1906 to force the National Erectors Association to recognize the union. James B. McNamara had placed the dynamite outside the printing plant, intending only to damage the building. But the explosives unexpectedly ignited several drums of highly flammable ink.

On 1 December 1911 (four days before the mayoral runoff), the two brothers came to court and pled guilty—James to the bombing itself and John as an accessory to the dynamiting of a local factory. James received a sentence of life imprisonment, John a sentence of fifteen years. Job Harriman’s bid for mayor was decisively defeated. And Los Angeles remained an open-shop stronghold.

But the class hostilities the case revealed did lead, in 1912, to the formation of the pro-labor Federal Commission on Industrial Relations and a tacit alliance between the AFL and President Woodrow Wilson. Ironically, the bomb set by James McNamara allowed Samuel Gompers to join hands with those who ruled the progressive state.

Fonei, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 5, The AFL in the Progressive Era, 1910–1915. New York: International Publishers, 1980.

Kazin, Michael. Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Stimson, Grace H. Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955.

James B and John J. McNamara Papers,1905-1961. Finding Guide. University of Cincinnati Archives and Rare Book Library. http://ead.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ead/view?docId=ead/OhCiUAR0003.xml&query=&brand=default