A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (16 page)

Anna Jarvis was a woman of fierce loyalty and tireless enterprise. She was also a total raving lunatic. Childless herself, the spinster schoolteacher was consumed by twin obsessions that tore her apart: First, a relentless effort to establish a perpetual tribute to her dead mother, and later, an equally tenacious drive to destroy the very monument she had created.

Jarvis's attachment to her mother was reminiscent of a remora. The bond was so strong, in fact, that Lillie, the younger sister, felt a little left out. “It has been your aim to render me virtually motherless,” Lillie complained in a letter to Anna. “Nothing would help and encourage me like your death.”

When Mother Jarvis died in 1905, Anna's mission began. It started in her hometown of Grafton, West Virginia, with a memorial service she organized on the second anniversary of her mother's passing. She purchased five hundred carnations, her mother's favorite flower, one for each mother in her church's congregation. Then she began to lobby for a national holiday in her mother's honor, browbeating politicians, pestering bureaucrats, and generally making an awful nuisance of herself. It worked. Mother's Day became a popular cause. Americans' loyalties may have been deeply divided in those prewar days, but everyone had a mother.

It all culminated with a joint resolution in Congress, signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, that established the second Sunday in May as a national holiday. But Anna Jarvis wasn't finished. She had barely begun. She quit her job and spent all her time writing foreign heads of state hoping to establish Mother's Day abroad. Her home became so cluttered with correspondence and mementos that she purchased the house next door and filled that up, too.

Then it started to get ugly. Mother's Day was becoming a crassly commercial bonanza for florists, card shops, and candy makers. Jarvis lost it. She railed first against the vile floral profiteers making a killing off her mother's beloved carnations. One of her press releases read: “
WHAT WILL YOU DO
to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?”

In the 1930s, when the U.S. postmaster announced a Mother's Day commemorative stamp bearing the portrait of Whistler's mother, Jarvis went ballistic.
Whistler's mother!
They had the wrong mother on their stamp! Jarvis demanded an audience with President Franklin Roosevelt, and succeeded in having “Mother's Day” removed from the issue. The stamp was still embellished with a vase of white carnations, however, which appalled her: More profit for the profiteers.

About the same time, she stormed into a meeting of the American War Mothers and tried to break up their sale of white carnations for Mother's Day. The police had to drag the sputtering woman out kicking and screaming. Soon she began wandering the streets showing strangers old photos of her taken at the time of her mother's death. Eventually Jarvis shut herself away in her dilapidated house and hung a sign in her window that read
WARNING, STAY AWAY
. She would sit for hours next to the radio, ear cocked, certain her dearly departed mother was trying to communicate with her through the radio waves.

In the end, she was sent penniless and babbling to a sanitarium. And though she was never told, perhaps as a safety measure, she was supported by contributions from the hated Florists Exchange.

Sleeping Angelenos were startled awake in the early morning hours of October 1, 1910, by a massive explosion many mistook for an earthquake. A cache of dynamite planted at the downtown headquarters of the
Los Angeles Times
had been detonated, flinging printing equipment and shooting flames high into the night sky. Inside the brick and granite structure known as “the Fortress,” workers preparing the next day's newspaper were consumed in an inferno fueled by shattered gas lines or crushed under collapsing floors and walls. Firefighters made heroic yet mostly futile efforts to contain the angry blaze, while bystanders kept at bay by the intense heat watched helplessly as those trapped inside made desperate leaps from upper-story windows. All told, twenty-one
Times
employees lost their lives in the blast, with many more injured. It was one of the most horrific crimes of the young century, and it would take one of America's foremost detectives to find out who was responsible.

With his fiery red hair, flamboyant personality, and penchant for self-promotion, William J. Burns had already made quite a name for himself thwarting counterfeiters as the star detective of the United States Secret Service and tracking down public land thieves in the West under a mandate from President Theodore Roosevelt. His investigations into the corporate and political malfeasance that had long infected the city of San Francisco made him a champion among progressives of the era. But it was his work solving the
Los Angeles Times
bombing that would thrust him to an entirely new level of renown and make him, at least for a time, an American folk hero.
The New York Times
declared him to be “the greatest detective certainly, and perhaps the only really great detective, the only detective of genius this country has produced.” His fame would lead him into the thick of a celebrated murder case in Georgia, which nearly got him lynched, and eventually to become the head of what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he was ultimately eclipsed in the national consciousness by his former deputy, J. Edgar Hoover.

The destruction of the
Times
building occurred during a period of intense class strife in America, when relations between industry and labor were dangerously volatile. This was particularly true in Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis, the rabidly antiunion publisher of the
Times,
waged a relentless campaign against organized labor. Otis had no doubt who was behind the attack on his Fortress.
UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE
TIMES
,
blared the headline of the next day's abbreviated edition of the paper, which was printed at an auxiliary plant. “Oh, you anarchic scum,” the publisher seethed in an editorial. “You leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins.” Labor leaders, fearing the explosion would give Otis and his ilk the ammunition they needed to step up their assault on unionism, quickly entrenched themselves and vigorously denied any connection to the attack. Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist candidate for president, even went so far as to accuse Otis of secretly blowing up his own building in order to blame it on organized labor and thus destroy it in California once and for all.

Los Angeles mayor George Alexander knew the simmering tension between Otis and the unions could easily erupt into war if the bombing wasn't solved quickly and decisively. He immediately hired Burns, who had recently left government service and formed his own agency. The detective had little to go on at first—except for an unexploded bomb that was intended to have been part of the mayhem wrought by the
Times
blast. The day the Fortress exploded, fifteen sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock were discovered at the home of Felix J. Zeehandelaar, secretary of the Merchant and Manufacturers Association, an antilabor organization founded by Otis and others to fend off the advances of unionism. Burns noticed that the design and components of the Zeehandelaar bomb were very similar to those of another unexploded bomb found in Peoria, Illinois, where he had been investigating a series of industrial explosions.

Burns was convinced there was a connection between the industrial sabotage in Peoria and the attack on the
Times,
but establishing it proved difficult. The unexploded Peoria bomb had been traced to a character calling himself “J. W. McGraw,” who remained at large, while the Zeehandelaar bomb led to two anarchists named David Caplan and Matthew Schmidt, and their leader, an unidentified man operating under the alias “J. B. Bryce.” All three of these men were also at large, and none matched the description of “J. W. McGraw.”

The elusive connection between Peoria and Los Angeles had Burns stumped, plus he faced a new source of pressure as well. Otis and other powerful antilabor types, furious that Mayor Alexander refused to take it on faith that organized labor was responsible for the
Times
bombing, demanded that a grand jury convene and that a special prosecutor named Earl Rogers head the investigation. Both Otis and Rogers were inveterate foes of Burns, and opposed his involvement with the case because they believed his earlier San Francisco graft investigations proved he was an anticorporate tool of radical progressives. As the detective later related, “Otis sent vigorous protest to the mayor denouncing me and deriding the mayor for employing me, expressing his opinion of me and anticipating failure.”

Otis and Rogers raised questions about the stalled progress of the investigation, suggesting that perhaps Burns wasn't earning the money he received from the city to solve the case. They exerted so much pressure that Mayor Alexander was eventually forced to withhold his fee. “The end of it,” Burns reported, “was that I had to go ahead and finance the investigation myself. It cost me $14,000.” That was a lot of money, but Burns sensed an imminent breakthrough and wasn't about to withdraw from such a potentially career-defining case. “I knew that our operatives were watching the right rat holes,” he said, “and I intended to keep them there as long as I could raise the money to pay their wages.”

Sure enough, the mysterious Peoria bomber known as “J. W. McGraw” was soon identified as Ortie McManigal, a labor extremist from Chicago. But his ties to the Los Angeles bombers Caplan and Schmidt, and their leader, “J. B. Bryce,” were still obscured. All Burns could do was watch McManigal and wait to see what he would do next. As it turned out, he went on a hunting trip to Wisconsin with a companion who called himself Frank Sullivan but who matched the description of “J. B. Bryce.” Burns immediately dispatched two of his agents to Wisconsin for a hunting trip of their own. After setting up camp near their quarry, the undercover detectives established an outdoorsman's rapport with the suspects. A souvenir snapshot of their time together was then shown to witnesses in Los Angeles and elsewhere who had seen “J. B. Bryce.” They confirmed that he and Frank Sullivan were one and the same. Now it was time to find out who he
really
was.

The mystery man was trailed to Cincinnati, where he went to the home of a Mrs. McNamara, who turned out to be his mother. “J. B. Bryce” was at last identified as James B. McNamara, an alcoholic ne'er-do-well with a very important brother: John J. McNamara, secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers. The union was one of the nation's most powerful and was suspected of being behind the explosions in Peoria and many others across the country. Could Otis have been right all along? Was it in fact a union bomb that had destroyed the
Times
Fortress? “Such an act is anarchy, pure and simple,” John McNamara had asserted after the
Times
explosion. “No sane individual or organization would resort to anything of the kind under any circumstances.” Did a terrorist lurk behind this seemingly sincere statement? Burns believed so, but he still needed proof.

Ortie McManigal and James McNamara were clearly guilty, but Burns believed that arresting them right away might destroy any chance of nailing John McNamara. “No one was likely to catch the Secretary-Treasurer of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers—respected in the high circles of organized labor and a close friend of American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers—carrying dynamite around in a handbag,” wrote Burns biographer Gene Caesar. “A conclusive link had to be established between John McNamara, the known bombers, and the bombings themselves, and Burns realized that it might take a long time to do it.”

The detective again decided to watch and wait, but McManigal proved dangerous on the loose. In December 1910 he slipped out of Chicago and returned to Los Angeles to blow up the Llewellyn Iron Works, where a bitter labor strike was in progress. (He was also reportedly set to bomb the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, the
Times
auxiliary printing plant, and some other buildings, but abandoned the project when a detonating cap accidentally exploded and slightly injured him.) The following April, McManigal met up with James McNamara in Toledo, Ohio, from where the two took a train to Detroit with bags full of explosives. It was time to haul them in before anyone else got hurt. Burns operatives who had been trailing the pair swooped in on them at a Detroit hotel.

James McNamara seemed resigned, but when Ortie McManigal realized he was being arrested for the
Times
bombing (not on an unrelated charge, as he had been told), he was horrified. People had died in that explosion, and it was a hanging offense. “I didn't have anything to do with [it],” he protested. “Jim [McNamara] did that one with the help of a couple of anarchists named Schmitz and Caplan. I wasn't even there.” When told it didn't matter, that he was still an accessory after the fact, McManigal panicked. “If I told you everything I know, would things go easy on me?” he asked. There were no guarantees, the Burns detectives replied, but his cooperation might weigh favorably. With that, McManigal started to sing. He admitted to planting the bombs in Peoria, as well as the one at the Llewellyn Iron Works in Los Angeles, and a long list of others—all under the direction of John McNamara. He also told the agents exactly what they would find at the Iron Workers union headquarters in Indianapolis, including a ledger with payments to him and James McNamara listed separately from legitimate union expenses, among other damning evidence. Based on the information provided by McManigal, John McNamara was arrested and extradited to Los Angeles.

The arrest of one of the nation's top labor officials was trumpeted in headlines across the country. Burns basked in the glory. He granted interviews to just about anyone who asked, and recounted his agency's initiative and daring in dramatic detail. The investigation, he told
The New York Times
with typical flair, “had led us among the tottering of wrecked buildings, where beneath impending dangers, we searched for clues.” The media responded to the colorful detective with adoring accounts of his exploits, like this one in
McClure's
magazine:

Yet as the press fawned over Burns, organized labor rallied around the McNamaras, who maintained their innocence, and demonized the detective. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, said the arrests were a vicious attempt to discredit unionism, and announced that the AFL was launching a nationwide campaign to raise a $300,000 defense fund for the brothers. “Labor has no intention of turning its back on John and Jim McNamara,” he declared. Clarence Darrow, among the most famous lawyers of the day (even before the “Scopes Monkey Trial”), was retained to defend the McNamaras—victims, he said, of a “capitalist conspiracy” that had been financed by “the steel trust with its gold” and “masterminded by William J. Burns.” Darrow's decision to take the case, against his better judgment, “was the most momentous…of his life,” writes his biographer Kevin Tierney, “for it was to be the bitterest culmination of the courtroom conflicts of capital and labor to take place prior to World War I—and would almost topple the AFL and Darrow personally at one fell swoop.”

As the McNamaras were being hailed as “Heroes of Labor” at rallies across the country, Burns defended himself against charges that he was part of a capitalist conspiracy to destroy unionism. “When I'm employed to find out who committed a crime, I go out and find him,” he said. “I don't care a row of red apples who he is or where he is. Those people who are calling me an ‘enemy of labor' for running down these dynamiters are as muddleheaded as the jawsmiths in San Francisco who called me an ‘enemy of capital' for going after the big fellows in the graft investigation out there. When I have my case against a criminal, I put my clamps on him just as quick whether he has diamond rings on his fingers or calluses as big as hoops.”