A few minutes later, he studied a photograph of three men posing on a bridge in New Haven. One of them was Alec, still a young man in his 20s. Another had been Alec's best man at his wedding. The third had been an usher. Alec's guest asked where these men were now.

"This fellow," said Alec, pointing at the best man, "died on the bridge a few months later." The other man died a few years after that, on a bridge in Pa.s.saic, New Jersey.

"A minute ago you said you didn't know many men who died."

"Well, that, yeah," said Alec. "I just happened to remember."

A drop of liquid appeared in the corner of his eye. Maybe it was grief or maybe just the natural wateriness of an old man's eyes. He flipped through the old photographs. For a moment, he was quiet. Then he came to a photograph of the Chase Manhattan Building under construction in 1960. He lifted the photograph and studied it, and his eyes sparkled. "That job was sixty-four floors," he said. "The turnbuckles on the derrick could hold fifty ton. Oh, that was some job."

SEVEN.

Cowboys of the Skies

Rough pioneers are these men of the steel, pushing each year their frontier line up toward the clouds. Wanderers, living for their jobs alone. Reckless, generous, cool-headed, brave, shaken only by that grim power of Fate, living their lives fast and free-the cowboys of the skies.

-ERNEST P POOLE, 1908

High steel ironworkers lived and died on an operatic scale in the first few decades of the twentieth century. They were dashing and tragic figures who walked on air like supermen and dropped from the sky like stricken birds. They were daring and restless and possibly insane. And they were also-this fact was becoming ever more inescapable-extremely violent. By the end of the first decade of the century, the ironworkers and their small union of several thousand would be the most infamous labor organization in the country and villains in one of the most gripping dramas of the time. Poor Sam Parks. The war with capital he craved he finally got, only he wasn't around to enjoy it.

The months immediately following Parks' death marked a moment of relative peace in relations between New York ironworkers and their employers. This ended abruptly in the fall of 1905, when the International a.s.sociation of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers declared a nationwide strike on American Bridge to punish the company for using non-union subcontractors. However justified the strike may have been, it was a rash and potentially suicidal gesture by a union that seemed to specialize in such gestures. American Bridge was the largest steel fabricator in the country, owned by U.S. Steel, the largest corporation in the world. The ironworkers were a small inchoate union with exactly $1,013.64 in their coffers.

To complicate matters, local New York ironworkers voted to expand the strike to most of the large steel erectors in the city, demanding a wage increase from $4.50 per day to $5. Most of the erectors refused the increase outright, though several, including George A. Fuller Company, did negotiate a deal to hire union men at $4.80 a day. Fuller had recently contracted to build the Plaza Hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. To complete the job on schedule, the company decided it had no choice but to go ahead with union men.

Fuller's willingness to deal with the ironworkers soon backfired. The trouble began in the spring of 1906, after the company hired a non-unionized subcontractor to do some of the ornamental (non-structural) ironwork at the Plaza. The affronted union bridgemen, strategically positioned a few stories above the non-union men, contrived to drive them off the job by "accidentally" dropping tools and hot rivets onto them. This went on for a few days before Fuller thought to put a stop to it. The company hired three armed watchmen to patrol the derrick floor and keep an eye on the 30 bridgemen. These measures only provoked the structural men further. "Beat it!" an ironworker told one of the watchmen. "If you know your business you'll skidoo." The watchman, armed with a revolver, stood his ground.

On the afternoon of July 11, just after lunch, the ironworkers made good on their threat. "Events showed that the whole attack had been outlined to a nicety," reported the Times Times, "and the dispatch with which the job was executed demonstrated that each man knew just where he was expected to be when the signal should be given." First, the ironworkers cut off escape routes. Then they pounced, 10 ironworkers per watchman, beating them mercilessly with wrenches and mauls. One gang dropped watchman Michael Butler through the middle of the building from the eighth floor to the fifth. Another gang dragged watchman John Cullen to the eastern edge of the building overlooking Grand Army Plaza. "Four men had him in hand and were swinging his body to and fro and about to toss it into s.p.a.ce to drop to the asphalt pavement in the Plaza below," reported the Times Times. Realizing that a body flying off the side of a building in the middle of the afternoon might draw unwanted attention, they instead left Cullen in a lump on the derrick floor, along with the bloodied body of the third watchman, William O'Toole, and returned to work as if nothing had happened. Cullen and O'Toole were severely injured. Michael Butler was dead.

The "Midair Murder," as the outraged press dubbed it, provided more evidence of what most steel companies, if not most New Yorkers, already believed by the summer of 1906: that unionized ironworkers were vicious and irredeemable thugs; and that the only sensible way to deal with such a union was to join arms and destroy it. This is precisely what the National Erectors' a.s.sociation proposed to do.

The National Erectors' a.s.sociation (NEA) was a coalition of steel fabricators and erectors that had formed in the spring of 1903, amidst the turmoil of the Sam Parks reign. American Bridge Company was by far the largest partic.i.p.ant in the NEA and, in many ways, its guiding light, representing the interests not only of itself but also of its corporate parent, U.S. Steel. Other members included such formidable ent.i.ties as McClintic-Marshall, Post & McCord, and Phoenix Bridge Company. The NEA first convened as a loose and ineffectual a.s.semblage of competing firms, but by 1906 it had coalesced into a strong body joined in a common cause. This cause was articulated in the deceptively mild language of the NEA's const.i.tution: "The object of this a.s.sociation shall be the inst.i.tution and maintenance of the open shop principle in the employment of labor in the erection of steel and iron bridges and buildings and other structural steel and iron work."

Theoretically, an "open shop" industry was one in which any man was ent.i.tled to work, whether he belonged to a union or not. More to the point, open-shop employers were ent.i.tled to hire whomever they pleased. Open shops did not explicitly prohibit union employees, but they disarmed the union of the only real weapon it had, the threat of a strike. Open-shop employers tended, in any case, to be not merely non-union but aggressively anti- anti-union. They discouraged unionism by firing pro-labor agitators or signing men under "yellow dog" non-union contracts. U.S. Steel, mother company of both American Bridge and Illinois Steel (another NEA member), had maintained a strict open-shop policy since the Homestead strike of 1892.

The NEA claimed the open-shop system to be more "moral," more patriotic, than closed shop, because it gave workers the freedom to work where they pleased. But Luke Grant, who later studied the conflict between ironworkers and the NEA on behalf of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, thought this righteous-sounding argument amounted to nothing more than "meaningless twaddle." The true reason employers favored the open shop was that non-union labor was cheaper than union labor. "No matter how many high-sounding phrases may be used in discussing the subject," wrote Grant, "in the last a.n.a.lysis it is a common, ordinary question of dollars and cents."

The "twaddle" not only obscured the real cause of the conflict, it also obscured its intensity. This was a fight to the death. The members of the NEA had only two options, declared William Post of Post & McCord: "breaking the union or breaking themselves." The NEA instantly became, as one labor historian put it, "one of the most determined and brutal open-shop employers' organizations in the United States."

The NEA's efforts to break the ironworkers union were well planned and highly effective. By the start of 1907, only half of the union men in New York were employed. Nationally, nearly all of the American Bridge jobs were completed on schedule with non-union labor. The ironworkers were "demoralized," bragged Walter Drew, commissioner of the NEA. His claim seemed to be confirmed in an emotional debate on the floor of the 1908 ironworkers' convention. "We have come to the conclusion that this is not a winning fight," announced a delegate from Brooklyn, while another asked, "How can you expect to beat the Steel Trust?" The bridgemen had fought valiantly, the New York delegates argued, but the time had come to either throw in the towel or up the ante. Given its history of rashness, perhaps it's no surprise which course the union chose.

DYNAMITE.

In June of 1907, a Detroit ironworker named Ortie McManigal was approached by the business agent of his local union, Harry Hockin. McManigal, a short, florid-faced man of 34, had recently arrived in Detroit to help construct the new Ford Motor building. As a younger man, he'd labored in stone quarries in his native Ohio, where he'd learned a good deal about the use of dynamite. Somehow, the business agent had gotten hold of this fact.

"I am told you know how to handle dynamite," said Hockin. "I want you to use the dynamite which I am going to procure as I direct you to use it." According to a confessional account McManigal was to publish several years later, Hockin then ordered McManigal to blow up several non-union jobs in the Detroit area. "I'm going to show these fellows just what a union is," declared Hockin.

McManigal later claimed that he felt like "a cornered rat." He wanted nothing to do with Hockin's scheme, he insisted, but the business agent warned him that he would be blacklisted by the union if he refused. "I could only see my wife and children hungry," wrote McManigal, "and myself tramping about the country vainly hunting for work, or, finding it, holding it only for a day or so, to be kicked out as a denigrated thug with the instincts of a tiger." He agreed, instead, to go dynamiting. The pangs this inflicted on his conscience were somewhat a.s.suaged by the $200 he would be paid per a.s.signment, almost 10 times what he could make in a full week as an ironworker.

What followed, as related in McManigal's breast-beating apologia, was his gradual descent into pyrotechnical perdition. Under Hockin's direction, he blew up a non-union construction site in Detroit, then went on to perform other demolition jobs on behalf of the union, including a bridge in Clinton, Iowa, and another in Buffalo, New York. McManigal traveled the country by train, staying in hotels under aliases, slipping onto construction sites in the dead of night, then scurrying away as the 50-foot fuse burned toward its resolution under a steel girder.

At first McManigal's orders came from Hockin, but he soon came to understand that the man calling the shots stood higher in the union's chain of command: it was John McNamara, the handsome and popular secretary-treasurer of the International a.s.sociation of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers. Still in his twenties at the time, John McNamara was an intelligent, charismatic, and extremely industrious young man. While carrying out his duties as secretary-treasurer, he managed to study law and gain admittance to the Indiana bar and to edit The Bridgemen's Magazine The Bridgemen's Magazine, in which he combined helpful tips for ironworkers' wives ("If a piece of lard about the size of a walnut be dropped into the cabbage pot it will not boil over") with union business and anti-scab polemics. Between these other obligations, he also found time to oversee one of the most extensive industrial sabotage campaigns in the country's history.

The ironworkers were not the first group of disenchanted laborers to avail themselves of dynamite to settle a grievance. Indeed, the beady-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchist was already a stock caricature by the turn of the century. No one, though, had ever used dynamite with such deliberation and abandon as the ironworkers now proceeded to do. Between 1907 and 1911, the union would dynamite at least seventy structural steel jobs, including steel mills, factories, bridges, and buildings.

In early December, at a hotel in Muncie, Indiana, Harry Hockin introduced Ortie McManigal to another of the union's professional dynamiters, a tall and reedy man named J. B. Brice. McManigal thought Brice looked familiar; he bore an anemic likeness to John McNamara, the secretary-treasurer of the union. There was a good reason for this. J. B. Brice was the alias of James McNamara, John's older brother. The elder McNamara was an alcoholic who had turned to dynamiting after losing his job as a printer. He had never succeeded at much of anything until he found his calling in blowing things up. He'd recently invented (or at least appropriated and improved) a new incendiary device called an "infernal machine." Instead of a fuse, which gave the dynamiter about half an hour to escape, the infernal machine was triggered by a fulminating cap wired to an alarm clock. The dynamiters could set the explosion for a precise time and be hundreds of miles away when it went off.

The day after they met, McManigal and McNamara drove into the country near Muncie to purchase some nitroglycerine from a well shooter. A far more powerful and dangerous explosive than dynamite, nitroglycerine-"the soup," as the men called it-now became the ironworkers' explosive of choice. One of the benefits of nitroglycerine was that it detonated with such force it left no evidence behind, not so much as a clock spring. The downside of nitroglycerine was its extreme volatility. Traveling the country by rail with their suitcases of "soup" beside them, the men were always one big b.u.mp or lurch away from vaporizing themselves and anyone who happened to be nearby.

McManigal and McNamara crisscrossed the country for much of 1910, occasionally teaming up for big jobs. In mid-July, they parted ways. McNamara left for the West Coast on an important though secretive mission. McManigal continued to travel at a furious pace, setting off bombs in Omaha, then Duluth, then Kansas City. In late August, he arrived in Peoria, Illinois, and on a rainy evening in early September he planted four infernal machines, two under a crane at an iron foundry, two others in a railroad yard under some bridge girders stored there by the McClintic-Marshall steel erection company. Later that evening, three of the four bombs exploded. The fourth failed to detonate. This is the bomb that fell into the hands of William Burns.

Detective William J. Burns was already moderately famous by the summer of 1910, having carved out a reputation as a brilliant U.S. Agent in several high-profile cases. Now he'd left government service for the more lucrative private sector. Burns counted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Teddy Roosevelt among his friends. Conan Doyle called him "America's Sherlock Holmes," a description that must have pleased Burns greatly. He'd badly wanted to pursue acting as a young man and still had a flair for self-dramatizing affectations, like the sword cane he frequently carried. With his jowly face and small prissy mouth, Burns did not look quite the part of dashing hero, but he was lucky to live in an age when newspapers still favored lithographic depictions over photographs. Artists of the time gave him a lean, flinty countenance that fit agreeably with his image as America's No. 1 Crime Stopper.

Burns signed a contract with McClintic-Marshall, a company that had been harder hit than most by the dynamiting and had a special interest in hunting down the perpetrators. Burns suspected ironworkers from the start-no great deductive leap there-but had little hard evidence until Peoria. Ortie McManigal's unexploded bomb led Burns and his detectives to a nitroglycerine wholesaler in Portland, Indiana. Clerks there recalled a customer named "J. W. McGraw," a short, florid-faced man who wore a cap. It was a pretty good description of Ortie McManigal.

At the end of September, Burns boarded a westbound train to attend a convention of his largest client, the American Bank a.s.sociation. As fate would have it, the Great Detective was racing to Los Angeles at the very moment a ma.s.sive explosion lit the skies over the dark city.

OTISTOWN EXPLODES.

Trade unionists didn't call the booming new city on the coast Los Angeles. They called it Otistown or, more completely, Otistown of the Open Shop. General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times, held no political office but he effectively ruled the city with his money and influence. He was an odd and cantankerous old man who had served in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, and who continued to live in a perpetual state of combat readiness, dressing for work in uniform and mounting a small cannon on the hood of his car. He designed the headquarters of his newspaper to look like a medieval castle and named it "the Fortress," while his new mansion on Wilshire Boulevard was "Bivouac" and his staff of reporters and editors were "the Phalanx." General Otis occasionally drilled the Phalanx in the use of the fifty or so rifles he kept on hand in case of attack. Attack by whom? Why, his archenemy, of course: Organized Labor.

Otis had almost singlehandedly made Los Angeles the least unionized city in the country. He despised unions. Since he knew the feeling was mutual, he fully expected union anarchists to target him and his empire. He became increasingly obsessed with self-defense over the summer of 1910, when laborites from San Francisco descended upon Los Angeles to make one last push to unionize the city. Otis may have been an eccentric but he was no paranoid. He had a good handle on how much some people wanted him dead.

Early in the morning of October 1, 1910, just a few minutes past 1 A.M. A.M., as the night staff prepared the next day's edition, an enormous blast rocked the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times headquarters. It tore through the south wall of the Fortress and blew out supports for the second floor, which collapsed under the burden of the linotype machines, which then fell through to the gas mains in the bas.e.m.e.nt and severed them. Several more explosions occurred. The Fortress burned furiously. By the time the fire was extinquished the next morning, 21 people were dead and news of the explosion had raced around the country. headquarters. It tore through the south wall of the Fortress and blew out supports for the second floor, which collapsed under the burden of the linotype machines, which then fell through to the gas mains in the bas.e.m.e.nt and severed them. Several more explosions occurred. The Fortress burned furiously. By the time the fire was extinquished the next morning, 21 people were dead and news of the explosion had raced around the country.

Otis was in Mexico at the time of the explosion, but he immediately returned to Los Angeles. He managed to put out an abbreviated paper the same day, using printing presses in his auxiliary plant. "UNIONIST BOMBS WRECK THE TIMES," exclaimed the paper's headline. There was as yet no evidence to implicate anyone, but Otis didn't hold back from shaking his fists and pointing his fingers. "O you anarchic sc.u.m, you cowardly murderers," he wrote, "you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight a.s.sa.s.sins, you whose hands are dripping with the innocent blood of your victims...." Otis immediately headlined the explosion "The Crime of the Century."

Detective Burns was still aboard his westbound train when a porter woke him in his sleeping berth to hand him a telegram from the mayor of Los Angeles. The mayor informed Burns of the explosion and asked him to investigate on behalf of the city. Arriving in Los Angeles later the same morning, Burns immediately went to work. He caught a lucky break that first day when police discovered two unexploded bombs, one outside a window at Otis's home, another at the home of a local anti-labor business leader. The police accidentally detonated the Otis bomb, but they successfully disarmed and examined the other. The explosive agent on this device was dynamite rather than nitroglycerine, but otherwise the contraption bore a marked similarity to the infernal machine that Burns had recovered and examined in Peoria a month earlier. The detective wasted no time in announcing the perpetrators of this national outrage. It was, he was sure, the ironworkers.

Ortie McManigal was in Indianapolis at the time of the Los Angeles bombing. He first learned of it from a newspaper the following morning, or so he claimed. He paid a visit to union headquarters that same morning, where he found John McNamara "cheerfully" reading the news. The secretary-treasurer admitted that his older brother might have had something to do with the explosion. He then told McManigal that he wanted to follow up the blast in the west with "an immediate echo in the east." He instructed McManigal to take eight quarts of nitroglycerin and board a train to Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, to blow up a depot under construction by the Phoenix Bridge Company. McManigal promptly set out to do as told.

As for James McNamara, McManigal did not see him again until early November. James had returned from the West Coast and was traveling under a new alias. He needed to lie low for a while, and McManigal, back from Worcester, wanted a vacation. The two men set off for a month-long hunting trip in the woods of northern Wisconsin. McNamara had gone a little "queer" since his Los Angeles venture. He was drinking heavily and looking even more anemic and ghoulish than usual. He told McManigal the story of his trip to Los Angeles: how he'd lent out his dynamiting services to a group of San Francisco radicals; that he never meant to kill so many people and was now terrified of getting caught; that he was haunted, certain that he was being watched wherever he went.

He had good reason to feel haunted. William Burns and company had been shadowing Ortie McManigal for weeks, ever since the Peoria bombing. Indeed, at the very moment that James was spilling his guts to Ortie, two detectives from the Burns Agency were camped nearby in the woods, posing as friendly fellow hunters. One Sunday afternoon near the end of the trip, McNamara made the mistake of posing for a photograph with these men. That photograph would soon become a key tool in Burns' investigation. Operatives would spread out across Los Angeles showing it to hotel and store clerks, asking questions and establishing McNamara's presence in the city before the explosion.

In the meantime, incredibly, both McManigal and McNamara returned to dynamiting. McManigal even carried out a Christmas Eve bombing in Los Angeles at the Llewellyn Iron Works. Burns detectives were hot on their trails the whole time but allowed the explosions to occur for the sake of evidence each crime generated. Finally, the detectives moved in.

On April 12, 1911, McManigal and McNamara arrived together in Detroit and registered at the Oxford Hotel under a.s.sumed names. The hotel lobby was packed with a theater troupe and no rooms were immediately available, so the men checked their suitcases-each loaded with explosives and guns-and started out for the street, planning to return a few hours later to retrieve their luggage and claim their room. They were suddenly surrounded by several Burns detectives. The detectives, who had no warrants, no jurisdiction, and no right of extradition, hustled them to a train station and whisked them out of town, effectively kidnapping them in the name of the law. Ortie McManigal, whose flair for confession was as advanced as his knack for dynamiting, cracked the moment Burns' men began to interrogate him.

Detective Burns had everything he needed now. With McManigal's confession in hand, he traveled to Indianapolis. There, on the evening of April 22, accompanied by local police and over a dozen of his own men, he burst in on a meeting of the executive board of the International a.s.sociation of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers and arrested John McNamara. While several of Burns's men spirited the secretary-treasurer away, Burns and local police searched union headquarters through the night. They discovered, among other items, 100 pounds of dynamite in the bas.e.m.e.nt. At a nearby barn rented by McNamara, they found a piano box packed with 17 sticks of dynamite and a couple of quarts of nitroglycerine.

Meanwhile, Burns's operatives drove McNamara by automobile to Terre Haute, Indiana, where they boarded a westbound Pennsylvania Flyer. In Dodge City, Kansas, the group changed trains to the California Limited. Already aboard that train, in another Pullman car, were McNamara's brother, James, and Ortie McManigal. Prevented from reading newspapers or talking to fellow pa.s.sengers, John was probably the only person in the country who didn't know his brother was on the train with him. The arrest of all three men had been made public by now and their cross-country trip was causing a huge stir in the press, the New York Times New York Times calling it "one of the most remarkable trips ever made by officers with prisoners." By the time the three men arrived at the Los Angeles County jail in separate automobiles on the afternoon of April 26, 1911, an enormous crowd had gathered to glimpse them. Nothing as extraordinary or as exciting as this had ever happened in Los Angeles. calling it "one of the most remarkable trips ever made by officers with prisoners." By the time the three men arrived at the Los Angeles County jail in separate automobiles on the afternoon of April 26, 1911, an enormous crowd had gathered to glimpse them. Nothing as extraordinary or as exciting as this had ever happened in Los Angeles.

A few weeks after the McNamaras' arrest, a tall, stooped, unkempt figure walked into their prison cells and introduced himself. The man did not look much like a beacon of salvation, but to the McNamaras he must have seemed exactly that, for he was none other than the "Great Defender" himself, Clarence Darrow. Today, Darrow is best remembered for defending the science of evolution in the landmark Scopes Trial of 1925, but in 1911 he was America's favorite protector of the underdog and friend of the undercla.s.s. When union officials first approached him, Darrow was reluctant to take on the McNamara case; perhaps he had an inkling of the grief it would bring him. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (of which the ironworkers union was a member), implored him to reconsider, and he eventually did. He would have many opportunities to regret the decision.

Gompers and virtually every high official in the labor movement treated the McNamaras' arrest as a frame-up. They noted that the Fortress had been having problems with its gas system for weeks before October 1 and suggested this as the probable cause of the explosion. Some even hinted darkly that Otis himself planted a bomb as a ruse to defame unionists. Otis was a monster, Burns was a stooge, McManigal was a stool pigeon, the McNamaras were martyrs-this was the party line, and it wasn't just unionists who bought it. The McNamaras' arrest occurred at a moment when progressive ideas were taking root in an American public fed up with enormous corporations that treated workers like chattel, and the arrest of "the boys" struck a chord among many in the middle cla.s.s. Progressives throughout the country rallied to the cause, holding fund-raisers and purchasing McNamara b.u.t.tons and McNamara stamps. The highlight of many of these fund-raisers was a feature film about the McNamaras, in which two handsome young actors played the brothers. (Their bereaved mother and several union officials appeared as themselves.) In Los Angeles, marchers took to the streets by the tens of thousands. A Socialist, Job Harriman, ran for mayor and looked like a winner, thanks largely to pro-McNamara/anti-Otis fervor. A socialist mayor of Otistown? It must have seemed like a cruel joke-no, a demonic hallucination-to the General.

And then, just as the trial was about to get under way, the pro-McNamara machine came to a crashing halt. Clarence Darrow had come to realize, thanks largely to information provided by his spies on the prosecution team, that the evidence against the McNamaras was overwhelming. The brothers' only hope, he believed, was to make a deal with prosecutors and save themselves from the death penalty. On the afternoon of December 1, James pled guilty to the Times Times bombing. As for John, there was little evidence to connect him directly to the bombing. As for John, there was little evidence to connect him directly to the Times Times explosion, but there was plenty to prove he'd ordered McManigal's Christmas Eve dynamiting of the Llewellyn Iron Works. John pled guilty to this lesser charge. explosion, but there was plenty to prove he'd ordered McManigal's Christmas Eve dynamiting of the Llewellyn Iron Works. John pled guilty to this lesser charge.

"Please say to the papers that I am guilty, but I did what I did for principle, and that I did not intend to murder a man," James told reporters from his cell in the county jail that night. "When I set that bomb, I only meant to scare those fellows who owned the Times Times."

For the millions of Americans who had supported the McNamaras and contributed to their defense, the guilty plea was a kick in the stomach-a knife in the back. A reporter found Samuel Gompers looking "depressed and haggard" in a New York hotel lobby the day after the plea. Some conservatives suspected that Gompers had known of the McNamaras' guilt from the start-may even have had a hand in it-but Gompers insisted he was as shocked as the rest of the true believers. "We, who were willing to give our encouragement, our pennies, our faith, why were we not told all from the beginning? We had a right to know." In Los Angeles, Job Harriman, the Socialist candidate for mayor who had seemed such a sure bet only weeks earlier, was easily defeated by the inc.u.mbent. The labor movement in Otistown was finished.

James McNamara died in San Quentin prison in 1941 at the age of 59. John McNamara, released 20 years earlier, died two months later while attending a mine workers' rally in Montana. He was 57.

The McNamara trial nearly ruined Clarence Darrow. Conservatives despised him for representing the McNamaras, while liberals questioned his decision to let the brothers plead guilty. In January of 1912, Los Angeles prosecutors indicted Darrow for attempting to bribe one of the McNamara jurors. Only his famous eloquence saved him from jail. "Will it be the gray dim walls of San Quentin?" he woefully addressed the jury. "Oh, you wild insane members of the steel trust.... Oh, you bloodhounds of detectives who do your masters' evil bidding. Oh, you district attorneys. You know not what you do!" The jury acquitted him after 11 minutes, but it took him years to regain his reputation.

The ironworkers union still had an ordeal to face, too. Fifty-four high-ranking union members were indicted for their partic.i.p.ation in the so-called "Dynamite Conspiracy" of the previous six years. Thirty-eight of these men were eventually found guilty, largely, again, due to testimony from Ortie McManigal. Herbert Hockin was given a six-year sentence. The union's president, Frank Ryan, got seven years.

The public, meanwhile, was left to wonder what exactly possessed the ironworkers. What had driven them to commit such wanton destruction? It's a question that would puzzle labor historians for years to come. For Louis Adamic, who wrote about the ironworkers in his 1934 study of industrial violence, Dynamite Dynamite, the ironworkers' propensity to violence was best explained by their peculiar personalities. "Only men of great physical strength and courage became skysc.r.a.per men," wrote Adamic. "Putting their lives in daily danger as they did, they developed a psychology of recklessness and violence that people in less hazardous occupations may find difficulty in understanding." Ironworkers were naturally half-c.o.c.ked, in other words. Compounding this tendency was their belief that they were in a fight for their union's survival. They were cornered rats-to mix Ortie McManigal's metaphors-with the instincts of a tiger.

Some members of the press, including the celebrated muckraker Lincoln Steffens, excused the ironworkers on the grounds that they were incited to dynamiting by the intractable steel erectors. This view was echoed in Luke Grant's 1915 study for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations: "They found themselves overmatched and, believing the existence of their organization was at stake, they hit below the belt in trying to turn the tide in their favor. If the union resorted to unfair and unlawful methods...the erectors were in a degree responsible." This is no doubt true. But whatever drove the ironworkers to use lethal force, absolution was, and remains, a tough sell. After all, the ends-justifies-the-means logic that made sense to the dynamiters of 1910 is the same logic that led terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center in 2001.

The McNamara case produced neither heroes nor martyrs, but it did mint a few winners. General Otis, of course, came off looking more like a sage than a crank. William Burns, the detective, was elevated to national fame. He wrote many articles about the case, published a book, saw himself portrayed in a Broadway play, and was later appointed by President Harding to run the country's Bureau of Investigation, precursor to the FBI. (As his a.s.sistant director, he named an ambitious 26-year-old agent named J. Edgar Hoover.) Ortie McManigal, the Great Confessor, didn't fare too badly, either. He'd been granted immunity for his testimony and was given a large sum of money by the NEA for his help in convicting the ironworkers. Afterward, he became a watchman in Los Angeles. He spent the last years of his life guarding the Los Angeles Bureau of Records, a building he'd once tried, and failed, to blow up.

INTO THE ETHER.

Oh, a pioneerIs the riveteerTill his pinnacle sc.r.a.pes the dome.He swings away where the planets play.The ether is his home.-THE B BRIDGEMEN'S M MAGAZINE, September 1909 September 1909At the end of September of 1911, as the McNamaras were preparing to go on trial, an ironworker named Morgan Richards, of 101 West 130th Street, entered the East 22nd Street station house in New York. He was a large man, over six feet tall with a husky build. He approached the desk and asked the policeman there to call his wife for him. "What fer?" the cop asked. "Telephone to her yourself."

"No, you do it for me," pleaded Richards. "It'll be easier all around." He'd been mugged by a gang of seven men, he explained, and they'd stolen his week's wages. "It ain't the money, honest. What's worrying me is how the Missus will take it. Now, be a good fellow and call her up."

"GIANT FEARS HIS WIFE" read the headline in the next day's paper. The short article that followed was hardly newsworthy, but what editor could pa.s.s up such a delicious man-bites-dog twist? An ironworker-a man who presumably feared nothing-terrified of his wife wife!

By the end of the first decade, the Ironworker had become a type. He was fearless, careless, defiant. He was the "Industrial Daredevil," as Scientific American Scientific American tagged him in 1912, "a peculiar type of human being." He was "daring to a degree which is almost criminal," according to the tagged him in 1912, "a peculiar type of human being." He was "daring to a degree which is almost criminal," according to the Literary Digest Literary Digest. He was an outlaw, a wander-l.u.s.ter, a renegade from a cla.s.s of men "as reckless with their money as they are with their lives." He was also, of course, a fighter. He was, for example, Arthur McGlade of East 178th Street, who appeared true to type in the Times Times in January of 1912. Like the hapless Richards before him, McGlade had run into a gang of thieves. They picked his pocket then attacked him on the platform of the Third Avenue El, unleashing the righteous fury of The Ironworker. in January of 1912. Like the hapless Richards before him, McGlade had run into a gang of thieves. They picked his pocket then attacked him on the platform of the Third Avenue El, unleashing the righteous fury of The Ironworker."Take my $28, will you?" exclaimed the ironworker, as he dealt blows right and left.Other men pa.s.sengers watched and women scurried from the platform to avoid the fight, but McGlade kept right on. With five blows he knocked down the five men, and as the first one rose to his feet the ironworker was ready for him again. Each time his huge fist whistled through the air there was a thud as it struck one of the five, and a second thud as the young man who was struck hit the platform flooring. Presently two of the men lay on the platform where McGlade had knocked them, afraid to get up.One of the others rose and tried to run away. McGlade caught him and threw him down the stairs after the first man. He seemed to like this idea, for before they could move he caught two of the others and tossed them down also. The two remaining jumped to their feet and took the steps at a couple bounds to escape the enraged ironworker.McGlade stormed, shouting, about the platform, looking for more foes.Now that that was an ironworker. So was Joseph Eick, a foreman accidentally buried under 4,000 pounds of steel beams in 1915. As men scrambled to remove the beams from their presumably dead boss's body, they heard his voice calling from beneath the steel. "Easy, there! Easy, there. Now-one two three!" Eick directed the rest of the rescue operation from beneath the steel, and when the last beam was off, he stood up and brushed himself off. "I'm all right," he coolly announced. "It takes more than that to hurt an ironworker." was an ironworker. So was Joseph Eick, a foreman accidentally buried under 4,000 pounds of steel beams in 1915. As men scrambled to remove the beams from their presumably dead boss's body, they heard his voice calling from beneath the steel. "Easy, there! Easy, there. Now-one two three!" Eick directed the rest of the rescue operation from beneath the steel, and when the last beam was off, he stood up and brushed himself off. "I'm all right," he coolly announced. "It takes more than that to hurt an ironworker."

Between the tragedy of the Quebec Bridge and the infamy of the dynamiting campaign, ironworkers had been in the news a good deal lately. The great majority of the men, though, carried on in peaceful anonymity, building bridges and skysc.r.a.pers in ever tinier silhouette against the sky. Strikes continued in New York, but employers and ironworkers found ways around them. The big jobs were officially open shop, but union men worked alongside non-union men. They needed the job, and the erectors were happy to have them as long as they didn't make an issue of their affiliation. Many charges could be leveled against union ironworkers, but no one, with the exception of a few folks in the NEA, ever claimed they weren't capable and hard workers. The wage in 1911, about $4.80 an day, wasn't much better than the union men had been making 10 years earlier, but it was still high by the standards of other blue-collar workers, most of whom still earned less than two dollars a day.

The ironworker was compensated, in part, for the risks he took, still considerable at the start of the century's second decade. In the fiscal year 191112, the international union paid out 124 death claims for a membership of about 11,000-over one percent of the members. Between 1910 and 1914, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, structural ironworkers suffered 12 deaths and 353.2 accidents per thousand workers-well over a third of the workforce killed or injured within four years. "The erection of structural steel," concluded the study's authors, "must be recognized as one of the most, if not the most, hazardous industrial operations" in the country.

The pa.s.sage of New York State's workers' compensation law in 1914 was the single most important event in the work lives of ironworkers before the Second World War. Workers' compensation laws required employers to contribute to an insurance policy that would pay out automatically to an injured worker. The new law not only provided a financial cushion for injured ironworkers and their families, it also gave an incentive to employers to find ways to prevent accidents and keep insurance premiums low.

Meanwhile, the frenzy of steel construction in New York that had begun at the end of the previous century occasionally paused for economic readjustments like the Panic of 1907, but otherwise continued unabated. By 1910, four of the longest bridges in the world reached across the East River into Brooklyn and Queens. The tallest building in the world, the 47-story Singer Tower, was completed in New York in 1908-a huge leap skyward. Even for ironworkers acclimated to height, the "Singerhorn," as the building was popularly known, offered a new thrill, and at every chance they shinnied up the steel flagpole atop the tower. The foreman would return, wrote journalist Earnest Poole, to find "some delighted man-monkey high up on the big bra.s.s ball, taking a look out to sea."

The Singer Tower held the t.i.tle as World's Tallest for less than a year. The Metropolitan Life Tower vaulted over it in 1909, rising to 50 stories, or 700 feet. Earnest Poole went up to visit the man-monkeys atop this building, too. Although these skysc.r.a.pers were built by huge corporations, the view that Poole described from above was graphically democratic:[L]ooking straight down through the brisk little puffs of smoke and steam, the whole mighty tangle of Manhattan Island drew close in one vivid picture: Fifth Avenue crowded with carriages, motors, and cabs, was apparently only a few yards away from tenement roofs, which were dotted with clothes out to dry. Police courts, churches, schools, sober old convents hedged close round with strips of green, the Tenderloin district, the Wall Street region, the Ghetto, the teeming Italian hive, lay all in a merry squeeze below: a flat bewildering ma.s.s, streets blackened with human ants, elevated trains rushing through with a m.u.f.fled roar.In the interest of mollifying a public still timid about skysc.r.a.pers, the new tall buildings were extremely well built, even overbuilt. Theodore Cooper had pushed the edge of the envelope with his Quebec Bridge, then fallen off it; the engineers of these buildings would take no such chances. They solidified the superstructures with ample diagonal bracing, making them very much like the triangulated trusses of a bridge. Any doubts about the strength of either the Singer or the Metropolitan towers were dispelled by a freak storm in 1912 that produced exactly the kind of winds that give engineers night sweats, with speeds sustaining 96 miles per hour. Both buildings survived perfectly intact.

Every bit as remarkable as the new heights were the newly achieved speeds of construction. The steel frames of tall buildings like the Singer and Metropolitan Life were erected in a matter of months. This was the era of "Taylorism," so called after Frederick Taylor, the same efficiency expert who'd prescribed ox-like laborers for steel companies twenty years earlier. Taylor had recently published his best-selling book, The Principles of Scientific Management The Principles of Scientific Management, and his ideas were very much in vogue. To do a thing efficiently, to not waste a step or a moment-this was the new American ideal in steel plants, in factories, in offices, even in homes, where housewives strove to Taylorize their domestic ch.o.r.es. "In the past the man was first," Taylor had written; "in the future the system must be first."

Taylor's vision of progress was blatantly dehumanizing, but to a writer from Harper's Weekly Harper's Weekly who visited a job site in 1910, the ironworkers did not seem to resent the push toward speed; rather, they seemed exhilarated by it. They took a "savage joy" in it, as gangs tried to outdo each other with feats of prowess. "They wait for nothing and obey no precedents in the building of the express skysc.r.a.per," wrote the man from who visited a job site in 1910, the ironworkers did not seem to resent the push toward speed; rather, they seemed exhilarated by it. They took a "savage joy" in it, as gangs tried to outdo each other with feats of prowess. "They wait for nothing and obey no precedents in the building of the express skysc.r.a.per," wrote the man from Harper's Harper's. "The skysc.r.a.per is altogether an American inst.i.tution. Its express speed of construction is also exclusively American, an expression of American enterprise, American inventiveness, American impatience and daredeviltry, American workmen."

One ironworker did complain mildly: "This going up at a story a day interferes with me social life. On that Thirteenth Street building there was a hotel within arm's-reach, and one day I got to talking with a pretty maid-through a window. Next day I had to talk down to her, and the next day I had to yell to her, and in two days more I had to say good-by. 'Good-by,' says she, 'Sorry to see you go; but I'll introduce you to my friend Katie who works on the tenth floor.'"

The future of the skysc.r.a.per, Harper's Harper's concluded in 1910, was not greater height, but greater speed: "The limit of height has been reached." But this was not quite so. Three years later, the Woolworth Building topped out at 792 feet, almost 100 feet higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower. concluded in 1910, was not greater height, but greater speed: "The limit of height has been reached." But this was not quite so. Three years later, the Woolworth Building topped out at 792 feet, almost 100 feet higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower.

For Frank Woolworth, founder of the chain of five-and-ten-cent stores that bore his name, it wasn't enough for his building to be tall. It had to be the tallest tallest; the most extraordinary building ever constructed. To design it, Woolworth chose Ca.s.s Gilbert, one of the country's leading architects. Gilbert clad the towering steel frame in terra cotta and decorated it like a cathedral, complete with gargoyles and a Gothic portal. His building was to be the "Cathedral of Commerce," as the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman christened it in his fore-word to a 1913 publicity brochure. "Just as religion monopolized art and architecture during the medieval epoch," wrote Cadman, "so commerce has engrossed the United States since 1865." This new building-or "Building," as publicity writers usually wrote it, with divine uppercase B-would be "the chosen habitation of that spirit in man which, through means of change and barter, binds alien people into unity and peace...."

[image]

At the top of the Woolworth Building, 1912.

(Brown Brothers) Fifteen years earlier, the sheer height of the Woolworth Building would have terrified most New Yorkers, but they were accustomed to skysc.r.a.pers now. They were a.s.sured, furthermore, that the Woolworth Building was the safest building ever made. It was fireproof, its elevators were accident proof. Its steel was stronger, too, for Bethlehem Steel had recently developed a technique of rolling wide-f.l.a.n.g.ed shapes that could handle more stress than earlier shapes. As the brochure informed its readers, "it may be safely stated that a hurricane, blowing at 200 miles per hour, would not damage the framework of this Building in any way. Winds of such velocity are, of course, unknown."

Not even G.o.d Himself, in other words, could blow this thing down.

THE GOLDEN AGE.

Near the end of 1923, a Philadelphia trade magazine, The Building Age, The Building Age, sent a questionnaire to several hundred American men between the ages of 20 and 26. The goal of the survey was to gauge the young men's enthusiasm for the building trades. Its results distressed the editors. Only a third of respondents professed any interest in entering the trades, despite the fact that construction paid relatively well. Of the 70 or so who thought they might be willing to give construction a chance, 25 percent preferred bricklaying and 20 percent preferred carpentry. How many wanted to be ironworkers? Exactly 3 percent. sent a questionnaire to several hundred American men between the ages of 20 and 26. The goal of the survey was to gauge the young men's enthusiasm for the building trades. Its results distressed the editors. Only a third of respondents professed any interest in entering the trades, despite the fact that construction paid relatively well. Of the 70 or so who thought they might be willing to give construction a chance, 25 percent preferred bricklaying and 20 percent preferred carpentry. How many wanted to be ironworkers? Exactly 3 percent.

The real wonder, after 20 years of bad press, wasn't why so few young men wanted to be ironworkers, but rather: who were those 3 percent? What sort of man wanted to risk his life in a job infamous for killing and maiming its pract.i.tioners or to join a union infamous for thuggery?

As it turned out, those who took their chances were in for a wonderful ride.

There had been economic booms before, but never one quite like the one that took hold of America in 1923 and lasted seven strange and fabulous years. In the 1920s, America would produce roughly 45 percent of the manufactured goods in the world, the economy would grow an average of 6 percent a year, average incomes would rise over 40 percent, the number of automobiles in the country would approximately quadruple, and the stock market would grow by leaps and bounds.

To those who were living through it, nothing symbolized the economic exuberance of the age more perfectly than the buildings that began to rise from all the loose money and speculative real estate. Skysc.r.a.pers climbed up from the ground almost as fast as Model T's rolled off Henry Ford's a.s.sembly lines. And what Detroit was to the automobile, New York was to the skysc.r.a.per. By the end of the decade, half of the country's 377 skysc.r.a.pers-defined as buildings 20 stories or taller-would be in New York City, and nearly half the structural steel in the country would be shipping to New York.

To live in New York in the 1920s was to inhabit a world under feverish overhaul. A constant caravan of trucks carried steel from river barges to construction sites. Plumes of dust released by round-the-clock foundation digging wafted down the avenues, accompanied by the rat-a-tat-a-tat rat-a-tat-a-tat of pneumatic rivet guns, "commonly complained of more than any other source of noise," according to the of pneumatic rivet guns, "commonly complained of more than any other source of noise," according to the Times Times in 1928. A promising solution, already in the works, was the "noiseless construction" of electric arc welding pioneered by Westinghouse. For the moment, though, the din of riveting was inescapable. in 1928. A promising solution, already in the works, was the "noiseless construction" of electric arc welding pioneered by Westinghouse. For the moment, though, the din of riveting was inescapable.

Equally inescapable was the fact that the Woolworth Building's reign as the world's tallest would not survive the boom. The only questions were when it would be surpa.s.sed and how high its successors would rise.

Economics was, as always, the ostensible reason to build high: as real estate prices rose, it only made sense for builders to add vertical square footage. That said, it wasn't always clear whether real estate prices were driving skysc.r.a.pers upwards or skysc.r.a.pers were driving real estate prices upwards. Because the capacity to build high on a plot of land automatically increased its value, builders had had to build high to recoup real estate costs. "If laws were pa.s.sed restricting the height of buildings here as height is restricted in London," wrote architect Harvey Wilson Corbett in 1929, "the price of our most valuable parcels of land would drop at least sixty percent." to build high to recoup real estate costs. "If laws were pa.s.sed restricting the height of buildings here as height is restricted in London," wrote architect Harvey Wilson Corbett in 1929, "the price of our most valuable parcels of land would drop at least sixty percent."

Economics did not adequately justify very tall buildings in Manhattan in any case, for at a certain point the price of the structure canceled out any possible income to be derived from it. And economics did not explain why tall buildings continued to rise, ever more urgently, through the late '20s, even though the real estate market was already glutted with office s.p.a.ce by 1927. Clearly, the bottom line wasn't driving the skyline.

The truth is, tall buildings told more about American swagger and one-upmanship than about the rational application of greed. This truth was demonstrated in the spring of 1929, when two buildings-or, more accurately, the egos of the men who financed and designed them-competed to vault past the Woolworth Building and claim the t.i.tle as supreme master of the skies. One of these men, Walter Chrysler, founder and president of Chrysler Motors, had hired the architect William Van Alen to design an appropriate object of grandeur as his headquarters. No sooner had Van Alen finished his plans for an 808-foot tower than an architect named H. Craig Severance announced that his Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street would be 840 feet tall, or 32 feet higher than the Chrysler. As it happened, Severance and Van Alen were ex-partners who despised each other, so the compet.i.tion to build the highest building in the world became intensely personal. Through the summer, the buildings rose, four miles apart. The architects fiddled with their plans and jockeyed for position. By autumn, the Bank of Manhattan appeared the winner at 927 feet. But Van Alen had a final trick up-or rather down-his sleeve: a stainless-steel pole, 185 feet long, that ironworkers secretly a.s.sembled inside a shaft in the center of the building's peak. On October 16, the ironworkers hoisted the pole out through the top of the roof. The Chrysler was now 1,046 feet tall, over a hundred feet taller than the Bank of Manhattan.

The press called the compet.i.tion the "Race Into the Sky," but it hadn't been a race, exactly, for victory went to the highest, not the fastest. (In fact, the Bank of Manhattan had gone up much faster than the Chrysler.) What this compet.i.tion really resembled was two boys standing back to back on their tippy-tippy toes, then brushing their hair up into a ducks' bill to gain a few inches on each other. There was nothing intrinsically significant about the outcome. The Chrysler Building "won" with a steel pole-an uninhabitable, decorative, eminently useless pole pole. How odd that skysc.r.a.pers, born 45 years earlier of practicality and common sense, had come to this.

But somehow this "race," and all that useless height, mattered. It captured the exuberance of the 1920s and seemed to suggest deeper truths about America, land of the skysc.r.a.per. Skysc.r.a.pers had graduated from mere real estate and become symbols-the primary symbol-of everything that was extraordinary about this country, including its ingenuity and its ambition, but also of what was a little scary and silly about it: the grown men up on their tippy-tippy toes, doing whatever it took to win.

A writer named Edmund Littell visited the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan while they were going up. For him, the most compelling partic.i.p.ants in the "race" weren't the architects or the financiers, but the men who were out there on the steel. "Yes, here it is that real battles...are being waged, and here is where the romance of the skysc.r.a.pers is being worked out. Up there in his habitation of height and steel the ironworker heaves himself from one beam to another, upward, always upward-his shoulders bulging, his knees tense, but his face as placid as the blue sky only an arm's reach beyond him."

Never had there been a finer time to be an ironworker than in the late 1920s. Putting aside labor disputes for a moment, and ignoring the fact that most of the ironworkers were employed under open-shop conditions the union had been fighting against for years, the work was abundant and the money was good-$14 a day in New York by 1926, $15 a couple of years later. Itinerancy was a constant, but the travel had been eased considerably by automobiles, the inexpensive "flivvers" that ironworkers earned enough to own and fuel.

The work was less dangerous, too. Derrick floors were more likely to be planked, and men were less likely to engage in the perilous practice of riding loads up from the street. "Nowadays, of course it's different," commented a veteran ironworker named Bill Ritchie, who figured he'd seen about forty men fall to their deaths. "Hardly anyone gets hurt. Not what I call hurt." Ironworkers still suffered about twice as many accidents as general construction workers or coal miners, but the odds that a man would make it to old age were certainly better than they'd been when Bill Ritchie entered the trade.

The greatest difference in the now prolonged lives of ironworkers was how they were perceived by the public: with admiration and respect rather than fear and loathing. The whole city seemed suddenly enthralled by these high-steel men. Crowds gathered at every new steel frame to watch them walk beams overhead or illicitly ride loads of steel hundreds of feet over the street.

Journalistic emissaries from terra firma made frequent excursions skyward and brought back breathless reports for popular magazines like Collier's Collier's and and Literary Digest Literary Digest and and The American Magazine The American Magazine. The writers told tales of falls and near falls and related encounters with remarkably fearless men who, in the words of one writer, did "a good deal of strolling on the thin edge of nothingness." Their feats were prodigious. Even their appet.i.tes were prodigious. One ironworker named Binzen, Collier's Collier's informed its readers, sat on a beam 38 stories above the ground and ate "four three-ply beef sandwiches, two bananas, two apples, a quarter of a four-story cake, a pint of black high-voltage coffee and a load of sc.r.a.p eating tobacco." informed its readers, sat on a beam 38 stories above the ground and ate "four three-ply beef sandwiches, two bananas, two apples, a quarter of a four-story cake, a pint of black high-voltage coffee and a load of sc.r.a.p eating tobacco."

In years to come, Indians and raising gangs would get star billing, but now it was Scandinavians and riveting gangs. The square-rigger days were long gone, but the squareheads still had it in their blood, or so they said, and every magazine story featured a "Swede" named Gunderson or Hagstrom or Sorenson. As for the riveting gangs, they were nothing new to Manhattan, but the higher the buildings rose, the more spectacular their feats appeared-the heater tossing his white-hot rivets in "hissing parabolas" (Collier's), (Collier's), the catcher s.n.a.t.c.hing them from the air, as insouciant and consistent as Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. "There, in the windy reaches of the unfinished frame," wrote C. G. Poore in the the catcher s.n.a.t.c.hing them from the air, as insouciant and consistent as Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. "There, in the windy reaches of the unfinished frame," wrote C. G. Poore in the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine, "they put on a show that most unfailingly delights the crowd below."