The dynamite was hidden in Ink Alley, the passageway beside the Los Angeles Times building where the presses ran through the night. Sixteen sticks of 80-percent dynamite, placed where the gas lines ran, in a building full of printers on the night shift. When it detonated at 1 a.m. on October 1, 1910, the explosion and the fire that followed killed 21 people. The Times called it 'the crime of the century.'
To understand the bombing, you have to understand what Los Angeles was in 1910: a city whose business establishment, led by Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, had declared open war on organized labor. Otis was one of the most aggressive anti-union publishers in American history, using his newspaper as a weapon against any effort to establish union shops in Los Angeles. He called union organizers 'anarchists' and 'socialists' and 'enemies of civilization.'
The International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers had been fighting for union recognition in steel and iron construction across the country. The union had been conducting a campaign of bombings at non-union construction sites — more than 100 incidents over four years. The Los Angeles Times building, symbol of the anti-union establishment, was a target of particular significance.
J.B. McNamara planted the bomb. He would later say he had not intended to kill anyone — that he had expected the nighttime explosion to destroy property, not people. The gas lines he did not know about transformed a property crime into the deadliest criminal act in California history.
The arrest of brothers J.B. and J.J. McNamara in April 1911 electrified the American labor movement. Labor leaders were convinced the men were innocent, that the evidence had been manufactured by private detective William J. Burns — himself a controversial figure whose aggressive methods had crossed legal lines. Workers across the country raised money for their defense.
Clarence Darrow, the greatest defense attorney of the era, was recruited to defend the McNamaras. Darrow had defended labor leader Bill Haywood in 1906 and had become a hero in union circles. He took the case reluctantly, having privately concluded — before he agreed to represent them — that the brothers were almost certainly guilty.
The trial became a national referendum on the conflict between capital and labor. Then, in December 1911, J.B. McNamara pleaded guilty. J.J. pleaded guilty to a separate bombing charge. The confessions devastated the labor movement's narrative of persecution and shattered the defense's strategy. J.B. received a life sentence; J.J. was sentenced to fifteen years. Darrow himself was subsequently charged with jury tampering and tried twice — both times acquitted.
The twenty-one people who died in Ink Alley were printers — working men, not the union-busting establishment that Otis embodied. They had nothing to do with the labor dispute that killed them. Among them was Robert Sawyer, a pressroom worker who had been at his post when the explosion came.
The bombing's legacy is complicated by its context. It remains one of the deadliest domestic terrorist acts in American history, and it discredited the radical wing of the labor movement at a crucial moment in the fight for workers' rights. But the conditions that produced it — the iron fist with which employers like Otis suppressed any attempt at collective bargaining — were real, and the men who planted the bomb were responding to a system of coercion that had few other pressure valves.
The Los Angeles Times building where the explosion occurred no longer stands. Its successor buildings have occupied the same block in downtown Los Angeles, and the newspaper that once called the bombing 'the crime of the century' has itself been through ownership changes, financial crises, and fundamental transformation. The labor movement that was both perpetrator and victim of the bombing eventually won most of what it sought. The twenty-one dead remain.