Louis Adamic Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, AK Press: Edinburgh, U.K., Oakland, CA, West Virginia, 2008 (Jon Bekken, Foreword), 1934 revised edition of the 1931 ed.
[Louis Adamic [1899-1954] whose first book was a biography of Robinson Jeffers, U. Washington Press, 1929. Dynamite was his second book.]
[p. 143] Chapter 19 The Plot to Dynamite the Los Angeles Times
"From the viewpoint of the class struggle, a peculiar situation existed in California early in 1910, or just prior to the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times.
"San Francisco was a stronghold of trade unionism. Labor had been well entrenched there even before the earthquake in 1906; after that catastrophe it became the dominent ekement in the city. The unions, especially those of the building trades, had taken advantage of the chaotic situation following the quake and organized so that in a couple of years they controlled practically every job in San Francisco. In achieving this control, the laborites had used strong-armed methods, including dynamite.
" . . .
"Labor leaders in San Francisco, as elsewhere, were go-getters of the first order, motivated by the same psychology as the directors of great trusts and corporations. They demanded high wages for labor and graft for themselves, and, holding an advantageous position, managed to get [p. 144] both . The membership of the trade unions was limited and corresponded to the body of stockholders in a capitalistic "racket."
" . . .
[p. 144] "In 1909, after the Schmitz machine was discredited, the laborites put forth a candidate completely their own-Patrick H. "Pinhead" McCarthy, president of the San Francisco Building Trade Council . . . Behind him was a master-mind in the person of another laborite, O.A. Tveitmoe, a dark Scandinavian of powerful build, a "gorilla," who was secretary of the Building Trades Council, boss of the Labor Party, and Samuel Gompers' big friend and trusted henchman on the Coast. And the men around Tveitmoe were such fellows as Anton Johannsen and Tom Mooney, thick-fisted, bull-necked, dynamic men, trained in the rough school of labor leadership; intolerant, tyrannical, loud-mouthed, direct. Some of them were firm believers in dynamite. They loved Roosevelt's phrase about "the big stick." They laughed at naive socialists who were conducting classes in economics, educating labor groups. "What we need is not classes in economics, but classes in chemistry." They were barbaric Nietzcheans. The socialists called them "gorillas."
[p. 145] " . . .
"II: On the other hand, Los Angeles, 500 miles to the south was a booming open-shop town, its industrial history closely linked with the career of an energetic personage, General Harrison Gray Otis, a union hater, publisher-editor of the Los Angeles Times.
"Otis had come to Southern California in the early eighties and, acquiring control of the Times, then a struggling sheet in a town of 12,000 developed "a tremendous and abiding faith in the future of Los Angeles," with its climate. He was an aggessive man, bound to be noticed in a small city. An ex-soldier of two campaigns, he was full of the martial spirit; when prosperity came his way, he built himself a mansion and called it "The Bivouac," and when he built the fateful Times Building, he made the architect give it the suggestion of a medieval fortress with battlements and other challenging appurtenances. Just before the McNamara case, while fighting the unions, he mounted a small cannon on the hood of his automobile.
"He loved a fight and, when in 1890 the local printer's union declared a strike against the newspapers in the city, demanding closed shop and a higher wage scale, he fought the movement with every means at his command, fair and foul. He won the battle and thus became the generalissimo of the open-shop forces in Los Angeles. He had the anti-union idea in his blood; early in the nineteenth century, his uncle and namesake, Senator Harrison Gray Otis of Massachusetts, was an intense opponent to all organzed efforts of labor to improve its lot.
"During the nineties Otis had become the most savage and effective enemy of labor unionism in the country, and as a result of his doings Los Angeles was-and is today- the outstanding open-shop town in the United States, "the white spot" on the industrial map of the country. Otis fought the unions tooth and nail. Often he picked fights. In the Times, referring to organized workers he used such terms as "sluggers," "union rowdies," "hired trouble breeders," "gas pipe ruffins," "strong-armed gang,"-some of which at certain times, no doubt, were justified.
[p. 146] "Otis organized a Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association which was primarily a union of business people against labor unions; and merchants, manufacturers, and contractors were compelled to join if they wanted to operate in Los Angeles. The greatest sin that a Los Angeles employer could commiit was to hire a union worker as such.
"About 1909 Otis discovered Nietzche, or rather he was introduced to Nietzscheism by a young gentleman, Willard Huntington Wright (now S.S. Van Dine, the detective story writer), who became literary editor of the Times. Wright had not yet written his summary of old Fredrich's philosophy, What Nietzche Taught, nor his Nietzchen novel, Man of Promise, but he was even then a Nietzchen, a believer in aristocracy, in superiority, in the exercise of might. He was a great find for Otis. At any rate, during Wright's literary editorship, the Times made frequent reference to those phases of Nietzche that seemed to agree with the polices and temperment of General Otis.
[p. 146] "Otis, naturally, acquired numerous enemies. He was personally disliked even by some of his business friends. Labor, of course, hated the ground he walked on. Union leaders referred to him by unprintable titles. Plain folks, reading his vituperative attacks on labor, would say: "It's a wonder somebody doesn't blow him up!" One of his journalistic rivals called him a "surly old swill dispenser." W.C. Brann, the iconoclast, could not find a mean enough word in the English language to call him by; Hiram Johnson, then an up-and-coming liberal politician, called him, "depraved, corrupt, crooked, putrescent." Still others considered him vain and pompous, quarrelsome and intolerant, unfair in his tactics, viscious in his attacks. One generous woman, Mrs. Fremont Older of San Francisco, said he was merely "an honest man who believes in the sacredness of property above all other things."
"Due mainly to Otis, the unions were extremely weak in Los Angeles, and wages were low and the working hours long."