Dynamiter

James B. McNamara never intended to be a dynamiter. After he became one, he never intended to kill anybody. He grew up in Ohio, in a big family, in an Irish neighborhood, where the boys ran in packs and the little kids peeked through saloon doors to see what the big kids were doing. He was always the last boy to run, was consequently the only one caught.

Jim became a printer, and wandered around Ohio. His brother John became secretary of the Structural Iron Workers.

Jim was about ready to settle down when he was offered a job by his brother's union. To fight open-shop contractors, the union was dynamiting structures built by non-union labor -- not demolishing them, but twisting the whole framework by placing the explosives at the point of greatest stress, forcing the contractor to pull it down.

For at least five years he traveled over the U. S. Nobody knows how many buildings were dynamited in that period; one figure is 150. McNamara's boast was that nobody was injured. Then, at 1:07 a.m. on Oct. 1, 1910, when McNamara was 29, there was a terrific explosion at the bitterly open-shop Los Angeles Times, followed by a fire in which 20 were killed and some 60 injured.

James and John McNamara were ar rested. Labor organized in their defense, $250,000 was raised, charges of frame-up roared through innumerable demonstrations, Clarence Darrow was rushed to Los Angeles to defend them, Muckraker Lincoln Steffens busied himself trying to work out a compromise. Suddenly, on Dec. 1, 1911, James McNamara confessed. It was the greatest moral shock in U. S. labor history. A thin-faced, impassioned man, with intense blue eyes and a Theodore Roosevelt mustache, McNamara told reporters: "They say I will swing for this, but if I swing it will be for a principle. ... I am guilty, but I did what I did for principle and I did not intend to murder a man. ... I meant only to throw a scare into those fellows who owned the Times. ..." All over the U. S., workmen who had rallied to McNamara were sickened, union leaders went into hiding. James McNamara was sentenced to San Quentin for life. His brother served ten years. A fellow dynamiter named Matthew Schmidt also got life. Thirty-eight International Trade Union officials went to prison.

The years passed. McNamara imperceptibly became "J. B.," the oldest San Quentin prisoner. At times the Communist Party would begin a movement for his release, but "J. B." could not play the part of a martyr to the labor movement.

Listening to other labor prisoners long-windedly complaining of the frame-ups that had put them in prison, Schmidt used to say, "Thank God, Jim, we are guilty." Bits of his story--the"true story" of the McNamara case--filtered out to different people, each having a fragment, like the scattered parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Last week, after 30 years in prison, death came also to the dynamiter.

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