In a sense — the less metaphorical one — lightning indeed only struck once in the same place. The three historic figures, strangers to each other -- legendary men who individually would "permanently transform the nature of American thought, politics, celebrity, and culture" — at the heart of Howard Blum’s enriching and transfixing social and cultural history American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century did in fact finally meet one spring evening in 1912 in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles after having crossed career paths in a momentous and variably red-letter manner.
What brought celebrated detective William J. Burns, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, and pioneering film director D.W. Griffith to that point in time and place entailed a long preceding series of convoluted events and entanglements involving an array of mired-up matters. For one thing, there were the issues purely Southern Californian in nature, such as the standby trouble spots and treasure troves - real estate and water rights. And in the second place were those more broadened concerns with the national resonance of class struggle, especially those considerations surrounding opportunists and unionists in boom times and new industry, which in itself generated increasingly violent strife — and a different kind of boom times — between capital and labor.
More specifically and most deadly was the October 1910 bombing of the offices of the Los Angeles Times --publisher Otis Chandler was a bitter opponent of unions — which killed 21 people, turning the city into “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor” and signifying an escalation in a devastating battle that was part and parcel of a war on some 100 American cities.
Called in to solve “The Crime of the Century” was Burns, a former Secret Service man known as “the American Sherlock Holmes.” After six months of sleuthing and snooping smoothly depicted in a narrative smacking of the most enthralling of mysteries or police procedurals, Burns arrested Iron Workers Union leaders and brothers James and Joseph McNamara, and a confederate, Ortie McManigal, all also involved in a nationwide terror campaign.
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