Employers used labor spies, agents provocateur, private detective agencies, and strike breakers to engage in a campaign against the unions.

Hard pressed by the open shop campaign, the IW reacted by electing the militant Frank M. Ryan president and J.J. McNamara the secretary-treasurer in 1905.

Unions in San Francisco feared that employers in their city would also soon begin pressing for wage cuts and start an open shop drive of their own.

On July 15, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously enacted an ordinance banning picketing and "speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone", with a penalty of fifty days in jail, a $100 fine, or both.

The bombers were unaware that a number of Times employees were working overnight to produce an extra edition the next afternoon which would carry the results of the Vanderbilt Cup auto race.

[5][19][20][21][22] The Times called the bombing the "crime of the century",[23] and Otis excoriated unions as "anarchic scum," "cowardly murderers," "leeches upon honest labor," and "midnight assassins.

The IW decided it was time for more bombings in Los Angeles and sent McManigal with a list of five bombing targets, including the Times auxiliary printing plant, the Llewellyn Iron Works, the Baker Iron Works, and two non-union construction sites: the Los Angeles County Hall of Records and the Hotel Alexandria.

McManigal set off a dynamite bomb at the Llewellyn Iron Works, partially wrecking the plant with the damage costing $25,000, but he found two of the other sites too closely guarded, and never visited the remaining two.

Meanwhile, George Alexander, Mayor of Los Angeles, was locked in a very close re-election battle against Job Harriman, a Socialist Party of America candidate.

The rest of the evidence, such as the other bombs found in Los Angeles the next morning, and all the material seized at union headquarters at Indianapolis, they claimed was planted.

To support the accidental gas explosion theory, the State Federation of Labor of California appointed a committee to travel to Los Angeles and investigate the matter.

[52] On October 18, he learned that U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham had obtained enough evidence on his own to secure, with President William Howard Taft's approval, a federal subpoena against the McNamaras.

Steffens proposed to defend their actions in print as "justifiable dynamiting"[53] in the face of employer violence and state-sponsored repression of labor unions.

In exchange for light prison terms for the McNamaras, the AFL would end its debilitating strike and organizing efforts against Los Angeles employers.

The National Erectors' Association had learned of the talks (both the defense and prosecution had their paid spies in the other's camp),[58] and was pressing Fredericks to reject any plea bargain.

[64] At his sentencing hearing, Jim McNamera's confession was read in court: I, James B. McNamera, having heretofore pleaded guilty to the crime of murder, desire to make this statement of facts: On the night of September 30, 1920, at 5:45 p.m., I placed in Ink Alley, a portion of the Times building, a suitcase containing sixteen sticks of 80 per cent dynamite, set to explode at one o'clock the next morning.

The judge stated that what really broke the deadlock was the arrest of Bert Franklin, a detective hired by the defense, on a charge of attempted bribery of jurors.

To those who say it would have been better to have gone to trial and suffered complete defeat, I would call attention to the fact that there were thirty or forty hotel registers, three in Los Angeles, many in San Francisco and others in different parts of the country.

"[73] The Socialist Party, however, refused to condemn the McNamara brothers, arguing that their actions were justified in view of the supposed employer- and state-sponsored terror their union had faced for the last 25 years.

But let him be one of them himself, reared in hard poverty, denied education, thrown into the brute struggle for existence from childhood, oppressed, exploited, forced to strike, clubbed by the police, jailed while his family is evicted, and his wife and children are hungry, and he will hesitate to condemn these as criminals who fight against the crimes of which they are the victims of such savage methods as have been forced upon them by their masters.

"[75] As part of the McNamara brothers' plea bargain, Los Angeles prosecutors had agreed not to pursue other labor union officials for the L.A. bombings.

Six more men, including San Francisco labor leader Olaf Tveitmoe and prosecution informer Herbert Hockin, were given six years.

In the case of Tveitmoe, the court ruled that evidence implicating him in the Los Angeles Times bombing was irrelevant to the federal charges, because that incident did not involve interstate transportation of dynamite.

[81] The following month, the US district attorney announced that, in light of the court of appeals ruling, that the government would not retry the five defendants whose convictions were reversed; the five were released.

[83] After the Indianapolis trials, the only cases remaining were of David Caplan and Matthew Schmidt, two anarchists who had helped Jim McNamara buy the dynamite used in the Los Angeles bombings.

Police speculated that the bomb was intended to be used the following day in Tarrytown, New York, where a number of anarchists, including one of the dead bombers, were due to face charges connected with attempted invasion of the Rockefeller summer estate.

But a search of Schmidt's belongings found a letter that led them to the Seattle area, where local police arrested David Caplan on February 18, 1915.

[89] Upon his conviction, Olaf Tveitmoe, secretary of the California Building Trades Council said: "There will be ten years' war in Los Angeles.

[95] Journalist Lincoln Steffens was so troubled by the vituperation heaped on the McNamara brothers that he began a campaign to ease economic and class differences in the United States.

By mid-1912, a number of prominent individuals — including social workers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, industrialist Henry Morgenthau, Sr., journalist Paul Kellogg, jurist Louis Brandeis, economist Irving Fisher, and pacifist minister John Haynes Holmes—had asked President Taft to appoint a commission on industrial relations to ease economic tensions in the country.