59th St. Bridge bomb plot part of union war with Big Biz
At Christmas time in 1907, a rogue dynamiter known by the nom de boom George O'Donnell sat in a rented room overlooking the East River and studied the construction of the new bridge to Long Island City. After four years of labor, the $20 million span that became the Queensboro Bridge was nearly finished. And the scoundrel O'Donnell aimed to bring it down.
It was a $2,500 hit for a patron known for erections, not demolitions: the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers.
The Queensboro job was to be a big bang in a largely forgotten terror campaign a century ago by union ironworkers against the open shop movement.
From 1905 to 1911, 86 structures - many of them bridges, buildings and viaducts built with non-union labor — were damaged in a plot by an inner ring snidely dubbed the "entertainment committee" at the ironworkers international headquarters in Indianapolis.
Blasts thundered in more than a dozen cities hitting, among others, a courthouse in Omaha, the Grand Opera House in Boston, and structures in Cleveland, New Orleans, Salt Lake City and New
Jersey. Kansas City saw five explosions in three years.
Union membership was booming, increasing to nearly 2 million from 1897 to 1904. This nettled Big Business. In 1903, David McLean Parry of the National Association of Manufacturers declared that unions followed "the law of the savages."
American Industries, a trade magazine, griped that unions regarded capitalists with "bitter hostility." It said, "The constant opposition of the labor union leaders to rational plans. . . has proven a continual source of amazement and chagrin to all fair-minded employers of union labor."
As many as 50 trades had a role in building colossal structures like the Queensboro. Powerful forces in the construction world — U.S. Steel, the American Bridge Co. and the National Erectors' Associationwere determined to keep such jobs open to non-unionists. This put them at odds with ironworkers. These cowboys of the skies were a different breed, plying a trade that the U.S. Bureau of Labor described at the time as "one of the most, if not the most, hazardous industrial operation." The ironworker on-the-job mortality rate was more than double that of coal miners.
"They work far up on dizzying structures," a federal commission noted in 1914. "They creep to and fro on narrow iron beams so far up in the air that the people down below look like little ants . . . They must become accustomed to going up high and not falling off."
Just one in four of the 50,000 American ironworkers were unionized in 1905, when the international ordered a strike, seeking official recognition from Big Business.
The dynamiting of open shop jobsites commenced within weeks.
The union employed three bombers: Ortie McManigal, an Ohio ironworker; James McNamara of Cincinnati, the sketchy younger brother of John McNamara, the international's secretary-treasurer; and O'Donnell, the enigmatic chief fuse-lighter in the New York area.
Enlisted by Frank Webb, a New Yorker on the union's executive board, O'Donnell pulled eight jobs in five months, including a railroad bridge in Harrison, N.J., and the Pelham drawbridge in the Bronx.
Webb cajoled O'Donnell to bring down the union's Holy Grail target, the Queensboro. He cased the site thoroughly, planning to conceal 100 pounds of dynamite on each of two piers supporting the cantilevered structure.
But as he began to lay in the sticks, he realized that tons of debris would tumble onto an electric powerhouse where as many as 30 men worked around the clock.
When he backed out, Webb called him "chicken-hearted."
There had been remarkably few fatalities in the bombings, most of them timed for the dead of night.
That changed on Oct. 1, 1910, when James McNamara dropped 16 sticks of dynamite in an alley outside the Los Angeles Times, whose owner, Harrison Gray Otis, was a virulent anti-unionist, calling guild members "leeches upon honest labor."
The explosion touched off a conflagration that killed 21 people and injured 100. The union had crossed the Rubicon. National outrage surged, and private eye William Burns — working for the National Erectors' Association — knitted together evidence of a bombing conspiracy. Thirtyeight union officers, including president Frank Ryan, were indicted in Indianapolis, convicted and sent to federal prison for up to seven years.
The McNamara brothers were convicted in California of the Times massacre. John got 15 years, and James got life.
The man known as O'Donnell avoided federal indictment because he was imprisoned under his alias in Massachusetts for assaulting a cop while fleeing his bombing of the Taunton River Bridge in Somerset.
He might have gone through life as an ironworker war mystery man except for an ironic twist.
After his parole in 1913, he was working on a building in Pittsburgh when a guild rep threatened to run him off unless he paid $26 for a local union card.
Brimming with umbrage, O'Donnell stepped out of the shadows, dictated a long confession and revealed his true identity: veteran ironworker George Davis of Coffeyville, Kan.
"I was feeling sore at being put off the job and thought the international had deserted me," he grumbled.
Davis revealed the aborted Queensboro bombing for the first time. He pleaded guilty to an explosives charge and served a brief prison term. More than a century later, the
old bridge at E. 59th St. survives.