American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century Review

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American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century Review"American Lightning" presents one chapter in the fierce cultural war of strikes, propaganda, politics, and violence that raged between labor unions and capitalist businesses in the early part of the 20th century: On October 1, 1910, six explosions destroyed the "Los Angeles Times" building, leaving 21 people dead and 17 injured. The owner of the "Times" newspaper was vehement anti-union propagandist Harrison Gray Otis. The bombing was immediately assumed to be part of a campaign by anarchists to attack the mechanisms of capital in which more than100 bombs were planted across the nation. The city of Los Angeles hired Billy Burns, former Secret Service agent and founder of the Burns Detective Agency, to find the persons responsible.
This is history for the popular fiction market. "American Lightning" tells the story of Billy Burns' investigation and the subsequent campaigns of public relations, witness intimidation, and juror bribery that took place as the three men whom Burns accused awaited trial in Los Angeles. Author Howard Blum relates the story in the style of narrative fiction, like a novel. He attempts to weave together the stories of three prominent men who helped shape this period in American history and were, in turn, shaped by the war between labor and capital: detective Billy Burns, crusading attorney Clarence Darrow, who represented the accused men, and filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who moved his operations from New York to Los Angeles in the midst of all the furor.
I appreciate that Howard Blum is trying to bring a forgotten chapter of American history to a broad audience. The 1910s were a time when the nation's security was threatened by very real violent conspiracies but Americans managed, for the most part, to prevail without succumbing to paranoia on a large scale. But "American Lightning" is hopelessly superficial and choppy for a history book. There is only enough information about the radical labor movement to place the story in a vague context. The many references to D. W. Griffith have nothing to do with the subject. There is an excess of filler, but the reader is left starved for real understanding. The intent is evidently to write a real-life thriller driven by three iconic characters, but this isn't a page-turner. It's an easy read but not informative enough to be history and not gripping enough to succeed as a novel.American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century Overview

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