Page:Henry Mulford Tichenor - A Wave of Horror (1912).djvu/6



The press reported that a "wave of horror swept over the land when James B. McNamara confessed to blowing up the Los Angeles Times building and thereby destroying 21 lives."

This speaks volumes for the reputation of the working class.

The Wave of Horror vividly disclosed the fact that the world is not accustomed to tales of wholesale murder committed by members of the working class—that it was fairly stunned to realize that workingmen—wage slaves—should do so foul a deed.

I am not going into the details or into any resume of the case—that has been amply exploited. Nor am I going into the pros and cons of probabilities or circumstantial aspects of the awful affair.

All the way from the absolute acceptance of the confession of James McNamara, that he is the lone guilty party, to the expressed opinion of those who assert that the whole thing is a monstrous frame-up engineered from start to finish to destroy the trades union movement, the inside facts of which may never be known, I leave to conjecture.

That the trick was turned at the psychological moment when the Los Angeles election seemed like a victory for the working class; that unusual and unheard of leniency towards the self-confessed dynamiters was openly published before the judge pronounced the sentence, I will not here attempt to explain; that such remarkable predictions as the following, clipped from one of the many remarkable press reports from Los Angeles the day of the judge's sentence, and which says: "If