The Cincinnati Police were looking for a terrorist, and Albert Rey looked guilty as sin. The new Harrison Avenue viaduct wasn’t even finished on 6 August 1908 when someone tried to blow it up. When the police arrived, they found Albert Rey standing amid a crowd of curious people. The cops had seen Rey before.



Just three months earlier, someone had planted a bomb at the Phoenix Club on Race Street at Ninth. The pipe bomb attached to the main entrance detonated when bartender Fred Buegel was closing up for the night. Luckily for Buegel, the “infernal machine” was crudely fashioned and blew out at the ends rather than exploding in the middle as intended. Buegel lost most of his left hand in the blast, but the shrapnel scattered sideways instead of into his body, and he survived.

Albert Rey, a chef at Shillito’s, was among the first on the scene and may have saved Buegel’s life by grabbing a heavy rubber band to fashion a tourniquet. Three months later, the police arrived at the Harrison Avenue bombing and first on the scene once again is Albert Rey. Hustled to Police Headquarters at City Hall, Rey endured a night of interrogation before his answers and alibis satisfied Lieutenant Samuel T. Corbin, and he was released.

The police were wrong about Rey, but they were thoroughly baffled while Cincinnati endured a year of terrifying explosions. From 1 May 1908 through 12 August 1909, Cincinnati was rocked by five bomb blasts. The Phoenix Club attack was never solved. The other four explosions proved to be part of a nationwide wave of terror that originated in the Queen City.

The attempt to blow-up the Harrison Avenue Viaduct – later replaced by today’s Western Hills Viaduct – was shoddy work. Damage to the steel pillars was minimal and the shattered concrete base was easily replaced. Contractor for the job was the Charles F. Grainger Company, a non-union shop. The foreman told police he thought a union agitator had planted the bomb. He was correct.

The International Association of Bridge and Iron Workers was struggling to find a toehold in the construction industry. Their efforts to unionize any of the big firms had failed and they decided on drastic measures to get the attention of the owners. Between 1905 and 1911, the union executed nearly 100 explosions in 17 states from Massachusetts to California.

Ringleaders of this campaign of terror were the McNamara brothers John and James, who grew up in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood. John was the national Secretary-Treasurer of the union. James worked off and on as a printer before getting into labor activism. Among their minions was Edward Clark, a Cincinnati ironworker and president of the Cincinnati local, who helped plan some of the bombings, including the viaduct attack.

As a demolition man, Clark was a loser. He took 25 sticks of dynamite to Dayton to demolish a bridge being built by the American Bridge Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel and a non-union shop. It was raining when Clark set his charges, so he left his umbrella – monogrammed with his initials – behind to keep the burning wick dry. The bridge survived the explosion with minimal damage. So did the umbrella, providing a material clue to the perpetrator. Clark’s failure brought down the wrath of John McNamara’s lieutenant Herbert Hockin, who henceforth used Clark to transport explosives, but not to detonate them. As reported in The Review, an anti-union magazine, some of this transportation ran right through Cincinnati:

“Some months later Hockin asked Clark by letter or telegram to meet him at the Post-office in Cincinnati. The meeting took place and there was another man there called Johnson who kept in the background, and then Hockin told Clark that he (Hockin) had arranged with the man from whom he got the dynamite for the Dayton job, to furnish him with more dynamite, and Clark went with this mysterious man and secured about 30 sticks of dynamite and delivered it to Johnson at the corner of Pike and Fifth Streets, Cincinnati.”

The union, having failed to obliterate the viaduct, direct their attentions to the Pittsburgh Construction Company, engaged in building a bridge out of Cincinnati’s West End over the Ohio River into Ludlow, Kentucky for the Cincinnati-Southern Railroad. Union bombers detonated three explosions in an attempt to derail the bridge, on 9 May 1909, 24 May 1909, and 12 August 1909. Damage to the West End was extensive, with hundreds of windows blown out and a couple of tenements sustaining structural damage. Damage to the railroad bridge was negligible. There was only one serious injury in these attempts, according to the Cincinnati Post [12 August 1909]:

“Sid Isley, a young man, was sitting near the girders at the moment. He was hurled many feet and has only a recollection of being rolled over and over, He was badly bruised. Isley was the only victim, although all around the scene of the explosion there are numerous crowded tenement houses. They were shaken by the explosion and window lights were torn out of sashes and smashed, but the tenants, although badly frightened, were not hurt.”

That was not the case with the McNamara brothers’ big job. Los Angeles was virulently anti-union, and anti-union sentiment was inflamed by the Los Angeles Times and its publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Heavily unionized San Francisco mobilized the national organized labor movement to unionize Los Angeles. The McNamara brothers enlisted and it was James “J.B.” McNamara himself who planted the dynamite outside the L.A. Times building. The explosion on 1 October 1910 did little damage itself, but ignited a fire that destroyed the building, killed at least 21 employees and injured another 100.

Both McNamara brothers were convicted on charges related to this attack. James was sentenced to life in San Quentin prison, where he remained until his death. John served ten years. Edward Clark turned state’s evidence and was released under a suspended sentence.

While the McNamara’s were on trial, the union kept planting explosives to encourage the idea that the wrong men had been arrested. The last attempted explosion was on 13 October 1911, when a pile of dynamite was found beneath a bridge in Santa Barbara hours before President William Howard Taft was due to roll over it in the railroad version of “Air Force One.”

There is an excellent online display about the McNamara brothers posted by the Archives and Rare Books Library of the University of Cincinnati, where a collection of related documents is stored. You can see the online exhibit here: