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On July 22, 1916, an event occurred that resulted in two innocent men being held as political prisoners by the state of California for 22 years. The story involves a sordid mixture of corrupt public officials, the military-industrial complex, yellow journalism, class warfare, heartless Republicans, unscrupulous strikebreakers, a prosecution frame-up, and terrorism. Viewed through the prism of today, nearly one hundred years later, the story emerges as a paradoxical object lesson, both heartening and disheartening, cynical and idealistic.
Background
In 1916, World War I had been raging in Europe for two years. A fierce debate swept the country over the prospect of US participation. In San Francisco, which had been the most unionized city in the nation until that time, business owners chafed under a local government that, until recently, had been controlled by labor. With war fever starting to grow, industrialists realized they could kill two birds with one stone: By whipping up jingoism, they could create both a favorable market for war goods and services as well as an unfavorable environment for labor, whose demands could now be labeled "unpatriotic."
The employers had already made inroads in local government. Graft and corruption charges had swept many of the Union Labor Party out of power in 1910 in favor of Republicans. One businessman caught up in the graft was Patrick Calhoun of United Railroad (URR). After the 1906 earthquake, he had been happy to grease some Union Labor palms for the installation of overhead electrical lines for his streetcar company, but he didn't like getting caught. Facing bribery charges, Calhoun doubled down, shelling out $100,000 to buy the election of his hand-picked district attorney, Charles M. Fickert. As soon as he was installed in office, Fickert dropped the graft charges against URR.
Meanwhile, a labor activist named Thomas Mooney (left) had been trying for years to unionize the streetcar workers at URR. Mooney was born in Chicago on December 8, 1882, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, an activist coal miner, died at age 36 of silicosis, a lung disease, when Tom was 10. Tom soon went to work in the factories, eventually moved to San Francisco, joined the iron molders union, and sold magazines to earn his way to the Second International, a worldwide labor conference held in Copenhagen in 1910.
Mooney came back more radicalized than ever, joining the International Workers of the World (IWW), hanging out with the likes of William Haywood, Mary "Mother" Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Alexander Berkman, and Emma Goldman, and fighting for the release of Joe Hill. He
Image courtesy Online Archives of California published a socialist paper called The Revolt which had a circulation of 1,500. He married Rena Hermann in 1911, and he even ran as the Socialist Party candidate for sheriff of San Francisco.
The Pinkerton Detective Agency was famous in those days as a strong arm organization used by employers to break strikes. One of those detectives, Martin Swanson, would play a pivotal role in the events which follow. The first encounter between Swanson and Mooney was an indication of things to come.
In September 1913 Mooney was asked by Edgar Hurley, a local trade unionist, to carry a suitcase from Oakland to Sacramento. Mooney had been set-up by Martin Swanson of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and when he arrived in Sacramento he was arrested and charged with transporting explosives [dynamite] illegally on a streetcar. He was convicted and sentenced to Folsom Penitentiary for two years.
Mooney was released on appeal....
Source
Then, in June 1916, a transmission tower that supplied electrical power to URR was dynamited. Swanson, now working for the Public Utilities Protective Bureau, set out to frame his old leftist adversary, Tom Mooney. Using $5,000 in reward money provided by URR, Swanson tried to place Mooney at the scene of the crime by bribing jitney bus driver Israel Weinberg, who often drove Mooney to trade union meetings. Failing in that attempt, Swanson approached Mooney's friend Warren Billings with a similar offer. Billings, a union worker, reported the offer to Mooney and the IWW. Billings, too, had a past with explosives, also having been convicted of carrying dynamite on a passenger train. Fickert wanted to arrest Mooney anyway, but the labor leader had been speaking to a meeting of over 200 workers when the incident occurred. His alibi was too solid, but Swanson and Fickert would prove to be as relentless as they were unscrupulous.
Preparedness Day Parade
At the urging of the Chamber of Commerce, the City of San Francisco decided to hold a Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, ostensibly to unify the populace and improve the national defense. The IWW, most trade unions, and the left-leaning San Francisco Bulletin opposed US involvement in the war. A Bulletin editorial published on July 13 noted,
Fear is the motive offered for public consumption, while ambition to make the United States a great military, navy, and commercial power has probably been the real driving force of the leaders of the movement.
Source
The great Democratic populist, William Jennings Bryan, also criticized the motives of the business owners, claiming that greed for war profits, not love of country, was their real object.
The parade was to be the largest ever. According to Wiki, the 3.5 hour procession had 51,329 marchers, including 2,134 organizations and 52 bands. While many of the marchers, including war veterans, were genuinely patriotic, many marchers were non-union workers forced to march by their employers under threat of termination.
Less than two weeks before the parade, the Chamber of Commerce formed a Law and Order Committee at a meeting of over 2,000 employers in order to rid San Francisco of its "anarchist elements." As the San Francisco Chronicle agreed in an editorial, there was a need for law and order "no matter what their preservation may cost." The group raised $1 million by the end of the year, and shipping magnate Captain Dollar, sounding like Sean Connery in The Untouchables, declared of union organizers,
When they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital, we send two of theirs.
Source
Tough talk was answered by radicals on the left. Wiki says one radical pamphlet threatened,
We are going to use a little direct action on the 22nd to show that militarism can't be forced on us and our children without a violent protest.
Mooney, however, called for restraint, warning the unions that provocateurs might use the occasion to hurt the movement. He pushed resolutions of non-violence through the Molders as well as the San Francisco Central Labor Council and the Building Trades Council.
On Saturday the 22nd, a clear and sunny day, the parade got underway about 1:30 pm. From Wiki:
At 2:06pm, about half an hour into the parade, a dynamite time bomb (using a clock as a timing device) exploded on the west side of Steuart Street, just south of Market Street, near the Ferry Building. The time bomb was concealed in a suitcase; the bombmaker had added heavy metal sash weights to the bomb to act as shrapnel when the explosives detonated to increase the bomb's effect. Ten bystanders were killed [six instantly] and forty wounded, making it the worst terrorist act in San Francisco history.
"Flag" image courtesy foundsf.org. All other images courtesy Online Archives of California
Arrest and Conviction
As soon as Martin Swanson heard of the bombing, he went that same evening to Fickert, the D.A., with his theory that Mooney was behind it. Perhaps because of their URR connections, Fickert hired Swanson that very night as a special investigator, and Swanson resigned from the Utilities Bureau. With over $17,000 in reward money posted, Swanson had plenty available for bribery.
After an "investigation," Fickert ordered the arrest of Mooney, his wife Rena, Warren Billings, Israel Weinberg, and Edward Nolan on July 26, 1916. All but the Mooneys were taken into custody that day. Tom and Rena were out of town, but after Tom read on the 28th that they were wanted, they returned to San Francisco and surrendered the next day. The Hearst newspapers had incorrectly reported that the Mooneys had "fled the city," ignoring the fact that they had purchased round trip tickets.
Billings and Mooney were quickly convicted, largely on the strength of the testimony of two "eyewitnesses" who claimed to have seen the two men plant the bomb. In separate trials, Billings was given life imprisonment in September, and in February Mooney was sentenced to be hanged. Rena and Weinberg (accused as an accomplice of driving them to the scene) were found not guilty, and charges against Nolan, who allegedly manufactured the bomb, were dropped for lack of evidence. Rena continued to be held on a related charge which was dropped 22 months later.
An anti-labor propaganda silent film was made shortly after the bombings. There is no certainty, but likely the Law and Order Committee, or at least some of its members, funded it.
After the convictions, the prosecution case began to unravel quickly. The hand-picked jury pool had consisted almost entirely of retired businessmen. The jury foreman, William MacNevin, turned out to be a close friend of the assistant prosecutor, Edward Cunha. MacNevin's wife later claimed her husband had colluded with Cunha during the trial. Cunha was despicable. Here's what he told John A. Fitch of Survey magazine in July 1917:
If the thing were done that ought to be done this whole God damn dirty low down bunch would be taken out and strung up without ceremony. They're a bunch of dirty anarchists, everyone of them, and they ought to be in jail on general principles. I'm not speaking now as an officer, I am just speaking as a man and a citizen, to show you my attitude. I'm disgusted with all this outcry over Mooney, - making a hero of him by Older and all that bunch where he is an anarchist and a murderer. If he ought to be out of jail let him get out. The Courts are open to him. But I'm not going to help him get out. If I knew that every single witness that testified against him had perjured himself in his testimony I wouldn't lift a finger to get him out. I told him to get out if he could.
And now people like Judge Griffin are going around saying he ought to have a new trial. Why, Judge Griffin almost cried there on the bench because we searched the Blast office without a search warrant. The Blast office, run by Berkman and that bunch of anarchists. Berkman's the man who shot Frick and he told me he did it on general principles because Frick is a capitalist. Berkman told me that he had no country and that he'd just as not spit on the American Flag. I ought to have murdered him right there for saying that. My only regret now is that I didn't. They'd talked in the Blast about stopping the Preparedness parade. They urged a meeting of protest and then they said that stronger measures should be taken. Do you think I was going to wait around 2 or 3 days for a search warrant for people like that? Now if it was your house or mine it would be different, but I'm glad there was a district attorney's office here with guts enough to go ahead and search those people without waiting for a warrant.
Source
With that agenda, it is no surprise that exculpatory evidence was suppressed. A photograph (below) of Tom and Rena atop a building showed a clock that read 1:58. Since, according to the prosecution, the bomb was planted at 1:50, there was no way, given the large crowds, that Mooney could have dropped off the bomb and made it back to the rooftop in that time.
Not guilty! The clock is highlighted in the box in the center. The Mooneys are circled to the right. This photo was suppressed by the prosecution.
Image courtesy foundsf.org
As revelations continued to come out, the prosecution's case disintegrated. The testimony of the state's two star witnesses, an unemployed waiter named John McDonald and Frank Oxman, a cattleman from Oregon, was shown to be perjury:
In November 1920, Draper Hand of the San Francisco Police Department, went to Mayor James Rolph and admitted that he had helped Charles Fickert and Martin Swanson to frame Mooney. Hand also confessed that he had arranged for John McDonald to get a job when he began threatening to tell the newspapers that he had lied in court about Mooney and Billings. Mooney's defence team now began to search for MacDonald. He was found in January 1921 and agreed to make a full confession. He claimed he did see two men with the large suitcase but was unable to get a good look at them. When he reported the incident to District Attorney Charles Fickert he was asked to say the men were Mooney and Warren Billings. Fickert said that if he did this "I will see that you get the biggest slice of the reward." Later two witnesses, Edgar Rigall and Earl K. Hatcher, came forward and provided evidence that Frank Oxman was 200 miles away during the bombing and could not have seen what he told the court at the trial of Mooney.
Source
The real eyewitnesses had said they saw two "Mexican-looking" men plant the bomb, but the prosecution also suppressed this testimony. The real eyewitnesses also did not pick Mooney and Billings out of a lineup. (Mexicans may have had some motive to plant the bomb. The US and the California Militia, led by Gen. John J. Pershing, was involved in an undeclared war against the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa at the time. However, no "Mexican-looking" bombers were ever produced.)
Things got so bad that the trial judge himself, Franklin Griffin, asked the state attorney general to petition the State Supreme Court for a new trial, which he did. Mooney's hanging, scheduled for May 17, 1917, was postponed till August 23, 1918, after President Woodrow Wilson appealed directly to Republican Governor William Stephens. Eventually the execution date was moved to December 13, 1918.
After the State Supreme Court refused a motion for retrial, President Wilson appointed a commission to look into the case.
...Secretary of Labor William Bauchop Wilson had the Director of General Employment John Densmore look at the case. He planted a dictaphone in Fickert’s office and was able to find out that Mooney and Billings had in all probability been framed. Fremont Older reported the allegation in the San Francisco Call of November 23, 1917.
Source
President Wilson began to write letters to Governor Stephens to pardon Mooney, but the Governor refused to answer the letters. Finally, on November 28, 1918, Stephens commuted Mooney's sentence to life in prison. Mooney was less than grateful, writing to the governor,
I prefer a glorious death at the hands of my traducers, you included, to a living grave.
(Note: Watch this short video where he says much the same thing at a subsequent bombing-related trial in 1933.)
By 1918, even William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers had been instrumental in poisoning the atmosphere for the defendants at the trial, had a change of heart. Fremont Older of the Bulletin took a rather cynical view of Hearst's "conversion":
The public tolerated the trial methods because the lies knowingly given currency by the Hearst papers had convinced it that Mooney and his fellow prisoners were guilty. When Hearst denounces those methods he denounces himself. When he asks clemency for Mooney he asks that a wrong be undone which could never have been done without his conscious aid.
There can be no excuse or evasion for Hearst. All that he or his New York editor knows now about the trial of Mooney he and his San Francisco editors knew a year ago. If it appears now that Mooney has been unjustly treated it appeared so then.
The only difference is that a year ago it took courage and a willingness to make sacrifices, to demand justice for Mooney and that now it is dangerous for a newspaper to stand out against that demand.
Fickert's ship is going down. And the rats are leaving it.
The Fight for Justice
With the prosecutors, investigators, witnesses, and jury totally discredited, clearly, Mooney and Billings were now being held because of their politics, not their guilt. Union workers took up Mooney's cause, and general strikes were held across the country in support of him. His cause became international, with workers worldwide clamoring for Mooney's freedom. By 1935, a survey showed that Mooney was the fourth most recognizable American in Europe, behind FDR, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford.
Mooney and his lawyers continued to fight in the courts to no avail. The U.S. Supreme Court denied cert on three different occasions. Unfortunately, Republicans retained control of the governorship of California for 20 more years after Stephens left office. All four refused to pardon Mooney, despite requests from people all over the country, including New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who took on the cause in 1931, but was unable to sway Governor James Rolph (the man who had been mayor of San Francisco at the time of the bombing). Eventually, an appeal was made to FDR to intervene, but he refused. Finally, Democrat Culbert Olsen was elected in 1938, and on January 7, 1939, shortly after being sworn in, Olsen pardoned Mooney, fulfilling a campaign promise. Billings was not released until 1942, but Mooney led the fight to free his friend. Billings didn't receive his official pardon until 1961.
Upon his release, Mooney was given a hero's welcome. A crowd of 25,000 marched down Market Street, led by Mooney and his old Molders Union Local. But things went badly for Mooney. His wife Rena said upon his release from San Quentin,
These twenty-two long years have been moth-eaten. Life to me has been something like a cloak. There is little left but the tatters.
Mooney himself was sickly, suffering from ulcers and jaundice. He had his gallbladder removed shortly after his release from prison. Deeply in debt, he tried to go on a lecture tour to raise money, but his body could not stand the stress. Bedridden, one of his last acts was to advance the campaign to free Communist Earl Browder. Although he had few visitors during his stay at St. Luke's Hospital, after his death on March 6, 1942, a large funeral was held for him in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.
That same year, Warren Billings was finally released. He opened a small jeweler's shop, got married, and eventually became vice-president of the Watchmaker's Union. He died in 1972.
Images of labor cartoons and strikers courtesy www.english.illinois.edu. All other images courtesy foundsf.org
Last Word
I'll give the last word to the trial judge, Franklin Griffin. In a 1928 letter to Republican Governor Clement Young, Griffin wrote:
Speaking very frankly, it seems to me that the great obstacle in the way of Mooney's pardon has been his alleged bad reputation. In other words, he has been denied real justice because the opinion seems to be prevalent, that he is a dangerous man to be at large and therefore should be, innocent or guilty, kept in prison. Conceding, for the sake of argument, that Mooney has been all he is painted, it is, to say the least, most specious reasoning; indeed, no reason at all, why Mooney should be denied the justice which, under our system, is due even the most degraded. Moreover, such a doctrine is more dangerous and pernicious than any Mooney has been accused of preaching.
Source
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