The March of Progressive Era Radicalism and Violence
The events and emerging organizations of the 1890s clearly indicated that, at times, the nation began taking a radical turn, and acts of labor violence and anarchist terrorism grew increasingly common. More traditional approaches to reform (party politics, the traditional labor movement, and benevolent reform organizations and institutions) sometimes gave way to radical alternatives. Emerging out of labor and the left’s discontent with Gilded Age and Progressive Era disparities were explicit organizations and approaches on the left that more regularly and openly advocated violence, sabotage, and “direct action.” Certainly, the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Party of America, and later the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) formed a complex network of organizations, radicals, organizers, and agitators that rank-and-file Americans may have feared, and the events during the decade before the San Francisco bombing seemed to only confirm a growing discontent. If the march of labor versus capital and the rise of American anarchism were any indication, a continued advance of class tension and antiradical buildup continued toward 1916 in these preceding years. In many ways, the nation’s fears focused on, of all places, Idaho.
During a snowy Southern Idaho night on December 30, 1905, former Governor Frank Steunenberg headed home. He had retired to Caldwell, Idaho, just west of Boise, four years earlier, had settled into business ventures with his brothers and was otherwise enjoying a normal winter evening. Because of blizzard-like conditions outside, he stopped into the Saratoga Hotel on his way for some mulled cider and perused the Caldwell Tribune by the barroom fireplace. On the chilly walk from the Saratoga to his home, Steunenberg looked his peculiarly disheveled self. His brown hair matted to his forehead, the tall, stocky governor looked “like a Roman senator,” according to one friend. When he arrived at his house on 16th Avenue, like he had done hundreds of times before, he walked up to his front wrought-iron gate. A hastily built trigger on the gate detonated a bomb, with the explosion taking both of his legs and throwing the governor 10 ft. With half of his clothes ripped off, he laid there with mangled legs, and the snow an ominous shade of pink. His wife thought the noise was a potbelly stove exploding but would quickly discover that it was something much more sinister. Steunenberg lived only another 20 minutes and was pronounced dead in his home at 7:10 pm that evening.
But the assassination was much more than a random violent act. Near the close of his gubernatorial term in 1899, Steunenberg had dealt with a serious crisis: a strike by the Western Federation of Miners in the Coeur d’Alene district in the northern part of the state, the epicenter of Idaho’s richest gold, lead, and silver mines. Responding to the use of violence by strikers (including the sabotage of the Bunker Hill mine), he proclaimed martial law and when he asked for federal troops, President William McKinley obliged. The soldiers were ordered to round up over 1,000 miners and placed them into detention centers—hot and cramped “bullpens,” as they were known by miners. On the one hand, validations came from those like Bartlett Sinclair, Steunenberg’s personal representative in northern Idaho during the Coeur d’Alene troubles, who spoke of Steunenberg in glowing terms, observing “a truer friend of laboring classes never lived.” Yet, Steunenberg was famous (or infamous) for the handling of that 1899 Mining War. The most radical miners and workers of the Northwest—and elsewhere—never forgot Steunenberg’s actions.
While anarchists and those keen on “the deed” would have rejoiced, news of the 1905 Steunenberg murder shocked many others. After all, its gruesome news was coupled with it being the first time in American history that dynamite was used in an assassination. Blame quickly fell where it increasingly did: on leftist “radical” labor activists. Idaho Governor Frank Gooding issued a $5,000 reward for the culprit(s) and Pinkerton detectives quickly received a confession from Harry Orchard, a labor spy and someone directly involved in the 1899 Coeur d’Alene violence as a labor terrorist.
Orchard seemed to represent a growing radical fringe of labor activists that many feared might cause just this kind of violence. After all, only a few months before the murder, radical American labor had in Chicago what one organizer called the “Continental Congress of the Working Class”—the 1905 founding meeting of the IWW, a mix of socialists and disgruntled trade unionists separating themselves from more traditional unions. At the center of the IWW, and messenger of the “Continental Congress” rhetoric, was a hard-drinking, Stetson-wearing, one-eyed labor organizer—standing 5'11" and 236 pounds—the menacing William “Big Bill” Haywood. He and IWW founders envisioned a union that did not discriminate on membership or tactics. Instead, the IWW—or “Wobblies,” as they became more commonly known—advocated for “one big union” and hoped that they could have a membership that did not exclude based on skill, race, or gender. A radical union with socialist leanings, they decided to abandon accommodating approaches of unions like the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Eugene Debs, the consummate face of American socialism [the SPA’s (Socialist Party of America) candidate for President five times], was at the meeting and proclaimed that if workers continued to side with the moderate AFL, they could expect to be “puked on in return.”1
Watching the IWW and labor organizers of other stripes very closely was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, an important piece of labor relations in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. The Pinkertons, founded by Allan Pinkerton in 1850, emerged as the private detective agency in the country. In fact, they orchestrated the Steunenberg investigation. They had been made famous by the successful thwarting of an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln; over time, its agents were more commonly hired and employed by corporations looking to protect their financial interests. Outdated police forces at the time simply could not patrol urban environments effectively, and they stood ill-equipped to handle the large labor demonstrations of the late nineteenth century. By the Homestead Strike, the Pinkertons were an acceptable and employed means of handling strikes and strikebreakers (though, ironically, the detectives could usually expect a wage of only about $1 a day). To meet the demand of labor unrest and the crime that came with westward expansion, the Pinkertons opened a new office in Denver in 1886 and had 20 offices by 1907. The business, in other words, warranted this company growth. They hired 58 new detectives in 1899 alone. The Pinkertons had clearly been anti-labor, and Samuel Gompers cited the “unscrupulousness” of the Pinkertons, saying “they have been not only private soldiers, hired by capital to commit violence, and spies in the ranks of labor, they have been and are being used … to provoke ill-advised action, or even violence, among workingmen.”
The Pinkertons had staked a position in Denver because of the growing radicalism among the working class in the American West. Turbulent economic conditions, due in part to volatile extractive industries like mining and timber, were endemic in the West. A largely single, male, and underpaid set of workers fostered resentment, particularly when working conditions—often unsafe—only exacerbated other pressures. Western workers, as historian Melvyn Dubofsky once contended, were the most attracted to socialism and syndicalism—and not necessarily “murder or mayhem,” but emerged as friendly to ideas of radical and dramatic social change.2
It was clear that Idaho mine owners and other resentful capitalists saw the murder as a particularly valuable opportunity to strike back against this radical labor fringe. They were convinced that, and encouraged by Orchard’s statements, this was a conspiracy that went all the way to the top and, they thought, here finally emerged the opportunity to strike a blow against organized labor in the United States. Orchard claimed (after being threatened with hanging) that leaders of the IWW and the Western Federation of Miners hired him to commit the murder. Idaho authorities now believed three IWW/WFM figures—Charles H. Moyer, George A. Pettibone, and none other than Big Bill Haywood—were the guilty conspirators. So, authorities, and specifically the Pinkertons, executed a well-orchestrated stakeout of Moyer, Pettibone, and Haywood (and even assigned them codenames “Viper,” “Copperhead,” and “Rattler”). Agents and Colorado authorities snagged the three men in Denver. Moyer was nabbed on a train platform as he prepared to head to the Black Hills of South Dakota. He was carrying $520.75 in cash, a.44 revolver, and a hundred rounds of ammunition, which he told his captors he always carried when “on the road.” For Haywood, capture was a bit more embarrassing. He was in bed at a place called the Granite Rooming House, stark naked, with his stenographer (who was also his sister-in-law) Winnie Minor.
The three “conspirators” were brought to Idaho for trial on a secret overnight train. Working together, the governors of Idaho and Colorado had successfully arranged for the secret, and illegal, extradition. The quick arrests of Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone, and the denial of due process of law, infuriated many. Protests surfaced among labor unions, radicals, and workers, and the radical press dubbed the forcible extradition to Idaho a “kidnapping.” For socialists, the accusations and hasty “abduction” symbolized a capitalist conspiracy, and Eugene Debs threatened an “armed revolution” in the event of a Haywood conviction. Debs even penned a polemical piece for the International Socialist Review titled, “Arouse Ye Slaves,” asking workers to fight against their capitalist oppressors should the verdict be unfavorable.
Even President Theodore Roosevelt (himself not shy about giving his opinion) weighed in. He grew so angry at Debs’ rhetoric that he explored legal options against the socialist leader. The president also deemed Moyer, Pettibone, Haywood, and Debs “undesirable citizens.” This curious presidential statement that so obviously challenged the presumption of innocence rallied defenders of the accused. In a New York City solidarity parade and elsewhere, buttons proclaiming “I Am an Undesirable Citizen” were ever fashionable.
Almost overnight, sleepy Caldwell, Idaho, had become the epicenter for the battle between “the interests” and “the people.” Journalists, activists, and, of course, lawyers descended upon Caldwell for the trial, while Moyer, Pettibone, and Haywood passed the months in jail. (Colorado socialists even nominated Haywood, in a Boise prison cell at the time, as their 1906 socialist gubernatorial candidate.)
Socialists quickly mobilized on behalf of the three accused men, with workers pledging $140,000 to the defense fund. Caldwell’s socialist local formally denounced “the attempt of the Capitalist press of the country … to pre-judge the case by calling our comrades ‘assassins,’ ‘murders,’ ‘conspirators,’ etc. before the evidence has been heard.” The socialist press also supported the accused. For three months in 1906, Hermon Titus now published the Socialist, previously based in Seattle, Washington, and Toledo, Ohio, from Caldwell to follow the pending court proceedings. Titus distributed the Socialist’s trial reports to every union paper in the United States and he estimated his paper’s accounts reached 2 million workers weekly. The Boise trial’s significance was not lost on workers and socialists everywhere. “Their battle is our battle, their cause our cause,” announced the International Socialist Review. A death sentence for the three accused men, it wrote, “would be a deadly blow at the heart of every labor organization in America.”
Caldwell seemed a “who’s who” of notable Americans around the time of the trial: James McParland, the nation’s “great” detective, famous for his work against the Molly McGuires in Pennsylvania, worked tirelessly (and sometimes deviously) on behalf of the prosecution. One of the nation’s most beloved actresses, Ethel Barrymore came through town (and even met with Harry Orchard) with the touring production of her traveling show Jinks. Gifford Pinchot spoke to a capacity crowd of 800 at a local theater and warned that at the current rate of forest consumption the United States had only 20 years of timber left. Walter Johnson, one of the best baseball pitchers in history, was dazzling fans as a member of the local Weiser (“Wheezer”) Kids and posted the gaudy mark of 77 consecutive scoreless innings. While the attorneys in the Haywood trial sat in the stands in stunned amazement, Johnson was only weeks from heading to the big leagues to begin a hall-of-fame career with the Washington Senators.
From Chicago, though, came one of the most nation’s notable characters to defend Haywood: Clarence Darrow. If he was not a celebrity by then, he would be after the Steunenberg defense (arguing in defense of Leopold and Loeb in 1924 and John Scopes in 1925, for example). A man described by social reformer Brand Whitlock as having a “beautiful ugliness,” Darrow arrived with a self-righteous sense of justice, clad in the finest silk shirts and black silk ties from Marshall Field’s back in Chicago, a far cry from the dress of the jury: all older, white, male farmers. After two months of trial, the rumpled Darrow delivered a closing argument that spanned 11 hours and 15 minutes. He finished by summarizing the stakes: “Out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the wide oceans where men are tossed and buffeted on the waves, through our mills and factories, and down deep under the earth… the poor, the weak and the suffering of the world are stretching out their helpless hands to this jury in mute appeal for Will Haywood’s life.”
On July 28, 1907, driven by Darrow’s eloquence, the jury acquitted Haywood and his “co-conspirators,” as the prosecution failed to prove the conspiracy. Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone escaped jail time, observed the American Federationist, despite “the whole power of the state” and the most “resourceful” prosecuting attorneys working for a conviction. Harry Orchard, however, received a lifetime sentence for the murder. After a conversion to Christianity, he lived out his days raising chickens and growing strawberries at the state penitentiary.3
The rise of this reactive American brand of labor violence and anarchism in the prewar years was certainly not surprising. At no other time in American history than the first part of the twentieth century did capital and labor come into such marked conflict. Just as Jack London’s protagonist Ernest Everhard described in the 1908 novel The Iron Heel, “never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux … an unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre [sic] and structure of society.” This strained relationship between “the interests” and “the people” resulted in a nation on edge. The roots of these tensions were notably long hours for low pay in often-dangerous conditions for the workers of a new industrial economy. The series of events that had already demonstrated the extent of these tensions, notably Haymarket (1886) and the Pullman Strike (1894), were only followed by these increasing violent alternatives that exemplified an increasingly radicalized and discontented working class, such as the 1905 Steunenberg murder in Idaho and the 1910 L.A. Times Building bombing in Los Angeles, where acts of violence (for some, propaganda of/by the deed) saw employment. The early twentieth century, without question, emerged as one of the most turbulent in our nation’s history. As the wealth gap widened and war approached, the unsettled relationship between the working class and capitalists steadily intensified in a myriad of ways. The era continued as a swirl of organizing, agitation, and, at times, violence.4
Similar terror gripped California a few years later. In the early hours of Saturday, October 1, 1910, an explosion and then resulting fire ripped through the building, killing 21 people, mostly printers, linotype operators, and telegraph workers. The explosion, which erupted shortly after 1 am, shattered windows all along First and Broadway. “There is no other cause than dynamite,” announced some sources, and blame immediately fell on organized labor, in no small part due to the sentiments expressed by the paper’s management like Assistant General Manager Harry Chandler. “There is no doubt that this terrible outrage can be laid to the doors of the labor unions,” he said to the press, “for years we have been receiving threatening letters from people who said that the paper ought to be blown up.” Proprietor of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis, who was in Mexico City, at the request of President Taft to help commemorate the Mexican centennial, hurried back to Los Angeles and quickly echoed these feelings. He issued a statement to the press, deploring the loss of life, especially of his “loyal and faithful workmen.” He then turned his attention to the “conspirators and assassins.” He refused to surrender the spirit of the Times in the face of, not just in L.A. but around the state and country, to “bomb throwers and anarchists.”5
The Chief of Police Alexander Galloway also endorsed these beliefs, telling the press, “I do not think that the despicable outrage was committed by a Los Angeles union labor man or any of their sympathizers, but by someone from another city.” So, while he made clear it was not an Angeleno, he did not deny the possibility of labor or its “sympathizers.” The City Council held a special meeting, and they allocated $25,000, to be used at the mayor’s discretion, to investigate the explosion’s cause. Mayor Alexander offered $2,500 of these funds as a reward for the perpetrator. He also decided to place another watchman at city hall, especially because there was only one on duty after hours for the entire building, including the treasury.
Anxieties remained high. Organizers postponed a planned labor parade for the following Monday. Intended as a protest to recent anti-picketing legislation in the city, local union leaders met with the mayor, chief of police, and others and determined it best to put off the parade, thinking it “unwise” at the time of uncertainty. As news trickled in, there was even a reported second attempted attack at the Times’ auxiliary plant on College and San Fernando streets by a night watchman at the nearby Baker Iron Works. The guard, C.J. Johnson, recalled investigating noises about 20 minutes after the Times building explosion, and spotted two men running away, so he fired two shots. About a half hour later, police arrested (in a typically nameless manner) “a negro.” More unease arrived outside of L.A. Later in the day, at the center of Riverside’s town center, residents were thrown into a “near panic” at the sound of a “sharp explosion.” Later, it was revealed that it was a photographer, working on some advertising work, taking photos of a storefront. He had apparently used too much powder and his flash caused the commotion. Clearly, citizens remained on edge.6
Union leaders were careful not only to first express their condolences to those who had perished but also to remind the public of the L.A. Times’ antiunion positions and offer a quick denial of any union ties. James Lynch, President of the International Typographical Union, accused the paper “for many years” of being “a bitter, unrelenting, and unreasoning enemy of trade unionism” and condemned the attempts of Otis and others to pin the attack on unionism. Speaking from St. Louis, AFL President Samuel Gompers, similarly said that while “the position of the Times toward union labor was well known,” he did not believe there was any connection to union men. After expressing regret for the loss of life, he told the press, “I see no reason for thinking that union members had anything to do with it.” Andrew J. Gallagher, Secretary of the San Francisco Labor Council, upon hearing the charge that the dynamiting was the act of “industrial enemies of the paper,” called it “absurd” and expressed his sympathies for the victims. The California State Federation of Labor conducted their own investigation and concluded that the blast resulted from a gas leak. The report also could not resist including in their findings a statement on Otis, noting “on the subject of industrial freedom it is no exaggeration to say that General Otis is insane.” As one might assume, Eugene Debs weighed in, too. He reminded readers of the Labor Journal that Otis and the Times had been very critical of him during the Pullman strike; in Debs’ words, they “lied about me outrageously.” He claimed that now, by 1910, the class war on the Pacific Coast “had reached its acutest stage,” with organized labor and socialist politics “in full swing.” As a result, he proposed, the owners and managers of the paper (who were not among the bomb’s victims) might have been prepared for the attack and hoped to use it, as he quoted from “capitalist” newspapers, so that “the last vestige of union labor has been wiped off the Pacific Coast.” As events unfolded, and only heightened tensions, another explosion ripped through L.A.’s Llewellyn Iron Works on Christmas Day.7
In April, authorities arrested James and John McNamara. Arrested in Indianapolis on April 22, John McNamara (known as “J.J.”) had served as a leader for the International Structural Iron Workers. When arrested in Indiana, Detective William Burns oversaw his secret transport, without legal representation or contact with friends and colleagues, back to Los Angeles. Samuel Gompers called it a “kidnapping” that “smacks of theatricals,” noting how the arrest and transport eerily resembled the Haywood arrest a few years earlier. “How long are the American people going to stand for legalized kidnapping?” he asked. Once again, he charged that not only was the extradition wrong but also that the “enemies of labor” and “huge money interests” were again hoping to strike a blow against labor unions.8
The suspects arrived in Pasadena and newspapers showed their arrival, with James (who went by “J.B.”) shielding his face. Also arrested and brought to California was Ortie McManigal, who confessed to the District Attorney on April 27 of his involvement in dynamiting plots over three years, including a March 1909 attempt to bomb the Boston Opera House. Wanting to “get it off my chest” (though probably seeking some immunity and help himself), he claimed during the three-hour confession to be a part of this and several other attacks, most of which were successful, culminating in the destruction of approximately $4 million in property. For the L.A. bombing, he fingered the McNamara brothers as the organizers (J.J.) and executors (with J.B. actually placing the bomb).9
On December 1, 1911, with the hope of avoiding the death penalty, James McNamara pleaded guilty to first-degree murder (the death of machinist Charles Haggerty, specifically). At the same time, John McNamara, reportedly “pale as a ghost,” pleaded guilty to the Llewellyn Iron Works bombing. “I have very little to say,” he said when interviewed by a San Francisco Call reporter, only making the point that “the ends justified the means” for his actions. A delighted Charles Fickert announced that J.B. “confessed because he was guilty, and that’s all there is to it.” The District Attorney John Fredericks asked, at the December 5 sentencing, for life imprisonment for James and 14 years in jail for John. Defeated, Clarence Darrow, as counsel for the defense, sat chewing on a yellow pencil, nodding his head at the chance to avoid the trial that some projected would cost up to $500,000. He later told the papers that he encouraged a confession because it was “the best thing” and the case “presented a stone wall.”10
Others remained defiant, including Walter Drew, who served as chief counsel for the National Erectors’ Association. The organization had hired detectives to look into the bombing and, typical of the pattern in Idaho and elsewhere, was convinced that the attack pointed to a much broader conspiracy. The McNamaras, Drew claimed, were merely “tools” used by the advocates of the closed shop and their crimes were “nominal compared to those committed by the men who send them to do these jobs and who paid for murdering men.” Not surprisingly, a string of arrests aimed not only at the McNamaras and their believed accomplices but also to a “vast conspiracy” of individuals involved in funding and moving dynamite and nitroglycerin across the country. “Dynamiters by [the] score” were part of this group of over 50 implicated.11
The state announced convictions in December 1913 in an Indianapolis courtroom. After 16 minutes of deliberation, the jury levied the guilty verdict upon a total of 38 men, living coast to coast, in the broader “dynamite conspiracy case.” The convictions included almost the entire executive staff of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Iron Workers (of which John had served as Secretary-Treasurer). Included among those convictions were two notable San Francisco labor activists, Olaf Tveitmoe, the Secretary of the California Building Trades Council, and a collaborator named Eugene Clancey. Their convictions came specifically for the illegal transfer of explosives. They typified the broader statewide connections of labor and the left, and San Francisco’s role in it all.12
Not unexpectedly, and amid this climate and links to the L.A. attacks, San Francisco in the prewar years emerged as a “who’s who” of notable leftists. Celebrated author Jack London, himself a known socialist, first met famed anarchist Emma Goldman in his beloved home city of San Francisco. At the age of 15, London began work at Hickett’s cannery on Myrtle Street in West Oakland. His memories of the work were far from fond. His shifts were 10 hours, mind-numbingly manning a machine during his time on duty. He once worked 36 straight hours. London began his activities in Bay Area radicalism with an address to an Oakland socialist party gathering in early 1907, speaking to the extradition and holding of the three Steunenberg suspects from Colorado. “If the work of freeing Moyer and Haywood and Pettibone is to be carried to a successful conclusion,” he announced in front of the group, “we must lift not only our fingers but our fists.” He also began an affair with another prominent San Francisco socialist, Anna Strunsky, not long after his first marriage. Together, they penned The Kempton-Wace Letters, a novel based on their romance correspondence. London later wrote the introduction to Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, causing some of his fans to refuse to purchase his own fiction. London failed to live an idyllic existence in the Bay Area, perhaps because of his political leanings. Tim Muldowney, owner of a resort in Oakland, assaulted London on June 21, 1910, and was charged with battery on the famed “author, globe troller, sailor, and journalist.”13
Another prominent San Franciscan leftist, and friend of London’s, was Lucy Robins Lang. A Jewish immigrant, she entered union activism through cigar making. She heard Emma Goldman speak while very young and became an anarchist. She eventually eloped and married another anarchist, Bob Robins, in 1904. Like their political beliefs, even their wedding vows were unconventional, allowing for reconsideration of the marriage after five years. They made a home in San Francisco and, at the encouragement of Jack London, established a vegetarian restaurant (even though London soon embraced a diet of raw meat). The city’s anarchists and radicals kept the place full of customers.14
Similarly, Emil Liess, known as a “prominent local Socialist,” staged public debates with anarchists in the community. The anarchist press particularly thrived in the city. Abe Isaak—who had edited Portland, Oregon’s The Firebrand, with two others, Henry Addis and Abner J. Pope—found himself in hot water for his work. Authorities arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned all three men in Portland for publishing an “obscene poem” the previous year (later revealed to be Walt Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me”). After the affair, Isaak relocated to San Francisco and revived his paper under a new title, Free Society. Eric Morton, a like-minded local anarchist and close friends with Matthew Schmidt of the Los Angeles Times conspiracy, busily edited his anarchist journal Freedom across town. The Circolo Studi Sociali L’Aurora (The Aurora Social Studies Circle) planned its first annual picnic specifically to benefit revolutionary papers. The Oakland event included “dancing and all kinds of games” and free dinner and drinks for ladies. Clearly, this was a varied and prominent cadre of radicals in San Francisco.15
During 1913, the city saw more labor-related unrest when workers went on strike against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco. The Los Angeles Herald reported the strike broken on May 23 because of a new electrical union and its agreement to terms with the company. Yet tensions surrounding the strike peaked that summer. In South San Francisco, four company poles were dynamited in the early morning hours of July 8. Violence erupted later that day at around 11 am, when 10 “strike sympathizers” allegedly attacked two nonunion employees.16
People were particularly on edge because of a huge cache of dynamite discovered near the Pacific Gas and Electric station at Sixth and H Streets, causing the Sacramento Union to run an editorial “Cut Out the Dynamite.” Believing it might be used for political means, “Dynamite should not be permitted a place … in any strike game,” it lectured. And yet, it did. On August 24, bombs blew up two of the company’s aerial transformer stations, knocking out lights for about half of Contra Costa County. Authorities searched for two men they believed responsible.17
Their attention turned to one young member of the city’s labor activists, Warren Billings, a.k.a. Tommy Harris. Raised by his German mother and Massachusetts-bred father in Brooklyn, Billings graduated from Brooklyn public school #144 and went to work as an errand boy in a print shop. By the time he was 17, he landed in the carpentry business, briefly, before another stint as a streetcar conductor. Almost by chance, he later found work in a shoe factory, which became his trade as he worked in five or six different factories. He eventually served as President of the Boot and Shoe Workers’ Union in San Francisco. He then drifted to Rochester and then Buffalo, beginning what was described as his “hobo period,” learning at the “school of hard knocks.” By age 19 and in 1912, he had other stops in Kansas City and Portland, Oregon, where he encountered the Wobblies and paid them a sympathetic ear, though did not officially join the IWW. He had been a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, though, and in just his early 20s, emerged as an active participant in the city’s labor circle. In this year, without work, he decided to travel to Mexico and join Pancho Villa’s army. As fate would have it, he stopped in San Francisco while en route, arriving on March 12, 1913. Visiting the Murray’s and Ready’s employment agency, he met a shoe factory striker, who in turn introduced Billings to Tom Mooney. While together during this shoe strike, amid a scuffle, a gunman employed by the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association shot Billings. His new acquaintance, Tom Mooney, also a part of this labor action, was run down by a car full of strikebreakers, which broke his leg.18
The authorities arrested Warren K. Billings in September for his presumed role in the 1913 Pacific Gas action. Police nabbed him inside the Lycke Saloon that Saturday night. He reportedly had with him a suitcase full of dynamite. While they believed Billings carried the dynamite with the intent of more attacks on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the suspect remained silent. Pinkerton detectives attempted to trace the purchase and movement of the dynamite from the Hercules plant and continued their search for a second man. Strangers allegedly offered Billings, 19 years old at the time and who had found modest work as a tailor’s assistant, $50 to transport a suitcase to a Sacramento saloon. Unemployed, he took the job, but the men in Sacramento turned out to be detectives working on a set-up for the gas company. Reportedly unbeknownst to him, the case contained dynamite, and Billings received a two-year prison sentence at Folsom Prison.19
Stockton, California, witnessed a strike the next year. There, agents working for the Merchants, Manufacturers and Employers’ Association tried to break the 1914 strike by sending labor leaders to jail. Tensions came to a head when one of the gunmen for the MM&E, a man named Hans le Jeune, visited the hotel room of Anton Johanseen, one of the Carpenter Union’s organizers. Johanssen, though, was ready and pulled his gun on le Jeune, who was forced to admit that he intended to plant suitcases of dynamite not only in Johanssen’s room but also in the baggage check room of the Southern Pacific station and a check slip snuck into the pocket of Olaf Tveitmoe, Secretary of the California Building Trades Council. J.P. Emerson, one of the detectives for the MM&E, was caught with one of the suitcases of dynamite but was curiously released without charge. At the center of exposing these deeds and getting Emerson back to jail were Tom Mooney and Ed Nolan. Emerson later confessed to having the case and being put by the MM&E to “discredit union labor.” Rena Mooney attended his trial, taking notes throughout, and these notes later saw use as evidence of her history with dynamite.20
One of the other figures in both the 1913 Pacific Gas and Electric Company and MM&E strikes was this character Tom Mooney, increasingly an important emerging labor figure in San Francisco and California. Born in Chicago to an Irish mother and father from Indiana, when he was two the family moved to Washington, Indiana, where he lived until around 10. He grew up around the coal mines of Indiana, where his father worked. Some of Tom’s earliest memories, in fact, were the labor troubles and stories he heard from his father. Once a scab tried to beat up Mooney’s father, and he responded by shooting the scab in the leg. His father’s death, not long after this incident, meant the end of Tom Mooney’s formal education, as he needed to work in order to support his mother and two younger siblings. He found work in a foundry at the age of 15, serving four years as a molder’s apprentice. At the end of this term, around August 1902, he asked for journeymen’s wages and also joined the International Core Makers’ Union (later the International Molders’ Union). This began a long relationship with the union; he was a card-carrying member of good standing for decades. His appeal for higher wages was not met, so he went to work for a foundry in East Cambridge at the Blake Pump Works. For the union there, he became shop committeeman at age 19. He and his colleagues received $2.55 for a nine-hour day of work; women there received $1.10 for 10 hours on the job. Mooney rightfully believed the unionized women were being taken advantage of, and when he pressed ownership, the superintendent laid him off. Thus began a long history of labor work and agitation.
By 1904, having worked for a spell of six months at a foundry in Waterbury, he found himself in St. Louis. At the time, the city hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and approximately 19 million visitors visited the fair during its seven months. Much like the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the Exposition once again offered an opportunity to showcase American advancement and Progressive Era prosperity. Yet jobs in the city were a bit scant, and Mooney took work in the Kansas and the Dakotas wheat fields, often traveling and looking for work, though never “on the bum,” as some at the time might have said of vagrants during the period. Back in Holyoke, he got work with the Dean Steam Pump Company, where he helped lead a strike for a shorter work day of nine hours instead of 10. In 1906, at the age of 23, he landed in Depew, New York, and was employed at the Gould Coupler Works, making bolsters for railroad trucks. There, he worked eight hour shifts for $4 each day. He lived at the YMCA in Buffalo while working there, and remained active in union work, almost winning a bid to the International Molders’ convention in Philadelphia.
On the stump or as a young organizer, those around him might have noticed that Mooney had a square chin, a straight mouth, and hazel eyes. He also possessed muscular hands that left little doubt about his time performing manual labor. Accounts varied of Mooney’s speech, as some thought that he sounded like a longshoreman and often used grammatical errors. Yet, others noticed that he always chose his words carefully and spoke like someone well read. When interviewed in prison, one visitor placed him equal to previous interviews of “novelists, poets, publicists, statesmen – many of the first caliber” that indicated a well-educated person.
His sympathies for and connections to more radical politics grew over time. In his younger years, he certainly encountered socialism, as one of the alderman in Holyoke was David Luther, who gave talks on the subject. Similarly, in Waterbury, he met a Swedish socialist named Peter Peterson and, like Luther, listened to him but remained committed to trade unionism. While he did not consider himself a socialist, during his first time at the ballot box, he voted socialist. In 1908, in Stockton, California, he solicited at stores, saloons, boarding houses, and offices on behalf of Debs and the SPA, raising about $75 for the campaign. He served as a delegate to the California Socialist convention in San Francisco and travelled to San Jose to meet the “Red Special” that fall. He met Debs and was able to board the campaign train. His enthusiasm earned him not only an invitation to join the train on its trip up to Portland, Oregon, but also to remain on the train on its swing back to Terre Haute before the election. Debs described their weeks on the train tour together fondly. “We ate and slept together,” he said, “everyone on the train loved him. To me he was a younger brother.” In a letter from June 28, 1909, Debs enthusiastically endorsed Mooney as “one of the most active workers in the labor movement. He is absolutely honest and trustworthy … filled with energy and ambition to better the condition of his class.” Debs deemed him “worthy of any position he may wish to hold in the labor movement.”21
It was no surprise that Debs praised his enthusiasm. During 1909 and these travels, Mooney heard word of a contest offered by Wilshire’s Magazine, which offered a “trip around the world” to the person who could secure the most subscriptions in eleven months. The brainchild of the “millionaire socialist” Gaylord Wilshire, Wilshire’s Magazine emerged as one of the country’s most important leftist publications, second only to Girard, Kansas Appeal to Reason. Wilshire’s boasted a circulation of approximately 200,000 at this time during 1909 and 1910. Determined to “win that trip fair and square,” Mooney set out, without any money, and covered about 8,000 miles while he crisscrossed the country by rail. He rode in boxcars and on top of passenger trains across much of the West, often sleeping in roundhouses, barns, and at Socialist party headquarters. He estimated that he sold about $1,000 worth of literature during two months aboard the Red Special. He made one last appeal in the pages of the International Socialist Review in 1910, asking for readers to send their $.25 subscriptions to him so that he might make one final push to win the contest. Despite his persistence, Mooney finished second to George Goebel of Newark, New Jersey, a national organizer and lecturer for the Socialist Party. So, Mooney had to settle for the runner up prize: a trip to the Copenhagen Congress of the Socialist International.22
By 1910, Tom Mooney lived at 973 Market Street, Room 301 in San Francisco. There, he continued a long history of labor activism. For many years a member in good standing in the International Molders’ Union of North America, he also worked as a Trustee of Molders’ Union No. 64. He served as a delegate to the Labor Council in 1912 and at the International Molders’ Convention in Milwaukee. Mooney was an active organizer in San Francisco for the “Amalgamated” Association of Street Car Men, too. By many accounts, corporate interests never forgot Mooney’s plans for this type of action. He had tried, with help from his wife Rena, to organize the employees of the United Railroads of San Francisco, much to the irritation of the city’s business community. By the 1913 Pacific Gas and Electric Company strike, which Mooney participated in, he ended up behind bars. Police charged him, along with H.I. Hanlon and Joe Brown, with having high explosives in his possession. Investigators tried to connect Mooney to the explosives, and they did discover some in a boat said to belong to Mooney, but after three trials, Mooney received a final acquittal in June 1914. Mooney was exonerated because the police who seized the boat failed to find any explosives. Still, Mooney earned a reputation as a “dynamiter” in the press regardless.23
By 1916, as a member of the Molders’ Union by this point for 14 years, he was, according to allies, a “marked man.” “Socialist educated and a Socialist still,” he continued to be involved in strikes in San Francisco. He caught a particularly suspicious eye for his work in the Stockton carmen’s strike. While it might have depended on the account, Mooney was most often characterized as a “labor agitator” and “radical.” An advocate for labor “of the most pronounced revolutionary type,” according to the Chicago Sunday Tribune, Mooney reportedly had a history of sympathizing with “extreme socialistic doctrines” that made him “a man to fear.” While precise evidence often lacked, his implication in dynamite and bombing plots cast a serious amount of suspicion toward him. These “mischievous activities” and “vague and anonymous threats” attributed to him—but not certainly so—were nonetheless incriminating for many. Writings about Mooney almost always included these matter-of-fact associations. Initially an “obscure labor organizer,” he was increasingly characterized as a known socialist and militant with “some relations” to Alexander Berkman and “other West Coast radicals.”24
Also implicated in the streetcar strike and a known associate of the Mooneys was Israel Weinberg. Weinberg got to know Mooney because his 12-year-old musically inclined son, Ernest, began taking lessons from Rena. While he initially studied the piano, because the boy showed considerable talent, Mrs. Mooney offered him additional violin lessons for free. As a show of his gratitude, he occasionally gave the Mooneys free rides in his jitney bus. One of the trips he provided Mrs. Mooney was purportedly to one of the organizing meetings for the United Railway Company strike.25
Israel Weinberg had immigrated from Russia, with no money or English skills. In 1902, he had organized the Jewish Carpenters’ Union in Cleveland. He served as a member of Carpenters’ Union No. 483. He began driving jitney buses and eventually was in a position to purchase a bus in San Francisco. He also sat on the executive board of the Jitney Bus Operators’ Union. They claimed to take about $3,000,000 in 5-cent fares, causing the United Railroads to lose income and “totter on the brink of receivership.” Far from a high-profile labor leader, Weinberg, certainly in comparison to Mooney and Billings, was characterized as “practically unknown.” Yet, he too found himself embroiled in this labor scene and with what some might have seen as disagreeable associations. These associations proved incriminating for Weinberg, even though he first met his alleged co-conspirators Nolan and Billings when he arrived at a jail cell with them.26
So, by 1916, San Francisco’s labor climate remained a complex blend of anarchism, labor radicalism, and action. On the eve of the 1916 attack, the city boasted a myriad of fluid movements, ideas, and radicals. While some might have been card-carrying socialists, they would not have considered themselves anarchists by any stretch of the imagination. Wobblies might have approved of direct action and sabotage and many more did not. The anarchists that perpetrated the deeds of this era, like in Los Angeles, were cut from many ideological cloths.
As he lay dying, Frank Steunenberg’s last words to his wife, Belle, were “What does it all mean?” So, what does this all mean? Before the Steunenberg murder captured national attention (and for sometime after), institutions like workman’s compensation, an eight-hour day, and, yes, even a federal income tax did not exist. In addition to the obvious notions of working-class rights, social justice, and the right to a fair trial, a small-town murder could offer powerful reminders of the battles that shaped modern America. Swelling and forceful alternatives exemplified an increasingly radicalized and discontented working-class left. After the 1905 Frank Steunenberg murder in Idaho, the swift blame placed on “Big Bill” Haywood and the IWW reflected the rather typical antiradical attitudes of the period. Additionally, the 1910 L.A. Times Building bombing that killed 21, an act of violence quickly pinned on unions, who the press labeled “anarchist scum”—the so-called “crime of the century” was again a chance to strike a serious blow to labor and radicals. Just as conservatives and the press hoped, the bombings and convictions effectively halted the labor movement in L.A., and the events exemplified the quick counteraction against labor, the left, and violent acts during the period. Undoubtedly, events in Idaho in 1905, Los Angeles in 1910, and what unfolded in San Francisco revealed that the West—and the nation—was building to 1916 as a high point of this wider atmosphere of radicalism and violence.
1 Jeffrey A. Johnson, “They Are All Red Out Here”: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895–1925 (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 71.
2 Paul Kahan, The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry (New York: Routledge), 201, 449; J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 191, 83; Melvyn Dubofsky, “The Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism, 1890–1905,” in The Labor History Reader, ed. Daniel J. Leab (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 230–231.
3 Spokesman-Review, December 31, 1905; David Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1955), 31; Lukas, Big Trouble; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 100; Carlos Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in Washington and British Columbia, 1885–1917 (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1979), 170; International Socialist Review 7 (May 1907): 686; Johnson, They Are All Red Out Here, 73–75; Dubofsky, Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 87; American Federationist 14 (September 1907): 672–673; International Socialist Review 6 (May 1906): 647, 7 (June 1907): 750, 7 (May 1907): 686–687; Appeal to Reason, June 12, 1909.
4 Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1908 edition (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), 77–78.
5 Wenatchee Daily World, October 1, 1910; Los Angeles Herald, October 2, 1910.
6 Los Angeles Herald, October 2, 1910.
7 El Paso Herald, October 1, 1910; Los Angeles Herald, October 2, 1910; Daily Capital Journal (Salem, OR) October 28, 1910; The Labor Journal (Everett, WA), October 21, 1910.
8 Washington Times, April 23, 1911.
9 San Francisco Call, April 28, 1911; Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, IL) February 14, 1912.
10 San Francisco Call, December 2, 1911.
11 Aberdeen Herald (Aberdeen, WA), December 4, 1911; Rock Island Argus, February 14, 1912.
12 Weekly Journal-Miner (Prescott, AZ), January 1, 1913.
13 Jack Ross, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 84. Joan London, Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1939), 37, 318. Los Angeles Herald, June 22, 1910.
14 Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 166.
15 Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 136, 242; The Blast, July 15, 1916.
16 Los Angeles Herald, May 23, 1913; San Francisco Call, July 9, 1913.
17 Sacramento Union, July 11, 1913, August 25, 1913.
18 The Survey 38 (May 5, 1917): 124; Haldeman-Julius, “The Amazing Frameup,” UCLA, 44–45; Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?” MICH, 7.
19 Sacramento Union, September 16, 1913; Minor, “The Frame-Up System,” 3; The Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 2, 1929.
20 Minor, “The Frame-Up System,” 3–4; Tom Mooney Molders Defense Committee, “Fickert Has Ravished Justice,” n.d.
21 Haldeman-Julius, “The Amazing Frameup,” UCLA, 27, 29–31, 34; International Socialist Review 17 (April 1917): 613.
22 Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 251; Thomas J. Mooney, “Hoboed Over 8,000 Miles,” International Socialist Review 10 (May 1910): 1052–1053.
23 Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 251; “Shall Mooney Hang?” 6; Sausalito News, June 27, 1914; The Sun, June 2, 1929.
24 Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 28, 1919; The Sun, June 2, 1929.
25 Cockran, “A Heinous Plot;” Minor, “Shall Mooney,” MICH, 7.
26 Minor, “Shall Mooney,” MICH, 7; Cockran, “A Heinous Plot;” Robert Minor, The Frame up System: Story of the San Francisco Bomb (San Francisco: International Workers Defense League, 1916), MICH; John A. Fitch, “The San Francisco Bomb Cases,” The Survey 38 (July 7, 1917): 305.