From the first moments after the blast on July 22, 1916, news and condemnation of the attack came quickly. The Los Angeles Herald said the “Diabolical crime … in San Francisco has disturbed the equilibrium of entire California.” The authorities vowed to swiftly bring the “swarthy man” they believed responsible to justice. As the police and investigators scrambled, most of them assumed, as the canvassing of the city began, that the perpetrator(s) must have come from one of the city’s poorer sections, particularly its primarily transient “lodging houses,” as they were known. Residents were told to remain vigilant. The attack, according to an agreeable press, was the work of a “fanatic demon.”
This enthusiasm for finding a culprit quickly reflected broader antilabor and anti-immigrant attitudes of the era. Authorities briefly detained, for example, a transient immigrant who, understandably terrified, was eventually allowed to go free. Just as in American history previously, like the Steunenberg manhunt and aftermath of the L.A. Times bombing, the “powers that be” (the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a hastily formed “anarchy squad,” and others) hoped to use the bombing as an opportunity to smash not only labor but also perceived “radicals,” often, of course, immigrants. The manhunt spoke to the weaknesses of criminal investigation and the immediate reaction led by a determined district attorney to radicalism at the time, sometimes at the expense of due process. In the end, those arrested would be vilified for their radical pasts and associations, and pay a heavy legal price.1
Almost immediately, though, precise blame landed on “radicals.” San Francisco Mayor James Rolph declared, “All agitators will be driven from the city.” One paper did not hesitate to specify the source of the attack: “The I.W.W., anarchists, and socialists have been very strong in denouncing the preparedness campaign … and some of these people are no doubt responsible for this dastardly act.” Similarly, the furious editors at Ontario, Oregon’s newspaper, described cold-blooded Industrial Workers of the World, anarchists, and socialists they felt clearly responsible. “They claim to be opposed to war, but they have no objection to murdering women and children when they think there is a chance to escape the punishment due, it wrote.”2
Other cities felt the shockwaves of the attack and had possible connections. In Chicago, Chief of Police Charles Healy ordered “strict surveillance” in the city by a special “anarchy squad.” He hoped that the ramped up measures might “pick up clews [sic] on the San Francisco tragedy.” Healy’s vigilance stood in line with early speculation that the bombing was “hatched” in a Chicago anarchist colony. Healy and police launched their own investigation accordingly, paying particular attention to the usual or supposedly known “haunts” of Chicago anarchists. Fueling this hunch, in part, was the Mundelein banquet poisoning the past winter, the case where Chicago Club assistant chef Jean Crones (a.k.a. Nestor Dondoglio) had been suspected of poisoning soup at a banquet for the Archbishop. The possible Crones connection swelled into a hunt for a gang of 15 like-minded anarchists whose main targets were the church, its clergy, and European monarchs and statesmen. Authorities arrested Crones that spring, but all of this, authorities felt, may have pointed toward the “Jean Crones Gang,” with their boasts of “destructive purposes,” being somehow involved in San Francisco.3
The bombing, and the hunt for the radicals responsible, made national news, too. “All known anarchists are under close surveillance,” reported the New York Times. The national attention on San Francisco surprised few, but especially those across the country skeptical of labor and the left. City officials swiftly alleged a much larger conspiracy. The District Attorney, Charles M. Fickert, typified this mindset and remained convinced that a “nationwide organization perpetrated the outrage.” Clearly, he claimed, this attack was the work of a “fanatic,” and the speeches of those so ardently opposed to the preparedness parade had found a receptive, radical audience.4
Fickert, described as a “big hulking fellow,” was said to look “less like a lawyer than a prizefighter.” He worked in 1901 as a strikebreaker during a teamsters strike and later ran for the office in 1909 against Francis Heney. In a speech to about 150 workers gathered at Fifth and Bryant streets, Heney accused Fickert of being “the candidate of the corporations” and that United Railroads, who Fickert had worked for during the 1907 strike, funded Fickert’s literature. Speculation arose that the street car company contributed around $100,000 to his campaign. With the support of two dozen of the city’s business leaders, including banking mogul I.W. Hellman, and in many ways in line with what Heney and his supporters alleged, Fickert won the election. Charles Fickert’s election, according to Fremont Older, “was really the end of our hopes of convicting the men who had debauched San Francisco.” As the large type read in “Frame Up” pamphlets, the case could be summarized with “The Real Perpetrators Have Never Even Been Looked For, Because a Corporation-Tool District Attorney Chooses to Take the Opportunity to Crush the Labor Enemies of His Masters.”5
Mooney defenders alleged that Fickert’s own ambitions drove, in part, his handling of the bombing. They charged that he had told family and friends he might find himself in the governor’s office someday and in part because of the fame the case might bring him. Not surprisingly, by 1916, then, Fickert looked to employ the attack to weaken labor in the city. He was not alone. Captain Robert Dollar, of the antilabor Dollar Steamship Company, was, labor sources claimed, overheard saying after the bombing, “this is a fine chance for the open shop.”6
This all was becoming an investigation about labor, then. In Theodora Pollock’s essay she said, “anyone who really knows the labor game in San Francisco (and not merely its political dickering) knows that these are labor cases and nothing but labor cases, and that they constitute an early assault in the ‘open shop’ was now on in this city.” In the November after the attack, business interests rejoiced when the city voted in a statute forbidding picketing. According to the Chamber of Commerce, this new legislation set upon the business of “relieving the city for all time of an instrument of violence, intimidation, and crime.” Pollock, in her critique of business tactics, further identified it all this way:
The same kind [of] providence seems to be have been with the Chamber of Commerce on Preparedness Day. For, blocked in their war shipments by the strike on the water front, the Chamber of Commerce had, with insane ravings, declared its now historic ‘open shop’ war appointed its Law and Order Committee to usurp the government of the city of San Francisco, pledged within fifteen minutes $300,000 of a million dollar labor-breaking fund. A white haired shipping magnate, Captain Dollar, had shouted that the way to restore order in San Francisco was to send a few ambulances of union men to the hospitals with broken heads.7
Yet San Francisco Police mobilized speedily. In a meeting late on Sunday, city and state police held a conference to outline search plans. Police Chief D.A. White organized two special bureaus, one with detectives asked to bring “quick retribution” and a second “secret bureau” made up of detectives experienced in dealing with “bomb plots and outrages in eastern cities.” Still, newspapers revealed a surprising amount of detail about the membership and mission of the “secret” bureau. About 15 of the city’s “best criminal hunters,” they announced, planned to “keep on file” the name of every known “anarchist and dynamiter.” The bureau also intended to attend all public anarchist meetings, as well as infiltrate their “secret conclaves.” Clearly, this demonstrated the broader national fears of radicalism, and the bombing fueled paranoia for some and offered a chance for retribution for others.8
The police reconstructed the explosive device and concluded that it contained a 6–8-in. diameter iron pipe, charged with nitro-tulol, nitrogylcerine, or “some similar high explosive,” set to detonate by a clock. The “death dealing missiles,” they decided, must have been the various scrap metals and bullets that sprayed into the crowd. The police investigation focused its initial attention on plumbing shops and metal supply companies, hoping to find out the source of the bomb’s deadly shrapnel. As they pieced together clues, police also found the handle to the suitcase near the scene, together with other pieces of the lock and clockwork. Within four days, the reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction reached $14,000, the largest sum ever offered in California.
When the reward funds totaled $17,500 for the apprehension of the perpetrators, according to one paper, “San Francisco frothed at the mouth in an orgy of fright, hatred and desire for vengeance.” Some expected the amount to reach $20,000. When the reward funds totaled $17,500 for the apprehension of the perpetrators, according to one paper, “San Francisco frothed at the mouth in an orgy of fright, hatred and desire for vengeance.” Some expected the amount to reach $20,000.
A few witnesses, and a myriad of conflicting stories, emerged. As early as Sunday, Police Headquarters received a call from a witness claiming that he saw a man place the suitcase on the sidewalk and walk away. The witness recalled telling the man that the spot was “not a safe place to leave it,” and the mysterious figure replied, “Attend to your own business; it’s my suitcase, and you let it alone.” Defense witness Jane K. Compton, visiting from Chicago, watched the parade from her hotel window across the street. She maintained that she saw a man crawling on the roof of the building across from her and remembered seeing the man “intently watching” in the moments before the blast. She recalled him leaning over the edge of the building, running back away from the edge, and then the explosion occurred. The defense tried to establish that the bomb might have been thrown from the roof. The police clearly had many leads but few definitive answers.9
M.T. Pendergast, a Spanish-American War veteran and member of the First California Volunteers from Oakland, who was within 8 ft. of the bomb, claimed to see two men leave a black suitcase. Pendergast had been living at 1923 E. 17th Street in Oakland and worked at the Home of Eternity Cemetery there. He arrived in San Francisco around 1:15 on July 22, and went to the southwest corner of Steuart and Market Streets, only a few feet from the site of the explosion. He claimed that he noticed a man standing up from a suitcase laying on the sidewalk next to the saloon. The man, he said, wore a dark suit, black fedora, and had a “very dark complexion.” After the man went into the saloon’s side door, he said, the explosion rang out. When he viewed the defendants in jail, however, none of them resembled the man he had seen above with the suitcase.10
Relief set in for many when authorities finally made an arrest two days after the attack. One man who had reportedly been “acting queerly” attracted attention. He had reportedly said publicly about the bombing, “That’s what they get for talking preparedness too much.” The suspect, Finnish immigrant Frank W. Josefson, was nabbed by police in the sailor’s boarding house he lived in on Drumm Street. “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it!” is all he could exclaim as they arrested him. When he arrived at the station house, he sat trembling. While the arrest certainly typified anti-immigrant sentiments of the day (newspapers had quickly called the bombing the “act of some Foreigner”), the police ultimately believed Josefson’s nervous and scared pleas. Josefson, police admitted, had no connections to the bombing and was released. Two days later, authorities in nearby Fresno apprehended another suspect named Osmond Jacobs. The authorities acted on a tip alleging Jacobs had remarked that the bombing was a “damned good thing.” The promise of this arrest, though, came and went as quickly as the Josefson case.11
The Chamber of Commerce called a public meeting for the night of Wednesday, July 26, at the Civic Auditorium, the city’s largest meeting place. As the planning unfolded, more threats arrived promising an attack on the attendees, purportedly in the same handwriting as the letters that arrived to newspapers before the bombing. Over 6,000 attended the gathering and heard talks from representatives from the Law and Order Committee, as well as the “Committee of the One Hundred,” a group “picked from the best stock San Francisco could produce in an hour of need.” Speakers included Mayor Rolph, Chamber President Frederick Koster, Archbishop Edward Hanna, and more. Their group also passed a rhetorically clear resolution, stating:
That we voice the indignation and horror of the law-abiding elements of this community at the murderous outrage committed on the streets of San Francisco and express the deep sympathy of the community to the sufferers of the infamous crime; that we demand the relentless pursuit of those responsible; that where the people make the laws the people must enforce the laws; that civilization rests on obedience to law, without which no society can persist, or life or property be secure, and we pledge our united support to the redemption of this city from violence and intimidation and the re-establishment of a law-abiding spirit, enforced by the authorities and supported unanimously by all the people.12
At the head of San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce, which had just formed an explicitly antilabor “Law and Order Committee,” was Chairman F.J. Koster. He had called for a mass meeting that Wednesday night to express the business community’s response. “The outrage is another expression of that disease our law and order committee started out to combat,” he announced, “We are bound to stamp it out.” Indeed, and even articulated in their account of events, the Chamber considered the July 22 attack “the natural, logical result of a long period of tolerance of lawlessness and intimidation, coercion and domination of courts, police, and elected officials.” Clearly, the city seemed to be moving strongly against “radicals.” Thus, the sweeping crackdown on dissent, the left, labor, and anarchists remained resolute.13
Labor sympathizers quickly pointed out how Koster, the Chamber of Commerce, and Fickert and the D.A.’s office not only seemed to be working together but also appeared set on a course for convictions against those with previous labor activities. They alleged that Fickert and Koster later met behind closed doors on September 15, 1916, in an unmarked room of the chamber’s offices, to talk about the case. Eugene Debs, not surprisingly, was quick to vilify the forces that emerged so willing to attack labor. In one of his missives, he labeled the city’s business interest and government forces “plundering plutocrats,” “hyenas,” and “blear eyed, bloated bandits.” If the Idaho Steunenberg affair demonstrated anything, it was that this kind of cooperation between local government and business interests was not uncommon. In San Francisco, friends of the defendants alleged that the Chamber spent $1 million for the prosecution, hiring three detective agencies simply “to terrorize witnesses, fix juries, and do general gumshoe work against the accused.”14
One of these leading investigators was Martin Swanson, a former Pinkerton detective, who remained convinced, as many in business circles did, that radical laborers were behind the bombing. For working-class forces in the city, Swanson was a sinister and conniving anti-working-class figure. Both the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and United Railroads had hired Swanson previously, and many in the labor community believed that the city’s nonunionized corporations “cordially hated” those involved in prior strikes. Swanson, they alleged, met with leaders of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company and orchestrated bringing in an electrician named Leffler and allegedly promising him a “good job” if he named individuals like Tom Mooney as involved in the 1913 strike. Swanson remained vigilant in his hopes of implicating and imprisoning certain labor figures ever since.15
Even more resolute in the wake of the 1916 bombing, Swanson drew up a list of all those involved in recent labor altercations, including three recent battles of note: the United Railroads strike, the Pacific Gas & Electric Company strike, and the Machinists’ strike. He turned the list over to police, asking for them to see who was in town during the Preparedness Day Parade bombing. In one defender’s words, “the whole deal was engineered” by Swanson, who hoped for revenge against previous labor malcontents. Of the list Swanson had drawn up after the bombing, only five were in the city on July 22, 1916, though, as the defense later pointed out, no one had identified those persons or had seen any of them on the premises at 721 Market Street. Probably not coincidentally, all five seemed to have had a history with Swanson and his employers.16
Among the first on Swanson’s list was William K. Billings, a 22-year-old past president of the Shoemakers Union. During the manhunt, his “radical” reputation resurfaced. As an unemployed 19-year-old, Billings, “accosted by strangers,” accepted $50 to deliver a suitcase to a saloon. According to his defense, waiting for him in the saloon were detectives, and the suitcase he carried contained dynamite, which earned Billings a two-year stint in the penitentiary. The press described Billings most often as “an ex-con,” and several witnesses to the San Francisco attack fingered Billings, each colorfully referring to him as a “prostitute,” a “sneak thief” and a “dope fiend.”
Estelle Smith, who worked for the dentist at 721 Market Street, told authorities that Billings arrived at the building and, claiming to be a photographer, asked if he could head to the roof to take pictures. She also said Billings had his suitcase on the rooftop along the parade route. During the parade, she watched from a window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mayor Rolph. She swore that after she waved at the mayor, she looked away from the window, and she saw, suspiciously, Billings coming down the stairs from the roof.17
Smith, a.k.a. Moore, a.k.a. Starr, emerged as a key eyewitness against Billings, though her past seemed in question, too. Her criminal record included both “moral offenses” and complicity in a murder where she was ultimately indicted for her part in a “sordid love quarrel” involving her uncle and half-brother. Her uncle was ultimately convicted for the crime. Still, Estelle Smith’s rather ignoble past, or allegations of one, continued to come out. In May 1914, police arrested her during raids of red-light houses in Los Angeles on the charge of “vagrancy.” Really, though, her reputation suffered because of her life as a “woman of the underworld.” During that instance, she avoided punishment for working with police and named the proprietor of the “house of ill fame.” This meant she would also work with police after the 1916 bombing.18
Billings captured Swanson’s initial attention after the July 22 explosion, and this was not their first encounter. Swanson had played a key role in convicting Billings in 1913 for involvement in the Pacific Gas & Electric strike, and he later visited him in jail with the purpose of having Billings finger others for a transmission tower explosion in June 1916. Ever persistent, and based on Smith’s accusation, Detective Swanson confronted Billings in a hospital prescription room at Lane Hospital on July 26, four days after the parade, where Billings was having some eczema treated on his knee. According to one pro-defense source, Swanson called in an “automobile load of fat police and fatter district attorneys” and cuffed Billings. Newspapers announced the arrest “despite his efforts to escape.” In the end, authorities were “certain that Billings was the leader of the gang” responsible, and would arrest Billings and four other suspects, without erstwhile investigation, all by July 27, based entirely on Swanson’s recommendation.19
Later that evening, at 11:30 pm, Edward Nolan, a member of Machinists’ Union #68, was also arrested at his home on Angelica Street. Nolan certainly had labor connections and a long history of labor organizing, as well. He had served as captain of pickets during the 1910 Los Angeles Metal Trades strike. In 1904, 1910, 1911, and 1912, Nolan served as a delegate to the Los Angeles Labor Council, in 1913–1914 to the San Francisco Labor Council, and in 1914 at the San Francisco Iron Trades Council. During July 1916, as defenders pointed out, he was serving as a delegate to the International Machinists’ Union convention in Baltimore during the Preparedness Day Parade. Nolan represented Lodge 68 at the national convention in Baltimore that summer.20
When police searched Nolan’s house, they claimed to find bomb-making materials in the basement, specifically plaster of paris, black powder, and saltpeter. In actuality, the home they searched was the home of William Nolan, an engineer with no relation to Edward Nolan. In addition to this error, how, given that he was 3,000 miles away, supporters asked rhetorically, could Ed Nolan have also been making a bomb in the cellar of his San Francisco home? Because the items were not actually his, authorities eventually let Nolan out on bail, but nine months later. Photographers snapped a picture of a jubilant Nolan and his wife, Ada, when he finally left the county jail. Eight murder charges were also levied against him, but the evidence appeared either missing or scant.21
While the police arrested Billings and Nolan early on, of particular interest to the city’s police was labor organizer Thomas Mooney. Mooney, now 33, was a noted “radical agitator” and could not escape the watchful eye of detective Swanson and San Francisco newspapers. Because of his past involvement with labor, he caught a suspicious eye, indeed.
Wild rumors swiftly circulated about Mooney’s supposed violent past. One tale recounted Mooney offering a “negro” $500 to blow up the famed Liberty Bell, on tour for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition/World’s Fair. The story, quickly dismissed, came from an African American on his way to jail when he confessed this and “Negroes in town say he is a well-known police tool.” This individual, Charles Organ, who claimed to have been offered the $500, wrote letters denying the Mooney plot story and claimed officers stole those letters. One article characterized him as “colored, picked up for forgery in Los Angeles and his third penitentiary sentence,” though admitted that Organ seemed coached by detectives on the Liberty Bell scheme and implicating Mooney. Organ issued this statement:
When in San Francisco jail I wrote four letters denying this lie, three to local newspapers and one to Mr. McNutt, Mooney’s attorney, but I guess they were suppressed. When I was arrested in Los Angeles, two detectives came to me and said ‘You know Mooney, the ‘bomb man.’ I told them I didn’t. But they dictated the whole ‘story’ to me, about the $500, throwing the bomb in the bay and filling the suitcase with bricks. They told me that if I stuck to this story I’d get off with a light sentence on the check charge, and also get a piece of the $17,000 bomb reward. In San Francisco jail they brought Mooney out alone and prompted me to identify him, but I refused. I never saw Mooney in my life before.22
While his name circulated as a suspect, Mooney and his wife Rena were out of town in the resort area of Monte Rio along the Russian River for a week’s vacation. They had made plans well in advance, including informing Rena Mooney’s pupils they would be away, and left San Francisco on a Monday, two days after the Saturday explosion. Then, they heard word they were wanted as outlaws. Tom Mooney, wearing his bathing suit and in a boat two miles up the river from his boarding house, found out while reading the newspaper. Mooney sent a telegram to the Chief of Police David White back in San Francisco that read, in part,
See by papers I am wanted by San Francisco police. My movements are and have been an open book. Will return by next train to San Francisco. I consider this attempt to incriminate me in connection with the bomb outrage one of the most dastardly pieces of work ever attempted.
The police, however, failed to let Mooney give himself up on his own terms. Instead, the authorities grabbed him and Rena at a way station and took them to the police station. The District Attorney, Fickert, claimed that he moved quickly, “in the interest of justice,” and made arrests, in the cases of the Mooneys and Billings, without warrants.23
Witnesses were brought to the police station and identified the five suspects in custody: Warren Billings, Israel Weinberg, Tom Mooney, Rena Mooney, and Edward Nolan. The accused were identified, though not picked out of a lineup. The D.A. office’s management of the case already cast doubt in the minds of some, particularly as the defendants were held not only in solitary confinement but also without any contact from family, friends, or counsel. When the Assistant D.A. told reporter John Fitch that the suspects “ought to be hung without ceremony,” it made clear that the prosecution was most interested in a swift conviction.24
The questioning of the five began without delay. Assistant District Attorney Brennan, who Mooney defenders said was a man “whose particular temperament fits him for bulldozing women,” handled the questioning of Rena Mooney. He reportedly questioned her for two days and two nights in a bathroom. He called in newspapermen to see her after the 48 hours and show that she was in fact “all nervous and excited just like a guilty woman.” The questioning of Billings unfolded as well, and he offered the Chief of Police a thorough retelling of his comings and goings on July 22, even drawing a map of his movements that day. Lawyers on his side announced that his alibi was “one of the most perfect” they had seen. One of the strengthening parts of his recounting happened when Billings retold a conversation that he overheard by businessman Bert Wertheimer outside his store, all with no corroboration with the other defendants. After the arrests, for some, there seemed a “deliberate attempt to arouse public prejudice against them [the defendants]” to the broader public, as members of the prosecution team conducted frequent interviews with the press.25
The grand jury met on August 1 to take testimony. The next day, on August 2, 1916, Warren Billings, Israel Weinberg, Tom Mooney, Rena Mooney, and Edward Nolan were jointly charged with murder. The state charged the five collectively for the, to this point, eight deaths. Formal charges rested on the specific death of Hetta Knapp, one of the bombing victims.26
An international collective, from Eugene Debs to Alexander Berkman, organized defense funds and literature on behalf of Mooney, his wife, and three other “conspirators.” This outpouring of support took financial and editorial forms. Over time, millions of dollars arrived in donations and in support of the defense. In print, publications like The Blast mobilized on behalf of the accused. Robert Minor, the former International Socialist Review cartoonist and contributor for The Blast, volunteered his services (for $15 a week) to take on the defense’s publicity work. Minor served as Treasurer of the International Workers’ Defense League out of San Francisco.27
Other sympathetic publications took notice of the efforts to pin the attack on Mooney and company. “Scarcely a day passes now without some attack on Mooney’s case,” read an essay in the International Socialist Review. The “frame-up,” as Mooney allies called it, had begun. Asking if labor would stand for another Haymarket (the title of her piece), Theodora Pollock made the parallels to 1886 as the 1916 story unfolded. She wrote:
San Francisco in 1916; Chicago in 1886. The closed shop fight now; the 8-hour day fight then. In both cases, a crime of violence occurs and is tied around the necks of innocent labor men in the hope of helping to crush the spirit of labor.
Less radical publications even admitted, despite skepticism about the resulting unrest about the case, that there existed a “pretty general opinion that Mooney did not have a fair trial.” Fremont Older, the editor at the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, appeared from the start as an “unflinching advocate” on behalf of Mooney and Billings but tried to maintain objectivity. He told his reporters following the trial to “avoid anything that would give color to the idea of the innocence of the defendants,” which brought him criticism from Mooney’s associates and charges that he had betrayed the labor movement. Critics charged that these defense editorials and efforts generally were the work of “agitators” and “propagandists” that aimed to foster a “spirit of unrest.” Despite the pretexts of justice and avoiding a “frame-up,” many sneered at the “selfish ambitions” of some of Mooney’s defenders who, these critics believed, hoped to use his case for their own causes.28
From the start, at the center of the investigation was an eagerness to make the bombing part of a much wider radical labor conspiracy and to link those movements and groups. From the first testimony before the grand jury, the prosecution advanced through all the legal proceedings that a conspiracy existed among the defendants to detonate a bomb at the Preparedness Parade. According to the state, Billings and Mooney were responsible for planting the case at Steuart and Market Streets, while Israel Weinberg, in his jitney, served as the drop-off and getaway car. Mooney defenders readily noticed the willingness of those in power in the city, “a group of wild men, controlled by the fiercest kind of class hatred,” they said, to pin the attack on Mooney and labor more broadly.29
Fickert and his colleagues doggedly advanced this idea that the five accused were part of a bigger anarchist conspiracy, with Alexander Berkman at the center. The determined D.A. ordered a search of The Blast’s office, doing so without a warrant. Brennan concurred, arguing in court during the Billings trial that a conviction would serve as “a stepping stone toward uncovering the greater conspiracy.” Because the pages of The Blast included numerous columns defending the suspects, Fickert labeled them anarchists and, if anarchists, then they could easily be, in his mind, the culprits. Further, he and the prosecution team would make reference to the threatening cards mailed to the San Francisco papers. The notes, they claimed, offered a clue into the perpetrator of the explosion, and Charles Fickert went as far as to claim that the cards and The Blast were penned by the same person (meaning Alexander Berkman). He also asserted that the perpetrator dropped the letters in a specific mailbox near Mooney’s residence in the Eilers Building. This was not proven. Strengthening the defense’s retort of these claims was the fact that the authorities did not indict Berkman with Mooney and the other defendants on August 2, 1916. Berkman was later arrested in New York under a California indictment the next summer, with Berkman by that time a long way from San Francisco. With the arrests of Berkman and Goldman, in New York, a representative from Fickert’s office indicated how these arrests had bearing on determining the fate of the Preparedness suspects, given, in their mind, the obvious associations.30
Of course, there emerged an at times frustrating tendency by authorities and the press to conflate labor activism with anarchism. “How long,” asked defender W.B. Cockran, “will it be before the words ‘labor agitator’ shall assume the same vicious, perverted significance that has already been fastened upon the word ‘anarchist?’” Indeed, the fluidity of labor and political movements demonstrated the claims of the intersections of these ideologies and groups worked in favor of the prosecution. In the end, the cases became classic instances of “guilty by association,” when sometimes there was not even an association.1
For their part, the city’s labor interests and unions varied in their careful distance from the attack and the accused. On the one hand, countless unions joined in the International Workers’ Defense League’s support of Mooney. By December 1916, unionized carpenters, painters, butchers, cigar makers, milk wagon drivers, and even salesmen of bakery goods backed the cause of the five accused.31
The State Federation of Labor, though, was slower in taking any action and, according to some of the San Francisco Labor Council, “stood aloof.” At the American Federation of Labor national convention in Baltimore, in November 1916, labor men looking to protect their interests told reporter John Fitch, “This is not a labor case.” While some of the accused “happen to be trade unionists,” they said, “their plight has nothing to do with that fact.” These attitudes changed, however. By the next summer, trade unionists and leaders in San Francisco did not shy from the labor connections. The San Francisco Labor Council now spoke out against the prosecution and maintained the innocence of the accused. They finally acted and issued resolutions of protest, adopted on July 27, 1917, demanding the immediate release of Rena Mooney and Israel Weinberg. Impeachable testimony and other perjuries drove them to act.32
Around this time, and even before the trials began, newspapers like the Philadelphia Public Ledger observed the potential for a miscarriage of justice. “If Mooney should be hanged,” its editors wrote, the result would surely be, to any open-minded observers, the “judicial murder of an innocent man.” It all might have seemed a bit sinister. Maxwell McNutt, one of Mooney’s lawyers, later recounted a conversation he had on the street with Martin Swanson, where the old Pinkerton man made clear the role of detectives in this case:
Don’t you think that if we can keep the private detectives in the background and make it appear that the regular officers of the law worked up the case we can convict Billings and then get Mooney, the man we want?
The stage was set for a trial of the five accused, with much on the line.33
1 Cockran, “A Heinous Plot.”
1 Los Angeles Herald, August 10, 1916; Medford Mail Tribune (OR), July 24, 1916; Tacoma Times, July 25, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916; New York Times, July 24, 1916; Sausalito News, July 29, 1916.
2 Evening Herald, July 24, 1916; Ontario Argus, July 27, 1916.
3 New York Times, July 24, 1916; Evening Herald, July 24, 1916; Toronto World, February 15, 1916; Grey River Argus, April 10, 1916; New York Times, July 25, 1916.
4 Evening Herald, July 24, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916.
5 Fremont Older, My Own Story (San Francisco: The Call Publishing Company, 1919), 120; “Fickert Has Ravished Justice,” n.d. 11; Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?” 15.
6 Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 184; San Francisco Call, October 29, 1909; Robert Minor, “The Frame-Up System: Story of the San Francisco Bomb.” San Francisco: International Workers’ Defense League, 1916. MICH, 7, 11.
7 Theodora Pollock, “Will Labor Stand for Another Haymarket?,” International Socialist Review (1916): 362; Foreword, Chamber of Commerce, A Beginning, 1916.
8 New York Times, July 24, 1916; Medford Mail Tribune, July 24, 1916; Weekly Journal-Miner (Prescott, AZ), July 26, 1916.
9 New York Times, July 24, 1916; Minor, “Frame Up,” 13.
10 Maxwell McNutt, “Petition for Pardon for Thomas Mooney. Before the Governor of California,” April 8, 1918, MICH, 79–80. Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 28, 1919.
11 Sausalito News, July 29, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916; Medford Mail Tribune, July 24, 1916; Weekly Journal-Miner, July 26, 1916.
12 Anton Johannen, “The Mooney Case,” IISH, Letter 1, Berkman, large file; Chamber of Commerce, A Beginning, 20-22.
13 Foreword, Chamber of Commerce, A Beginning, 1916; Medford Mail Tribune, July 24, 1916; Bisbee Daily Review, July 23, 1916.
14 Minor, “Frame-Up,” 12; International Socialist Review 17 (April 1917): 613–614; Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?”, 4.
15 Minor, “Frame-Up,” 3, 12; Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 2, 1929.
16 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 3. Nye, “Justice for Tom Mooney,” 4.
17 John A. Fitch, “The San Francisco Bomb Cases,” The Survey 38 (July 7, 1917): 306.
18 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon”; Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 28, 1919. Nye, “Justice for Tom Mooney,” 4; Minor, “Frame-Up,” 10–11.
19 The Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 2, 1929; Minor, “The Frame-Up System”; New York Times, July 28, 1916; Robert Minor, “The San Francisco Frame-Up,” International Socialist Review 17 (1916): 216–217.
20 Fitch, “The San Francisco Bomb Cases,” 305; Pollock, “Will Labor Stand,” ISR, 1916, 362; Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?”, MICH, 7.
21 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 13. Minor, The Frame-Up System, 5, 8; Minor, “Shall Mooney Hang?” MICH, 6.
22 Minor, “The Suitcase Ghost,” 424–425; Minor, “The Frame-up,” MICH; The Sun (Baltimore, MD), June 2, 1929.
23 The Sun, June 2, 1929; W. Bourke Cockran, “A Heinous Plot”; Carl Nolte, “Centennial of 1916 SF Bombing that Led to Infamous Convictions,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2016.
24 San Francisco Call-Bulletin, January 8, 1932; Organized Labor, July 14, 1917.
25 Minor, “Frame-Up,” 8–9; San Francisco Call-Bulletin, January 8, 1932.
26 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 3–4. Appellant’s Opening Brief, The People of California vs. Thomas J. Mooney (September 1917), Labadie/Michigan Collections, 1–2.
27 Anton Johannen, “The Mooney Case,” IISH, Letter 1, Berkman, large file; Pollock, “Will Labor Stand,” ISR, 1916, 363.
28 Pollock, “Will Labor Stand?,” 360–363; Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 28, 1919; Haldeman-Julius, “The Amazing Frameup,” UCLA, 22.
29 McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 5. New York Globe September 15, 1917.
30 Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 185; Alexander Berkman, “Legal Assassination,” Mother Earth 11 (October 1916); Organized Labor, July 14, 1917; McNutt, “Petition for Pardon,” 57–59.
31 Robert Minor, “The Frame-Up System: Story of the San Francisco Bomb,” (San Francisco: International Workers Defense League), 1916, MICH, 2.
32 John A. Fitch, “The San Francisco Bomb Cases,” The Survey 38 (July 7, 1917): 305; Tom Mooney Molders Defense Committee, “Fickert Has Ravished Justice,” n.d.
33 Philadelphia Public Ledger, September 25, 1917; Fitch, “The San Francisco Bomb Cases,” 306.