No intelligent man who reads the record and goes into the circumstances surrounding the conviction of Tom Mooney can doubt that he was railroaded into the penitentiary. No one can question that he is an innocent man.
William Allen White, Editor, Emporia Gazette (Kansas)
What happened on the streets of San Francisco on the afternoon of July 22, 1916, seemed to pull at the fabric of the country. A horrific act, the deaths of 10 innocent victims alarmed citizens from coast to coast, and the events that tenuous summer represented a larger pivotal stage in American history. The subsequent legal battle, much of which was clearly rooted in fabricated and altered evidence, had led to the conviction and imprisonment of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. Held in jail for years, Mooney may have been the nation’s most famous political prisoner, but the fate of he and Billings divided opinions. For some, the accused typified un-American radicals; to others, they were falsely accused martyrs for labor and the marginalized. The legal maneuvering had continued for 20 years, but, as it does, the nation moved on and lives continued elsewhere.
Many Red Scare deportees, sent aboard the Buford, better known as the “Soviet Ark,” found themselves in Russia or scattered across Europe. The most famous of these deportees, such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, saw the press paint the group as violent and dangerous. By the summer of 1936, Berkman, now 65 years old, lived in Nice, France. He subsisted modestly, making a bit of money translating anarchist works between French and English. He fell into ill health and suffered from prostate problems and uremia. Overcome by depression and his conditions, he decided to take his own life, shooting himself in the heart. Emma Goldman, who lived in nearby St. Tropez, rushed to his side, yet he died from the wounds. She handled the funeral arrangements and oversaw Berkman’s burial at the Cochez Cemetery outside Nice. Goldman spent considerable time moving between a number of countries and ultimately died in in Toronto, Canada. U.S. authorities allowed her body to be transported to Chicago, the site of the famed Haymarket affair, for burial with other anarchists and socialists.1
Frank Oxman, the infamous prosecution witness, passed away without (as some hoped) a deathbed confession. He had been indicted in 1917 for subornation of jury after appearing as the prosecution’s chief witness. Judge Cockran, in his posttrial missives, pointed out that not until after Mooney’s first sentence was it revealed that Oxman provided testimony that was a “tissue of perjuries.” Still, Judge Griffin dismissed the case and few people saw Oxman after 1918, and he returned to Oregon. On July 22, 1931, Oxman died of a heart attack, exactly 15 years after the bombing. The determined former District Attorney Charles Fickert quietly died of pneumonia in San Francisco in 1937.2
The fight by Mooney and others on his behalf carried on, just as it had for over two decades. In May 1933, now graying and 50, Mooney watched as jury selection began for his “new” trial. With Frank Walsh and Leo Gallagher working for him, Mooney sat there, as he had many times before, in a losing effort.3
By 1939, years of legal wrangling culminated with California Governor Culbert Olson, the first Democratic governor in 40 years and recognizing the string of perjury and fabricated statements, to move toward pardoning Mooney. Olson had pledged as a gubernatorial candidate that, if elected, he would free Mooney. In the earliest hours on the job, Olson claimed to have heard from now Judge Maxwell McNutt of the superior court in San Mateo County. McNutt, the former Mooney attorney, informed the new governor that Martin Swanson and the San Francisco Police had “shadowed Mooney every minute” on July 22, 1916 and that “he was not at or near the place where the crime was committed and … he did nothing that would indicate that he was in any way connected with it.”
In the morning hours of January 7, 1939, a car drove the now 56-year-old Mooney to Sacramento to meet with the governor at 10 am. The meeting came just five days after Olson’s inauguration. Broadcast nationally on the radio, Olson said from the floor of the state assembly: “I have signed and now hand to you, Tom Mooney this final and unconditional pardon. I now instruct Warden Smith to now release you to the freedom which I expect you to exercise with the high ideals I have tried to indicate.” Cheers erupted in the hall. With his rights and freedom again his, Mooney was permitted to say a few words. Grinning, he stepped to the rostrum and waited for the applause to slow. He spoke slowly and purposefully, saying that he and the governor were “the symbols of democratic expression, of the will and desires of the people of California.” He pointed out the parallels between the swelling fascism in Europe and the U.S. antilabor attitudes. He also seemed to continue to recognize that his conviction may have been a part of something much larger. “I am aware,” he said, “that this is not the case of an individual charged with murder but symbolizes the whole economic order. That order is in a state of decay not only here but throughout the world.” The sense of disorder in the world, so apparent at the end of the nineteenth century, seemed persistent, and the bombing story reflected a world in flux and the continued perception by some of a democratic and capitalist order gone awry.
Tom Mooney walked out of prison that day, finally vindicated. He proceeded to embark on a victory tour of sorts. On the day that the governor granted him his freedom, Mooney participated in a parade in San Francisco. Accompanied by labor leader Harry Bridges, Mooney personally led the parade up Market Street. The day he received his freedom, Mooney turned to the Governor and pledged, “I intend to dedicate my life to remove the shame from the state of California by working for the release of my co-sufferer – Warren K. Billings,” who also served 23 years behind bars and saw release from Folsom Prison in 1939, 10 months after Mooney’s pardon. Billings remained an active labor advocate, ran a watch shop in California in his later years, and died in 1972.4 Sadly, Mooney’s absolution did not last as long; he died three years after his 1939 release.
In addition to the long and ongoing violations of civil liberties, we now know that the wrongful conviction of Mooney and Billings was a gross misappropriation of justice. Yet, definitive culpability for the bombing remained speculative for some time. Some have inferred Celsten Eklund, a San Francisco orator and anarchist agitator, may have perpetrated the attack (he attempted to bomb the Saints Peter and Paul Church in 1927). Luigi Galleani remained coy until his last days in the United States. On June 23, 1919, as he awaited deportation in a cell on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, Bureau of Investigation agents interviewed Galleani, and yet he frustratingly said very little (he had unequivocally denied Mooney’s guilt in an interview the previous November). In the 1960s, books by Curt Gentry (Frame-Up, 1967) and Richard Frost (The Mooney Case, 1968) offered their explanations of responsibility. Gentry posited that the attack was part of a broader campaign of German espionage. Frost concurred that this German sabotage idea (specifically, that this was a bomb intended for a waterfront munitions vessel) was “the most attractive hypothesis.” Most recently, in their book on Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, Paul and Karen Avrich decisively concluded that members of Volonta conducted the bombing. Any kind of certainty about the perpetrator(s) is, I believe, eager. As the 100-year anniversary of the attack has come and gone in 2016, the consensus seems clear: “It is impossible to know what really happened that day in 1916,” said Chris Carlsson, a local historian, “But, for sure, it was not Mooney and Billings who planted that bomb.”5
Perhaps, the “whodunit” does not hold as much significance as the why and what the events tell us. The San Francisco bombing (and “the Mooney Case,” as it became so famously known) stands as an unexplored, yet characteristic and significant, event during a decisive time in American history. Yet, it also stands as a high point for a much broader period of domestic terrorism and anarchist violence, indeed displaying the wider radical American tradition during the Progressive Era. Since at least Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886, industrialists and workers had stood at odds, and the attack also has clear connections to similar events of terror of its era, notably Caldwell, Idaho, in 1905; Los Angeles, California, in 1910; the mail bombs of 1919; the Sacco and Vanzetti case in 1920; and the Wall Street bombing in 1920. The Preparedness Day Bombing was not the first, nor was it the last moment of leftist terrorism and radicalism in U.S. history, but it offers us a valuable lens into quite possibly the apex moment of a much longer history, in a different America where violence was a more prevalent and oft-used tool of dissent. Ultimately, the quick and forceful governmental responses to radical and anarchist deeds rendered agitators of this ilk weak by the dawn of the 1920s. Of course, the bombings and attacks of this period also have intimate parallels with contemporary acts of domestic terrorism, such as Oklahoma City in 1995, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and the Boston Marathon in 2013. Key to this era is the prominence of wartime dissent, the Red Scare, and the heated isolationism debate that dominated headlines. Also shrouded in this debate were questions of “loyalty” that often revealed thinly-veiled anti-immigrant and anti-ethnic attitudes, as outsiders saw criticism for this radicalism. The era suggests a time when our criminal justice system operated perhaps swiftly but with greater fault. This story reminds us that class consciousness and the widening rich-poor gap are far from new phenomena in the American experience, and, in fact, radicalism could act on larger anxieties with disastrous results.
1 New York Times, July 2, 1936; Goldman died in February 1940. Paul Kahan, The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry (New York: Routledge, 2014), 95.
2 TMDC Press Release, October 1931, Berkman, IISH, 367; “The Mooney Case,” An Address by Hon. W. Bourke Cockran, July 28, 1918, MICH; Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 251–252; Desert Sun, October 22, 1937.
3 Nashua Telegraph (Nashua, NH), May 24, 1933.
4 Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York: Random House, 2007), 215; Spokane Daily Chronicle (Spokane, WA), January 6, 1939; Frost, The Mooney Case, 486.
5 Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2013), 22; See: William Issel, For Both Cross and Flag: Catholic Action, Anti-Catholicism, and National Security Politics in World War II San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 24-27; Curt Gentry, Frame-Up (New York: Norton, 1967), 477; Frost, The Mooney Case, 489. This conclusion is supported by “interviews with undisclosed sources.” Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2012), 265; Carl Nolte, “Centennial of 1916 SF Bombing that Led to Infamous Convictions,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 2016.