3581

Thomas Mooney Propaganda;"Shall Mooney Hang", 1916-39 [146403]

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Thomas Mooney Propaganda; Shall Mooney Hang , 1916-39  [146403]
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This is a collection of about 20 pieces of pro-Mooney propaganda.
1916-1939 Thomas Joseph “Tom” Mooney, San Francisco, California
Tom Mooney was a activist and labor leader who settled in San Francisco. Well known as a militant and socialist, he was tried and convicted for the Preparedness Day bombing on July 22, 1916. The bombing occurred in San Francisco at Stewart and Market Streets near the Embarcadero, resulting in 10 deaths and 40 injuries.

The collection consists of 20 pieces and hundreds of pro Mooney propaganda. An example of titles for some of the booklets include:
Justice is Waiting
Pardon Tom Mooney He Is Innocent
Leftward – Tom Mooney Issue – Self Published
Mooney Frame Up Condemed
Justice and Labor in the Mooney Case
Shall Tom Mooney Hang
There are additionally, some letters from the Tom Mooney Molder’s Defense Committee .

Letter from Tom Mooney Defense Committee (in the collection):
July 1, 1930
Dear Comrade:
We presume you have been notified by your National Office that it has set aside the week of July 15th to 22nd as a National Mooney-Billings Week, to be observed by all Socialist locals.

The purpose of these meetings is to arouse interest in the case, and to give wide publicity to the facts about Mooney and Billings. Both men have made formal requests for pardon, and their petitions clearly set forth the evidence that proves them innocent of the crime for which they are serving life sentences.

At this time we feel that nothing buy constant and constructive agitation for their pardon will have any result. There is not a shred of evidence on which to hold them in prison, but there they remain, and there they will stay, we fear, until an indignant populace demands their release.

Your National Office is planning to have speakers of prominence address the mass meetings in the larger cities, such as Frank P. Walsh, in New York City, and Clarence Darrow, in Chicago, both well-known as supporters and friends of Mooney and Billings. You will no doubt have to depend on your regular local speakers, and in case they are not thoroughly familiar with the Mooney-Billings Case, the enclosed pamphlet will enlighten them.

This little pamphlet sells for ten cents. We can let you have them in quantities at $5.00 per hundred, and the sale of them will help you to cover the expenses of your meeting, and besides will be excellent propaganda for our cause.

We know you will do all you can to make your meeting a success. Your press, The Labor World, published here, and The New Leader, of New York City, and others, are generous in giving wide publicity to the Mooney-Billings Week meetings; so we hope you will do your best to reach all your fellow-townsmen and to make them feel that as American citizens it is up to each and everyone of them to urge justice for these two martyrs of Capitalist iniquity --- Mooney and Billings.
Sincerely,
Tom Mooney Molders’ Defense Committee

Notice prepared by Intercollegiate Council of the Potomac Branch of the L.I.D. (in the collection)

IS MOONEY GUILTY? LET THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.
July 22, 1916. Ten persons killed by a bomb during a Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.

July 27. Tom Mooney, a labor agitator, arrested.

February 7, 1917. Mooney convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

March 27, 1918. President Wilson telegraphed Governor W.D. Stephens, asking commutation after his mediation commission reported there was doubt about the justice of Mooney’s conviction.

November 26, 1918. Mooney’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

February 7, 1921. John McDonald, prosecution witness, sign an affidavit that his testimony which located Mooney at the scene of the crime, was false.

September 24, 1926. Judge Franklin Griffin who tried Mooney, expressed belief that there had been a miscarriage of justice and recommended a pardon.

July 2, 1930. State Supreme Court heard the witness, McDonald, declare that his earlier testimony was false.

December 1, 1931. James J. Walker and others asked Governor Rolph for pardon.

April 21, 1932. Governor Rolph denied pardon for Mooney.

March 25, 1933. Mooney trial on old indictment set for April 26.

Prepared by Intercollegiate Council of the Potomac Branch of the L.I.D.

Thomas Joseph “Tom” Mooney, (December 8, 1882 - March 6, 1942), was an American political activist and labor leader, who was convicted with Warren K. Billings of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916. Believed by many to have been wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit, Mooney served 22 years in prison before finally being pardoned in 1939.

The son of Irish immigrants, Mooney was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 8, 1882. His father, Bernard, had been a coal miner and a militant organizer for the Knights of Labor in struggles so intense that after one fight he was left for dead. Bernard Mooney died of “miner’s con”, (now known as silicosis), at the age of 36, when Tom, the eldest of three surviving children, was ten years old. Tom’s sister Anna told neighbors that the family had originated in Holyoke, Massachusetts, not Chicago.

Thomas held many jobs as an industrial worker before developing a career as a labor leader and socialist activist. As a young man, Mooney toured Europe, where he learned about socialism. After arriving in California, he met his wife Rena, and found a place in the Socialist Party of America and the presidential campaign of Eugene V. Dobs. In 1910, Mooney won a trip to the Second International Conference in Copenhagen by selling a huge number of subscriptions to the socialist Wilshire Magazine. On his way home, he visited the British Trades Union Congress in Sheffield, England.

Mooney subsequently settled in San Francisco, where he briefly became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, (IWW) before resigning from that organization. Over the next few years Mooney became friendly with some of IWW’s leading figures such as William “Bill” Haywood, Mary “Mother” Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. He married Rena Hermann in 1911, and became the publisher of The Revolt, a socialist newspaper in San Francisco. The paper was a modest success, with a circulation of 1,500 readers. Mooney later ran for sheriff as the Socialist Party of American candidate.

Mooney was later arrested and tried three times but never convicted of a charge of transporting explosives for the purpose of blowing up power transmission lines during a Pacific Gas & Electric strike in 1913.

He was well known as a militant, a socialist, and a suspected dynamiter. He was tried and convicted for the Preparedness Day bombing, July 22, 1916 in San Francisco. The bomb exploded at Stewart and Market Street near the Embarcadero. Mooney had been tipped off to threats that preceded the parade and pushed resolutions through his union, the Iron Molders, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council and the Building Trades Council warning that agents provocateurs might attempt to blacken the labor movement by causing a disturbance at the parade. Ten deaths and forty injuries resulted from the explosion in the midst of the Preparedness Day parade. The bombing took place at the height of anarchist violence in the United States, especially the Galleamist anarcho-communist movement of Luigi Galleani.

Mooney, his wife Rena, and two associates, Warren K. Billings, (1893-1972) and jitney driver Israel Weinberg, were arrested. They show trial that followed was conducted in a lynch mob atmosphere, and featured several witnesses whose testimony was allegedly coached by the prosecutors D.A. Charles Fickert and deputy D.A. Eddie Cunha. It included one witness who claimed her “astral body” was at the scene. Mooney and Billings were convicted in separate trials and Mooney was sentenced to be hanged and Billings got a life sentence. Rena Mooney and Weinberg were acquitted.

After Mooney was sentenced, the Socialist Party tried to expel him, but his local branch held out. Due to worldwide agitation from Mexico City to Petrograd in the Soviet Union, US President Woodrow Wilson became involved. Without informing Mooney’s defense committee, Wilson telegraphed California Governor William Stephens asking him to commute Mooney’s sentence to life imprisonment, or at least stay the impending execution. Later, a commission setup by Wilson found little evidence of Mooney’s guilt.

In 1918, Mooney’s sentence was changed to life imprisonment, the same as Billings. Mooney, prisoner No. 31921, quickly became one of the most famous political prisoners in America. A worldwide campaign to free Tom Mooney followed. During that time his wife Rena, Bulletin editor Fremont Older, anarchist Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, Lucy Robins, Lang, heiress Aline Barnsdall, Hollywood celebrities, international politicians and many other well-known people campaigned for his release. Caroline Decker, a labor activist who later became active in California agricultural unionism, first went to California as part of a “Free Tom Mooney” delegation. While imprisoned, Mooney corresponded with fellow union leader Ned Cobb of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union.

During his time at San Quentin, Mooney was a highly dependable orderly in the prison hospital. Dorothea Lange went to the prison to photograph him, and one of the photographs she took was used in a poster published by the Tom Mooney Defense Committee.

In 1931, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker made a solidarity visit to Tom’s sister Anna’s house in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Mooney filed a writ of habeas corpus which was heard by the United States Supreme Court in 1937. Even though he presented evidence that his conviction was obtained through the use of perjured testimony and that the prosecution had suppressed favorable evidence, his writ was denied because he had not first filed a writ in state county. Nevertheless, his case is important because it helped establish that a conviction based upon false evidence violates due process. Mooney was pardoned in 1939 by liberal Democratic Governor Culbert Olson. The Sunday after his release, he visited the grave of his mother, one of his greatest supporters, on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.
He then walked in a parade up Market Street from the Embarcadero to the San Francisco Civic Center, accompanied by an honor guard of one hundred husky longshoremen with their hooks, led by Mooney’s own union, Local 164 of the International Molder’s Union in the vanguard. No police or politicians were invited; bosses of the big unions were unwelcome and stayed away. Mooney thumbed his nose at the Hearst building at Third and Market, a gesture against the local press editors who had railed against him for decades.

He was old from years in prison, sick with ulcers and jaundice. He had not worn his martyrdom well; he broke with modest Warren K. Billings, who was convicted with him and who somehow was never regarded as a martyr; he was estranged from his wife; his former colleagues in the labor movement often found him to be selfish and conceited.

Mooney then campaigned for Billing’s release, although he two men had become estranged. He traveled around the county making speeches. He drew a full house at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Billings was released in 1939 and pardoned in 1961.

After attempting a lecture tour, Mooney collapsed from illness. The California Federation of Labor turned down a resolution to pay his bills, as his politics were deemed too radical. While dying in a San Francisco hospital, Mooney, at 59, had only a few visitors, only a few money letters from friends. From his bed he helped advance a campaign to free Communist Earl Browder as Chairman of the “Citizens” Committee to Free Earl Browder.

Mooney died at Saint Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco on March 6, 1942. A large funeral celebration was held at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium. He is interned at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Coloma, California.