John
MacDonald worked as a waiter in San
Francisco. His health was poor and had been syphilitic for several
years. The disease attacked his nerve and brain tissue and gave him
cerebral-spinal lues, a permanent syphilitic affliction, whose effects
include distortion of memory and hallucinations. MacDonald illness
resulted him having difficulty finding work.
On
22nd July, 1916, MacDonald was watching a march through the streets
of San Francisco in favour of an improvement in national defence.
During the march a bomb went off in Steuart Street killing six people
(four more died later). MacDonald later claimed
he saw two men with a suitcase at the scene of the crime at about
1.50 p.m. Around 2.00 p.m. the men left the suitcase on the sidewalk
and disappeared into the crowd. Later he identified the two men as
Warren Billings and Tom
Mooney.
However,
at the trial, a photograph showed that Mooney was over a mile from
the scene. A clock in the photograph clearly read 1.58 p.m. The heavy
traffic at the time meant that it was impossible for Mooney to have
been at the scene of the bombing.
MacDonald's
evidence was also undermined by the fact that he had been shown photographs
of Mooney and Billings and had been taken to the cells where they
were being detained before he identified them as the two men with
the suitcase at the scene of the crime.
Despite
this, Tom
Mooney
was
sentenced to death and Warren Billings
to life-imprisonment. MacDonald
never received the reward he had been promised but the police did
help him obtain a job in Tracy. This did not last long and in October
1919 he moved to Baltimore.
In
November 1920, Draper Hand of the San Francisco Police Department,
went to Mayor James Rolph and admitted
that he had helped District Attorney Charles
Fickert and Martin Swanson to frame
Mooney and Billings. Hand also confessed that he had arranged for
MacDonald to get a job when he began threatening to tell the newspapers
that he had lied in court about Mooney and Billings.
Mooney's
defence team now began to search for MacDonald. He was found in January
1921 and agreed to make a full confession. He claimed he did see two
men with the large suitcase but was unable to get a good look at them.
When he reported the incident to District
Attorney Charles Fickert he was asked
to say the men were identify Warren Billings
and Tom
Mooney.
Fickert said that if he did this "I will see that you get the
biggest slice of the reward."
In
July 1930 McDonald made another statement where he completely repudiated
his original testimony in court. He admitted that he had committed
perjury because he had been promised money by District Attorney Charles
Fickert.
(1)
John
Densmore's report on the Mooney
and Billings Case was
passed to the Secretary of Labor in November 1917.
As
one reads the testimony and studies the way in which the cases were
conducted one is apt to wonder at many things - at the apparent failure
of the district attorney's office to conduct a real investigation
at the scene of the crime; at the easy adaptability of some of the
star witnesses; at the irregular methods pursued by the prosecution
in identifying the various defendants; at the sorry type of men and
women brought forward to prove essential matters of fact in a case
of the gravest importance; at the seeming inefficacy of even a well-established
alibi; at the sangfroid with which the prosecution occasionally discarded
an untenable theory to adopt another not quite so preposterous; at
the refusal of the public prosecutor to call as witnesses people who
actually saw the falling of the bomb; in short, at the general flimsiness
and improbability of the testimony adduced, together with a total
absence of anything that looks like a genuine effort
to arrive at the facts in the case.
These things, as one reads and studies the complete record, are calculated
to cause in the minds of even the most blasé a decided mental
rebellion. The plain truth is, there is nothing about the cases to
produce a feeling of confidence that the dignity and majesty of the
law have been upheld. There is nowhere anything even remotely resembling
consistency, the effect being that of patchwork, of incongruous makeshift,
of clumsy and often desperate expediency.
It is not the purpose of this report to enter into a detailed analysis
of the evidence presented in these cases - evidence which, in its
general outlines at least, is already familiar to you in your capacity
as president, ex officio, of the Mediation Commission. It will be
enough to remind you that Billings was tried first; that in September
1916, he was found guilty, owing largely to the testimony of Estelle
Smith, John McDonald, Mellie and Sadie Edeau, and Louis Rominger,
all of whom have long since been thoroughly discredited; that when
Mooney was placed on trial, in January of the year following, the
prosecution decided, for reasons which were obvious, not to use Rominger
or Estelle Smith, but to add to the list of witnesses a certain Frank
C. Oxman, whose testimony, corroborative of the testimony of the two
Edeau women, formed the strongest link in the chain of evidence against
the defendant; that on the strength of this testimony Mooney was found
guilty; that on February 24, 1917, he was sentenced to death; and
that subsequently, to wit, in April of the same year, it was demonstrated
beyond the shadow of a doubt that Oxman, the prosecution's star witness,
had attempted to suborn perjury and had thus in effect destroyed his
own credibility.
The exposure of Oxman's perfidy, involving as it did the district
attorney's office, seemed at first to promise that Mooney would be
granted a new trial. The district attorney himself, Mr. Charles M.
Fickert, when confronted with the facts, acknowledged in the presence
of reputable witnesses that he would agree to a new trial. His principal
assistant, Mr. Edward A. Cunha, made a virtual confession of guilty
knowledge of the facts relating to Oxman, and promised, in a spirit
of contrition, to see that justice should be done the man who had
been convicted through Oxman's testimony. The trial judge, Franklin
A. Griffin, one of the first to recognize the terrible significance
of the expose, and keenly jealous of his own honor, lost no time in
officially suggesting the propriety of a new trial. The attorney general
of the state, Hon. Ulysses S. Webb, urged similar action in a request
filed with the Supreme Court of California.
Matters thus seemed in a fair way to be rectified, when two things
occurred to upset the hopes of the defense. The first was a sudden
change of front on the part of Fickert, who now denied that he had
ever agreed to a new trial, and whose efforts henceforth were devoted
to a clumsy attempt to whitewash Oxman and justify his own motives
and conduct throughout. The second was a decision of the Supreme Court
to the effect that it could not go outside the record in the case
- in other words, that judgment could not be set aside merely for
the reason that it was predicated upon perjured testimony.
There are excellent grounds for believing that Fickert's sudden change
of attitude was prompted by emissaries from some of the local corporate
interests most bitterly opposed to union labor. It was charged by
the Mooney defendants, with considerable plausibility, that Fickert
was the creature and tool of these powerful interests, chief among
which are the Chamber of Commerce and the principal public-service
utilities of the city of San Francisco. In this connection it is of
the utmost significance that Fickert should have entrusted the major
portion of the investigating work necessary in these cases to Martin
Swanson, a corporation detective, who for some time prior to the bomb
explosion had been vainly attempting to connect these same defendants
with other crimes of violence.
Since the Oxman exposure, the district attorney's case has melted
steadily away until there is little left but an unsavory record of
manipulation and perjury, further revelations having impeached the
credibility of practically all the principal witnesses for the prosecution.
And if any additional confirmation were needed of the inherent weakness
of the cases against these codefendants, the acquittal of Mrs. Mooney
on July 26, 1917, and of Israel Weinberg on the 27th of the following
October would seem to supply it.
These acquittals were followed by the investigation of the Mediation
Commission and its report to the President under date of January 16,
1918. The Commission's report, while disregarding entirely the question
of the guilt or innocence of the accused, nevertheless found in the
attendant circumstances sufficient grounds for uneasiness and doubt
as to whether the two men convicted had received fair and impartial
trials.
Ordinarily
the relentless persecution of four or five defendants, even though
it resulted in unmerited punishment for them all, would conceivably
have but a local effect, which would soon be obliterated and forgotten.
But in the Mooney case, which is nothing but a phase of the old war
between capital and organized labor, a miscarriage of justice would
inflame the passions of laboring men everywhere and add to a conviction,
already too widespread, that workingmen can expect no justice from
an orderly appeal to the established courts.
Yet this miscarriage of justice is in process of rapid consummation.
One man is about to be hanged; another is in prison for life; the
remaining defendants are still in peril of their liberty or lives,
one or the other of which they will surely lose if some check is not
given to the activities of this most amazing of district attorneys.
(2)
Draper Hand, statement to Mayor James Rolph
(November, 1920)
McDonald
said to me, "Unless I get a job I'm going to spill everything
to Fremont Older."
I went to Lieutenant Goff and warned him to arrange a job of some
kind for McDonald. Then he was given a job - in Tracy or somewhere
in the interior of the state.
He didn't tell everything then, but I'm sure that he'd tell the truth
if he were brought here now.
(3)
John MacDonald, affidavit, published in the San Francisco Call
newspaper (7th February, 1921).
About
a week before the trial of Thomas J. Mooney, Assistant District Attorney
Ed Cunha sent for me and I went into his private office. He read over
the testimony which I had given in the Billings trial. He said to
me: "You had
better make the time that you saw the man set the suitcase at 1:30
instead of 1:50." I said to him: "Mr. McNutt will grab that
right away; he will see that I changed my testimony from what it was
in the Billings trial."
He said, "Oh, hell,
we will beat him on that. You can say that you were not positive about
it at the time of the first trial." He said, "You see, if
that suitcase was set at 1:30 that would give them time to get back
up Mission street on top of the Eilers' building".
I followed the instruction
of Mr. Cunha, and said that I was not positive, that it might be between
1:30 and 1:45.
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