Warren
Billings, the son of a carpenter, was born at Middletown in 1893.
His father died two years later leaving his mother a widow with nine
children.
Billings
did a variety of jobs including farm labourer, a shoe lining cutter
and a streetcar conductor. He moved to San
Francisco in 1913 and soon afterwards he became active in radical
politics. He joined the Socialist Party
of America where he met Tom
Mooney.
The two men became involved in a strike in a shoe factory. During
the dispute Billings was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.
On
his release in 1914 he went to live with Mooney and his wife, Rena
Mooney. Blacklisted in the shoe manufacturing trade, Billings
managed to find work in the Ford assembly plant in San Francisco.
In
1916 Billings and Mooney became involved in a strike of streetcar
workers employed by the United Railroads (URR). On 11th June a high-voltage
tower of the Sierra and San Francisco Power Company, which served
the URR, was dynamited in the San Bruno hills. Soon afterwards the
URR offered a reward of $5,000 for information leading to the arrest
and conviction of the dynamiters.
Martin
Swanson, who worked for the Public Utilities Protective Bureau,
became convinced that Tom
Mooney
was
the man responsible for the bombing. On 13th June 1916 Swanson interviewed
Israel Weinberg, a jitney bus driver who had often taken Mooney to
trade union meetings. Swanson offered Weinberg
a share of the $5,000 reward if he could provide evidence that would
convict Mooney of the San Bruno bombing.
Soon
afterwards Swanson approached Billings. As well as a share of the
$5,000 reward Billings was offered a job with the Pacific Gas and
Electric Company if he could provide information connecting Mooney
with the San Bruno bombing. Billings refused and reported the approach
to Mooney and George Speed, the secretary of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW).
On
22nd July, 1916, employers in San Francisco
organized a march through the streets in favour of an improvement
in national defence. Critics of the march such as William
Jennings Bryan, claimed that the Preparedness March was being
organized by financiers and factory owners who would benefit from
increased spending on munitions.
During
the march a bomb went off in Steuart Street killing six people (four
more died later) and 40 were badly wounded. Two witnesses described
two dark-skinned men, probably Mexicans, carrying a heavy suitcase
near to where the bomb exploded.
The
Chamber of Commerce immediately offered a reward of $5,000 for information
leading to the arrest and conviction of the dynamiters. Other organizations
and individuals added to this sum and the reward soon reached $17,000.
Offering such a large reward was condemned by the editor of the New
York Times claiming it was a "sweepstake for perjurers".
On
the evening of the bombing Martin Swanson
went to see the District Attorney, Charles
Fickert. Swanson told Fickert that despite the claims that it
was the work of Mexicans, he was convinced that Billings and Tom
Mooney were
responsible for the explosion. The next day Swanson resigned from
the Public Utilities Protective Bureau and began working for the District
Attorney's office. On 26th July 1916, Fickert ordered the arrest of
Billings, Mooney, his wife Rena Mooney,
Israel Weinberg and Edward Nolan.
None of the witnesses of the bombing identified the defendants in
the lineup. The prosecution case was instead based on the testimony
of two men, an unemployed waiter, John
McDonald and Frank Oxman, a cattleman
from Oregon. They claimed that they saw Billings plant the bomb at
1.50 p.m. Oxman also said he saw Tom
Mooney and
his wife talking with Billings a few minutes later. However, at the
trial, a photograph showed that the couple were 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 and his
wife to have been at the scene of the bombing at 1.50 p.m. Despite
this, Mooney was sentenced to death and Billings to life-imprisonment.
Rena Mooney and Israel Weinberg were
found not guilty and Edward Nolan was never brought to trial.
Billings
was sent to Folsom Prison. For several years he worked in the stone
quarry. He also taught himself the skills of a watch repairman and
eventually became the official prison watchmaker.
A
large number of people believed that Billings and Mooney had been
framed. Those involved in the campaign to get them released included
Robert Minor, Fremont
Older, George Bernard Shaw, Heywood
Broun, Samuel Gompers, Eugene
V. Debs, Roger Baldwin, John
Dewey, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald
Garrison Villard, Norman Hapgood,
Crystal Eastman, Norman
Thomas, Upton Sinclair, Theodore
Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Lincoln
Steffens, H. L. Mencken, Burton
K. Wheeler, Sherwood Anderson, Abraham
Muste, Harry Bridges, James
Larkin, James Cannon, William
Z. Foster, Alexander Berkman, Emma
Goldman, William Haywood, William
A. White, Carl Sandburg, Arturo
Giovannitti and Robert Lovett.
The
American government also became concerned about the Mooney
and Billings Case and the Secretary of Labor, William
Bauchop Wilson, delegated John Densmore,
the Director of General Employment, to investigate the case. By secretly
installing a dictaphone in the private office of the District Attorney
he was able to discover that Mooney and Billings had probably been
framed by Charles Fickert. The report
was leaked to Fremont Older who published
it in the San Francisco Call on
23rd November 1917.
There
were protests all over the world and President Woodrow
Wilson called on William Stephens,
the Governor of California, to look again at the case. Two weeks before
Tom
Mooney was
scheduled to hang, Stephens commuted his sentence to life imprisonment
in San Quentin. Soon afterwards Mooney wrote to Stephens: "I
prefer a glorious death at the hands of my traducers, you included,
to a living grave."
In
November 1920, Draper Hand of the San Francisco Police Department,
went to Mayor James Rolph and admitted
that he had helped Charles Fickert and
Martin Swanson to frame Mooney. Later
two witnesses, Edgar Rigall and Earl K. Hatcher, came forward and
provided evidence that Frank Oxman was
200 miles away during the bombing and could not have seen what he
told the court at the trial of Mooney. In
February 1921 John McDonald confessed
that the police had forced him to lie about the planting of the bomb.
Despite this new evidence the Californian authorities refused a retrial.
After
the publication of this new evidence it
was generally believed that Charles Fickert
and Martin Swanson had framed Mooney
and Billings. However, Republican
governors over the next twenty years: William
Stephens (1917-1923), Friend Richardson
(1923-1927), Clement Young (1927-1931),
James Rolph (1931-1934) and Frank
Merriam (1934-39) all refused to order the release of the two
men.
In
1937 a group of politicians led by Caroline
O'Day, Nan Honeyman, Jerry
O'Connell, Emanuel Celler, James
E. Murray, Vito Marcantonio, Gerald
Nye and Usher Burdick asked President
Franklin D. Roosevelt to intercede
in the case. When Roosevelt declined Murray and O'Connell introduced
a resolution in the Senate calling on Governor Frank
Merriam to pardon Mooney and Billings.
In
November 1938 Culbert Olson was elected
as Governor of California. He was the first member of the Democratic
Party to hold this office for forty-four years. Soon after gaining
power Olson ordered that Mooney and Billings should be released from
prison.
Billings
opened a small jeweler's shop in San Francisco after leaving Folsom
Prison. He got married and eventually became vice president of the
Watchmakers Union. Warren Billings, who was officially pardoned in
December 1961 for the San Francisco bombing, died in 1972.
Warren
Billings (middle) leaving Folsom
Prison in 1939.
(1)
Charles
Fickert, during the trial of Warren Billings (September 1916)
Gentlemen, the case here is by far more serious than any other case
that was ever submitted to any jury. It is not a question of this
defendant against Mrs. Van Loo; that unhappy woman is at rest; those
orphan children must go through life, thinking of the scenes that
were enacted there. But here, gentlemen, was the offense: This American
flag—this American flag was what they desired to offend. They
offended that by killing the women and men that worshipped it. Here
is another photograph of Mrs. Van Loo, dying on the streets of our
city, and in a feeble hand she holds the American flag, and if that
flag is to continue to wave, you men must put an end to such acts
as these. So far as I am concerned, no personal consequences are going
to swerve me one jot from my sworn duty. What are personal consequences,
what are political consequences in a crisis like this? Gentlemen,
the very life of the Nation is at stake. No foreign foes were on our
land at this time, but some traitor, some murderous villain, who,
with his associates, perpetrated this crime, and to disgrace the flag,
they took the life of this unfortunate woman.
Now, we have here, gentlemen, enough evidence at 721 Market Street
- and God only knows, if it had not been for the action of Estelle
Smith, and those who saw him there. God only knows, there may have
been three or four hundred children of the working class of San Francisco
blown into eternity.
He (Billings) probably delighted in hearing the cries of these women
and children. My God! You have heard it described here, and I have
seen it afterwards - women with babes in their arms, their legs shot
away, crawling away from the wreck of the cruel shell, and if you
could have heard the cries of some of those children, if you could
have seen, like I have seen, my friend Lawlor there blown beyond recognition,
you could not have thought lightly of it.
(2)
Maxwell McNutt, defending Warren Billings at his trial (September
1916)
This historic case was spawned in the brain of a private detective
named Martin Swanson, and hatched in the super-heated perfervid imaginations
of the Smiths, the Kidwells, the Moores and the McDonalds, and fostered
and brought into being and reared by the Fickerts, the Brennans, and
the Traffic Squad.
Every bit of evidence, with the exception of those four men that were
on the roof of the Eiler's Building, every bit of evidence that has
been produced before this jury, had been volunteered at some time
or another to the Prosecution, and had been put in the ashcan. Why?
Because it did not fit the "dream" of McDonald.
(3)
The Secretary of Labor, William Bauchop
Wilson, delegated John Densmore,
the Director of General Employment, to investigate the Mooney
and Billings Case.
By secretly installing a Dictaphone in the office of the District
Attorney he was able to discover that the men had probably been
framed by Charles Fickert. Densmore's
report on the 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 blase 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.
(4)
Eugene Debs,
speech in Canton, Ohio (16th June 1918)
They would have you believe that the Socialist Party consists
in the main of disloyalists and traitors. It is true in a sense not
at all to their discredit. We frankly admit that we are disloyalists
and traitors to the real traitors of this nation; to the gang that
on the Pacific coast are trying to hang Tom Mooney and Warren Billings
in spite of their well-known innocence and the protest of practically
the whole civilized world.
I
know Tom Mooney intimately - as if he were my own brother. He is an
absolutely honest man. He had no more to do with the crime with which
he was charged and for which he was convicted than I had. And if he
ought to go to the gallows, so ought I. If he is guilty every man
who belongs to a labor organization or to the Socialist Party is likewise
guilty.
What
is Tom Mooney guilty of? I will tell you. I am familiar with his record.
For years he has been fighting bravely and without compromise the
battles of the working class out on the Pacific coast. He refused
to be bribed and he could not be browbeaten. In spite of all attempts
to intimidate him he continued loyally in the service of the organized
workers, and for this he became a marked man. The henchmen of the
powerful and corrupt corporations, concluding finally that he could
not be bought or bribed or bullied, decided he must therefore be murdered.
(5)
Warren Billings, letter to a friend in Berkeley (1930)
In "doing time" the true philosopher takes the wholly reasonable
view of the matter
that instead of "doing time" he is merely living here -
just as a settler on his frontier ranch lived for years in one little
community among the same friends and relatives, making the best of
conditions as he found them - doing whatever work became necessary
and getting what enjoyment he could out of his meagre existence. In
tact in the final analysis my prison is no different than your own
- a little more restricted perhaps. Mentally there are no restrictions
- we set our own horizons.
(6)
Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (1968)
The Mooney case festered unresolved for more than twenty years, its
causes widespread, its consequences pernicious. The trials and imprisonment
of Mooney and Billings revealed dramatically the intolerance and injustice
accorded radical dissenters before, during, and long after the First
World War. The case, developing out of class social tensions and public
anxieties accompanying the Preparedness Day crime, was forged through
the repeated abuse of fair procedures by local law enforcement officials.
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