John
Densmore was born on 25th November 1877. He became a lawyer and William
Bauchop Wilson, America's first Secretary of Labor, appointed
him as Director of General Employment.
On
22nd July, 1916, employers in San Francisco
organized a march through the streets 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). Two witnesses described
two dark-skinned men, probably Mexicans, carrying a heavy suitcase
near to where the bomb exploded.
The
police ignored this information and charged two trade union leaders,
Tom
Mooney and
Warren Billings,
with the crime. The two men were found guilty and Mooney was sentenced
to death and Billings received a life sentence.
The
American government also became concerned about the Mooney
and Billings Case and the Secretary of Labor, William
Bauchop Wilson, delegated Densmore 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.
Armed
with the information from Densmore's report, President Woodrow
Wilson called on William Stephens,
the Governor of California, to look again at the case. Two weeks before
Mooney was scheduled to hang, Stephens commuted his sentence to life
imprisonment in San Quentin.
John
Densmore died on 29th July 1937.
(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 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.
(2)
President Woodrow
Wilson, letter to Governor William
Stephens (22nd January, 1918)
Will you permit a suggestion from me in these troubled times which
perhaps justify what I should feel hardly justifiable in other circumstances?
The suggestion is this: Would it not be possible to postpone the execution
of the sentence of Mooney until he can be tried upon one of the other
indictments against him, in order to give full weight and consideration
to the important changes which I understand to have taken place in
the evidence against him?
I urge this very respectfully indeed but very earnestly, because the
case has assumed international importance and I feel free to make
the suggestion because I am sure that you are as anxious as anyone
can be to have no doubt or occasion of criticism of any sort attach
itself to the case.
(3)
President
Woodrow
Wilson, letter to Governor William
Stephens (June, 1918)
I beg that you will believe that I am moved only by a sense of public
duty and of consciousness of the many and complicated interests involved
when I again must respectfully suggest a commutation of the death
sentence imposed upon Mooney. I would not venture again to call your
attention to this case did I not know the international significance
which attaches to it.
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