Martin
Swanson was born in Sweden
in
1878. He emigrated to America and served in the United
States Marines.
Swanson left the Marines after reaching the rank of sergeant.
Swanson
joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency
and was involved in the arrest of both Tom
Mooney and
Warren Billings in
1913.
By
1916 Swanson was working for the Public Utilities Protective Bureau.
On 11th June 1916, 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.
Swanson
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 Warren 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). 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 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 Tom
Mooney and
Warren Billings 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 Warren
Billings plant the bomb at 1.50 p.m. Oxman 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.
After
the trial one of the witnesses, Mrs. Compton, who had seen the bomber
but claimed it was not Tom
Mooney and
Warren Billings,
claimed that Swanson had made threats concerning her husband's job
if she testified in court.
The
American government 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 Swanson and 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.
In
November 1920, Draper Hand of the San Francisco Police Department,
went to Mayor James Rolph and admitted
that he had helped Swanson and Fickert 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.
(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)
Draper Hand, statement to Mayor James Rolph
(November, 1920)
Swanson sent for me and asked me to take Oxman to the North End station
and show him Weinberg's auto. They had taken the car out there. I
took Oxman to see the car. It was his first and only sight of the
car. Oxman was very much concerned, when he saw the car, to find out
if it were possible for a man to sit in it and hold a suitcase as
he was going to describe in court. He had me get in the car and let
my hand hang down over the side, as if I were holding a suitcase.
He wasn't satisfied till I got in and did as he wanted; after that
he thought his version was all right - that the defense wouldn't prove
it impossible.
There wasn't any license plate on the car when I took Oxman to see
it. If the plate had been there it would be bad for the prosecution
if Oxman were asked if he hadn't got the number when he saw the car
at the police station. Cunha had had the plate taken off that car.
It was in a drawer in an inner office at the station. Cunha told me
to copy the number. I did that and gave it to him. As far as I know
Oxman never saw the license plate itself.
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