There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Monday December 18, 1916
San Francisco, California – The Closed Shop Fight and Frame-Up
From the December edition of the International Socialist Review:
Will Labor Stand for Another
Haymarket?By THEODORA POLLOK
SAN FRANCISCO in 1916; Chicago in 1886. The closed shop fight now; the 8-hour fight then. In both cases, a crime of violence occurs and is tied around the necks of innocent labor men in the hope of helping to crush the spirit of labor.
In Chicago in 1886 a slavish press and an inflamed public mind, and the labor and radical groups, too weak to save the chosen victims. Today in San Francisco a slavish press, but a public mind open to conviction. Yet young Billings, first of the San Francisco Preparedness Day explosion defendants to be tried, has been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, and only the fighting working class of the country can save him—by saving his four co-defendants.
Tom Mooney’s trial, the second trial, is set for the 27th of November. It is Tom Mooney’s life that is desired above all others by this gang of ruffians, the “gentlemen” of the Chamber of Commerce, the United Railroads, and the Pacific Gas & Electric, and their tools in the District Attorney’s office. For Mooney, helped by his little music teacher wife, Rena, who is one of his co-defendants—Mooney recently dared actually try to organize the carmen of the United Railroads, who have been beaten down, spied upon and “weeded out” since the great car strike before the earthquake.
The tactics of the prosecution are such as might rather be expected in some backwoods lumber baron’s camp than in a great urban center. Indeed, with the “Law and Order” Committee from the Chamber of Commerce censoring all the press, the truth is even harder to get to the people than in a small town where it flies from mouth to mouth.
Scarcely a day passes now without some attack on Mooney’s case in the newspapers—the prosecution’s way of preparing the public for the extreme penalty. Yesterday it was the story of a negro who had been paid $500 by Mooney to blow up—what do you suppose-the “Liberty” bell (long since, poor bell, cracked and silent in the land of Ludlow and Bayonne, of Mesaba and San Francisco). He was also approached by Mooney to blow up a building at the Exposition (reason not given) and a boat (I seem to have failed to grasp the “why” of that, but it had something to do with causing or not causing war). This negro authority on Mooney’s past is a “three-time” forger, who was on his way to the penitentiary when he confessed. Negroes in town say he is a well-known police tool.
Before his story came out, we got track of a janitor at the house of Mrs. Mooney’s sister who, having been lied about to the police by his anger-crazed wife, was being put under the thumb-screws that his “confession” might help to convict Mooney.
On testimony so extracted from criminals or underworld “stools,” with whom the police can play “cat-and-mouse,” Billings was convicted. Here’s the list : (1) A prostitute, Estelle Smith, once indicted for murder in an incestuous “love” shooting and later dragged into the police net in a red light raid along with a negro. (2) A sneak thief, Crowley, who had been convicted of a most revolting felony, on parole when he testified, who is an habitue of houses where male perverts pick up their companions. (3) A dope fiend, McDonald, who boasted to responsible people of the money he was to receive for his testimony; who “seen Billings” as “in a dream” deposit the fatal suit case—and also “seen” Mooney with Billings until the prosecution was shown a picture, accidentally taken, which proved Mooney to have been a mile and a half away, when the prosecution admitted that he didn’t see Mooney, but asked the jury to convict Billings on this same man’s “seeing.” An ex (?) detective, an ex-strikebreaker policeman, two women dead-beats—such are the people, and practically all of the people, who sold Billings’ young life for a part of the reward of $21,000 offered for the conviction of the bomb planter.
Against them stood the twenty witnesses for the defense, entirely reputable people, unknown to and without friendly feeling for the defendant—working people, store-keeping people and professional people.
Over-zealous for their masters, the Chamber of Commerce and the public utilities, the District Attorney’s office proved Billings in three places at the same time; identified him as wearing a “light-dark” suit, a plain suit and a striped suit; proved that he was 5 feet 3, and also that he was 5 feet 9; that he carried a new black suit case, also that he carried an old yellow suit case. And the defense proved a perfect alibi by word and detail and circumstance, an alibi unshaken from the first days of Billings’ arrest, as the Chief of Police himself testified.
You would say a conviction was impossible on such silliness. So did the San Francisco public, even after the rage which the Law and Order Committee-censored papers had sought to lash them into, subsided. So did the San Francisco Call, which had the story “Billings Acquitted” all set up and had three times to corroborate the crazy verdict of guilt before it changed its presses.
But what was there to wonder about?
Billings’ jury of his peers consisted of eight acknowledged “retired” men—the trade name for professional jurymen; the foreman, a man of eighty-three years of age, “hard of hearing,” eleven years a juror—men whose death beds should be haunted by the gibbets of those whom they have hanged at the nod of their master, the District Attorney. The judge knew this prearrangement for beating the truth; the district attorney knew it; these jurymen are their daily servants, and the much praised fairness of the rulings of the judge on the bunch of trash which the District Attorney presented as the evidence against Billings, has but fastened the prison doors more securely on Billings, for their very “fairness” (merciful heaven!) makes a reversal in the Appellate Court the more difficult to obtain.
And this District Attorney Fickert! In his occupancy of the office the Chamber of Commerce was surely blessed. For District Attorney Fickert has been the acknowledged tool of the United Railroads since he was put in there (by the help of union labor) to dismiss the prosecutions for graft against the labor-hating Pat Calhoun and other officials of the United Railroads in the great San Francisco “Graft Prosecutions.”
The same kind providence seems to have been with the Chamber of Commerce on Preparedness Day. For, blocked in their war shipments by the strike on the water front, the Chamber of Commerce had, with insane ravings, declared its now historic “open shop” war, appointed its Law and Order Committee to usurp the government of the city of San Francisco, pledged within fifteen minutes $300,000 of a million dollar labor-breaking fund. A white-haired shipping magnate, Captain Dollar, had shouted that the way to restore order in San Francisco was to send a few ambulances of union men to the hospitals with broken heads.
Right then came the Preparedness Parade and the bomb. “This is a fine chance for the open shop!” a well-known member of the Chamber of Commerce was heard to exclaim. (Was this fore-thought or after-thought?) Disregarding dozens of letters of warning sent to prospective paraders beforehand, the Chamber of Commerce forces swept the five defendants into jail, taking them from a list of active union men given by the chief detective of the public utilities corporations, Martin Swanson, who, from sundown of the very day of the disaster, became City Detective Martin Swanson.
The assertion has been sent out from the District Attorney’s office that these are not labor cases.
But anyone who really knows the labor game in San Francisco, and not merely its political dickering, knows that these are labor cases and nothing but labor cases, and that they constitute an early assault in the “open shop” war now on in this city.
Examine the bare record for yourself! Then judge: Is this a labor case? Ed. Nolan (Machinists Lodge man for fifteen years, and formerly a member of both the Los Angeles and the San Francisco Labor Councils), a brainy, ardent fighter for the Hop Pickers, for the McNamaras, Caplan and Schmidt, the Magons, to the fore in the iron trades strike in Los Angeles, and the late lockout in Stockton—a marked man to the M. & M. Tom Mooney (in the Molders’ Union for fourteen years), Socialist educated and a Socialist still, tireless and full of vim in every recent strike in San Francisco, and especially obnoxious for his expose (along with Nolan) of a detective’s “plant” in Stockton, and very recently an organizer of the local carmens unsuccessful strike. His wife, Rena Mooney, a music teacher by profession, but an indefatigable and plucky worker in labor’s cause. Billings at twenty-two president of the Shoe Workers Union and a delegate to the Labor Council, and three years before that an active and responsible worker in the Pacific Gas & Electric strike. Israel Weinberg, on the Executive Committee of the Jitney Bus Operators Union, now in a violent struggle with the United Railroads, and an enthusiastic helper of Mooney in the work of organizing the carmen. These men, this woman, are the victims of the labor-hating public utilities and their financial associates!
The twentieth [thirtieth] anniversary of the Chicago Martyrs was held all over this country a few days ago—the men who twenty years ago gave their lives in the eight-hour struggle. Will it take five lives and twenty more years to establish the fact that these men are the martyrs of the closed-shop movement? Disgraceful to commemorate that bitter harvest and not save these men from a like ending!
And as Ed. Nolan says of himself and the other defendants—Ed. Nolan, as brave and wise and true a fighter for liberty for the workers and as pure-hearted an idealist as the American labor movement has ever been privileged to make a fight for—”They’ve got us in here now, but by God, we don’t intend to go down without making a fight out of it. That’s all we ask.”
Send us funds and still more funds, and every bit of outside pressure you can muster by meetings and talks and shop agitation. We can save these men if you will help. And saving them can score a victory for the “closed shop” in the new industrial cities of the West. Big Business, emboldened by its huge war profits, has attacked the greatest strong hold of unionism in America; and if it succeeds in strangling its San Francisco victims, every leader of radical thought in America will be victimized. Address Robert Minor, Treasurer, International Workers’ Defense League, 210 Russ Building, San Francisco.
———-
[Photographs rearranged.]
SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 17
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company,
July 1916-June 1917
https://books.google.com/books?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ
ISR Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA327
Theodora Pollock on the Mooney-Billings Case of 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA360
IMAGES
Tom and Rena Mooney, ISR, Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA363
Mooney Billings Case, Frame Up, R Minor, ISR Dec 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA361
See also:
Mooney-Billings Case of 1916
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmooneycase.htm
Robert Minor
http://spartacus-educational.com/ARTminor.htm
For more on Theodora Pollok:
See The Nation of Jan 4, 1919, a letter to the editor written Dec 21,1918, “Off With Her Head”:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=tVo5AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA18
And this from The Nation of Jan 25, 1919, beginning with “In a vacant lot…”
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=tVo5AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA123
The Silent Defenders (Sacramento Frame-Up of 1918)
-by Harvey Duff
pdf! http://debs.indstate.edu/d855s5_1920.pdf
Note: Sadly, Pollok finds it necessary to take special note of the race of one the prosecutions witnesses, the sexual orientation of another, and the status of the woman as a prostitute to discount their testimony, rather than to focus on the testimony itself as she did for the (presumably) white man who testified for the prosecution.
This is much like today when we find a well-off online newspaper publisher mocking the economic condition of those white workers who voted against the political party favored by that very well-off publisher.
“Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/12/12/1610198/-Be-happy-for-coal-miners-losing-their-health-insurance-They-re-getting-exactly-what-they-voted-for