There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 10, 1918
From San Francisco to Petrograd, Workers Fight for Life of Tom Mooney
From The Liberator of March 1918:
The Peril of Tom Mooney
By Robert Minor
THE story of the manner in which Tom Mooney’s death sentence was procured is stock conversation in American working-class homes. It has gone as far as the trenches of the European armies. There is hardly a Russian village where the name of “Tom Muni” has not been heard. Actually, the names of the witnesses in the case are spoken in Siberian villages, and a certain California district attorney is regularly cursed around the samovar.
The only evidence against Tom Mooney that a sensible man would listen to, was that of an Oregon cattleman, Frank C. Oxman, who came into the trial at the last moment, took the stand like a breeze from the prairie, swore that he was a country gentleman, loved his wife, and had seen Israel Weinberg drive Tom Mooney, Mrs. Mooney, Billings and an unidentified man to the scene of the crime in Israel Weinberg’s jitney bus, of the number of which car he had made a note on a telegraph envelope which he had in his pocket at that moment. He never made a mistake in his life in the identity of a person, as he was used to identifying cattle on the range….Mooney was condemned to die on the gallows.
While the motion for a new trial was pending, Oxman’s presence at the scene of the crime was disputed; whereupon District Attorney Fickert issued a newspaper interview stating that he had another witness named Rigall who would fully corroborate Oxman if a new trial were held.
The motion was denied and Mooney sentenced.
Fickert gave Kigali’s address as “Oregon.” But we finally found him living in Grayville, Illinois, Oxman’s original home, from which he had fled after being caught in a land graft.
Rigall readily admitted that he had gone to San Francisco at the request of Oxman. But on discovering that he was expected to swear away human life for money, he had left on the day he was expected to testify.
Rigall produced letters Oxman had written. One of them offered him “two hundred dollars in the clear” to come to San Francisco as “a expurt witness. You will only haf to anser three & four question and I will post you on them,” wrote the breezy cattleman.
Rigall and the letters were brought back to San Francisco. District Attorney Fickert admitted that it was a clear case of perjury-plotting, and promised a new trial and acquittal. Fickert’s assistant, Cunha, broke down. “I didn’t want to take the case in the first place,” he said, “but Fickert made me take it, and then I got enthusiastic and one thing led to another and I came to this.”
Nolan was released on nominal bail, with the public announcement that there had been no evidence against him.
Fickert begged for delay in which to get Oxman to “exonerate” him of blame, “and then I’ll throw Oxman to the dogs,” he said privately. But Oxman was jailed, became terror-stricken, and the situation was dangerous.
The Chamber of Commerce came to the rescue through its chief attorney; $10,000 was produced from somewhere, which money Fickert paid to an attorney to defend Oxman; and Fickert then announced that he would see that justice was done by prosecuting Oxman himself.
The Grand Jury was hastily summoned and “whitewashed” Oxman in consideration for the right to open up the redlight district, which had been closed by a moral crusade.
Fickert and the lawyer he had hired to defend Oxman got together and agreed upon a satisfactory jury, and, with the help of an assistant attorney general, the cattleman’s acquittal was arranged in advance. A witness who made affidavit that Oxman had offered to bribe her to enlarge her testimony was not permitted to appear.
Cunha remarked aloud during the trial, “We’ve got to get this old guy off, or we’ll all go to the scrap heap.”
Oxman’s defense was that he had thought he saw his old home-town friend Rigall at the same time he saw Mooney and the others, but that after sending for Rigall he found that he had been mistaken in his identity.
There was a middle page, he said, missing from the principal one of his letters, on which he had written, “Don’t come if you are not the man I saw in San Francisco on July 22nd.” His attention was called to the fact that the two pages of the letter on hand were connected in the middle of a sentence. Oxman said, “Oh, I didn’t mean a page from between the two, I meant that I wrote that in a post-script on a separate sheet of paper.”
So the cattleman was triumphantly acquitted.
Mrs. Mooney was tried and found not guilty. The Chamber of Commerce employed an attorney to aid in prosecuting her. She is still held in jail, and it is said that she will be tried again and hanged. The jury in Weinberg’s trial reached a verdict of “not guilty” in three minutes. He is still in jail and the prosecutor announced that he would try him again and hang him.
Sounds of labor unrest were heard from San Francisco to Petrograd. The labor unions of the State of Washington held a ten-minute general strike in all industries as a warning. Diplomatic exchanges on the Mooney case took place between Washington and the Kerensky government of Russia. As a result, President Wilson telegraphed to Governor Stephens of California the request that Mooney ‘s execution be not allowed to take place before he had had a new trial. The President appointed a commission, headed by the Secretary of Labor, to investigate. The commission’s report has now been made public. It practically substantiates labor’s charges of crime and conspiracy on the part of Big Business and the District Attorney’s office to “get” Mooney, Mrs. Mooney, Billings, Weinberg and Nolan. The critical sentence of the Commission’s report is this: “When Oxman was discredited the verdict against Mooney was discredited.”
After the Oxman exposure, the Attorney General of California asked the Supreme Court that, in view of it, the case should be returned to the Trial Court for a new trial. The Supreme Court, however, under the laws of California, found itself without jurisdiction to consider matters outside the record. The case is now before that Court on appeal, to be disposed of solely on errors appearing from the record of the trial.
The Commission therefore, “respectfully recommends in case the Supreme Court of California should find it necessary (confined as it is by jurisdictional limitations) to sustain the conviction of Mooney on the record of the trial, that the President use his good offices to invoke action by the Governor of California and the co-operation of its prosecuting officers, to the end that a new trial may be had for Mooney whereby guilt or innocence may be put to the test of unquestionable justice. This result can easily be accomplished by postponing the execution of the sentence of Mooney to await the outcome of a new trial, based upon prosecution under one of the untried indictments against him.”
So, even at the best, Mooney’s life still rests with the power of public opinion to force a just trial, and the willingness of organized labor and the friends of labor’s struggle to furnish funds for another defense. And there still remains the case of Billings, framed up in the same way, and now serving a life-term in San Quentin prison. When Mooney heard of the favorable report of the President’s Commission, his first words were, “Well, if I’m entitled to a new trial, Billings is too.”
SOURCE & IMAGE
The Liberator
(New York, New York)
-March 1918
Page 29: “The Peril of Tom Mooney” by Robert Minor
-article and drawing by Robert Minor
http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1918/0300-liberator-v1n01-opt.pdf
https://archive.org/stream/TheLiberator-Vol1No01/180300-liberator-v1n01-opt#page/n0/mode/2up
See also:
Thomas Mooney
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mooney
Literary Digest, Volume 57
April -June 1918
Funk and Wagnalls, 1918
https://books.google.com/books?id=FVsxAQAAMAAJ
Literary Digest of April 14, 1918
-“The President and Tom Mooney”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=FVsxAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.RA1-PA14