There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, January 12, 1917
San Francisco, California – Frame-Up of Tom Mooney Examined
Writing in this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review, Robert Minor, Treasurer of the International Workers’ Defense League, exposes a few interesting details in the ongoing frame-up of the San Francisco labor leader, Tom Mooney:
The Suitcase Ghost
By ROBERT MINOR
LIKE the giant trees that astonish the eye of the traveler, like the wonderful climate and other marvels of the state, California produces the most amazing manifestations of the Labor Struggle.
Since the McNamara plea of guilty, there has been a ghost in nearly every labor dispute. That ghost is “the Suitcase.” There is a suitcase in every strike. Sometimes made of yellow leather, some times of black morocco, the suitcase is more often built of nightmares—pure imagination. But the suitcase, in one form or another, is a California institution.
When made of more than imagination, the suitcase has usually been (since the McNamara case) in the hand of an agent of the corporations, and loaded with dynamite.
In Stockton, three years ago, Anton Johannsen, labor organizer, “got the drop on” a gunman who came to his hotel room to kill him for the Merchants,’ Manufacturers’ and Employers’ Ass’n. The trapped gunman confessed that it was his intention, after killing Johannsen, to place a suitcase of dynamite in his room, another suitcase of the same explosive in the Santa Fe station checking room, with the check slipped into the pocket of the Secretary of the Building Trades Council. One of the other plotters, J. J. Emerson, was caught by a bungling policeman with a suitcase of dynamite, confessed to the plot to “plant” it so as to blame the strikers, but was, of course, acquitted in spite of the confession. (What are courts for?) Ed Nolan and Tom Mooney were instrumental in the expose.
In the same strike, Warren K. Billings, then 19 years of age, out of a job, was accosted by strangers who offered him $50 to carry a suitcase to Sacramento, to be delivered to two men whom he was to meet in a saloon. The boy accepted the offer. The men waiting for him in the saloon in Sacramento proved to be detectives, the suitcase contained dynamite, and Billings was given a two-year sentence.
When an explosion occurred in the San Francisco preparedness parade and killed ten persons, the blame was laid upon labor organizers with a suitcase. This in spite of the fact that the most reliable witness, a prominent physician, and several others whose names the police promptly lost, stated that they had seen a large, cylindrical bomb thrown.
For, the only way to scare Labor off from defense of a labor case is to shout “SUITCASE” at them, instead of “Booh!”
Ed Nolan, Tom Mooney, his wife, Rena Mooney, Warren Billings, and Israel Weinberg are now on trial for their lives for the preparedness parade suitcase. Such is the psychology of the Coast, that no evidence was even introduced to prove that the Labor men had a bomb; only a suitcase, with its contents not even referred to in the evidence!
In cases of public excitement in California, everybody sees suitcases. With $17,000 as their reward for the “seeing.” one prostitute, one cocaine victim (just emerging from a drug store), one proven perjurer-detective, one strikebreaker, and various casual glancers, thought that they saw Billings on the day of the explosion with a suitcase that was yellow—no, black—no, let’s see, it was brown “or something like that”—or, rather, it was a camera case a part of the time.
After proving a perfect alibi and showing by photographs that the sole witness who claimed to see him at the scene of the crime was perjuring himself, Billings was convicted in his first trial, not because he was guilty, as the professional jurymen afterward explained, but so that he would help the District Attorney find the real dynamiters.
The authorities had obliterated the criminal records of all of their principal witnesses until after Billings was convicted. But the final exposure left the state with out any witnesses against the second victim, Mooney. Witnesses had to be got.
So, one Charles Organ, colored, picked up for forgery in Los Angeles and given his third penitentiary sentence, was instructed by detectives to say that he had been given $500 by Tom Mooney to blow up the Liberty Bell (don’t laugh) with a suitcase bomb. All would have gone well for “justice” if Organ had not been taken away from the association of detectives and put into the comparatively honest company of convicts, where he got ashamed of his role and made the following confession:
When in San Francisco jail I wrote four letters denying this lie, three to local newspapers, and one to Mr. McNutt, Mooney’s attorney, but I guess they were suppressed. When I was arrested in Los Angeles, two detectives came to me and said: “You know Mooney, the ‘bomb man.'” I told them I didn’t. But they dictated the whole “story” to me, about the $500, throwing the bomb in the bay and filling the suitcase with bricks. They told me that if I stuck to this story I’d get off with a light sentence on the check charge, and also get a piece of the $17,000 bomb reward. In San Francisco jail they brought Mooney out alone and prompted me to identify him, but I refused. I never saw Mooney in my life before.
“Suitcase Justice” received an awful blow by this bit of honesty in an unexpected quarter, in view of the fact that the other two principal witnesses against Mooney, one of them had been proven a liar by photographs of Mooney a mile and a quarter away from the crime, and the other, Mrs. Allie Kidwell had written a letter (which fell into the hands of the defense) explaining to her husband, another forger in San Quentin penitentiary, that she was being given a pardon for “hubby” in exchange for her swearing that she saw Mooney acting suspiciously at one of the places figuring in the case.
It is simply awful that the muckrakers keep on discovering the prostitution records of the “heroic young ladies” who were going to dare death by testifying against the “desperate dynamiters” for the sake of the fair name of Justice and $17,000, as well as the previous conviction of one young gentleman for giving syphilis to a seventeen-year-old girl. It has blocked the wheels of justice till—
One Charles M. Fickert, District Attorney (whose election was paid for by the United Railroads to the amount of $100,000, for the single purpose of dismissing indictments against United Railroad bribers), has seen one gubernatorial ambition go to smash in the anger of Labor against the rotten effort to hang four men and a woman for their labor activities against the United Railroads. And—
One James Brennan, Assistant District Attorney, has seen the light and backed out of the prosecution of the frame-up, for the sake of his ambition to be elected City Attorney.
Poor Fickert was left to hold the bag—the suitcase! The Building Trades Council and the Labor Council followed the California A. F. of L. convention in denouncing the frame-up. The ghastly scheme has half fallen through. Something had to be done quickly.
So a little frame-up within the big was planned. Israel Weinberg, against whom the prosecutor admitted in private that he had no evidence, was to be kidnapped in an automobile, taken to some mysterious destination with a load of plug-ugly detectives, and—well, nobody would have known what happened, but a CONFESSION was to be announced, with plenty of gentlemen-detectives to swear to it.
But Weinberg’s little wife happened to be in the jail when the attempt was made, and by her Weinberg got word to his lawyers and newspaper men and the beastly plan was blown up by publicity. The town has temporarily forgotten the awfulness of the thing in a good, hearty laugh at poor, simple, rotten Fickert.
What’s to be done? Fickert has let the real culprits escape-has not even investigated the real bomb affair, and he “has to get somebody,” as his assistant plaintively explained, “or the people will get us”!
WANTED: Quick, by the prosecutor, cocaine victims, pimps, prostitutes, gunmen—anybody who will swear to what’s wanted. $17,000 reward!
And—
WANTED: Quick, by the defense, money to pay court expenses to thwart the crime and forever lay the suitcase ghost in California!
Robert Minor,
Treasurer, International Workers’ Defense League,
210 Russ Building, San Francisco.[Photograph added.]
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 January 1917
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA387
“The Suitcase Ghost” by Robert Minor
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA424
IMAGE
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
International Workers Defense League, Labor Orgs, Jan 31, 1917
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175035184137;view=2up;seq=4
See also:
Mooney-Billings Case
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAmooneycase.htm
Robert Minor
http://spartacus-educational.com/ARTminor.htm
The Frame-Up System:
Story of So-Called Bomb Trials in San Francisco
by Robert Minor.
San Francisco: International Worker’s Defense League, 1917/1918
(Pamphlet was written sometime after Mooney’s trial and before his death sentence was commuted to life in prison in November of 1918.)
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005596555
Pete Seeger Speaks
Do Re Mi – Woody Guthrie