Hellraisers Journal: “To the Shame of Labor” by Robert Minor, “Mooney Plot Exposed!”

You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday May 8, 1917
From the International Socialist Review: The Mooney Case

TO THE SHAME OF LABOR

By ROBERT MINOR

W. Bourke Cockran is a democratic leader, as well as the most noted lay orator in expounding the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Bourke Cockran is known internationally for his remarkable mentality and almost unequaled oratory in Congress and upon the democratic platform. He cannot be accused of being prejudiced in favor of violent overturners of society. Cockran spent six weeks in San Francisco as volunteer chief counsel for Tom Mooney, and at that time steeped himself in every detail, confidential or otherwise, of the entire story of the prosecution of Mooney, Billings, Nolan, Weinberg and Mrs. Mooney on the charge of blowing up the preparedness parade. One of the highest-priced attorneys in the world, he charged for his services—nothing.

When a cynical jury of twelve business men and retired derelicts sentenced Tom Mooney to hang, Cochran told me that he had never received so heavy a blow in his life. He said that if such things could be, the nation was rotting at its foundation.

The greatest orator of America is now touring the United States fervently pleading to the American conscience to awaken and stamp from its soil the viper of corruption whose poisoned fang is exhibited in the dishonest proceedings against the Labor unionists in California. Twenty thousand heard Cockran in Chicago in a most eloquent appeal, under the auspices of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Ten thousand packed Carnegie Hall in New York, under the auspices of the Central Federated Union. Cockran is giving the present epoch of his life to what he declares is to America what the Dreyfus case was to France. Cockran is not a ranting, cursing, lie-spitting Billy Sunday, and therefore the foul capitalist press is not telling much about it; but the massmeetings of Bourke Cockran are one of the biggest things of the kind ever seen in America.

Why does Cockran do this? If Mooney is guilty, Cockran knows it. If there were any doubt about Mooney’s innocence, Cockran would have that doubt. Why is the grand old man who holds the leadership of American oratory as ably as it once was held by Ingersoll, giving his life and world-wide name, at the age of sixty-three, to this case?

It is because working men are being slowly, in most cowardly hypocrisy, murdered in California for daring to assert the primary right of human beings to organize for their own protection.

As cruelly as ever men’s bodies were broken upon the rack and wheel are these men tortured with the lying hope of justice through the farcial jugglery of court rooms, as they wend their way one by one to death. With an understanding that he had to meet a certain charge, built upon the same story which was used to convict his alleged co-conspirator, a prisoner brings his perfect proof of innocence before the court with the quivering hope in his heart that surely he will not be murdered in defiance of evidence.

Only to be met by a change of stories! Although he was charged with committing the act in the company of another man, going together, doing the same thing, and the other man has been convicted upon that story, he finds that the prosecutors simply abandon that story and tell another one, another hideous lie entirely different and contradictory to the lie that convicted the first man! The same witnesses get on the stand in the second trial and blandly assure the court that, though they had lied in the first case in convicting the first prisoner, they would now tell the truth, and that the truth was so and so. Then the witness will proceed to tell a story that gets around alibi photographs, witnesses, every sort of disproof of the case that the prisoner thought he would have to meet.

Before the heat of the bomb had cooled from the sidewalk at the scene where ten people were killed, a private detective for the United Railroads was put in charge of the investigation by a district attorney, notoriously the hired tool of the same street-car corporation—in fact, put in office solely to dismiss indictments against crooked street railway officials. Within a few minutes a sledge-hammer and crow bar had destroyed the scene of the explosion and constructed a framed-up scene entirely different from that caused by the bomb. Photographs of this fake “effect of the explosion” were taken and actually shown to the juries to prove that a suit case bomb had been placed there instead of a thrown bomb falling there. Six reputable persons, one of them a prominent physician, who marched in the parade, saw the bomb fall into the crowd. All but the prominent physician were terrorized or chased out of the city or persuaded to keep quiet until after we had caught the district attorney lying red-handed and declaring that he did not know the address of one of the witnesses. When he finally turned over her address about three hours after she had left the city for a secret residence elsewhere—we finally located all six of the witnesses and proved that there was never a suitcase bomb in the affair.

The first prisoner was convicted while the district attorney had, locked in his safe, photographic films proving the innocence of the boy that he asked the jury to hang. The boy’s attorney heard of the photographs and demanded them. The district attorney turned over what purported to be the photographs, but the street clocks in these pictures of Mooney and his wife on the roof of their home a mile and a quarter away from the scene of the crime did not show the time of day and therefore the value of the pictures was almost destroyed. The boy, Warren K. Billings, was convicted.

Then, when Mooney came to trial, somebody tipped us off that the photographs turned over by the district attorney were not authentic, that they had been falsified so as to obliterate the time on the street clocks. By a hard legal fight, the defense forced the district attorney to disgorge the films to be examined by an expert. The expert enlarged them, and the street clocks showed the exact time that Mooney was supposed to be committing the crime with Billings a mile and a quarter away! Thus Mooney went to trial with absolute proof that the witnesses against Billings had lied in saying that he and Mooney were at the scene of the crime at or near that time. What did the prosecutors do?

Their witnesses took the stand and told a different story, swearing that they had testified falsely before as to time. Also, the chief witness, a drug victim named John McDonald, alias McDaniels, testified that he had lied to the Grand Jury and in the conviction of Billings in saying that Mooney and Billings crossed the street on foot through the parade. He said now that they did not cross the street through the parade and that he did not see them on the other side of the street, as he said in convicting Billings. That gave an opportunity for the State to claim that the men left in an automobile, in order to make the mile and a half from the scene of the crime to the roof of the Mooney’s home at 1:58, when the first photograph was taken.

A cattleman from Oregon, named Frank C. Oxman, took the stand under the influence of liquor, and swore that he saw the men come and go in an auto mobile.

There happened to be in the audience a woman who was with Oxman a mile away from there at that time, and she, in horror, came and made oath to that effect.

But it makes no difference. Truth, decency, justice are dead letters where labor is being baited with a mock trial by the Chamber of Commerce that has sworn to crush the last throb of labor rebellion on the Pacific Coast.

Warren Billings is in the penitentiary for life; Tom Mooney is sentenced to hang. Israel Weinberg faces the black-robed lynching before a jury of the business class on April 23d.

Then will come Rena Mooney and Ed. Nolan.

Tom Mooney’s offense was to organize a strike against the United Railroads. Billings and Weinberg committed the offense of refusing a $5,000 bribe to testify against Mooney. Rena Mooney is to die for helping Tom organize the car men. She is one of the best known music teachers in San Francisco. Edward D. Nolan is slated for hanging for being a friend of Tom Mooney and active in all recent strikes in San Francisco. He was in Baltimore as a delegate to the National Machinists’ convention at the time he is charged with having to do with bombmaking in San Francisco. The only evidence offered against him was a box of Epsom Salts, which a detective swore before the Grand Jury was gunpowder.

Oh, what a shame to all America!

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