Mooney & Billings

On the sultry afternoon of July 22, 1916 a Preparedness Day parade moved martially down San Francisco's Market Street between close-packed lines of spectators. Suddenly at the corner of Steuart Street a large bomb in a suitcase exploded, showered the throng with metal slugs, killed ten persons, wounded 40. Within the week police arrested Thomas Mooney, radical labor leader, Warren Billings, I. W. W. agitator, and three smaller figures. They were charged with wholesale murder. Billings, who had been found guilty in 1913 of using dynamite in labor disputes, was tried, convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment. Mooney was also found guilty and received a death sentence which Governor Stephens of California in 1918 commuted to life imprisonment at the suggestion of President Wilson.

Because of local passions and prejudices which enveloped their trials the cases of Mooney and Billings became celebrated throughout the U. S. Committees of Liberals were formed to get them out of jail. Investigation proved that the State's witnesses at the trials--persons who said they saw Mooney and Billings at the bomb scene--had perjured themselves. The judge and juries in the two cases recommended release. Mooney at San Quentin and Billings at Folsom insisted on nothing less than pardons to vindicate them. Again and again it was claimed they had been convicted for their radical beliefs.

Last week the Supreme Court of California dashed Billings' hope for release after 14 years' imprisonment when, after a long review of his case, it advised Governor Clement Calhoun Young not to pardon him. Because he was a two-time felon, Billings' application for pardon had, under the law, to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Mooney on the other hand could and did apply directly to Governor Young. That official had declared that the essential facts were the same in both cases and that his action in each would be guided by the court's findings on the Billings' petition. Its adverse opinion boded ill for Mooney.

Declared the court: "The applicant has made no attempt to offer anything in the way of an affirmative showing that with respect to the crime in question he is in truth and in fact an innocent man. . . . He was the friend and associate of persons actively engaged in plotting, attempting and even executing crimes of violence. . . . The deliberated and fiendishly-prepared-for crime of Preparedness Day was in all human probability conceived and carried forward to its execution by the same evilly disposed individuals whose friend and associate Billings had been. . . . If he himself did not prepare and plant the deadly time bomb, he and his intimate associate and co-defendant Mooney knew who did prepare and plant that bomb. . . ."

At Folsom Prison Billings, small, brown-haired, looking younger than his 37 years, remarked: "Well, that's that. It doesn't bother me. I've been here 14 years and I'm good for a longer stretch."

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