Where it Happened

For the third time Tom Mooney passed out of San Quentin Prison last week, was ferried under guard across the bay to San Francisco, where he and Warren K. Billings were convicted of bombing the local Preparedness Day parade in 1916, with a loss of ten lives. So often has the militant U. S. Labor movement thrust his case into court in a consistently unsuccessful effort to exonerate it and him, free him from a life sentence, that today Tom Mooney has come to think of himself as an important public personage in his own right. Now the Mooney lawyers had for the first time been able to put their case in full before the California Supreme Court. Acting on a suggestion from the U. S. Supreme Court when it refused to free their client, last winter, they were now asking California's highest bench, through a referee, for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that Mooney was convicted on perjured testimony with the knowledge of the prosecution. Granting of such a writ would be tantamount to acquittal.

The platoon of newshawks and cameramen who met Mooney at the San Francisco jail found him, as always, cocked and primed to talk about his "martyrdom." He expected no redress from the California Court, he said, but had great hopes for a final victory before the U. S. Supreme Court. Twenty pounds heavier than when he left San Francisco, he was tanned, seemed fully alert despite his 52 years and nearly a generation behind bars. His "prison heart," a nervous cardio-vascular affliction, did not appear to bother him, but in the general excitement he could not keep back the tears. "I'll be all right," wept Tom Mooney. "It's the shock, coming back here--back to San Francisco where it all happened."

Preparing to rehash all the old familiar points of the case, Mooney's counsel during the first week introduced only one novelty: the theory that the fatal explosive was not planted in the street by Mooney or anyone else, but was tossed off a roof by unknown dynamiters. Admittedly the defense lost an opening play to the State's Deputy Attorney General when the Supreme Court refused to define the admissibility of testimony which the referee might hear, a move which, according to Mooney, invited the State to fight him with material ranging from the Haymarket Riots to last year's General Strike in San Francisco. The defense won a play when the Court agreed to have Convict Billings brought from Folsom Prison to San Francisco, so that he will face his one-time co-agitator when he gives his testimony. The pair have split because Billings will accept parole. Mooney will not.

Dramatic moment of the week's hearings came when Tom Mooney, the one-time molder who claims he was framed by "the bosses" for agitating a streetcar strike, expounded his social views from the stand. Having had plenty of time since 1916 to acquaint himself with Marxian phraseology, he spoke easily of ''exploiting the workers" "working class struggle. "the historic objective." "I am a social revolutionist," he proudly declared, "one who believes all the wealth of the world should be socialized. ... I have always been in favor of the I. W. W. The President of the United States believes the same thing!"

Next day, having spread his doctrines through the nation's Press, oldtime "Wobbly" Mooney asked that they be expunged from the record as "irrelevant." To this the State's Deputy Attorney General readily agreed, satisfied that Mooney's statement had already had full effect in radical-hating California.

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