Thomas Mooney was an American political activist and labor radical.
Background
Thomas Joseph "Tom" Mooney was born on December 8, 1882, in Chicago, Illinois. He was the eldest of three surviving children of Bryan called Bernard and Mary (Hefferon, or Heffernan) Mooney. His father, born of Irish parents in a railroad construction camp in Indiana, was a coal miner, and Tom and his brother and sister grew up around the mines of Washington, Ind. His mother, a native of County Mayo, Ireland, had lived in Holyoke, Massachusetts, before her marriage. After her husband died in 1892, she returned with her children to Holyoke, where she took a job sorting rags in a paper mill.
Education
Young Tom attended a Catholic parochial school for a short time, but after being flogged for lying, transferred to public school.
Career
At the age of fourteen, Mooney went to work in a local factory; the following year he was apprenticed as an iron molder. He soon joined the molder's union but found work in his trade only sporadically. On a trip to Europe in 1907, he became converted to socialism. Back in the United States, he hawked Socialist literature from the campaign train of Eugene Debs during the 1908 presidential race, and two years later he attended the International Socialist Congress at Copenhagen.
Settling in San Francisco, he affiliated with various radical and labor groups, including the Industrial Workers of the World and the left-wing faction of the San Francisco Socialists, whose newspaper, Revolt, he helped publish. In 1910 he ran as the Socialist candidate for superior court judge and in 1911 for sheriff. Dedicated to left-wing unity, he organized molders for William Z. Foster's Syndicalist League of North America and joined the International Workers Defense League, an organization formed to provide legal aid to radicals. In 1913, Mooney and a young drifter from New York, Warren Knox Billings, joined a prolonged, violent strike of electrical workers against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
During the turmoil Billings was arrested by a dogged company detective, Martin Swanson, for carrying dynamite, and he was later imprisoned. Fearing that Swanson would try to implicate him as well, Mooney went into hiding but was arrested near Richmond, California, and charged with illegal possession of high explosives. After two trials resulting in hung juries, he was acquitted in 1914. Two years later he attempted unsuccessfully to provoke a wildcat strike by streetcar men in San Francisco. During the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade, one of the many held throughout the United States to demonstrate for military readiness, a bomb exploded on Steuart Street, killing ten persons and wounding forty.
Because radicals of every type, as well as organized labor, had opposed the parade, the press depicted the crime as an act of anarchist terrorism. Beyond a few fragments of shrapnel, little physical evidence was discovered; but District Attorney Charles M. Fickert theorized that a time bomb had been carried to the scene in a suitcase. Acting on information supplied by Mooney's nemesis, Swanson, Fickert arrested Tom and Rena Mooney, Warren Billings, and several others, charging them with the crime.
Billings was tried in September 1916 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mooney, defended by Maxwell McNutt and Bourke Cockran, was tried in January 1917 before Judge Franklin A. Griffin. The prosecution's star witness, not called at the Billings trial, was Frank C. Oxman, a wealthy cattleman, who claimed to have seen Mooney and Billings in the Steuart Street area carrying a suitcase. Although Oxman's testimony conflicted with that of another prosecution witness, Mooney was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to hang. Later, after a motion for a retrial was denied, it was revealed that Oxman had perjured himself in his affidavit to the district attorney; the defense also discovered that Oxman had a history of fraudulent activities, and that he had probably not even arrived in San Francisco until four hours after the crime.
Despite this evidence, Fickert, pressured by the Hearst press and the Chamber of Commerce "Law and Order Committee, " opposed a retrial. Rena Mooney was tried without Oxman's testimony in the summer of 1917 and was acquitted. During Mooney's trial his support had come primarily from labor radicals, led by the anarchist Robert Minor, who reactivated the dormant International Workers Defense League to publicize the cause; from the militantly progressive wing of the trade-union movement, particularly the Chicago Federation of Labor; and from a small group of concerned attorneys headed by Bourke Cockran. After his conviction, however, more orthodox groups, including the previously recalcitrant San Francisco Labor Council, joined in seeking a commutation of his sentence.
In the protracted legal battle that ensued, Mooney was aided by many prominent citizens, including Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union; Frank P. Walsh, his chief defense attorney from 1923 to 1939; Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin; and Samuel Gompers of the A. F. of L. His case soon became an international cause célèbre.
When mobs protesting his conviction marched on the American embassy in Petrograd in 1917, threatening the success of an American mission to Russia, President Wilson urged California's governor to order Mooney to be retried. That summer a Federal Mediation Commission appointed to investigate I. W. W. strikes against the copper and lumber industries was persuaded by Col. Edward M. House to look into the case; its report questioned the justice of the verdict. In November 1918 Gov. William D. Stephens commuted Mooney's sentence to life imprisonment. With Mooney saved from hanging, public interest in the case slackened.
For two decades his supporters continued their efforts to win his freedom, either through executive clemency or through legal action; but a succession of cautious Republican governors, a partisan state supreme court, and procedural deficiencies in the criminal code and state constitution all served to keep Mooney in San Quentin and Billings in Folsom prison. Unlike Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Mooney was unattractive in character. Vain, preoccupied with the burdens of his injustice, determined to run his own defense movement from prison, he alienated those who served him best.
During the New Deal years, sentiment began to stir in his favor. Upton Sinclair, in his unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1934, pledged to free Mooney if elected. An appeal to the United States Supreme Court on the ground that due process had been violated when Mooney was imprisoned as a result of perjured testimony brought a decision expanding the federal role in habeas corpus proceedings but did not change Mooney's status. He was finally pardoned by a Democratic governor, Culbert L. Olson, on January 7, 1939. Billings, whose cause had never received the same attention, was freed by commutation of sentence that October; he was officially pardoned in 1961.
After his release, Mooney went on tour under labor auspices but soon faded from view. The years in prison had left him in poor health, $20, 000 in debt, and estranged from his wife. He spent most of his last two years at St. Luke's Hospital, San Francisco, suffering from bleeding ulcers. He died there and was buried in Cypress Lawn Cemetery, Colma, California.
Achievements
Thomas Mooney is known as a socialist union organizer and activist convicted of murder in connection with a 1916 San Francisco bomb explosion.
Connections
On July 3, 1911, in Stockton, California, Mooney married Rena Ellen (Brink) Hermann, a divorced music teacher; they had no children.
