Martyrs of Yesterday
Clark, Joseph
THE MOONEY CASE, by Richard H. Frost. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 495 pp. $12.50. IT TAKES very little effort to get an argument going between generations about progress. Has...
...But one reason, perhaps, that too many people will not read it is the forbidding bulk, not to speak of the high cost of the volume...
...A bomb exploded at a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco on July 22, 1916, and 10 people were killed, 40 wounded by the blast...
...Hui, 1935 decision in Mooney v. Holohan...
...Therecan be no retreat from that principle here...
...If people would only read," Marx is supposed to have once said...
...Who gets the credit for the good fight...
...The book originated in what was clearly an extraordinarily good Ph.D...
...nay, more, not only knew they lied, but the prosecutors Fickert and Cunha conspired to suborn the testimony at the trials of Mooney and Billings...
...For 23 years Mooney and Billings werein jail, while an unending fight went on for theirfreedom...
...The conservative Justice who rose to the defense of civil liberty spoke quietly, but the words were thunderous support "of the requirement of due process": That requirement [Justice Hughes said] insafe-guarding the liberty of the citizen againstdeprivation through the action of the State, embodies the fundamental conceptions of justice which lie at the base of our civil and political institutions...
...thearrest of Israel Weinberg, jitney driver...
...Above all, the Mooney Case expanded the protection oTthe writ of habeas corpus, especially through the Supreme Court ruling of 1935...
...After much exchange about the dastardly bombing, with Mooney agreeing it was "the most heinous crime," he tells the prosecutors, "I am only a working man and there are many tricks in this game and I want my rights all safe-guarded, and I realize they cannot be safe-guarded under these circumstances...
...then the arrests of Tom Mooney, union militant, and of his wife Rena...
...One of the most revealing sections of this book gives much of the verbatim text of the first interrogation of Mooney after he was arrested in 1916 following the bombing of the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade...
...Here is a book with weighty evidence that says things do change, and sometimes for the better...
...Billings had to wait ten months longer before he gained freedom...
...In many ways, the Mooney case originated in the conflict between employer groups and labor unions in San Francisco...
...Has there been any in the last couple of generations...
...In other words, it has become a bitter industrial struggle...
...Is this really the worst of all possible worlds at the worst of all possible times...
...Frost turns up a report by the U.S...
...Such convictions have been upheld in the past and those of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were notorious examples...
...That principle was stated by Associated Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in a recent decision: More than 30 years ago this Court held thatthe Fourteenth Amendment cannot tolerate a state criminal conviction obtained by the knowing use of false evidence...
...How many long years of imprisonment were endured until Justice Hughes, speaking for the Supreme Court in 1935, sternly admonished the California Supreme Court that an issue of justice was involved...
...Then came the arrest of Warren Billings, labor activist...
...District Attorney in San Francisco who, at the very outset of the case, reported to his superiors in Washington: "The truth of thisbomb situation here is that it was taken up by the Law and Order Committee of the Chamber of Commerce as a chance to suppress the Unions, and the Unions evidently took up Mooney's side of it in order to countermove against the action of the Chamber of Commerce...
...At the very outset Brennan, who prosecuted Billings, demanded from Mooney: "How long have you known Billings...
...There is [no] fair-minded, honest, liberty-loving man that can deny me that right...
...But a superior dissertation does not always make the most readable book...
...Weinberg and Mrs...
...As to the fight itself Frost makes an objective estimate of those who contributed to this long and often heart-breaking struggle...
...Mooney were acquitted, charges were dropped against Nolan, but Mooney and Billings were convicted, with Mooney sentenced to hang and Billings tolife imprisonment...
...Mooney himself was complex, a difficult man, often a trial to his friends, including the wife he put aside after the long fight was ended in victory...
...But a curious aspect of this fight, as of almost every other struggle against injustice, is that there are invariably the little old (or young) wealthy ladies who devote themselves with all their strength to a vindication of the right...
...One of the many virtues of this book is that in presenting an exhaustive history of the Mooney case it also delineates the central actors...
...Justice Stewart was referring to the Court's * To older generations of radicals the Mooneystory was told a thousand times...
...Mooney is here revealed as a man of extraordinary courage, intelligence, and principle...
...Mooney was not only steadfast in confounding his tormentors but prescient in defense of his constitutional rights...
...THERE IS A CLASS STRUGGLE, even in America...
...Today it has become a model in many respects...
...dissertation...
...IT TAKES very little effort to get an argument going between generations about progress...
...and Mooney replied: "I insist that I have the right to counsel...
...The cops and prosecutors were depriving him of his constitutional rights and trying to get him to implicate Billings and his other comrades...
...There were demonstrations forMooney in Russia, and President Wilson appealedto the California authorities to commute the death sentence...
...It is a requirementthat cannot be deemed to be satisfied by merenotice and hearing if a State has contrived a conviction through the pretense of a trial whichin truth is but used as a means of deprivinga defendant of liberty through a deliberatedeception of court and jury by the presentation of testimony known to be perjured...
...But the bitterness of "the oppressor's wrong" and "the law's delay" was suffered for four more years before Governor Olson began his Administration in January 1939 with the pardon and release of Tom Mooney...
...There has been nodeviation from that established principle...
...That decision came after the interminable efforts of Mooney's defenders to obtain evidence (which they did obtain) that the prosecution's witnesses lied on the witness stand and that the California prosecutors knew they lied...
...and thearrest of Ed Nolan, machinist union organizer...
...Speaking of the law's delay, it wasn't till 19 years after the arrest that the police stenogra BOOKS pher's record of the interrogation was made public as a result of the defense's efforts...
...If those who are certain that we live in the worst of times would read this book they might have cause for reflection on the nature of the struggle for justice that has been going on so long, and often with some results...
...The long and arduous fight to free the two labor militants finally succeeded and also vindicated a principle...
...And Frost makes the sound judgment: "Without the help of all of them and others as well, Mooney and Billings probably would have gone the way of Parsons and Spies, of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...It might have been a service if author and publisher had produced a volume smaller by half, with some of the detail absent, but still with Frost's cogent, remarkably lucid presentation...
...The California Supreme Court, bastion of disregard for civil liberties during the Mooney case, has changed with the press of the fight...
...Legal measures went hand-in-hand with publicity and mass movements to arouse public sympathy...
...And these, Mooney in the first place, are presented as rounded human beings, with their weaknesses as well as their strengths...
...To cite a juridical example, it might come as a surprise that only in recent times was the principle accepted that convictions resulting from perjured evidence are faulty and should be thrown out...
...Today a California defendant has the right to know in advance who are the prosecution witnesses and to examine documents that will be used against him...
...As the author of The Mooney Case indicates, the California Court preceded the Warren Court in barring use of evidence secured through illegal search and seizure, and it also established the principle of "criminal discovery"— the sharing of information by both sides before a trial...
...The Anarchists credited Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, the Communists, Robert Minor, the Irish, Bourke Cockran, the liberals, Fremont Older, trade unionists, Samuel Gompers and Edward Nockels...
Vol. 16 • March 1969 • No. 2
