Fremont Older and the 1916 San Francisco Bombing: A Tireless Crusade for Justice

By John C. Ralston

On Saturday, July 22, 1916, as "Preparedness Day" parade units assembled south of San Francisco's Market Street, a terrorist bomb exploded, killing ten people and wounding forty. San Francisco was outraged. Instead of searching for the perpetrators, however, the district attorney used the bombing as an excuse to arrest, try and convict two obscure labor figures without evidence. Author John C. Ralston chronicles the dramatic events following the initial tragedy as newspaper editor Fremont Older discovers the case is based on blatant perjury and exposes the secondary crime to the public. What became known as the "American Dreyfus Case" led to an international outcry, finally resulting in one defendant's pardon and the other's parole--but only after both men had been imprisoned for twenty-three years..

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625847515

John C. Ralston

John C. Ralston is a third-generation San Franciscan with a strong interest in his native city. John holds a history degree from University of California, Berkeley, and a teaching credential from San Francisco State University. A member of several local historical organizations, John is Program Director of the Los Altos Hills Historical Society.

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Author

Preface

This book is the product of a consuming interest in the history of my native city, San Francisco. In particular, it is the product of a long fascination with a figure that dominated my city’s history for almost forty years, the great newspaper editor Fremont Older. More about Older’s life and career will be found in the first chapter of this work, so it suffices to say here that besides being at the top of his profession, he had a unique gift for personal growth: beginning his career as a yellow journalist who published gossip and scandals in the fashion of the time, he developed into a nonjudgmental figure who looked beneath the surface of individuals and events to seek the root causes of both individual and societal behavior.

In 2003, I gave a presentation to the San Francisco History Association (SFHA) on the Billings-Mooney case that led to a two-part article in the quarterly publication of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society (SFM&HS) on the case, all of which has culminated in the work you are reading. As so often with anything he touched, Older dominated the case, which unfortunately he did not live to see resolved. While this work may add to the voluminous scholarship on the Billings-Mooney case, I hope that it stands as a tribute to Older and that my writing meets the high standards he demanded of all who worked with and for him.

I would like to thank the staff at the San Francisco Main Library History Room for its help in obtaining photographs and illustrations, as well as permissions to reprint: Jeff Thomas, Dee Dee (Wendy) Kramer, Photo Curator Christina Moretta and Archivist Susan Goldstein. Thanks to Susan Snyder at the Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley, for her prompt help in supplying images and permissions. Thanks also to the unnamed staff at the Green Library, Stanford University, who long ago recognized the guy who keeps coming in requesting obscure old San Francisco newspaper files. Thanks to Paul Middents in Washington State for pointing out today’s location of the Alibi Clock that figured so prominently in the Billings-Mooney case. Thanks to Mike, Vince and Josh of the City of Vallejo, California, Department of Public Works, for responding so quickly to my queries about the same clock.

I thank my brother, Stephen, for reading and correcting the section of the epilogue referring to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. My special thanks to Aubrie Koenig, commissioning editor at The History Press in Charleston, South Carolina, for her enthusiasm in recognizing the potential of this work and guiding it through publication, and to History Press project editor Ryan Finn.

My final thanks are reserved for a person very special, my wife, Lana. Born in an outlying area of Siberia, a native of the former Soviet Union, she has delved enthusiastically into the history of her adopted state of California. Her contribution to our local Los Altos Hills Historical Society is acknowledged by all who have had the good fortune to experience it. Her contribution to my life is beyond description. This book is dedicated to her.

Introduction

The American Dreyfus Case

On Saturday, January 5, 1895, at the École Militaire on Paris’s Champs-de-Mars, about 1,200 meters southeast of the looming Eiffel Tower, a strange ceremony was held. In the courtyard, a thirty-six-year-old artillery officer, now a convict, was marched under guard and ordered to halt. As a crowd gawked, another officer ripped off the convict’s insignia of rank, buttons and decorations and, in a final degradation, broke his sword over his knee. The humiliated officer was then marched around the courtyard perimeter before soldiers from Paris regiments. Outside the courtyard, it was the crowd’s turn. With no such military restraint required of the soldiers in the courtyard, they screamed, Traitor, Death to him and, tellingly, Dirty Jew!

The previous September 1894, a cleaning woman at the German embassy, secretly working for France’s Statistics (intelligence) Section, had found in a wastebasket a document offering to sell the Germans military secrets. Called the bordereau, it appeared to have been written by an officer knowledgeable about French army artillery. Handwriting experts who were shown the document were divided as to who wrote it, but nonetheless, the Statistics Section named a suspect: the degraded artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus’s misfortune was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was Jewish at a time when anti-Semitism was particularly rife in France, which had a long, dishonorable history of it. He was from Alsace, a disputed region on the Franco-German border that was annexed by Germany after France suffered a humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. And France’s defeat still stung the nation’s military establishment. Thus, anti-Semitism, sectionalism and militarism all conspired against Dreyfus. Although his handwriting only slightly matched the writing on the bordereau—and another officer’s handwriting matched it more—Dreyfus was secretly tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to life in a hellish prison on Devil’s Island, just above French Guiana, where he was not expected to live long.

On Saturday, September 23, 1916, more than twenty-one years after Dreyfus’s degradation, a jury filed into a San Francisco courtroom after deliberating and announced its verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree. The defendant—now a convicted murderer—was one Warren Knox Billings. The verdict was a shock, so much so that a veteran San Francisco Bulletin editor had a heart attack upon hearing it. Oddly, for reasons that would not be revealed for another four years and were questionable even then, prosecuting attorney James Brennan had not asked for the death penalty for Billings but rather life imprisonment. Exultant district attorney Charles M. Fickert said that Billings’s conviction was merely a pioneer case and that he expected similar verdicts for more defendants.

Less than five months later, on Friday, February 9, 1917, Fickert got his similar verdict. A jury in the murder trial of Thomas (Tom) J. Mooney also returned a verdict of guilty in the first degree. There was no recommendation of life imprisonment, meaning that Mooney would be sentenced to hang. Tom Mooney’s sister, Anna Mooney, screamed and fainted, and his aged mother began crying. Mrs. Israel Weinberg, wife of one of Mooney’s codefendants, wailed and fainted as well. Mooney paled but was quiet as he was handcuffed and led from the courtroom. Again, Fickert was jubilant: We are merely on the threshold of the prosecutions to follow this conviction.

As in the Dreyfus case, there was an indisputable crime. On Saturday, July 22, 1916, a terrorist bomb had exploded during a great patriotic Preparedness parade. Ten people were killed and forty injured, many seriously. The murders led to an outcry for arrest and suppression of anarchists, an umbrella term that included labor figures, nonconformists and other antiestablishment types. Billings was arrested on Thursday the twenty-seventh and Mooney the next day. Both were held incommunicado several days before being booked.

DESPITE THE HORRIBLE SENTENCE pronounced on him, Dreyfus was fortunate in one regard, having a close-knit, supportive family of some wealth. In June 1895, his brother, Mathieu, engaged a literary critic to begin a campaign with French authors and intellectuals in proving Alfred Dreyfus’s innocence. Belief spread gradually and then grew with revelations of the prosecution’s perjury and coverup of the bordereau’s real author, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. To begin with, Dreyfus hadn’t a motive for selling secrets to Germany: from a well-off family, with an independent income besides his salary, he didn’t need money. Esterhazy meanwhile was a spendthrift and a womanizer and had gambling debts. Support for Dreyfus culminated with the publication in January 1898 of the great French author and journalist Emile Zola’s J’Accuse…! (I Accuse!), a blistering indictment of Dreyfus’s frame-up. L’Affaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Affair) became international. Outside France, opinion was overwhelmingly favorable to him.

Neither Billings nor Mooney had money, but the American Federation of Labor hired detectives to investigate the chief prosecution witness against Mooney. Acting on a tip, they went to Grayville, Illinois, where they found letters to a local resident indicating that the witness was not even in San Francisco at the time he testified seeing Billings and Mooney plant the bomb. The letters were taken to San Francisco and shown to the great newspaper editor Fremont Older. Older in San Francisco was counterpart to Zola in Paris. He printed the letters on the front page of the evening Bulletin and, with others, conducted further investigation that demonstrated that the prosecution’s cases against Billings and Mooney were completely fraudulent: prosecution witnesses contradicted themselves and one another; they were paid to testify; the jury foreman in Mooney’s trial was in collusion with the district attorney’s office. Support for the defendants spread nationally and internationally. Inevitably, Billings-Mooney came to be called the American Dreyfus Case.

In fact, there were conspicuous parallels. There was an obvious crime, but both prosecutions, rather than investigating to find a suspect or suspects, decided on suspects in advance and then fished for evidence against them. When no evidence was found, the prosecutions faked it. Evidence favoring the defendants was ignored or suppressed. In each case, an institution threatened with exposure closed ranks to protect its own, repeated its discredited cases and attacked its defendants and critics personally rather than admit wrongdoing. The defendants’ backgrounds made that easier. For many Frenchmen, Dreyfus’s ethnicity was guilt enough, so why bother? The attitude was stated candidly multiple times. Billings and Mooney were societal outcasts. Being suspected of radicalism and of using violence in labor-management disputes earlier, many people said that they deserved imprisonment, guilty of the bombing or not.

There were differences, of course. In France, one man was imprisoned, while in San Francisco, two men were imprisoned and other people tried, but with the prosecution having fallen apart with Fremont Older’s exposures of perjury, there were no more convictions. (Most treatments refer to the Mooney Case, as though it involved just one man, but as there were two, I call it Billings-Mooney.) And Dreyfus was imprisoned for four and a half years and then retried, pardoned, reinstated in the army and, in 1906, made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in a ceremony in the very courtyard where he had been degraded eleven years earlier. Billings and Mooney were imprisoned far longer, and Billings was not fully exonerated until forty-five years after the Preparedness Day bombing.

Fremont Older and Emile Zola paid dearly for their advocacy. Threats, vituperation, innuendoes and outright lies were used against them. Older almost lost his livelihood at the then advanced age of sixty-two. Zola was tried and convicted of libel because of J’Accuse…! and went to England to escape imprisonment. Older was physically attacked, and Zola may even have been murdered, although this was never proven.

France is considered the peak of European civilization, and in many ways it is. The nation has contributed mightily to the visual arts, architecture, design, literature, music, viticulture and cuisine (especially cuisine), and the French are justifiably renowned for knowing how to live well and enjoy life. The Dreyfus Affair, however, exposed fissures in French society. As Zola and his allies (Dreyfusards) campaigned for Dreyfus’s release, prosecution supporters (Anti-Dreyfusards) campaigned to keep an innocent man on Devil’s Island rather than compromise the military establishment’s honor. Associates, friends and even families were bitterly divided. The case continues to be much written about. A good recent example is Louis Begley’s aptly titled Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale University Press, 2009), a concise treatment of the affair and its relevance today.

In a remarkably short time, California had also become a civilization. After and even during the gold rush, authors, artists, photographers and architects created in new California styles. After the disastrous earthquake and fire of April 1906, San Francisco rose from its ashes and gave the world the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) of 1915, to which France had links. Composer Camille Saint-Saëns, France’s official representative, composed the piece Hail, California for the PPIE, and the French Pavilion inspired a permanent structure, the Legion of Honor Museum. Billings-Mooney, however, also exposed fissures. Some of Fremont Older’s earlier allies turned against him. The case was an excuse for capital to suppress labor, which led to the bitter Pacific Coast longshoremen’s strike of 1934.

Like the Dreyfus Affair, Billings-Mooney is a seminal case about which every new generation must learn. This is the story of the American Dreyfus Case.

San Francisco in 1916

In San Francisco, California, in 1916, there began a chain of events that would resound throughout the world, disgracing the city and the United States. Twenty-three years would pass before the disgrace was even partially gone and another twenty-two until it was gone completely. Today, long after the principals have died and the events are mostly forgotten, the Billings-Mooney case is relevant as a demonstration of how civil liberties can be jeopardized when a society reacts to physical danger.

To understand the bitterness of the Billings-Mooney case and why it went on so long, it is necessary to understand San Francisco before the turn of the twentieth century. As everyone knows, San Francisco lies by an active geological fault, the San Andreas. Running down the middle of the city and dividing it roughly in two was another kind of fault, a social, economic and political one that we can call the Market Street fault. North of Market was mostly middle class and upper-middle class, with the mansions of Nob Hill millionaires—Stanford, Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, Flood and Towne—dominating all. South of Market—called South of the Slot because of the cable car tracks on Market Street that predated the 1906 earthquake and fire—was predominantly working class and transient. South of the Slot was more than a geographical expression; it was a way of life.

San Francisco grew in a very short time from a tented town to a major American city, and the demand for skilled workers had almost always exceeded the supply. The city was a union labor stronghold. (Los Angeles by contrast was mostly open shop, and Los Angeles employers were determined to keep it that way.) Management and labor—North of Market and South of Market—clashed regularly in San Francisco, sometimes one side winning, sometimes the other; a war with no decisive battle. In 1901, a bitter teamster-waterfront strike began when business organized the Employers’ Association to break union labor. Neither side won a clear victory, but labor men, convinced that neither major political party represented them, organized the Union Labor Party (ULP). The ULP was immediately exploited by a brilliant but unscrupulous lawyer, Abraham Ruef, who engineered the party’s nomination for mayor of his friend and client, the tall, handsome, charismatic Eugene E. Schmitz, head of the Musician’s Union. Schmitz amazed political authorities by winning easily, although few of the ULP ticket were elected with him.

Ruef’s power grab immediately got the notice of Fremont Older, managing editor of the San Francisco evening Bulletin. Older, from an impoverished Wisconsin family whose men had been wiped out in the Civil War, was a striking figure, more than six-foot-two and athletic, whose only vice was cigars. Self-educated and a voracious reader, he had learned the newspaper trade from the ground up. He and his brainy, beautiful wife, Cora, a published writer, made a conspicuous and handsome couple in San Francisco. The Bulletin was a unique newspaper. Independently owned by Robert A. (R.A.) Crothers, a Canadian-born lawyer who had inherited it in part from his deceased brother-in-law, Loring Pickering Sr., the paper had a history of crusades against graft and corruption but had deteriorated badly by 1895, when Crothers offered Older the job of managing editor. Feeding readers a mixture of moral zeal and sensationalism, Older boosted Bulletin circulation to the largest of any evening newspaper’s west of Chicago.

Older had a unique gift for attracting talent: Bulletin staff would include cartoonists Rube Goldberg, Robert Ripley (Ripley’s Believe or Not!) and Tad Dorgan and writers and editors Maxwell Anderson (Key Largo, Anne of the Thousand Days), Robert L. Duffus, Ernest J. Hopkins, Edgar Scoop Gleeson and Rose Wilder Lane (who coauthored the Little House series, which until recently was attributed solely to her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder). It was a time when people got all their information from newspapers, and an editor like Older had enormous influence.

After Schmitz was inaugurated in 1902, scraps of information reached Older about graft: payoffs, police overlooking liquor license violation and brothels flourishing with police protection. The Bulletin went on the attack, but Schmitz was reelected in 1903. In 1905, Older organized a fusion ticket with Democratic and Republican Parties nominating a single candidate. Mathematically, that seemed sure of winning, but to the horror of Older and his allies, Schmitz won a third term, and the entire Union Labor ticket, including all eighteen members of the board of supervisors, was elected with him.

Shocked by the indifference of San Francisco voters, Older swore to make people believe him and went to Washington, D.C., to ask President Theodore Roosevelt to lend a special federal prosecutor, Francis J. Heney, to bring charges against Ruef, Schmitz and the supervisors. Roosevelt eventually agreed to that and also to lending Detective William Burns, but there were obstacles. Costs of the prosecution would be about $100,000, far beyond the district attorney’s budget, and the prosecution would have to be conducted under the auspices of District Attorney William Langdon, about whom little was known other than that he had been elected on the ticket chosen by Abraham Ruef.

Older rashly assured Heney and Roosevelt that he would take care of the money, and when he returned to San Francisco, he called on Langdon. Older got a surprise when Langdon assured him that as chief law enforcement officer of San Francisco, he would prosecute any man who breaks the law; plainly, that included Ruef. The $100,000 was a problem. Older had no money, but he knew everyone in San Francisco who did, including former mayor James Duvall Phelan and young Rudolph Spreckels, of the Spreckels sugar family, who had made his own fortune and had a strong sense of public duty. Spreckels said that he would back the investigation to the limit, but he and Heney said that prosecution must not be limited to a few corrupt officials—it had to go to the very top, including the officials of the Southern Pacific railroad, which had corrupted California and debauched government.

The graft prosecution. Left to right: Detective Frank Burns, Fremont Older, Cora Older, Francis Heney, Charles Cobb and Rudolph Spreckels. Bancroft Library.

The graft prosecution began early in 1906 and was kept secret at first. The destruction of San Francisco in the earthquake and fire was a setback to the prosecution: Schmitz rose to the occasion and, rightly or wrongly, was hailed a hero, but in October 1906,