The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1928-07-27
Mooney and Billings Rot in Jail
Because Labor Leaders are Yellow

DOCduSG AdUOE LSdOCIS are CHOW
Twelve years ago, July 27, 1916, the San
Francisco sheriff locked into five cells in the
county jail the organizer of a streetcar strike
Thomas ]. Mooney, an assistant in the strike
Warren K Billings, MONEYS wife and two
other men we'll known in the California labor
movement
The charge was murder. The frame-up was
based upon the explosion Of bomb in "pre
paredness" parade which had killed or mortally
wounded ten persons.
Since then every civilized country in the
world has felt the storm of its class struggle
blow stronger by at least some degree on the
issue of the Mooney case"
The Mooney case" became the most cele-
brated case in all labor history. What the Drey-
fus case was for the lower middle class cause
of "iustice," the Mooney case became for the
swelling tide of the militant labor movement
which, already breaking through the chains OF
military restrictions in one great country, was
about to overthrow the Russian Empire.
The nartyrdom of Mooney and Billings is an
American epic. The Mooney case, which reached
the point of death sentence for Mooney COM
muted to life Imprisonment only because Wood
row Wilson'S imperialist war plans were I'M
peded by the wave of anger it caused, is twin to
the Sacco-V anzetti case.
The whole world knows that Mooney and
Billings had nothing to do with the prepared
ness day. tragedy in San Francisco-to argue
on that point would be a waste of time No
one seriously claims any longer that they had
ANYTHING to do with the crime of which they
were convicted.
And so it is commonly said that Mooney and
Billings are in the penitentiary because the
CAPITALIST class wishes to keep them there But
70 leave it at that and say no more would be
only an incomplete truth and therefore an in
direct lie. Let us speak again the truth on this
twelfth anniversary of the Imprisonment OF
Mooney and Billings-the other half of the
truth which is that Mooney and Billings are in
iail because the official labor movement of the
United States is foully corrupted by class col
alteration and because the controlling leaders
Of the trade unions in the main are in a con-
scious alliance with the capitalist powers.
Our memory is not so short as not to recall
that Mooney and his co-defendants were ar
rested with the direct connivance OF Broulllet,
PRESIDENT of the San Francisco Labor Council,
p. Fl. Mccarthy, the bride enriched president of
the California building trades unions, and the
whole official family of California trade union
bureaucracy, supported craftily by the Exec
r,tive Council of the American Federation Of
abor. We have not forgotten that, although
enc Debs defed his party to come out openly
1T the beginning for Mooney and Billings, the
ocialist party as an organization, national and
state, remained publicly non-committal and
worked privately to withhold working class sup
port for Mooney whom it characterized as an
''anarchist' although he was member of the
party.
1t is true that after the tide of working
class support had in spite of them reached
high point, the A. F. of L. bureaucracy and
the Socialist Party bureaucracy made formal
gestures in behalf of Mooney and Billings But
every man and woman familiar with the labor
movement knows now and knew then that
these were only formal gestures to an aroused
mass sentiment. These bureaucrats knew only
too well, what proved to be the fact, that every
militant left wing tendency in the trade unions
and in the Socialist Party would be crystallized
around the Mooney Billings defense move
ment That nearly all of the older figures now
in the left wing trade union movement, guided
by the Trade Union Educational League, and
nearly all of the older leaders of the present
Communist Party were then the leaders of
the international Workers Defense League