Gary Kamiya May 16, 2014 Updated: May 17, 2014 4:32 p.m.
On a sultry July afternoon in 1916, as thousands of flag-waving San Franciscans clogged Market Street for a "Preparedness Day" parade to support war readiness, an explosion killed 10 people and set in motion the greatest miscarriage of justice in the city's history.
There was never any direct evidence pointing to the person who detonated the bomb at 2:06 p.m. on Steuart Street near Market, a blast that sent body parts flying through the air and wounded 40 in addition to those killed. That lack of evidence, however, didn't keep two innocent men from being convicted of the crime.
In the paranoid, vengeful atmosphere that enveloped San Francisco after the bombing - one whipped into a frenzy by William Randolph Hearst's flagship newspaper, the Examiner - left-wing labor activists Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were arrested, tried and found guilty. The verdicts had barely been handed down when evidence revealed that the entire judicial process had been a farce, marked by illegal arrests, perjured and coached witnesses and gross prosecutorial misconduct. Yet neither man was released for decades.
America's patriotic mania for "preparedness" was partly driven by World War I, which was raging in Europe, but more by fear of revolutionary Mexico.
Long viewed by American capitalists as a compliant fiefdom, Mexico had been racked by turmoil after the ouster of dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911. When guerrilla leader Pancho Villa sacked the town of Columbus, N.M., killing 17 Americans, the Hearst papers demanded that the U.S. invade and annex Mexico and civilize its "mongrel mixture of Aztec, Indian and Spanish buccaneer" people. A nationwide "Preparedness" movement arose.
A bitter class divide already existed in San Francisco, where the business community was squared off against the city's powerful unions. The Preparedness movement exacerbated these tensions.
The movement was embraced by merchants, bankers and capitalists, who saw it as the duty of "every red-blooded American in San Francisco" to support the cause. Labor and left-wing groups denounced it as a way for businessmen and munitions manufacturers to increase profits.
As Richard H. Frost notes in his definitive 1968 study, "The Mooney Case," the Preparedness Day parade was made up almost entirely of businessmen and white-collar employees. Virtually none of the city's large working-class population took part.
Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were militant labor activists. Mooney was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and a socialist. Both men had been implicated in a direct-action campaign against Pacific Gas and Electric Co., in which a number of electrical towers were blown up. Mooney was acquitted, but Billings served a year in jail.
In the hysteria after the parade bombing, their backgrounds made the men perfect stooges.
The Chamber of Commerce's Law and Order Committee, which had been formed to break San Francisco's unions, joined the Hearst press in demanding that anarchists, radicals and other un-American types be rounded up. Actual evidence of guilt was not necessary: Merely being a radical was enough.
Police soon declared that Billings and Mooney were suspects and arrested them. The arrests were blatantly illegal - there was no evidence against either man - but that made no difference. San Franciscans wanted convictions, and District Attorney Charles Fickert was going to supply them.
Billings' trial came first. His alibi was strong and the case against him weak, but that made no difference. Fickert's closing argument ignored the facts and appealed directly to the jury's patriotic outrage: "This American flag, this American flag was what they desired to offend!" Billings was sentenced to life in prison.
The case against Mooney was even weaker. A photograph established that he was more than a mile away minutes before the bomb exploded. The key witness against him, a cattleman named Frank Oxman, said he had seen Mooney riding in a jitney down Market Street during the parade, which would have been impossible because the street was closed to traffic.
The convictions were appalling enough, but subsequent developments were still more outrageous.
After Mooney was sentenced to death, it emerged that Oxman had persuaded an acquaintance to commit perjury to support his testimony. This bombshell should have resulted in a new trial for Mooney, but Fickert said no and a judge backed him up.
The pattern was repeated over and over. New evidence kept appearing that exonerated Mooney and revealed prosecutorial wrongdoing - but although his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Gov. William Stephens in 1918, for various legal reasons he could never win a new trial. Years later, state Supreme Court Justice Raymond Peters said that if no legal procedure existed to set aside Mooney's conviction, the court should have invented one.
Years turned into decades, and the case became famous around the world, but still nothing happened. It was a Dickensian nightmare, one of the lowest points in the history of California law.
But it wasn't just the courts that were to blame: The media and public opinion also played a crucial role in keeping Mooney and Billings locked up. Crusading editor Fremont Older fought to expose the frame-up, but the flag-waving sensationalism of Hearst's yellow journalism was stronger.
And the people of California didn't care enough about a left-wing rabble-rouser to try to free him. As San Francisco attorney G.S. Arnold wrote, Californians wanted Mooney - he was the one who got all the attention; Billings was forgotten behind bars - kept in prison because they didn't want him "urging dynamite as a tonic for the body politic. I doubt this sentiment will ever change."
Mooney remained in San Quentin Prison until 1939, when Gov. Culbert Olson, a liberal, pardoned him. His 22 years in jail had shattered his health, and he died three years later at age 58.
Once Mooney was pardoned, the authorities could no longer justify holding Billings, and he received a commutation reducing his sentence to time served. He was released 10 months after Mooney but was not given a full pardon until 1961 - 45 years after the Preparedness Day bombing.
On a smaller scale, the case of Mooney and Billings presaged the disgraceful internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the assault on Muslims' civil rights after 9/11 - each an example of how fear, borne of national security hysteria, can threaten Americans' most precious possession, their rights.
Last week's trivia question: What piece of land was called Il Giardino by early Italians in San Francisco?
This week's trivia question: What incessant sound after the 1906 earthquake almost drove some survivors mad?