Death of Tom Mooney

He was never meant to be a martyr. He was a wandering iron molder, an obscure left-wing Socialist, an unknown writer for a little, radical West Coast paper. Few Americans had ever heard of Tom Mooney until he went to prison for San Francisco's 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, and, if his guilt had been certain, few Americans would ever have heard of him again.

But, as a man whom most of the world believed innocent, Tom Mooney grew famous; he was labor's international cause celebre. When he was finally pardoned in 1939, after 22 years, a caravan of 200 automobiles followed him from prison to San Francisco; he walked bareheaded leading "a great labor parade, spoke to thousands from a platform at City Hall. Parents held up their children to see Tom Mooney.

He was a great man-for a day. But he was old from years in prison, sick with ulcers and jaundice. He had not worn his martyrdom well; he broke with modest Warren K. Billings, who was convicted with him and who somehow was never regarded as a martyr; he was estranged from his wife; labor people found him selfish and conceited.

He started to make a lecture tour, collapsed. At an Illinois labor convention he hung wistfully around the hall, a little man in shabby clothes, waiting in vain for an invitation to speak. He fell sick again. The California Federation of Labor turned down a resolution to pay his bills; he had veered too far to their left.

Flat on his back in a San Francisco hospital, Tom Mooney, at 59, had only a few visitors, only a few money letters from friends. From his bed he conducted a feeble campaign to free Communist Earl Browder. Last week anticlimactic death came to Tom Mooney.

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