Scope and Content Note
The papers of Warren Knox Billings (1893-1972) span the years 1899-1973, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1920-1939. Consisting of Family Correspondence, General Correspondence, Legal File, Subject File, Miscellany, Addition, and Oversize material, the collection is focused on Billings's arrest, trial, and conviction for planting the 1916 Preparedness Day bomb that killed ten persons and wounded forty others during a Market Street parade in San Francisco.
The Mooney-Billings case, with Tom J. Mooney, Billings's fellow laborer as codefendant, became a cause célèbre of radicals and civil libertarians who argued that the men were the victims of a politically inspired effort to break the union movement in San Francisco and to destroy the militant International Workers of the World. For over twenty years, various defense committees worked to release the pair, but despite post-trial information that cast doubt on the credibility of the state's case, Billings did not go free until California governor Culbert L. Olson commuted his sentence to time served in 1939. Out of prison for the first time in twenty-three years, Billings took up the watchmaking trade he had learned in Folsom State Prison and became active in San Francisco Bay area labor councils. He also continued the campaign for a full pardon that he began in prison, and he served on the defense committees of individuals he believed had been unfairly treated by internal security agencies during the Cold War. In 1961, eleven years before his death, Governor Edmund G. Brown (1905- 1996) granted him the pardon he had sought since his conviction nearly a half century earlier.
The Billings Papers reflect all aspects of his life after 1920, but the emphasis is on the period between 1920 and his commutation of sentence. During this time, Billings seemingly kept all incoming and most outgoing letters with correspondents who varied from solicitous pen pals of prisoners to lawyers and radical friends who represented his case before the courts and the American public. Chief among his advocates were San Francisco newspaper publisher Fremont Older, radicals Mary Gallagher and Madeline Wieland Gross (who was also his cousin), and attorneys George Thomas Davis, John Frederick Finerty, Henry T. Hunt, and John G. Lawler.
The collection contains only a few letters from Mooney to Billings, and none from Billings to Mooney, so that information on their relationship must be derived from a clippings file, from letters Billings wrote to the public, and from his correspondence with associates such as Madeline Gross and Mary Gallagher. The two women alternately served as secretaries of his defense committees, and their letters to and from Billings are personal and revealing. Also significant are communications with lawyers and his exchanges with Josephine Rudolph, the woman whom he later married and whose letters are found in the Family Correspondence. From these papers it is possible to trace the reasoning behind Billings's decision to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, to break from Mooney and organize his own defense committee, to request and then withdraw an appeal for parole, and to campaign for a commutation and a pardon. Other notable correspondents include Roger Nash Baldwin, Rose Baron, Lena Morrow Lewis, Vito Marcantonio, Herbert Resner, Paul Ritchie, and Paul Scharrenburg.
By the time Billings received his commutation of sentence from Governor Olson in 1939, he had collected a store of transcripts relating to the history of the case. Arranged in the Legal File and encompassing Mooney's trial as well as his own, the transcripts contain testimony from the original trials, exhibit materials, and copies of his and Mooney's near-print and printed applications for pardon and for writs of habeas corpus. In the file is the transcript of the preliminary examination of Tom Mooney on a charge in 1914 of possessing explosives during a California electrical workers' strike.
In the Subject File are files pertaining to Billings's defense committees and to his personal and financial affairs while in Folsom State Prison. Also in the collection are writings by Billings and records concerning his participation in organizations to aid Vern Ralph Smith, a fellow Californian, and Earl Browder, Communist Party leader, in their fight for civil liberties during the 1940s.