Scope & Contents

Thomas J. Mooney was born in Chicago on December 8, 1882, the son of a coal miner and a rag sorter in a paper mill. A journeyman iron molder, he became a member of the International Molders Union in 1902. He became a socialist while traveling in Europe and returning home in 1907, joined the Socialist Party in Stockton, California. He campaigned for Debs’s presidency in 1908 and two years later settled in San Francisco, aligning himself with the party’s left wing. Mooney was arrested several times for strike activity beginning in 1913, but became a martyr hero after his conviction along with Warren Billings in the July 22, 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing which killed ten people. Public protest and the intervention of President Woodrow Wilson got his hanging sentence commuted to life imprisonment, but even though the suppression of evidence and suborning of perjury made the case a cause celebre, he didn’t receive a pardon until 1939. Mooney died March 6, 1942.

The Tom Mooney Collection consists of copies of correspondence between Mooney and Salt Lake City I.M.U. member, E. A. Carlson, in the Tom Mooney File at the University of Utah Libraries and of a series of articles on the Mooney case, radicalism and labor organizing on the Pacific Coast written by Walter Woehlke for Sunset, the Pacific Monthly.