The Mooney Case by Richard H. Frost and: Frame-up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings by Curt Gentry (review)

Reviews 265 place to save it. The conventional-Romantic view (coming from the effete East, of course) is powerless. We need an esthetics, a consciousness of the land, which goes beyond the vacation-time pastoral. The Adams-Newhall book attempts to frame just such a consciousness. It treats the social history, but also tries to get into the wilderness, to show the real heart of the country. The cycle of the seasons is treated almost poetic­ ally by Miss Newhall, and Ansel Adam’s photographs, especially when they are comparatively ordinary pictures of woods and ponds and not the great vaulting scenery shots, are deep and reflective. The book is handsome, and it tries hard to be more than that. Unfortunately, the writing has a few precious places. Speaking of In­ dians being “superb swimmers,” Newhall writes, More than one white party in a canoe has been surprised by sud­ den and unexpected propulsion from below, and has looked down on mermaids, black hair swirling around them, pushing the dugout to the beach, and then laughing, curving like fish and vanishing under water. This is the never-never West. And I don’t know any naturalists who have reported moose attacking beavers by battering down their lodges. But most of the book is better. It looks beyond the brief white history to the Indians, for one thing, and it looks beyond the famous valley to the surrounding wilder­ ness. Though it is a survey and an introduction only, it points in fruitful directions. T h o m a s J . L y o n , Utah State University The Mooney Case. By Richard H. Frost. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968. x + 495, notes, index. $12.50.) Frame-up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings. By Curt Gentry. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1967. x -f 440, appendix, bibliography, index. $7.50.) In early 1917, a San Francisco court convicted Warren Billings and Tom Mooney of murder by detonating a bomb at the city’s preparedness parade the previous year. Judges sentenced Mooney to death and Billings to prison. For about two decades thereafter notable attorneys, a few labor leaders, citi­ zens, liberal newspapers, and a variety of others mounted appeals which Cali­ fornia judges and governors heard and denied. Tom Mooney became a cause célébré till his release from jail in 1939. Each book focuses on the Mooney case from the prebombing days through the trials, his term in prison, ending with his pardon and death. Both authors relegated Billings to a minor role. Tom Mooney arrived in San Francisco from the solidly American Mid­ west a few years before World War I. Being a restless and energetic (as well as a directionless) young man, he became involved in making a living and protecting the working man’s rights from the increasingly remote employer. He may have accepted some political philosophy such as anarchism or syndical- 266 Western American Literature ism to which he had been exposed; most likely he felt competent and im­ pelled to mobilize the power of workingmen to redress grievances, mostly economic. Billings, less clearly depicted, may have been prone to more violence than the apparently outspoken but pragmatic Mooney. San Francisco’s milieu at that moment included a welter of forces which combined to convict the two men. Proprietary elitists guarded their economic rights zealously, patriotism intensified as the United States became increas­ ingly involved in World War I, the adversary system flourished in court and press, and so it goes. But the most despicable human role in the entire tragedy seems to have been played by Charles Fickert, locally renowned ex-Stanford football player elevated to the position of district attorney. His office, dedi­ cated to convicting Mooney and Billings, heard only what it wanted from witnesses several of whom subsequently proved unreliable if not liars. San Francisco police, unfamiliar with bombings, bungled hopelessly the initial investigation at the scene of the explosion; they then collected incredibly conflicting evidence used selectively by the city’s representatives of the adversary system. Though faults and falsehoods became public knowledge, the two con­ victed men could not use such true...