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F I R S TP R E V765NEXTLAST

Terrorist Bombing, One Market Street
The site of chef Bradley Ogden's well known One Market Restaurant is also the location of one of the city's most notorious chapters. On July 22, 1916 San Francisco was holding a Preparedness Day parade prior to the country entering World War I. It was at this spot that a bomb was exploded in the crowd, killing ten and wounding forty. On scant evidence, Thomas Mooney, a local labor organizer was quickly arrested along with his wife and four others. Hysteria and anti-labor sentiment whipped to a froth by William Randolph Hearst's newspapers led to a show trial that even featured one witness who claimed her 'astral body' was at the scene. Mooney and co-defendent Warren Billings were convicted and sentenced to hang.

Evidence of the perjury and false testimony at the trial soon became common knowledge, and a world-wide campaign to free Tom Mooney followed. An investigation ordered by President Woodrow Wilson showed little evidence for conviction and uncovered several witnesses whose perjury had been coached by the prosecutors. Wilson telegraphed California Governor William Stephens asking him to commute Mooney's sentence to life imprisonment, which he did. But Mooney and Billings still spent 22½ years in prison before finally being pardoned in 1938.

After his release Mooney, accompanied by over one hundred longshoremen, walked up Market Street from the site of the bombing to the Hearst Building where he spat on the building that housed the editors who had unfairly railed against him for decades. Mooney died four years later in 1942. A huge funeral was held for him at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.
[ MAP F-16 ]


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