Mooney, Tom
Mooney, Tom
Born in 1883 in Chicago; died Mar. 6, 1942, in San Francisco. Participant in the workers’ movement in the USA.
A foundry worker, Mooney joined the Socialist Party in 1907. In 1910 he attended the Copenhagen congress of the Second International and afterward was very active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was arrested in 1916 along with the labor activist W. Billings on a trumped-up charge of conspiring to set off a bomb during a militarist demonstration in San Francisco on July 22, 1916. Despite his innocence Mooney was sentenced to death in 1917, but public pressure caused this to be commuted in 1918 to life imprisonment. In 1939 the authorities were compelled to release him.