Warren Billings

Warren Knox Billings (July 4, 1893 – September 4, 1972) was a labor leader and political activist, who was convicted with Thomas Mooney of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916. It is believed that the two were wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. Billings served 23 years in prison before being released in 1939 and finally being pardoned in 1961 by governor Edmund G. Brown.

Billings was born in Middletown, New York on July 4, 1893. His mother was of German ancestry and his father, William Billings, was born in Massachusetts. William billings died in 1895, he left his wife and nine children without financial backing. Warren Billings moved in with his older sister whose husband would make Warren work until exhaustion, Warren would protest against the unfair treatment. After graduating in 1908 from public school, he went off and worked at a variety of jobs. In 1911 he was convicted and given a suspended sentence for possession of burglar's tools.

In March 1913, Billings went to an employment agency for work. He was told there was an opening for a shoe liner at a shoe company that was on strike. He replied that he was no strikebreaker. This is when he was approached by a man outside the employment office who showed him a red card of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was offered to be a spy for IWW and he accepted. He would work in the factory to figure out how many shoes they were making. In this organization he met Thomas Mooney, who became his trusted advisor.

Billings was convicted and imprisoned for one year on a charge of possession of dynamite for the Pacific Gas & Electric strike in 1913. He was found with 60 sticks of dynamite, but testified that he was just ordered to bring a suitcase to a location but had no idea what was in it.

His association with Mooney, who was a well known socialist and militant, strengthened the prosecution’s connection between Billings and the Preparedness Day bombing, which took place on July 22, 1916 in San Francisco. The bomb exploded at Steuart and Market Street, killing ten and wounding forty. In the days leading up to the bombing detective Swanson offered reward money to Billings in exchange for evidence that would convict Thomas Mooney, but Billings then let Mooney know about the plots against him. The bombing took place during the height of anarchist violence in the United States by the Galleanist anarcho-communist movement of Luigi Galleani.

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