To begin at the beginning:  the “Goober case” parallels in its main outlines the case of Tom Mooney.  If you wish to know about this case, send fifteen cents to the Mooney Defense Committee, Post Office Box 894, San Francisco, for the pamphlet, “Shall Mooney Hang,” by Robert Minor.  The business men of San Francisco raised a million dollars to save the city from union labor, and the Mooney case was the way they did it.  It happened, however, that the judge before whom Mooney was convicted weakened, and wrote to the Attorney-General of the State to the effect that he had become convinced that Mooney was convicted by perjured testimony.  But meantime Mooney was in jail, and is there still.  Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco “Call,” who has been conducting an investigation into this case, has recently written to the author:  “Altogether, it is the most amazing story I have ever had anything to do with.  When all is known that I think can be known, it will be shown clearly that the State before an open-eyed community was able to murder a man with the instruments that the people have provided for bringing about justice.  There isn’t a scrap of testimony in either of the Mooney or Billings cases that wasn’t perjured, except that of the man who drew the blue prints of Market Street.”

To what extent has the detection and punishment of radicalism in America passed out of the hands of public authorities and into the hands of “Big Business?” Any business man will of course agree that when “Big Business” has interests to protect, it must and will protect them.  So far as possible it will make use of the public authorities; but when thru corruption or fear of politics these fail, “Big Business” has to act for itself.  In the Colorado coal strike the coal companies raised the money to pay the state militia, and recruited new companies of militia from their private detectives.  The Reds called this “Government by Gunmen,” and the writer in his muckraking days wrote a novel about it, “King Coal.”  The man who directed the militia during this coal strike was A. C. Felts of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who was killed just the other day while governing several coal counties in West Virginia.

You will find this condition in the lumber country of Washington and Oregon, in the oil country of Oklahoma and Kansas, in the copper country of Michigan, Montana and Arizona, and in all the big coal districts.  In the steel country of Western Pennsylvania you will find that all the local authorities are officials of the steel companies.  If you go to Bristol, R. I., you will find that the National India Rubber Company has agreed to pay the salaries of two-thirds of the town’s police force.