Nevada’s Pardon Board Rectifies an Old Judicial Scar

CARSON CITY, Nev. —  Morrie Preston was a quiet, young telephone lineman from Los Angeles who had never before joined a union. Joe Smith was a down-on-his-luck entrepreneur from England. Together, they seemed an unlikely pair of radical unionists.

But in the blunt and brutal world of boom-town Nevada 80 years ago, a duplicitous mix of circumstance and suspicion cast the two men among Bill Heywood, Joe Hill and other early union heroes in the fierce struggle between labor and capital.

Fictitious Conspiracy

When Preston shot and mortally wounded another armed man in a heated argument outside a Goldfield, Nev., restaurant in 1907--a not-uncommon event in the Wild West--he and Smith became central figures in a fictitious conspiracy concocted by local mine owners to discredit the two men and their radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies.”

Perjured testimony and inflamed public opinion persuaded the jury that the two men led a union conspiracy to murder local businessmen, and the two IWW organizers were sent to prison. Preston served seven years of his 25-year sentence for second-degree murder, despite his plea of self-defense; Smith served four years of a 10-year manslaughter sentence, even though he was at home having dinner with his family at the time of the gun battle.

Although their convictions stirred working people across the nation--Preston was nominated for President by the Socialist Labor Party while still in jail--it soon was supplanted by even more spectacular labor strife. But their cause was not forgotten.

In 1980, long after both men died in poverty and obscurity, Nevada historians Sally Vanjani and Guy Louis Rocha began their own investigation of the case. What they found--letters conceding perjury and hinting at bribery, malicious neglect by appeals courts of the day and fruitless pleas for clemency by some of the era’s top state officials--prompted Smith’s descendants to petition the state to clear their family name.

On Tuesday, they won. After a formal plea by Carson City lawyer Laura W. FitzSimmons and a half-hour of spirited debate, the Nevada State Board of Pardons voted 6 to 1 to grant both men posthumous pardons--the first in state history--in acknowledgment of the unfair nature of their trial.

The decision was greeted with tears and applause in the cramped chambers of the Nevada Supreme Court. The five members of that body, along with Gov. Richard Bryan and Atty. Gen. Brian McKay, form the pardons board.

“I’m so happy justice is done,” said a tearful Diane Smith Varni of Watsonville, Calif. “This (trial) destroyed my grandfather and broke up my family. Now we have all gotten back together and cleared his name.”

Not Fully Satisfied

“I’m not totally satisfied,” added another of Joe Smith’s grandchildren, Ronald Smith of Napa, Calif., who was reunited with many of his relatives by their effort to reopen the case. “I just wish there was some way to prove him innocent.”

Smith died in 1935 in Oakland. None of Preston’s relatives were in court Tuesday since he died childless in Hollywood in 1924 when he fell from a telephone pole.

According to a Vanjani and Rocha book on the case, titled “The Ignoble Conspiracy,” Preston and Smith became IWW activists after arriving in Nevada around the turn of the century. Preston was manning a picket line outside a restaurant owned by John Silva on March 10, 1907, when Silva drew a pistol from the behind the bar and went outside to confront the pickets. The two men faced off and Silva was shot once. He died later that night and Preston turned himself in.

Smith, the IWW organizer who had called for the restaurant boycott because Silva docked the pay of a waitress who left without notice, was arrested later at his home and charged with conspiring in the manslaughter.

Focus of Attention

The controversial trial helped undermine the IWW throughout the West. Six months later, federal troops were briefly dispatched to suppress the Wobblies and other union activists in Goldfield.

Although the members of the pardons board debated whether their action would be “legally meaningful,” they for the most part conceded that Joseph Smith did indeed appear to be innocent. This opinion was altered by a 1914 letter unearthed by Vanjani and Rocha in which prosecutor J. F. Douglas acknowledged to an earlier pardons board that two key prosecution witnesses--Thomas (Gunplay Maxwell) Bliss, a member of Butch Cassidy’s outlaw gang, and William L. Claiborne, a petty thief and bunco artist--had lied while giving testimony at the trial.

“This is damning to me and cries out for relief,” said Associate Justice John C. Mowbry as he read the record.

“It is quite evident the process was flawed and quite evident these men were denied due process,” said Chief Justice E. M. Gunderson.

A Dissenting View

However, Associate Justice C. Clifton Young, who eventually cast the only vote against the pardons, argued that the passage of time made it impossible to accurately judge the fairness of the trial--or the veracity of the evidence being used to discredit it.

“We might argue that Smith lacked competent counsel and Preston was denied an appeal,” he said, “but does that mean, ipso facto, we say 75 years later that all is forgiven, that it was a political trial and (the trial) should be overturned?”

The rest of the board agreed that it should, and in doing so confirmed the beliefs of scholars, union members and radical politicians.

“The trial was a travesty,” said Rocha, who spent five years researching the case and the book. “They were tried more for their (socialist) political beliefs than for any crime . . . .”

“This was a classic case of men with money and influence subverting the justice system to persecute someone for their political beliefs,” said Rocha, the Nevada state archivist. “It also was one of the paramount cases laying the foundation of the anti-union feeling that persists in Nevada to this day.”