Biography
Israel Weinberg was a San Francisco jitney driver and president of the Jitney Bus Operators' Union, indicted along with Tom Mooney, Warren Billings, Rena Mooney, and Edward Nolan for the July 22, 1916 Preparedness Day Parade bombing. The prosecution alleged that he had driven the bombers to the scene in his jitney. He was acquitted at trial in 1917 after the prosecution's case collapsed.
Robert Minor’s retrospective identifies Mooney, his wife Rena, Billings, Weinberg and Nolan as the five jailed in the Preparedness Day prosecution. It attributes frame-up allegations to police-directed witnesses, altered photograph reproductions and trial procedures. It distinguishes Billings’s life sentence and Mooney’s commuted death sentence from the other defendants’ involvement. Ten years is a retrospective campaign description, not a final term or evidence that all five remained imprisoned in 1926.
RobertMinor’s contemporary TheyAreBuildingtheGallows identifies the five SanFrancisco defendants in a captioned jail group photograph. The article argues that prosecution witnesses and jury selection were corrupted; those claims are attributed to Minor. RenaMooney’s trial was ongoing, TomMooney’s execution threatened and labor organizations demanding release, so neither prospective execution nor a demand for freedom is recorded as an accomplished event.
International Socialist Review, July1917, vol.XVIII no.1, PDF page 30.
