Biography
Morrie R. Preston was a young IWW-aligned restaurant cook in Goldfield, Nevada who, during the bitter 1907 Goldfield Consolidated Mines strike, shot and killed restaurant owner John Silva in what he maintained was self-defense. Mine operators and the Nevada Mine Owners' Association seized on the killing to frame Preston as a Western Federation of Miners assassin, securing a 25-year murder conviction widely viewed by labor historians as a frame-up. Preston was paroled in 1914 after a sustained labor defense campaign and posthumously pardoned by the Nevada Board of Pardons in 1987. He was paroled in 1914 and died in a Los Angeles workplace accident on October 10, 1924.
Thompson’s Goldfield account reports that Preston fired after restaurant owner Silva advanced on him with a gun during a picket confrontation. The account attributes a later finding of self-defense and absence of conspiracy evidence to the parole board seven years afterward, citing Solidarity of June 6, 1914. It also reports that the Socialist Labor Party nominated Preston for vice president against his wishes although he was not a party member. These retrospective assertions supplement the defense history; no new custody date or service total is inferred.
Fred W. Thompson and Jon Bekken, The IWW: Its First 100 Years, physical PDF pages 40, 41, 48. Source179 SHA256 aa128f62023cae68c84b07606880c2cb665c80266f78854951758922bab40afa.
