Biography
William Burns was arrested in Yosemite National Park for violating the California criminal syndicalism law by organizing for the IWW and "knowingly" becoming a member of the union. He was arrested in April 1923 and served approximately seventeen months in the county jail while awaiting trial. Because he was arrested in a federal park, Burns was tried in federal court. His jury consisted of a bank president, a "real estate shark, " a deputy sheriff, the superintendent of a bonding company and other persons with admitted prejudice against the IWW. Burns received a fifteen-month prison sentence, which he served in Leavenworth Penitentiary from November 1927 until May 14, 1928, when his sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge.
The May 15, 1928 Fort Leavenworth dispatch reports that Burns was physically released the preceding day, May 14, after President Coolidge commuted his sentence. It describes the Supreme Court sustaining his California criminal-syndicalism conviction in May 1927 and identifies the ACLU and IWW General Defense Committee as appeal sponsors. The article says he began a fifteen-month sentence in November 1927, while its headline and subheading imply fifteen months served; that inconsistent wording is not converted into an actual fifteen-month total. This later Leavenworth phase is separate from his already recorded approximately seventeen months of earlier county-jail pretrial detention. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1928/1928-ny/v05-n115-NY-may-16-1928-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
White describes Burns as a logger, construction worker and deep-water sailor arrested in Yosemite in April1923 while walking railroad track toward a lumber job with IWW credentials and literature. The Supreme Court affirmed in1927 despite no proof of Burns personally participating in the cited sabotage acts. This was a California criminal-syndicalism prosecution tried federally because of the location, not an Espionage Act conviction.
