Older, Fremont
Newsman, Statesman, Thinker
Entry Author: John
C. Ralston
In America today heroes have been replaced by bureaucrats.
When we mention historical figures, if we mention them at
all, it's gossip: Kennedy's affairs - real or alleged; Franklin
D. Roosevelt's likewise; Jefferson's children by Sally Hemmings.
The truth remains that America has produced heroes, famous
and not-so-famous men and women from eras when public achievements
were venerated and personal matters left alone.
Fremont Older (1856-1935) was one of our heroes. Born
into an impoverished Wisconsin family whose men had been wiped
out in the Civil War, Older had a Dickensian boyhood, and
it could not have been coincidence that his favorite author
was Charles Dickens. Coming to San Francisco in 1873, he drifted
from one printer's job to another in pursuit of his boyhood
dream of becoming an editor, until a chance encounter got
him a job in Redwood City, California, launching his journalistic
career. His unusually sympathetic and probing reportorial
style got him noticed back in San Francisco, and after returning
to the city as a reporter he moved rapidly into editorial
positions.
Fremont Older c. 1910
In 1895 Older got the chance of a lifetime when the owner
of the moribund old San Francisco Bulletin offered
him the position of Managing Editor. Older wrought a transformation
in the paper that is practically unparalleled in any business:
in less than a year the paper had new quarters, new equipment,
new staff, and boasted the largest circulation of any afternoon
newspaper west of Chicago.
Older had a unique gift for attracting and developing talent,
and Bulletin staff included such names as Robert Ripley
(Ripley's Believe It or Not), Rube Goldberg, Robert L. Duffus,
Maxwell Anderson (Key Largo, Anne of the Thousand Days),
and Rose Wilder Lane, who co-authored the Little House
series with her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Older's journalism was populist, and to
be sure, sensational, but below the sensationalism lay a bedrock
of uncompromising rectitude. Older's rectitude almost cost
him his life on at least three occasions. After San Francisco
voters handed Older and his reform allies a bitter defeat
in 1905 by re-electing the corrupt administration of Mayor
Eugene Schmitz, a tool of boss Abraham Ruef, Older
initiated the Graft Prosecution that got Schmitz and Ruef
convicted of extortion. The prosecution did not just go after
a few corrupt politicians. Wealthy and prominent San Franciscans
faced indictment and possible conviction for conniving with
Ruef-Schmitz, and they fought the prosecution with every imaginable
weapon: detectives, and hoodlums harassed prosecution members;
the Oakland home of one of Ruef's former supervisors was dynamited;
Older and his wife Cora were themselves the target of a dynamite
plot; and Older was kidnapped on Van Ness Avenue in broad
daylight under cover of an arrest warrant issued in Los Angeles,
rushed at gunpoint out of San Francisco by car, and put aboard
a southbound train; he survived only because a young lawyer
whose identity was never revealed heard the kidnappers say
something about giving Older "a run through the mountains."
The lawyer got off the train at Salinas, telephoned San Francisco,
and Older was rescued in Santa Barbara.
The graft prosecution ended when the defendants managed to
elect their own District Attorney, the corrupt, incompetent
Charles M. Fickert. Ruef alone of all the defendants went
to jail, and then Older did something that astounded everyone:
reasoning that it was wrong to pick out a single individual
for punishment when it was the system that had to be changed,
he went to San Quentin, held out his hand to Ruef in the visiting
room, said he was sorry for much he had done, and asked forgiveness.
The Bulletin campaigned for Ruef's parole after
a year. Famous and ordinary men and women trooped to Older's
office with stories of their lives, pleas for help, or just
to talk. He was called "Father Confessor to a City."
Fremont and Cora Older built a house of a uniquely livable
California design above Cupertino, California, but they were
not destined for a quiet retirement. Labor and management
continued to clash in San Francisco, and in 1916 there was
a bitter waterfront strike. Thomas J. Mooney, a self-proclaimed
organizer who went from one cause to another and had been
tried and acquitted of conspiring to dynamite utility towers,
and Warren K. Billings, a transient from New York State who
had been convicted of transporting explosives in a set-up,
attracted the attention of the "Law and Order Committee"
of San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce. In the United States
there was bitter ethnic and political division over the Great
War in Europe, General Pershing's incursion into Mexico, and
the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. San Francisco was the world
in microcosm: Bulletin reporter Ernest Hopkins said the city
was "neurotic with civic and labor strife."
The volatile mix exploded on July 22, 1916 during a great
patriotic "Preparedness Day" parade when a bomb
killed ten people and wounded forty others. Older was a confirmed
pacifist, but he predicted that he would get blamed for the
bomb. He and other pacifists were. Billings and Mooney were
arrested and tried. Billings had a convincing alibi, but he
was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Mooney was tried shortly afterwards. His defense produced
an even better alibi, but a surprise prosecution witness testified
that Billings, Mooney, Rena (Mrs. Tom) Mooney and another
defendant drove down Market Street in a jitney during the
parade and deposited the bomb.
 Older
believe Mooney guilty until the defense unexpectedly discovered
letters of the chief prosecution witness that suggested he
was not in San Francisco when the bomb went off and that the
prosecution's case was fabricated. Older was in a terrible
position: his publisher was a conservative old gentleman who
didn't want any more fights, but Older was absolutely dedicated
to the mission of the fourth estate. The Bulletin printed
the letters. Older and the defense discovered perjuries by
other prosecution witnesses and The Bulletin kept up
the fight, but in 1918 Older got an ultimatum to drop the
case or be fired. In this horrible situation he was rescued
by William Randolph Hearst, who had been trying to hire him
for years.
Fremont Older, 1919
Now editor of Hearst's evening Call, Older printed
the report of a Federal investigator who had planted microphones
in the District Attorney's office and recorded the prosecution,
among other things, plotting to convict Rena Mooney by blackmailing
witnesses. Tom Mooney's execution was only three weeks away,
and President Woodrow Wilson intervened with the Governor,
who commuted Mooney's sentence to life imprisonment. There
followed a long, drawn-out fight to free Billings and Mooney.
The injustice of their case and the senseless destruction
of World War I made Older a confirmed pessimist about the
human race, but he never stopped trying to help people. Billings
and Mooney were freed in 1939 after twenty-three years in
jail, but Older did not see it. On March 3, 1935, he had collapsed
at the wheel of his car and died of a heart attack while driving
Cora and their ward Mary back from a camellia show in Sacramento.
His last words, when they came back to the car in which he
had been writing a column on the essayist Michel de Montaigne,
were "If you had waited fifteen more minutes, I would
have finished."
Bibliography
Fremont Older, My Own Story, MacMillan, 1926
Fremont Older, Growing Up, Call Publishing, 1931
San Francisco Bulletin, 1895-1918
San Francisco Call (afterwards Call-Bulletin)
1918-1935
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Born: 1856, Wisconsin