‘James H. Mulroney. 5’6 1/8″ 160 lbs. Age 35. Laborer and seaman. Born Australia. Dark brown hair. Grey blue eyes: Indistinct tattoo forearm anterior, Sailor, Tombstone, “Memory of my Mother!” Arrested Sacramento 12/22/1917, Remanded into Federal Custody 12/31/1917, $10,000 bail. Sent to county jail 4 years Conspiracy. Indicted 1/16/19. Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.’ Sacramento 1919 arrest record.

‘Prison Tuberculosis Takes the Life of Another Wobbly’ from The Daily Worker (City Edition). Vol. 2 No. 47. May 12, 1924.

TUCSON, Arizona, May 11.- Tuberculosis, contracted in prison, has claimed one more I.W.W. member who was convicted of opposition to the United States entering the war in Europe. James Mulroney, sailor and shipbuilder, is dead here after desperate struggle of two years to regain health. Only few weeks ago William Weyh, another I.W.W. also convicted in the war case, died here under similar circumstances.

Mulroney was arrested in California in 1917. He was one of 53 men who were confined for 64 days and nights in a cell 20 by 30 feet in the Sacramento city jail. All of them could not lie down at once. It was winter. Each man had but cotton blanket. They slept in relays on damp concrete floor. Food was bad and inadequate. Five of those men died, of tuberculosis and influenza, in the months while the group awaited trial under war indictments.

Thomas Martinez, Mexican I.W.W., imprisoned in the Chicago war trial in 1918, also died of tuberculosis after being let out of Leavenworth two years ago. Ricardo Flores Magon, Mexican editor of periodical in Los Angeles, nearly blind, was permitted to die in his cell at Leavenworth in December, 1922, for lack of medical attention. He was likewise imprisoned for war opinions.

Arrangements for funeral services over Mulroney’s body are being made by the General Defense Committee of Chicago.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020097/1924-05-12/ed-1/seq-4/