Biography
James Johnson was arrested in Seattle on September 29, 1916, as Everett authorities attempted to build an arson conspiracy case against IWW members in the conflict that preceded the Everett Massacre. He was taken to the Everett jail and accused of involvement in local fires. Walker C. Smith's contemporary account says Johnson was initially held without a warrant — one was not issued until October 17, about nineteen days after the arrest — and that authorities shifted their theory when one of the fires attributed to him turned out to have occurred after he was already in custody. Police reportedly tried to induce confessions by falsely telling Johnson and his co-accused George Bradley that the other had confessed, though the two had allegedly never met before their arrests. Smith reported that Johnson was jailed fifty-eight days without a preliminary hearing; the calendar interval from September 29 to the November 23 release is fifty-five days, so one of the dates or the count is imprecise, and the fifty-eight-day figure is kept as reported rather than as arithmetic.
He is not the J. J. Johnson of the Los Angeles criminal-syndicalism records, nor any other James Johnson in this database.
