Biography
Margaret E. Cornell was an Irish-born office clerk, age 52 at the time of her conviction, who worked at the German Consulate in San Francisco. She was the only woman convicted in the federal Hindu-German Conspiracy trial (formally the Indo-German-Irish plot to ship American weapons to India for an uprising against British rule and to disrupt British and Allied munitions shipping during World War I). Federal prosecutors charged her under Sections 13 and 37 of the U.S. criminal code with espionage and conspiracy for transmitting coded messages between her boss, Consul-General Franz Bopp, and Charles C. Crowley, a private detective hired by the consulate. At trial she testified, I am now a woman without a country. Whether she was a willing participant or a low-level clerical dupe was disputed. Her trial drew heavy press coverage and her mug shot was reproduced in Butterick's Delineator (July 1918) in the gallery of Huns, Spies and Traitors. The San Quentin admission record dated February 8, 1918 lists her as Margaret E. Cornell, occupation office clerk, age 52, birthplace Ireland. She had Irish-Republican sympathies, and the 1916 Easter Rising is part of the political context of her case. Cornell told the court she had tuberculosis and feared dying in prison; her ultimate fate is not well documented in surviving newspaper records.
