Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday September 18, 1901 Mother Jones, Interviewed in Indianapolis, Advises Ruling Class
From the Appeal to Reason of September 14, 1901:
An Interview With Mother Jones.
“Mother” Jones, as she is affectionately called by her boys, for whom she labors in season and out of season, was interviewed by an Indianapolis reporter at the time of her visit to that city, in which she said:
The issues of the day are capitalism and Socialism. We have our rights and I will I fight for them until the bitter end. We are now in a great industrial battle with the two armies of labor and capital arrayed against each other. We want to bring harmony out of chaos. A great industrial war is on. There is no question about it. We will have a number of strikes and other uprisings, but the workers are educating themselves. While they are producing they are reasoning. They will resort to the ballot and not to the bullet. Out of this industrial chaos they will bring industrial harmony. They will not be begging their masters to give them a day’s work or a loaf of bread, They will simply take that which is theirs by rights. They produce it, and in producing it, they should own it. We are after the machinery of production, distribution and exchange.
The era of Socialism is dawning. From the records I find that in 1850 the wealth of the American nation was $8,000,000,000. The share of the working people was 62½%, and the people who exploit had but 37½%. In 1880 the producer’s share went down to 24%, while the wealth of the nation had increased to $48,000,000,000, and the share of the non-producers had increased to 76%. In 1901 the nation’s wealth is estimated at $100,000,000,000, and the exploiters have 90% of that amount, and the producers only 10%. After $22,000,000 were raked in on the first of July as dividends, the workers had not even 10%.
Here is the point I am getting at: The capitalist class can do but little more exploiting in America. The people are disinherited, but they do not seem to realize it.
Inside of the next ten years the capitalists will have reached into eastern nations for new fields, and the middle class capitalists will have disappeared from society. The proletariat of nations will have molded its parts together and will come on the field as the conscious revolutionary party for the first time in the history of the world and will demand the surrender of the keys of nature’s storehouse. If the ruling class takes notice of the past it will surrender gracefully.
I look for the possible solution of the industrial problem in the dawn of the era of Socialism. Then will the masses of oppressed men and women of the nations of the earth rally to its bright banner and hail the advance of the Co-operative Commonwealth when all laborers will be capitalists and every capitalist will be a laborer, and industrial harmony will at last have come to a patient, long-suffering people.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday September 17, 1921 Editor Marlen E. Pew Wires Protest to Governor Morgan of West Virginia
From the United Mine Workers Journal of September 15, 1921:
DEMANDS AN EXPLANATION
The Washington Herald September 5, 1921
NEW YORK, Sept. 3.—The shooting and arrest of newspaper correspondents in the West Virginia reign of terror, which included a woman reporter, has aroused members of the press throughout the country.
An indignant protest was sent to the governor of West Virginia tonight by Marlen E. Pew, of the International News Service. Mr. Pew wired as follows:
Hon. E. F. Morgan, Governor, Charleston, W. Va.
Sir: Miss Mildred Morris of our Washington staff, one of the best known, most accomplished and conscientious reporters in this country, assigned to Logan because of her special knowledge of industrial affairs, wires me tonight that she was slightly injured, arrested and submitted to indignities today by state guards. Miss Morris weighs, I should say, about 100 pounds, but I do not believe that all the thugs in the livery of your state can terrorize or intimidate her when she is sent on a mission for the press.
I think I am justified in asking you if there is a censorship of terror in your state. If the state guards of West Virginia, their native sense of chivalry dead and buried, are of the belief that they can prevent the publication of the truth concerning not only the surface, but the underlying facts of this private war, by insults and injury to a woman representing some 600 newspapers and equipped with credentials from the commander of the federal forces in your state, I am here to tell you that they are mistaken. Please advise me by telegram tonight what you propose doing to redress this wrong to this lady, and whether we may expect some respect for the constitutional right of the press from the government of West Virginia, if indeed West Virginia still has a government in the meaning of the original democratic institution.
I am indignant and I want your blood to boil as a man as well as a governor and punish this particular infamy.
MARLEN E. PEW, Editor and Manager, International News Service.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday September 16, 1921 Mildred Morris Describes Her Sojourn into the Battle Zone of West Virginia
From the United Mine Workers Journal of September 15, 1921:
HUNTINGTON , W. Va .– Four newspaper correspondents who have the memorable experience of penetrating the mountainous regions where war between the miners and state police has been raging for nearly two weeks and being the first to obtain an eye-witness picture of the firing line, are alive tonight by the grace of God.
As a member of the party I arrived here after escaping from Logan, where the four of us had been placed under guard.
Under a shower of bullets from both sides we convinced ourselves that war–real war-has been going on in West Virginia.
Three times a fusillade of steel bullets poured on us from the Springfield rifles of the state gunmen and three times we were fired on by the miners.
And after it was all over we were taken with our wounded to Logan, under guard.
Boyden Sparkes, of the New York Tribune, was shot through the leg and a bullet all but penetrated his scalp. One of the miners whom we had persuaded to act as a guide was shot in the ankle and is seriously wounded. When we were able to convince the state police, whose lines we had penetrated, that we were non-combatants merely on a sightseeing tour all military operations ceased while officers stared at us in amazement and asked:
“How in h–-l we had got there and what we meant?”
Military passes we presented from General Bandholtz, representative of the War Department, and commander of the United States troops now in the war zone were scorned.
“We don’t know nothing about him. Nobody has told us federal troops are here and we haven’t seen them, so we don’t know nothing about them,” the young officer in charge informed us.
Charged with being spies and “red necks” we were taken to state military headquarters in Logan and after an insulting examination by Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan county, we were ordered taken to a hotel. Each of us, including the wounded members of our party, was placed in charge of a guard, who was given orders to accompany us wherever we went.
For more than three hours I was subjected to indignities by this guard and other members of the state police.
Only after frantic appeals Mr. Sparkes was permitted to communicate with his office in New York in order that his wife might know he was not seriously injured. None of the rest of us was permitted to establish our identity and our passes from General Bandholtz were received with the same scorn by Sheriff Chafin and his attaches as the officers of the state police on the battle front had shown. My guard, an insolent youth, insisted on going with me into the bedroom assigned to me. When I objected he said he was acting under orders. To avoid this indignity, I was compelled to sit in the hotel lobby while more insolent and youthful members of the state police made insolent queries and threatened me if I refused to answer.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 15, 1921 “Marching Through West Virginia” by Heber Blankenhorn
From The Nation of September 14, 1921:
Marching Through West Virginia
By HEBER BLANKENHORN
I
IF—as the war correspondents used to begin—you will place your left hand on the map of West Virginia, with the edge of the palm along the Kanawha River at Charleston, the down-pointing thumb will lie along the road southwest into Logan and Mingo counties, and the outstretched fingers will represent the valleys whence the miners collected for the march along the thumb-line. That region has filled the country’s newspapers with communiques, dealing with contending “armies,” “lines” held along Spruce Fork Ridge, intrenchments, machine-gun nests, bombing planes, so many dead for the day, so many wounded.
Marmet is ten miles from the State capital at the mouth of Lens Creek Valley. On the afternoon of August 22 a cordon of 100 armed men is stretched across the dirt road, the mine railroad, and the creek, barring out officers of the law, reporters, all inquirers. Inside lies the “trouble.” The miners have been mobilizing for four days. A snooping airplane has just been driven off with hundreds of shots. Accident and a chance acquaintance let me in.
The men, a glance shows, are mountaineers, in blue overalls or parts of khaki uniform, carrying rifles as casually as picks or sticks. They are typical. The whole village seems to be out, except the children, women, and old men. They show the usual mining-town mixture of cordiality and suspicion to strangers. But the mining-camp air of loneliness and lethargy is gone. Lens Creek Valley is electric and bustling. They mention the towns they come from, dozens of names, in the New River region, in Fayette County, in counties far to the north. All are union men, some railroaders. After a mile we reach camp. Hundreds are moving out of it—toward Logan. Over half are youths, a quarter are Negroes, another quarter seem to be heads of families, sober looking, sober speaking. Camp is being broken to a point four miles further on. Trucks of provisions, meat, groceries, canned goods move up past us.
“This time we’re sure going through to Mingo,” the boys say.
Them Baldwin-Feltses [company detectives] has got to go. They gotta stop shooting miners down there. Keeney turned us back the last time, him and that last Governor. Maybe Keeney was right that time. This new Governor got elected on a promise to take these Baldwin-Feltses out. If nobody else can budge them thugs, we’re the boys that can. This time we go through with it.
“What started you?”
This thing’s been brewing a long while. Then two of our people gets shot down on the courthouse steps—you heard of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers? The Governor gives them a safe conduct; they leave their guns behind and get killed in front of their wives. It was a trap.
“But that was several weeks ago.”
Well, it takes a while for word to get ’round. Then they let his murderer, that Baldwin-Felts, Lively, out on bond-free-with a hundred miners in jail in Mingo on no charges at all—just martial law. Well, we heard from up the river that everybody was coming here. We knew what for. When we found lots had no guns we sent back to get them.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 14, 1911 “The Blighting of the Babies” -from John Spargo’s Bitter Cry of the Children
From The Progressive Woman of September 1911:
THE BLIGHTING OF THE BABIES —————
(From “the Bitter Cry of the Children” by John Spargo)
Poverty and Death are grim companions.Wherever there is much poverty the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double that of Belgravia; in Paris, the poverty stricken district of Ménilmontant has a death -rate twice as high as that of the Elysée; in Chicago, the death-rate varies from about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards .
The ill developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working class the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the number is at least 350,000.
This difference in the death-rates of the various social classes is even more strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year of life differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents and the amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In Boston’s “Back Bay” district the death-rate at all ages last year was 13.45 per thousand as compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which is a typical working class district, and of the total number of deaths the percentage under one year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in the latter. Wolf , in his classic studies based upon the vital statistics of Erfurt for a period of twenty years, found that for every 1,000 children born in working-class families 505 died in the first year; among the middle classes 173, and among the higher classes only 89. Of every 1,000 illegitimate children registered-almost entirely of the poorer classes-352 died before the end of the first year.
Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants among the rich was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it was often as high as 40 per cent.
Dr. Playfair says that 18 per cent of the children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and 55 per cent of those of the working-class die under the age of five years.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday September 13, 1911 “Echoes from the Triangle Fire…Americans Need Big Shocks”
From The Ladies’ Garment Worker of September 1911:
Echoes from the Triangle Fire.
Dr. Price Suggests Co-operation Between
the Waist Makers’ Union and the
Board of Sanitary Control.
The whole community is responsible for the safety of its workers.
Parents and friends of the 145 victims who were in the Triangle fire, says the New York “Call,” and of the scores of workers who saved their lives but were maimed and injured, have written, telephoned and appeared in person at the office of the Ladies’ Waist and Dress Makers’ Union, in the last two days, calling upon the union to see to it that Harris & Blanck, the owners of the Triangle shop, be brought to trial.
The parents and friends of the victims also called upon the union officials to demand an account from the Red Cross as to the manner in which $100,000 collected for the benefit of the families of the fire victims, has been disposed of, if it had been disposed of.
As a result of these numerous calls the Executive Board of the Ladies’ Waist Maker’s Union stirred up the committee of three which has been appointed some time ago to look into the Triangle case, to immediate, vigorous activity.
The committee, which consists of Sam Spivack, A. Silver, and Sam Gusman, met last night at 151 Clinton street to decide upon plans to co-operate with the parents and friends of the fire victims, and to determine upon ways and means of improving conditions in the shops where the lives of workers are daily exposed to the fire panics.
Several of the parents and friends of the Triangle victims, who called at the office of the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, said that they will either get up a petition or will write personal letters to District Attorney Whitman calling upon him to bring Harris and Blanck to trial.
Dr. George M. Price, M. D., the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control in the Cloak and Suit Industry of New York, has written to the “Call” suggesting a way in which the Board might co-operate with the Waistmakers’ Union.
Americans need big shocks, says Dr. Price.
Because several meetings have been held, because a “safety committee” has been appointed, because the papers devoted a few pages to factory fire damages, it is not to be expected that the 30,000 shops in the city should have suddenly become improved, that new fire escapes should have been put in where needed, and that workers should have become interested in protecting their lives from fires instead of devoting their whole time to the most important question of election of business delegates?
Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 12, 1921 Gompers on Fight of West Virginia Miners Against Government by Gunthug
From the Duluth Labor World of September 10, 1921:
WASHINGTON, D. C., Sept. 8.—Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in a statement issued this week sets forth the fundamental facts in relation to the situation in West Virginia. He declares that in the mines there an unrestrained, unlimited greed absolutely dominates.
“The appetite of this private greed is upheld by a private army of killers the like of which exists in no other state,” says the labor chief. He shows how the state government has crumbled under the rule of the mining interests and declares the federal government must destroy the rule of gunmen by restoring civil government.
Information Lacking.
[Says Mr. Gompers in his statement:]
With the situation in West Virginia at a most critical juncture it is almost beyond belief that there has not been placed before the public complete and accurate information regarding the events leading up to the position taken by the President of the United States.
There are certain basic facts which must lie considered before there can be fair and proper judgment of the West Virginia situation. These facts have not been presented adequately and in most cases not at all.
The public press has been negligent and the federal government has been equally so in not presenting to the people the full underlying truth.
Prejudice Miners’ Case.
The great mass of news relating to West Virginia conveys the impression that lawless bands of miners are roving the state without reason except an unjustified bitterness against the mine owners. “Uneducated mountaineers,” they are called.
There are four basis facts which are consistently ignored and which it is the duty of government and press to present. These are:
1—The mines of West Virginia constitute the last refuge of autocracy in the mining industry. In these mines an unrestrained, unlimited greed dominates absolutely. Absentee owners hold immense tracts of rich mining land, demanding only dividends.
Private Army of Killers.
2—T’he appetite of this private greed is upheld by a private army of killers the like of which no longer exists in any other state. This private army is paid by the mine owners and naturally seeks to justify its presence by making “business” for itself in the form of trouble. The Baldwin-Felts detective agency recruits this army, but the mine owners pay the bill. Deputy sheriffs, paid by mine owners, form another wing of the private army, equally dangerous.
A Direct Protest.
3—The present strike is a direct protest against the action of the mine owners of West Virginia in refusing to abide by the award of the United States coal commission. If the United States government at this time defends the mine owners and does not destroy the private armies of the mine owners the government is in the position of sustaining a defiance of an order issued by its own authority.
4—The state government of West Virginia has broken down, not because the miners have protested against lawlessness, but because it has failed to stop the mine owners from enforcing law as a private business at the hands of privately paid and privately directed gunmen.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday September 11, 1921 Forty Warrants Issued For West Virginia Miners’ Army
From the Baltimore Sun of September 9, 1921:
WARRANTS OUT FOR 40 IN W. VA. MINERS’ ARMY ———- Special Grand Jury Next Week To Hear Evidence Of Recent Disorders. ———-
PART OF TROOPS WITHDRAWN ———- Military Authorities Indicate They Anticipate No More Marches Into Mingo. ———-
Charleston, W. Va., Sept. 8.-The first step toward the prosecution of those alleged to be responsible for disturbances along the Boone-Logan county border was taken today when 40 warrants were issued at Logan at the instance of County Prosecutor John Chafin, it was, announced today at Governor Morgan’s office. It was stated further that a special grand jury would be called there next week before which witnesses, already summoned, are expected to appear.
It was not known at the Governor’s office for whom the warrants were issued, according to the announcement.
Part of the Federal forces sent into West Virginia last week today were withdrawn. The Twenty-sixth Infantry returned to Camp Dix, New Jersey; the Eighty-eight Aero Squadron, with the exception of two airships and crews, left for Langley Field, Virginia, and the Chemical Warfare Service Section for Edgewood Arsenal, New Jersey.
No official statement was made concerning further withdrawals of troops, but it was learned that, should the Nineteenth Infantry be sent back to its home station, the Fortieth Regiment, Col. E. A. Shuttlesworth commanding, now on duty in Logan county, would be distributed throughout the district affected by the gathering of miners and others during the latter part of August.
The military authorities today indicated they anticipated no further attempts at marches into Mingo county on the part of protestants against State martial law in force there.
—–
Federal Agents Investigating.
Washington, Sept. 8.-Any action by the Federal Government to fix the responsibility for the recent mine disorders in the West Virginia coal fields will depend on the results of investigations now being made, it was said today at the Department of Justice.
Federal agents are at work, it was said, but no reports from them have yet reached the department.
—————
—————
—————
—————
—————
—————
—————
—————
