Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 7, 1904 Hastings, Colorado – Mother Jones Exposes Rockefeller’s “Sunday School Methods”
From the Duluth Labor World of February 6, 1904:
MOTHER JONES Says Rockefeller Oppresses the Coal Miners.
Hastings, Colo., Feb. 5.-[Mother Jones, the miners’ friend, who is now going up and down among the striking miners in Colorado, says:]
Rockefeller’s mining company cleared $39,000 [*] last year, and every dollar of it was wrung form the miners.
At some of these mining camps a miner is not even allowed to bring a pound of butter from the outside. He is compelled to buy everything at the company’s store. Every man who comes to the mines to work must be searched, and when he goes to visit a friend outside the camp an armed guard goes with him.
What would a Chicago workingman think if he had to pay 90 cents for a quart of syrup that cost at wholesale $1.25 a gallon? What would he think if his employer taxed him a dollar a month for a doctor whether he needed one or not? What would he think if he was obliged to pay his employer 50 cents a month for a preacher?
“Yetsuch are Mr. Rockefeller’s Sunday school methods of conducting his mining business in Colorado,” says Mother Jones.
Hellraisers Journal – February 6, 1914 Trinidad, Colorado – Mary Thomas Held in Filthy Cell
SINGING IN JAIL THROUGH BROKEN WINDOW
Mary Thomas, noted singer and resident of the Ludlow Tent Colony, was one of the women arrested on January 22nd, the day that General Chase tumbled from his horse and ordered his troops to “Ride Down the Women!” Soon her two little daughters, three and four, were brought to her, and the three of them were held in the filthy cold cell for eleven days.
Her crime was talking back to an officer who had ordered her to move off the sidewalk from where she had been watching the parade. She told him:
You go on and go wash your dirty clothes you have on before you order me off of the sidewalk.
The militiaman began to pull her and she fought back using her fingernails on him. She was taken to jail where she placed a call to Louie Tikas at the Ludlow Tent Colony to let him know of her arrest.
At night she stood at the broken window and sang beautiful arias to her supporters gathered outside in the ally. She gives this account:
Then the hundreds of men prisoners in the basement jail…joined in. It almost drove the police and military out of their minds. It caught on through town, and soon all you could hear was “Union Forever” throughout Trinidad. I continued this procedure daily. The crowds came, and grew bigger and bigger. Finally it got so that the police had to disperse them. This made them angry and they would break the jail windows. It was no use to replace the panes, for they would just be broken again the next day.
Apparently, the little girls also caused some trouble in the jail cell. Mrs. Thomas tells the story of her release:
In the middle of the night two officers came rattling the door. “What are you trying to do?” they yelled. I didn’t know what they were talking about having been wakened out of a sound sleep. Then I noticed that the place was swimming in water. My children must not have turned off the tap. A mopping crew came immediately, supervised by a guard.A few hours later the jailer and another man unlocked our door and said angrily, “Get out!” “What? Without notice?” I said jokingly. “Get out, and take that wrecking crew with you!” I lost no time in obeying that welcome command, and we headed for the union headquarters.
Note: Newsclip from The Rocky Mountain News of January 23, 1914.
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MARY THOMAS DESCRIBES COMPANY TOWN
Mary Thomas, the greet-singer at the Ludlow Tent Colony, came from Wales with her two little daughters last July. Her husband, Tom, picked her up at the Trinidad train depot, and on the way back to the Delagua mining camp, he warned her in a whisper, “Don’t talk about anything important within hearing of that stool pigeon driver for the company.” As they approached the camp he cautioned her, “Don’t be nervous if the mine guards question you. I’ll answer their questions.”
It was dark when they arrived at that camp, and two big guards shined their lights into the automobile, inspecting Mary and the two little girls. Tom was thoroughly interrogated and had to explain to the satisfaction of the mine guards that he was bringing his wife and children into the camp. Finally, they were permitted to enter.
Mary states that she was completely demoralized when she saw the tumbled down shack that was to be her home. The door opened directly onto the dirt street in front of the house. There was no front yard and no porch, only a block of wood for a step. The cupboard was broken, the chairs were rickety, and the walls were lined with thin cardboard, torn and sagging in several places. Should a fire ever get started, she thought, the shack would go up in flames like a tinderbox.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 5, 1914 News from Michigan Copper Strike: Striker Shot; May Prove Fatal
From The Calumet News of February 2, 1914:
[Note: Names above are incorrect, see below.]
Monday February 2, 1914, Hancock-Houghton, Michigan –Striker John Laitila Shot by Scabs, Not Expected to Live
John Laitila, striking copper miner, was shot by James Johnson, a scab, yesterday near the Superior mine as he confronted Johnson and three other scabs who were on their way to work. Laitila is not expected to live. Prosecuting Attorney Lucas is looking into the matter. An arrest is expected. We have learned that the Lucas doubts the story of self-defense told by Johnson, and further believes that the gun found on Laitila was planted on him by the killers.
The trial of the Waddell men in the killing of the strikers at the Seeberville boarding house begins today. Six gunthugs are on trial, and the sympathy of the kept press almost brings tears to the eyes. According to The Daily Mining Gazette, the gunthugs are “young men of good character and agreeable social manners,” while the men they murdered were “ugly” and “drunk.” Left unexplained by the Gazette is why men of such good character would come to seize men, without authority of law, and, when the men resisted being unlawfully seized, then shoot up a home, especially one containing a family with young children..
From The Indianapolis Star of February 3, 1914:
House Mine Committees To Inquire into Strikes
Washington, Feb. 1-Subcommittees of the House committee on mines will leave Washington next Wednesday night for the West to investigate the Colorado and Michigan mine strikes.
The Colorado investigators, Representatives Foster, Illinois, chairman; Byrnes, South Carolina; Evans, Montana (Democrats); Austin, Tennessee, and Sutherland, West Virginia (Republicans), will go first to Denver, then to Trinidad and Pueblo and later to Boulder.
Representatives Taylor of Colorado, chairman; Hamlin, Mississippi; Carey, Pennsylvania (Democrats); Howell, Utah, and Switzer, Ohio (Republicans), the subcommittee for the Michigan inquiry, will go direct to Calumet and take in Houghton and other places in the strike-affected area.
None of the committeemen would venture a prediction as to how long their tasks would occupy them.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday February 3, 1914 “Calumet” by Leslie H. Marcy, Part II-Profits, Wages and Working Conditions
From the International Socialist Review of February 1914:
[Part II of II]
We have seen how the copper country is governed by an “invisible government”; from the judge on the bench, to the grand jury in session; from the national guard of the state of Michigan, on “duty,” since July 24, 1913, to the sheriff with his hundreds of imported professional strike breakers whom he swore in as deputies. The Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, Calumet, is the invisible government of Michigan.
This poor-little-rich corporation was “created” in the early fifties. According to a statement given out by Attorney Peterman, and endorsed by General Manager W. F. Denton, and General Manager C. L. Lawton, we find this devout confession: ”The profits of the Calumet and Hecla have been large, but they were due solely to the fact that the Creator put such rich ore in the company’s ground.”
However, Congress in the year of our Lord, 1852, seems to have been in total ignorance of this little gift on the Creator’s part to the copper crowd, for we find that “it gave to the state of Michigan 750,000 acres of public land, to aid it in building a ship canal around the Falls of St. Mary. The state in turn bargained this land to the contractors who built the canal, at a dollar and a quarter an acre. The lands thus disposed of at so beggarly a price were supposed to be swamp, or overflowed lands, but somehow, and strange to say, a part of them are now the rocky matrices from which the Calumet and Hecla has long been extracting shot-copper,-that company having in some way got hold of them. Years later a man named Chandler, who claimed to have bought the same land over again from the State of Michigan, brought a suit to dispossess the copper company,-charging all sorts of fraud in the switching of swamps so as to be quarries of copper-bearing rock. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, on the ground that as he got his deed from the state, he was in no better plight than the state, and that the state could not go back on its first deed to the canal contractors: so the Calumet and Hecla people kept it.”
This “good thing” was capitalized for $2,500,000 in shares of $25 each, instead of $100-note that. Of this $25 a share, only $12 was paid in. A total cash investment of $1,200,000. According to the Mining and Engineering World of December 27th, Calumet and Hecla has declared dividends on issued capitalization to December 1, 1913, amounting to $121,650,000, or $1,216 a share or $101 profits for each dollar invested.
Dividends for 1900 amounted to 320 per cent; for 1906, 280 per cent; for 1907, 260 per cent. In the Boston market, the stock was quoted on the day before New Years, at 427, bid price. Bearing in mind that the par value of the shares is but $25, this figure means that the stock is now worth more than 1,700 per cent, and bearing in mind also that only $12 a share was actually paid in, it means more than 3,400 per cent, market value. The president of the company receives a salary greater than the president of the United States.
Not long ago, when dividends threatened to be unusually enormous, the company purchased an extensive island in Lake Superior, stocked it with the finest game, and it is now used by stockholders of the company as a hunting preserve.
And the capitalists, who have never seen the inside of a mine shaft, who have stolen and defrauded to gain possession of the Calumet mines, have refused to permit their wage slaves, who produce all the wealth brought out of the mines, to organize into a union. They have denied the right of these workers to organize to demand more wages and better working conditions. Their arrogance is summed up in the words “We have nothing to arbitrate.”
These capitalists want MORE labor from the laborers. They are not satisfied with having stolen hundreds of millions from the men who have dug the wealth from the dangerous recesses of the earth. They demand still MORE.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 2, 1914 “Calumet” by Leslie H. Marcy, Part I-The Fighting Finns
From the International Socialist Review of February 1914:
[Part I of II]
SEVENTY-TWO copper miners, with their wives and children, met death at these doors on Christmas Eve in Calumet, Michigan.
A brief hour before this little company of silent ones had passed up the stairs into the Italian Hall to join hundreds of other strikers and their families. A Christmas tree had been arranged by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners to put a bit of cheer into the hearts of the kiddies and perhaps to encourage the men and women in their struggle against the copper barons for more bread and better working conditions.
But “Peace on earth and good will toward men” is not down on the capitalist program. For months past imported thugs and gun-men, in the pay of the copper companies, as guards, had gone about shooting up strikers, breaking up union headquarters, disrupting meetings and otherwise “establishing law and order.”
It should surprise no one then to learn that upon this occasion a “mysterious” stranger appeared suddenly in the doorway of Italian Hall with a false cry of “fire!”
Comrade Annie Clemanc [Clemenc] had just finished her address of welcome; the toys were still on the tree-when forty-eight pairs of little feet arose at the alarm and ran down the stairway. They were met by “deputies,” who blocked the doors to escape. In the crush and panic that followed seventy-two human beings were killed.
* * * *
A bleak mining region and the rigors of a Lake Superior winter, with the hardship of five months’ strike, made still more poignant the crushing sorrow. Over the two miles of road from Calumet to the bit of ground owned by the Western Federation of Miners marched the procession with hearse, undertakers’ wagons and an automobile truck carrying a few coffins, followed by 480 miners, in squads of four, carrying 67 coffins. They lowered them into two long trenches that yawned in the snows of the copper country. Behind them came fifty Cornish miners chanting hymns, their voices thick with emotion. Thousands of miners with their wives and children formed the procession. All but a dozen of the burials were in common graves dug by members of the union.
Came the Finns to the fair state of Michigan about sixty years ago-to spend their lifetime and labor time in the mines.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 1, 1914 Indianapolis, Indiana – President Moyer Speaks at Mine Workers’ Convention
From The Indianapolis News of January 26, 1914:
Charles Moyer, President of the Western Federation of Miners gave a long speech at the Convention of the United Mine Workers now in progress in Indianapolis. In his speech, President Moyer described the ongoing violations of Constitutional Rights in both the Colorado and the Michigan strikes:
…..What is being done in the state of Colorado in the miners’ strike, is being done in the state of Michigan. I don’t think it is any worse. In the state of Colorado men and women have been mistreated by the military, by the armed thugs of the mine owners’ association; they have been arrested without warrant; they have been sent to jail; they have been deprived of all of those rights that are supposed to belong to an American citizen, or one living under this government, the same as they have in Colorado.
Mother Jones has been deprived of her liberty by the military, and is now confined in the custody of the military of that state, without any warrant, absolutely deprived of her constitutional rights.
In the state of Michigan representatives of organized labor have been assaulted, ordered from the state, deprived of every right that we are supposed to enjoy under this great Constitution of ours, and yet, after months of effort we are at this time uncertain as to whether our national government, our representatives down at Washington, are going to make an investigation: are going to inquire into the facts as whether or not these things that we claim and that we believe we furnished them a preponderance of evidence of, are in violation of our American citizenship. They say, I believe, as an excuse for their hesitancy in acting, that they do not want to interfere with state rights, and in answer to that we say that the Constitution of the United States gives the right to every American citizen to meet in peaceable assembly, to freely express himself in speech…..
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