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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 17, 1920
West Virginia – Mother Jones Fights for Miners, Causes Trouble for Mine Operators
From The Richmond Daily Register of August 6, 1920:
“Mother” Jones has reached the West Virginia mines and is said to be responsible for much of the recent trouble started there.
[Photograph added.]
August 15, 1920 – Princeton, West Virginia
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting, Part I of III:
My friends, in all the ages of man the human race has trod, it has looked forward to that mighty power where men could enjoy the right to live as nature intended that they should.
We have not made millionaires, but we have made billionaires on both sides of the house. We have built up the greatest oligarchy that the world has ever known in history.
On the other side, we have the greatest slaves the world has ever known. There is no getting away from that.
I am not going to abuse the operators nor the bosses for their system. The mine owners and the steel robbers are all a product of the system of industry. It is just like an ulcer, and we have got to clean the ulcer.
(Hissing from the audience.)
God—they make me sick. They are worse than an old bunch of cats yelling for their mother.
Today, the world has turned over. The average man don’t see it. The ministers don’t see it and they don’t see what is wrong. They cannot see it. But the man who sits in the tower and his fortune of clouds clash, knows there is a cause for those clouds clashing before the clap of thunder comes. All over the world is the clashing of clouds. In the office, the doctor don’t pay attention to it. The man who watches the clouds don’t understand it. People want to watch the battle.
I cannot understand why the student don’t understand it. But he takes his life in his hands and goes out and operates it, but he don’t own one product of it, and then the men say when there is an invention, “Why don’t I get a fair share of this invention?” Well, it belongs to all the world to make the world happy, but you know the hog who is always grabbing the dollar. You have got to clean house on that person. You can do without dollars, but not without men and women to produce the wealth of the nation.
I am here today, and I may be criticized, but that don’t worry me. The hired newspapers don’t worry me. I am still Old Mother Jones, raising hell with the agitators. I don’t go to sleep. I am not a suffragette, for I have been suffering all my life.
I am busy getting this working man to understand what belongs to him, and his power to take possession of it, and then we will use the ballot.
Get this into you! I don’t bother about politics. I don’t care. What I want is to get you solidified. If we don’t give the bosses what they want, they will raise hell. The politicians know this very well. The question lies here in the ownership of my bread, and I cannot eat until I ask that brute for the right to eat. Now I have got to work or steal.
If you ever saw a policeman with a club in his hand, I want to ask you, did you ever see that policeman club a millionaire? But it is “Get out of here, damn you, go on to jail, damn you,” if it is a working man.
You go to hear a minister, and the sky-pilots will yell “Hurrah for Jesus.” They have a system.
Now, men, I want to tell you there is a rotten system. We have got to do away with it. I came into this State 21 years ago, when Mr. Houston referred me to Mr. Watson, and I went into his work. I met his men. The men who came to meet me were beat up by the guards that night, and why I wasn’t beat up, I never have known. But they beat those men up and would have murdered them had I not been there. Twenty-five years ago, those men were under the rule of gunmen, crushed and robbed, and their children were being brought up that way. Two years ago, we went in and organized those fields, and no one was hurt. Schwab and Watson were the only ones hurt.
We are not fools or cowards, and we must demand the same rights in industry.
We had a fight in Colorado and I went from here. I left our men at Cabin Creek organized when I went away. When I came back there wasn’t an organized man in it. I went up one morning facing the militia and the Baldwin-Felts gunmen and the mine owners, and I organized those men and we are organized today.
Their children are getting educated, and are going to better schools, and the miners get their money every two weeks. They are not paid in scrip, and can buy where they please.
I want you to understand that when I went up New River 20 years ago, I had to walk 19 miles of the night and count the railroad ties. I could go up there everywhere now and stay in a miner’s house, and nobody comes to bother me.
We had some men murdered in Mingo. It is very sad. I do not like it. We had enough murder during the war.
To the millionaires that were made during the war, 25 or 26 for every millionaire that was made during the war, the bones of American youths are bleaching on the other side. They went over to destroy Kaisers, and they have come home to find more Kaisers than they ever found in Germany. Poor old Kaiser.
We have got it at home. They own the press, the pulpits and every avenue. You know that. You know that! (pointing to a gentleman in the audience) You know I am telling the truth. You have got on a white collar, and I know you are not a working man.
Our mission now is to clean up the monied Kaisers at home. You cannot do it by law, because they will declare the law unconstitutional.
I am out to do away with this, for it is a disgrace to the pages of American history. I am not a church worker or a Sunday School teacher, but I am one woman that will not stand to see the blood of babes lost.
By God, I am not afraid of the Baldwins. I licked hell out of them up Cabin Creek. They turned machine guns on us, but they didn’t shoot me, damn them, by Jesus Christ.
I want you to see this. (Exhibiting a photograph.) Do you see it? It is a rapid firing gun, a machine gun. This went across seven states of this nation. The Baldwin-Felts—I am going to talk plain. I know that in a few miles from here is their headquarters [at Bluefield]. I know they are in this audience, but I don’t take water when they are here; regardless of the Supreme Court, I am going to defend the honor of this nation.
Here is another one. (Exhibiting another picture.) They crossed seven states. There is the funeral of the fifteen babes that they murdered in Ludlow, Colorado. I have the pictures. Here are some more of the dead that were murdered by those machine guns. Here is some more of them.
(In a low, pathetic tone.) These were noble characters. They never violated laws. They were just asking for more bread to feed their children.
Here, I want to show you. Here is Baldwin-Felts men that left West Virginia and went to Colorado and put the State uniform on them.
Now, men, I don’t care whether you are an operator, or who you are. Is that to the honor of the American nation in the days to come? When future generations read it, what will they think?
They took two machine guns across seven states. They sent the Baldwin- Felts thugs to murder babes in Colorado. The Baldwin-Felts are a product of a brutal system—the brute force development.
Note: Emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones Princeton WV Speech, Aug 15, 1920
Steel Speeches, p226
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
The Richmond Daily Register
(Richmond, Kentucky)
-Aug 6, 1920
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86069168/1920-08-06/ed-1/seq-1/
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
-Pages 224-231 (246 of 361)
Speech at Princeton WV from
Army Intelligence Report of Aug 15, 1920
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/246/mode/2up
IMAGE
Mother Jones w Workman, Hatfield n Fry, UMWJ p11, July 15, 1920
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2hg5AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PT328
See also:
Tag: Battle of Matewan
https://weneverforget.org/tag/battle-of-matewan/
For more on events mentioned in Mother’s speech, see:
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
Charles Kerr, Chicago, 1925
https://archive.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/
The Correspondence of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
https://books.google.com/books?id=EZ2xAAAAIAAJ
-Page 210 (263 of 416)
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735057897435/viewer#page/248/mode/2up
Charleston, W. Va.,
Aug 17, 1920.Mr. John H. Walker, Pres,
State Federation of Labor,
E. & W. Bldg, 120 S. 6th St,
Springfield, Ill.
Dear John:I received your letter yesterday, I was glad to hear from you. I send back check to you that you sent me, you had better hold it and take care of it, if I have it, it won’t last two weeks until it is gone.
I will be going to Missouri in a week or ten days, and I will then stop off at Springfield and see you, and have a talk with you. Things are pretty lively over here, we are doing business. I had a meeting at Princeton, West Va., yesterday the first labor meeting ever held there. It was only five miles from Bluefield, the head-quarters of the Baldwin Thugs. I must have had six or seven thousand people, there were seven wagon-loads of Baldwin Thugs at the meeting, but John, I licked Hell out of the whole crowd. I put a new life and a new spirit into the wretches, certainly it was taking my life in my hands, because I had to come back thirty-two miles, over rough lonely roads along the mountains, with only one man and he was a lawyer, and the Schaufer with me, every one was afraid they would follow me and murder me, but we bluffed them and took the wrong road. It was near eleven o’clock when I got into Hinton, but after I crossed the river, I felt safe. I got into Charleston at four o’clock in the morning, had no sleep for twenty-eight hours. I had to go thirty-four miles over that rough road and back the same and then speak for one hour and a half to that tremenduous audence, but John, I sowed the seed anyhow, the voice of labor should not be raised there before, it was just as bad as homestead, but anybody else would have got killed.
Give my love to them all at home, I will let you know when I start for Springfield so you will be in town.
Sincerely yours,
Mother
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 23, 1919
Homestead, Pennsylvania -Mother Jones and Steel Organizers Arrested
Hellraisers Journal –Wednesday October 29, 1919
Mother Jones News for September 1919, Part I
Duquesne, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Arrested for Organizing Steel Workers
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They’ll Never Keep Us Down – Hazel Dickens