Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: Mother Jones Railroaded by West Virginia’s Military Commission

Quote WB Hilton re Mother Jones Courage, ed Wlg Maj p10, Mar 6, 1913 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 31, 1913
Mother Jones and Comrades Railroaded by Military Commission of West Virginia

From the Appeal to Reason of March 29, 1913:

Mother Jones Railroaded
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IN the writ of habeas corpus, sworn to and filed with the supreme court of West Virginia, the military commission, by James I. Pratt, its president, says relative to Mother Jones and her co-defendants: “Defendants deny that the petitioners are innocent of the charges against them, but on the contrary believe and so aver that the PETITIONERS ARE GUILTY thereof.”

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The supreme court, after having this evidence before them, remanded the cases of Mother Jones, Boswell, Parsons, John Brown and others to THIS SAME MILITARY COMMISSION TO BE TRIED BY THEM.

In other words, the military commission expressed in print and under oath its belief in the guilt of the parties to be tried, and the supreme court of West Virginia then authorized this commission, that had expressed its belief before trial, to hear the case. Never was such an unfair thing done in the history of America.

It was to be expected that the defendants would have been convicted. The case was tried under circumstances that were peculiarly brutal. It was not a trial, but a cruel farce. Mother Jones, over eighty years old, but a fighter from the word “go,” who has seen all sorts of injustice and every kind of suffering, was so overcome by the horror of the situation that she fainted three times and was finally borne from the court room in a helpless condition.

This isn’t all. The court was preparing to try the accused without them being present, and when objection was made to this outrage, the judge advocate of the commission explained that they did not think the presence of the petitioners was necessary and if the court would “imagine they were present” it would do just as well. Such vigorous protest was made that finally the prisoners were brought into court under armed guard.

The cases grew out of a strike that has been on in West Virginia for a year. The mining companies refused to recognize the union and a strike followed. An appeal by the mine owners was made to the governor and troops were sent into the territory and martial law declared. The brutality of the troops has been almost unbelievable. Miners by the hundreds were evicted from their house and during the cold whiter months had to carry in frail tents on the hillsides. Many deaths have occurred because of exposure.

A military commission was appointed to try all who interfered in any way with the operation of the scabs sent to run the mines. The methods of this commission were flagrant in the highest degree. Finally Mother Jones, Boswell, Parsons, John Brown and others were arrested. At first Mother Jones was thrown into prison. Afterward when the workers of the United States became vehement against such treatment of an aged woman, she was kept under armed guard at a private house.

The accused were found guilty. Then a peculiar thing happened. The case was held up a number of days, the idea evidently being to get them into the penitentiary before the people were aware of what had occurred.

During all this time a campaign of vilification was waged in certain classes of papers throughout the United States. Mother Jones, who his sacrificed more in the interest of the toiler than any woman of America, Mother Jones, known as the angel of the mines, was heralded over the country as a prostitute. The whole agitation was charged to the Socialists in violent and incendiary language, the APPEAL, which was circulated in the strike district being denounced as a paper “so vile in blasphemy and treason that it seems the very ink that prints it would blush for shame.” While this vilification and this campaign of lying was in progress, the capitalist press kept very quiet about the civil war and the murdering that was being done in West Virginia-things as bad as have occurred in Mexico.

The APPEAL charges the governor of the state and the mine owners of West Virginia, and the supreme court of West Virginia, with the exception of one judge who dissented from the infamous decision noted, with being conspirators against the lives and liberty of the workers of that state. It charges them with treason, in violating the rights of American citizenship and setting aside civil law to accomplish the murder of the innocent. It charges the government of the United States with participation in the guilt, in that it has failed to take cognizance of the situation when the agreement that was made with the state when it was admitted into the union, was openly violated and overridden.

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AN ABYSMAL SHAME.

Behold a woman, past eighty rears of age, a woman whose life has been spent in ministration to toil and alleviation of suffering; a woman, the luster of whose name for all time will outshine the glory of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Florence Nightingale; a woman, now, at this moment, in the impious hands of a mine owner’s drum-head court martial; a woman who has appealed in vain to every feeling of manhood, every sense of honor, every spark of decency, every sentiment of fair play, and every misnamed court of justice only to be ignored and overruled! Only yesterday, poor tortured soul and wasted body, she swooned three times in her last fruitless effort to have an American civil court-conservator of the majesty of the law-God save the mark!-shield her from the sentence that a secret court of military thugs had pronounced, that she be sent to a dungeon for the remnant of her shattered days. And that court surrenders its boasted majesty, crawls in the spittle of its masters, and remands her to the military tribunal of thugs!

With what is she charged?

With the heinous offense of having stolen a machine gun, thus preventing the shoulder-strap thugs from playfully shooting down her friends, the sooty, the sweaty miners. But such a charge seems too preposterous to even the brass-buttoned military substituted for the courts; so on second thought she is charged with inciting to bloodshed.

Inciting whom to shed blood? Surely not the blue-coated thugs to whom killing is a profession, a pastime. Whom then? Her friends, the sooty, sweaty miners, inciting them to save themselves from being shot by exercising the legal right of self-defense.

And shall Mother Jones, the angel of the mines, be imprisoned for the remainder of her life-for death rather-in a noisome dungeon?

Never! Not unless American womanhood is as dead as is American manhood!

[Photograph and emphasis added.]