Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 24, 1909
Mother Jones Praises Article by Turner on Brutality of Mexican Government
From the Appeal to Reason of October 23, 1909:
Mexico and Murder
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BY MOTHER JONES
I RISEto ask the American people, have you read John K. Turner’s article in the American Magazine for October on the frightful brutality of the Mexican government towards its people? If not, read it at once. Then ask your Christian minister why they are silent in the face of this frightful tragedy at our very doors.
Why are they silent? Because they worship at the shrine of Mammon.
If the Revolutionary fathers could come back to earth, the first question they would ask would be what has become of the national pride? Did it die with the immortal Lincoln? Look at the frightful pictures in the American Magazine. Imagine these lashes falling on your flesh. See and feel the blood dripping from your body. Go down to Belem prison see the shocking pictures there. Then, men and women, ask yourselves, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Look at their lacerated bodies, their hopeless lives.
They ask you, does God sleep? No, he does not. He will wipe out injustice with suffering, wrong with blood, and sin with death. The disgraceful phase of it all is that we stand and see the public officials whom we pay, become bloodhounds and man-grabbers in the service of bloody Diaz.
From article by John Kenneth Turner in American Magazine of October 1909
It looks as if this government of the people and for the people and by the people, so-called, had become general scavenger for the most ferocious murderer on the face of God’s earth.We have in our jails and prisons some of the bravest revolutionists, perhaps the world has known.Leavenworth, Kan., holds three of these brave political refugees. Yuma, Arizona, holds three more. That brave soul who swam the river across the Del Rio last year was arrested, tried in the federal court and turned loose; re-arrested under the emigration laws and turned loose by the bureau in Washington; re-arrested for the benefit of the hungry jackal who is thirsting for human blood and placed in jail in Texas to await trial.
Why all this? Listen: The American capitalists have started a steel trust in Mexico capitalized at fifty million dollars, and a smelter trust at sixty million. Cheap labor of course.
Attorney General Wickersham is a large stockholder in the Mexican Central railroad, where Harriman, before he passed to the great beyond, held most of the preferred stock. Hearst owns three million acres of mineral lands adjoining the Standard Oil company. The capitalist pirates have robbed the people of this nation, now they are going into Mexico to carry out the advice of Carnegie, and “hire labor cheap and make millions.”
Rob the Mexicans now and next China.
This young legal leper, Oscar Lawler, has men imprisoned for daring to protest against such tyranny and robbery. He held three revolutionists in jail in Los Angeles without trial for twenty months, contrary to law.
Will it be recorded in the days to come that we, the people of a Christian nation, stood for our president, the chief executive, taking the hand of the most brutal specimen of the human race that this age has produced?
How the immortal Lincoln would blush with shame, and frown with contempt at the mention of such men as Lawler and Wickersham! Contrast these legal satraps with John K. Turner, who took his life in his hands to make the world better for mankind to live in. All honor to John K. Turner! The world will call you blessed.
President Taft was placed in power by the Wall street robbers and he can not do as his natural instincts would urge him to do. When a man is nominated by the money power of Wall street his independence is gone, his manhood is sacrificed and his love of liberty, if he ever had any, must be offered up on the altar of selfish ambition.
I know what Lincoln would say to that crew on Wall street: “The nation first and you last!”
The people who make up this nation will some day wake from their slumber with horror. I hope it will not be too late.
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