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Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 27, 1914
Poem for Mother Jones, Held in Cold Cellar Cell at Walsenburg, Colorado
From The Voice of the People (New Orleans) of March 26, 1914:
“The Soul of Mother Jones” by Covington Hall
General Chase and Eugene V. Debs Opine on Mother Jones,
Now Held, by Order of General John Chase, in the Military Bastille
at Walsenburg, Colorado.
GENERAL CHASE ON MOTHER JONES
General Chase has been expressing his views on Mother Jones who is now held prisoner at Walsenburg in a cold cellar cell by the state of Colorado.
The General claims that John McLennan, President of District 15, United Mine Workers of America, confided to him that:
Mother Jones was a very headstrong old woman, who would not submit to guidance or suggestion of any kind, even from her own people, and that they had to suffer her to do as she wanted, oftentimes to the great annoyance of those in charge of the strike.
The General then continues, giving Mother Jones credit for most of the trouble in the strike zone:
She is an eccentric and peculiar figure. I make no mention of her personal history [the old Polly Pry charges], with which we are not concerned. She seems, however, to have in an exceptional degree the faculty of stirring up and inciting the more ignorant and criminally disposed to deeds of violence and crime. Prior to the advent of the state’s troops she made a a series of speeches in the strike zone, of which I have authentic and verbatim reports. These speeches are couched in course, vulgar, and profane language, and address themselves to the lowest passions of mankind. I confidently believe that most of the murders and other acts of violent crime committed in the strike region have been inspired by this woman’s incendiary utterances. The fact that she is a woman and advanced in years she uses as a shield, as well as a means of invoking popular sympathetic sentiment in case of her incarceration. She is undoubtedly a most dangerous factor in the peace problem. I am informed that she was so found in West Virginia and elsewhere and that disturbance and anarchy held sway. She was held for murder in West Virginia, and I am advised that her police record is in the possession of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
[Emphasis added.]
EUGENE DEBS ON MOTHER JONES
Not surprisingly, Eugene Debs has an entirely different opinion of Mother Jones. In a recent issue of the Miner’s Magazine, official journal of the Western Federation of Miners, he lauds Mother Jones as a heroine of the working class:
Mother Jones.
Sitting in her prison pen in the strike zone of Colorado, Mother Jones, in the silence of her cell, broken only by the tread of the beetle-browed degenerates that serve as the dogs of the plutocratic scoundrels who have imprisoned her, is writing a chapter in the history of the American Republic, for which the children of the future will weave garlands for her grave and rear monuments to her memory.
Long after the Wellborns, Osgoods and Browns [the “big three” coal operators] have gone the way of kindred pirates and been swallowed up in oblivion, or are remembered only to excite loathing and execration, the name and fame of Mother Jones will inspire the gratitude and reverence of the people she fought for with such intrepid valor and suffered with such unflinching fortitude to set free.
Brave, defiant, battle-breathing Mother Jones!
She is the flaming incarnation of the world’s proletarian revolt against Capitalism’s bloody misrule!
The Madame Breschovsky of the American social revolution!
Prison and persecution cannot quench, but only fan into fiercer flame the inextinguishable fire of her unconquerable soul.
Like the Maid of Orleans, this snow-crowned old warrior of the working class, too, heard voices, but not the mystic voices heard in dreams. The voices she heard came up out of the pits; the choking, sobbing, agonizing voices of the abysmal hell of wage slavery, and these voices of toilers mangled and robbed, insulted and despised, and their children crying for bread, filled her soul with unutterable hate for wage slavery and fired her valorous spirit, as that of the sublime old fanatic, John Brown, had been fired half a century ago, into the flaming fuse of an avenging, destroying and emancipating revolution.
Mother Jones in a scab-herding militia prison pen!
Governor Ammons in the state’s Imperial capital!
Behold them both, the one the inspired liberator of the masses, the other the servile lackey of the princes of plunder and assassination; the one as glorious in her guarded cell as the other is despicable in his guarded sanctum.
Here you see the living impersonation of the lofty revolutionary character, and the low reactionary creature that are face to face today in the mightiest struggle that ever shocked this earth.
The cruel, outrageous, infamous incarceration of a woman of eighty-three, with no shadow of accusation resting upon her fair name, would disgrace the beast of the jungle, but it cannot blacken the man-enslaving, woman-debasing, child-devouring misrule of the Moloch of the Twentieth Century-Capitalism.
Arouse, ye plundered toilers of the nation, in unvanquishable host and strike for industrial freedom and social justice!-Eugene V.Debs
[Emphasis added.]
From the Seattle Union Record of February 21, 1914:
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, WV Court Martial, No Plea to Make,
Pittsburgh Post p3, Mar 8, 1913
https://www.newspapers.com/article/pittsburgh-daily-post-mar-8-1913-pittsb/123676845/
The Voice of the People
(New Orleans, Louisiana)
-Mar 26, 1914, p1
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/lumberjack/140326-voiceofthepeople-v3n13w64.pdf
The Military Occupation of the Coal Strike Zone of Colorado,
By the Colorado National Guard, 1913-1914
-by Colorado. Adjutant-General’s Office, General
https://archive.org/details/militaryoccupati00colorich/mode/2up?ref=ol
Mother Jones per General John Chase
https://archive.org/details/militaryoccupati00colorich/page/44/mode/2up?ref=ol&q=jones&view=theater
Miners’ Magazine, Mar 1914, “Mother Jones” by EVD
Journal of the Switchmen’s Union, Volume 16
The Union, 1914
The article by Debs was republished to:
Apr 8, 1914, Michigan Miners Bulletin p2
(copy in possession of Janet Raye)
May 1914 Switchmen’s Journal, p336
(search: jones debs ammons)
https://books.google.com/books?id=rAUdAAAAYAAJ
CRTN Mother Jones Silence by Gen Chase and Colorado Gov Ammons,
Seattle Union Record p3, Feb 21, 1914
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1009545923/
See also:
William Covington Hall (August 25, 1871 – February 21, 1952),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covington_Hall
Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 22, 1904
Denver, Colorado – The Polly Pry Claims Mother Jones Could Be Former Madam
Madame Breschovsky/Catherine Breshkovsky
Yekaterina Konstantinovna Breshko-Breshkovskaya (née Verigo;
born 25 January [O.S. 13 January] 1844 – 12 September 1934),
better known as Catherine Breshkovsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Breshkovsky
-by Covington Hall, edited by David Roediger
CH Kerr, 1999
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 25 1914
Tag: Military Despotism Colorado 1914
https://weneverforget.org/tag/military-despotism-colorado-1914/
Tag: Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1913-1914
https://weneverforget.org/tag/colorado-coalfield-strike-of-1913-1914/
The Most Dangerous Woman · Ani DiFranco · Utah Phillips