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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 27, 1908
Mother Jones Visits Girard; Reports on Child Labor in Alabama
From the Appeal to Reason of October 24, 1908:
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When Mother Jones returned from her recent trip to Alabama she stopped in Girard long enough to write the following story of her experience for the Appeal and its readers, and then hurried on to other fields to continue her work of agitating and organizing workers to battle for their emancipation.
T HAD been thirteen years since I bid farewell to the workers in Alabama and went forth to other fields to fight their bitter battles. I returned again in 1908 to see what they were doing for the welfare of their children. Governor Comer, being the chief star of the State, I went out to Avondale, on the out skirts of Birmingham, to take a glance at his slave pen. I found there some where between five and six hundred slaves. The governor, who in his generous nature could provide money for Jesus, reduced the wages of his slaves first 10 per cent, and then 16.
As the wretches were already up against starvation, a few of them struck, and I accompanied an organizer and the editor of the Labor Advocate to help organize the slaves into a union of their craft. I addressed the body, and after I got through quite a large number became members of the Textile Workers’ Union. I returned again inside of an other week, held another meeting with them and another large number joined. I was also going to complete my work on Monday, the 12th, but I had to leave for southern Illinois. He has not yet discharged any of them nor has he threatened to call an extra session of the legislature to pass the vagrancy bill in case they struck against the last reduction. Of all the God-cursed conditions that surround any gathering of slaves, or slave pen, Comer’s mill district beats them all. As you look at them you immediately conclude they have been lashed into fear, but they still have some spirit of revolt in them. They work all of thirteen hours a day. They are supposed to go in at 6 in the morning, but the machinery starts up soon after five, and they have to be there. They are supposed to get forty-five minutes for dinner, but the machinery starts up again after they are out for twenty minutes and they have to be at their post.
When I was in Alabama thirteen years ago, they had no child labor law. Since then they passed a very lame one, so- called. They evade the law in this way: A child who has passed his or her twelfth year can take in his younger brothers or sisters from six years on, and get them to work with him. They are not on the pay roll, but the pay for these little ones goes into the elder one’s pay. So that when you look at the pay roll you think this one child makes quite a good bit when perhaps there are two or three younger than he under the lash. Then the governor runs a pill peddler, who is his nephew. There is two cents of every dollar knocked off of the 600 slaves to pay this doctor. You see it’s all in the family. Then they have a Sunday school, and the chief guy of the Sunday school has a gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and when he is talking about Jesus, you can see him open up the mouth to show the golden calf. So the little ones pay particular attention to what he says. I found them all suffering from chills and fever and malaria; and whatever change they have left goes to the patent medicine doctor.
One woman told me that her mother had gone into that mill and worked, and took her four children with her. She says, I have been in the mill since I was four years old. I am now thirty-four. She looked to me as if she were sixty.
She has a kindly nature if treated right, but her whole life and spirit was crushed out beneath the iron wheels of Comer’s greed. When you think of the little ones that this mother brings forth you can see how society is cursed with an abnormal human being. She knew nothing but the whiz of the machinery in the factory. As I talked to her with many others she said: “O can you do something for us?” The wives, the mothers and the children all go in to produce dividends, profit, profit, profit. This brutal governor is a pillar of the First Methodist church in Birmingham. On Sunday he gets up and sings “O Lord will you have another star for my crown when I get there?” What a job God must have hiring mechanics to make stars for that black-hearted villain’s crown “when he gets there.” I saw the little ones lying on the bed shaking with chills and I could hear them ask parents and masters, what they were here for; what crime they had committed that they were brought here and sold to the dividend auctioneer.
Men and women of America, when will you stop your hypocritical actions and rise up in your might to protest against these conditions? When in Alabama 13 years ago these women ran from four to five looms. Today I find them running some 24 looms, and when you think of the high tension, when you think of the cruelty to their nerves, you may know why the glory of their lives is gone. The days when their labor was not a burden are gone; now it is all a hot rush and worry and incessant sweat. They scratch their bits of corn out of these hard days. Think of these young girls and children on their feet guiding that machinery for twelve or thirteen hours a day; running that machinery hour by hour; and in their fever at night I hear them moaning “O what will I do, I can’t make the machine go, it won’t wind.” It is hell, worse than hell. Think of these children standing in the midst of these spindles every thread of which must be incessantly watched so that it may be instantly pieced together in a hot room amid its roaring machinery, so loud that one cannot hear himself no matter how close they are at hand.
Amid the whizzing wheels and bands and switch racks that would snatch off a limb for one second’s carelessness, all this in hot air so that in summer a great thirst scorches their throats, the weavers are encircled by twenty-four terrific looms in a steamed atmosphere which is worse than hell. A method of communication has to be used as if they were dumb animals. At any moment a rebellious shuttle may shoot forth and knock an eye out. A loose skirt may be seized by a wheel or a strap, and then the horrors of the accident can be better imagined than told.
Their mentality is dwarfed, and if they say a word the cruel boss, who is a scab, goes after them. They tell me that when they get thirsty they cannot get enough water to drink. They are all victims of some ailment. They are never free from headache. Owing to the necessity of cleaning machinery they do not eat at noon. An unpleasant odor coming from the oil and grease while the rumbling of shafts and drums with squeaking of wheels and spindles, make them sick. They rise at 4 o’clock in the morning to prepare to enter that slave pen at half past five. They are all pale, dyspeptic, hollow chested, and it seems as if life has no charms for them. They cannot go and seek other employment because the energy has been all used up from childhood in their particular line of industry. Mr. Roosevelt makes no allusion to these undesirable citizens who murder these children for gold. I believe that the god of justice will yet rise and take it into his own hands and punish the devourers of children’s lives for profit.
This is the democratic south, my friends-this is a democratic administration. This is what Mr. Bryan and Mr. Gompers want to uphold. I stand for the overthrow of the entire system that murders childhood. I stand for the overthrow of a system that can give $6,000 jobs to labor leaders who have betrayed these infants in their infancy. I stand for the teachings of Christ put into practice, not the teachings of capitalism and graft and murder.
I stand for the day when this rotten structure will totter of its own vileness. I stand for the day when the baby child will live in God’s fair land, and enjoy its air, its food, its pleasures, when every mother will caress it warmly, when there will be no parasites, no slaves, when $2,000 won’t be paid for a hat to cover the skull of the desirable citizen’s daughter, when the child shall not be taxed for such diabolical infamy; when poodle dogs will not be caressed on the life-blood of innocent childhood; when these children of Comer’s hell-hole will live in God’s heaven without any master to rob them of their lives.
The high temperature of the mills combined by an abnormal humidity of the air produced by steaming as done by manufacturers makes bad material weave easier and tends to diminish the workers’ power of resisting disease. The humid atmosphere promotes perspiration, but makes evaporation from the skin more difficult; and in this condition the operator, when he leaves the mill, has to face a much reduced temperature which produces serious chest affections. They are all narrow-chested, thin, disheartened looking.
I found very few of them who could read or write as I went to take their names to register it for their charter. I found they would come and ask me “you write his or her name” whoever they voted for. No wonder the governor could send his daughter to the seashore, no wonder he could have the audacity to drive miners back at the point of the bayonet. No wonder men and women commit suicide. They are too tired out at the end of the day to engage in any mental pursuit. They want something or some one to cheer them up.
As a new Rudyard Kipling would say:
Comer, go reckon our dead
By the forges red
And the factories where your slaves spin.
You’ve eaten their lives,
Their babes and wives.
For which Roosevelt says you’re a desirable citizen.
It was your legal right, your legal share.
If blood be the price of your god-cursed gold,
God knows, these slaves have paid it dear.———-
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCE & IMAGES
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Oct 24, 1908
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587501
See also:
Re trip by Mother Jones to Alabama in Sept 1908:
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 11, 1908
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1908
In Alabama: “Old Mother Jones..claims every miner as her son…”
Article above can also be found here:
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
Note: Steel uses as his source:
St. Louis Labor of Oct 24, 1908.
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
“Yours for the Revolution”
The Appeal to reason, 1895-1922
-ed by John Graham
University of Nebraska Press, Jun 1, 1990
https://books.google.com/books?id=2_YDAQAAIAAJ
Note: searching google book section:
“thirteen years since I bid farewell to the workers in alabama”
+ “mother jones”
reveals that this article-with all negative references to Roosevelt, Bryan and Gompers edited out-was also carried by the trade union journals of the day.
From ISR of March 1901, MJ on Southern Mills:
The International Socialist Review, Volume 1
(Chicago, Illinois)
July 1900-June 1901
Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1901
https://books.google.com/books?id=KJ_VAAAAMAAJ
ISR – March 1901
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=KJ_VAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA513
“Civilization in Southern Mills” by Mother Jones
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=KJ_VAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA539
ISR article also found here:
Mother Jones Speaks
Collected Writings and Speeches
-ed by Philip S Foner
Monad Press, 1983
https://books.google.com/books?id=T_m5AAAAIAAJ
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