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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday April 21, 1912
Duluth, Minnesota – Mother Jones Speaks at Lincoln Park Auditorium
From The Labor World of April 20, 1912:
Mary Jones, the little mother of the miners, and familiarly known throughout the country as Mother Jones, was a visitor in Duluth Monday and Tuesday. She delivered an address Monday evening at the Lincoln Park Auditorium in the interest of the shop employes of the Harriman lines who are on strike.
Mother Jones has been sent out by the United Mine Workers’ Union to help the striking railroad men. She is meeting with much success in soliciting funds. A fairly good collection was taken up at the Lincoln Park meeting.
During her visit to Duluth, Mother Jones spent much of her time in the office of the Labor World. We have’ known her for almost twenty years, and blamed if she does not look younger today than she did two decades ago. She attributes her youthful appearance to the fact that she has not been in jail lately nor has she been quarantined for smallpox.
Is Eighty Years of Age.
Mother Jones will be eighty years of age on May first. She is as active and as sprightly as a woman of thirty. She never looked better in her life. Her complexion is as clear as that of a baby and there is not the sign of a furrow on her kind old face.
Fight? When she is asked a question about labor conditions in the mining regions of America, her eyes flash, her mouth is set firm, her fist is clenched and she stretches out her arm with the vigor and force of an athlete. She tells a story of social injustice that reaches the heart of the most hardened.
In her speech at Lincoln Park the daily newspapers dwelled only upon the shafts she hurled at men and women of the toady type who “bend the cringing hinges of the knee that thrift may follow fawning.”
Knows the Labor Movement.
Mother Jones understands the philosophy of the labor movement. She has a peculiar way, which is distinctly her own, of driving her points right to the hearts of her listeners. For a moment she will philosophically discuss the growth and development of production; then like a flash she will clinch her argument with a militant attack upon both men and women who are responsible for injustices that have been permitted to creep into the industrial system.
Mother Jones is said to be without fear. During her strenuous life she has been cast into prison, confined in bull pens, driven at the points of bayonets, and once or twice has had a pistol aimed close to her face by willing servants of the capitalistic class.
Mother Boosts Gompers.
In her speech she gave some timely advice to that type of workingmen who take pride in condemning everything with which the American Federation of Labor has to do. She said to them,
You men had better quit your I. W. W., and your attacks upon Samuel Gompers. It will be time enough for you to condemn Mr. Gompers when you shall have done as much for labor as he has done.
Mother Jones believes thoroughly in the organization of the working classes on the industrial field. She has seen so much hypocrisy in the so-called “political organization of the working classes” that she has lost faith in its efficacy, if not in the good sense of its leading apostles.
While Mother Jones was with us she reviewed some of the exciting experiences she had in northern Minnesota during the strike of the miners in 1907. She related some of her trials in the mining camps of Pennsylvania, Colorado and Utah. In Pennsylvania she was called upon to address a meeting of the wives of striking miners. It seems that the strike had been in existence for many weeks. The women had become discouraged; they were without food and their babies were starving. They were on the point of insisting that their husbands return to work.
Pleads With Miners’ Wives.
Mother Jones was sent for. She plead with the wives and mothers as only a woman can. She was indeed their mother, and before she had finished every mother in the audience raised her baby above her head and pledged herself in the name of her starving babes that she would give courage to the men and would urge them to remain true in the strike. In two more weeks the strike was settled. The miners won a complete victory.
That night Mother Jones went to the hotel which was owned by the mining company. When she was comfortably asleep she was aroused by the superintendent of the mining company and ordered out. She made her way to a little light on the hillside. It happened to be the shack of a striking miner. She was taken in and wrapped in an old blanket. She spent the night sleeping on the floor, sharing the lot of a coal miner and his family.
Tribute to “Billy” Wilson.
Mother Jones paid a glowing tribute to Congressman W. B. Wilson, the coal miner. She told of one trip she made through the anthracite coal regions with Mr. Wilson when he was working by the day, and they walked fifty miles with but five cents worth of crackers for food.
She says she knows of one occasion when Wilson could have obtained a large sum of money from the mine owners if he would but agree to leave the district. This is the man some of the Socialist claim is not a true representative of the working classes, simply because he is a Democratic member of congress. The label may not be on the bottle, but its contents are the most pure and wholesome that can be found anywhere.
When Mother Jones was in Colorado she was cast into a bull-pen with the miners who were detained there. The next day she was placed aboard a train and sent to Kansas with but five cents in her packet. She waited at the station until the next westbound train appeared. She told the conductor her story. He carried her to Denver, and upon her arrival at the capitol of Colorado, she went forthwith to the office of Governor Peabody and what she told him is not in print, but Peabody saw that she was left unmolested thereafter.
Quarantined in Utah.
Later she was sent to Utah where the mine owners had everything their own way. They controlled the courts and the police and all the machinery of government, including the health officer. A lone case of smallpox had broken out somewhere on the hills. Mother Jones had passed within two miles of the house, but this was sufficiently near to warrant the health officer to quarantine her.
She was kept under guard as a smallpox suspect for sixteen days. While thus detained every effort was made to crush the striking miners. On another occasion when the coal miners were on strike an ex-convict acting as a Pinkerton detective, came to her room one day and pointing a gun under her nose, demanded that she tell where the miners kept their money, and he threatened if she did not tell at once he would blow her brains out.
“Shoot, You Coward!”
“Shoot, you coward. I dare you to shoot,” answered the little old fighter. He dropped his gun and muttering a few words of profanity left her. Not long after this man was killed by a deputy sheriff.
It’s a treat to hear the good mother tell of her exciting experiences in her struggles for the working classes. If we had a few men on the firing line with the courage, the grit and the determination of Mary Jones, this industrial struggle in which we are engaged would be more easily conducted.
Mother Jones left for Two Harbors Tuesday and returned on Wednesday. She spoke last night at Crookston.
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[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCE & IMAGE
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-Apr 20, 1912
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn78000395/1912-04-20/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn78000395/1912-04-20/ed-1/seq-3/
See also:
Tag: Illinois Central and Harriman Lines Strike of 1911 to 1915
https://weneverforget.org/tag/illinois-central-and-harriman-lines-strike-of-1911-to-1915/
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday August 27, 1907
From The Labor World: “Labor’s Little Angel” Speaks in Duluth
Autobiography of Mother Jones
Kerr, 1925
(-for more on events described above)
https://archive.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/
Mother Jones in Northern Minnesota, April 1912:
Duluth, Two Harbors, Crookston
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No More Deaths for Dollars – Ed Pickford