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Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 12, 1904
Traveling West Virginia with Mother Jones during the Great Coal Strike of 1897
From the Boston Sunday Herald of September 11, 1904:
In the Sunday Magazine Section of the Boston Herald, a reporter recalls traveling with Mother Jones into the hills of West Virginia during the “first great anthracite strike” [most likely the Bituminous Coal Strike of 1897]. The reporter describes how Mother beguiled a young mine owner into allowing her to speak to his employees “near the pit mouth on his own property.” As gleaned from the memory of the reporter, the result of the speech given by Mother Jones to those miners and their families was dramatic.
…..In West Virginia, during the first great anthracite strike , the United Mine Workers of America had placed some of its organizers. Among these was “Mother” Jones, the only woman organizer employed by the trades unions. On the way she had traveled through the mountain roads by night and day, toiling in the passes, tramping the railroad tracks, riding in farm wagons, or push carts, or in whatever way seemed easiest to get from camp to camp to preach the doctrine that working men must unite, the slogan of the trades unions.
She had a good measure of success, and the fame of her power as a trouble maker had spread among the mine owners. She was detested and feared by half the state, wondered about and gaped over by the other half. She was sleeping under any sort of shelter, eating the coarsest of food, stripping herself of clothing to give away right and left. Though she was earning a fair salary, she could not use it to make life easier for herself in this environment.
Reaching a town one morning which was practically dominated by the influence of a rich young mine owner, she applied for permission to the authorities to hold a mass meeting. She was refused the permit unless she could gain the consent of the mine owner himself, who held a position of local political authority. Two reporters, who had been sent out to watch the progress of events in this part of the state, believed that no speechmaking would occur in this town. “Mother” Jones thought differently. She sought the mine owner in his home. She told him that she had come to make a request which she saw in his face he would grant. He smiled and asked who she was and what she desired. With the benignity of the most gentle kindliness and simple dignity the old lady replied demurely that she was “Mother” Jones, and wished to have a talk with his employees.
“You, ‘Mother’ Jones,” said the rich man, astonished; “you are surely not in earnest?”
“Yes, I am ‘Mother’ Jones, the wicked old woman,” replied the supplicant with her steadfastly radiant expression and her almost subtle smile; so quiet, so gentle, so intelligent it made the words she uttered so whimsically of herself, a patent libel and insult upon her character. It was an irony that disturbed the judgment of the rich young man.
The mine owner studied the fact, the attitude, the folded hands of the woman before him, and then inquired what she would like him to do. “Mother” Jones said she would like him to send word through his mines that she was there, and grant her permission to talk on Sunday in an open space near the pit mouth on his own property. Though it seems incredible, the young mine owner consented. The inscrutable smile had been too much for his resistance.
The word was accordingly sent out through the mines that “Mother” Jones was to speak by permission of the operator. The foreman and bosses could scarcely believe their ears, and the ignorant miners, the foreign element that could scarcely speak English, did not believe. They feared it was some trap to compass their economic ruin, or more simply, to cost them their jobs. On Sunday morning only a few persons gathered at the meeting place designated, and “Mother” Jones seated on a rock, watched and waited.
The Local Labor Leader Surprised.
“This is going to be a frost,” said the local labor leader, one John Walker.
“Wait a little,” said “Mother” Jones.
Gradually it was apparent what the old lady was watching with her smiling eyes. Men were climbing up through the mountain passes and hiding behind huge boulders; they were peeping over the tops and around the sides of their hiding places, and women were lurking in the thickets.
“Come nearer, comrades; don’t be afraid, brothers,” said “Mother” Jones, standing up, and then she began to talk. In a few minutes about 100 men and women gathered in front of the rocky platform. The mine owner himself sat on a rock some paces away.
Has any one ever told you, my children, about the lives you are living, more so that you may understand how it is you pass your days on earth? Have you told each other about it and thought it over among yourselves, so that you might imagine a brighter day and begin to bring it to pass? If no one has done so, I will do it for you today. I want you to see yourselves as you are, Mothers and children, and to think if it is not time you look on yourselves, and upon each other. Let us consider this together, for I am one of you, and I know what it is to suffer.
So the old lady, standing very quietly in her deep, far-reaching voice, painted a picture of the life of a miner from his young boyhood to his old age. It was a vivid picture. She talked of the first introduction a boy had to those dismal caves under the earth, dripping with moisture often so low that he must crawl into the coal veins; must lie on his back to work. She told how miners stood bent over until the back ached too much to straighten, or in sulpher water that ate through the shoes and made sores on the flesh; how their hands became cracked and the nails broken off in the quick; how the bit of bacon and beans in the dinner pail failed to stop the craving of their empty stomachs, and the thought of the barefoot children, at home and the sick mother was all too dreary to make the home-going a cheerful one.
And at home how often when the wife lay helpless in bed the miner must follow a day’s toil by domestic chores. There was no one to rub the lineament on the aching back, with Mary sick in bed. He must fetch the water and put the kettle to boil and try to wash off the coal dust that stuck into the pores of the skin. He must search the bare cupboard for a pinch of tea, the end of a stale loaf and the bit of cold potato. He might sit on the doorstep and smoke his pipe for an hour after tending the children, while Mary told him of what the doctor had said she must have for medicine and nourishment, which they both knew they could not afford. Other nights there was no place to go for a bit of amusement but the saloon, and sometimes he was too tired and too poor to go there.
And so, while he smoked, the miner thought how he could never own a home, were it ever so humble; how he could not make his wife happy, or his children any better than himself, and how he must get up in the morning and go through it all again; how that some day the fall of rock would come or the rheumatism cripple him; that Mary herself might die and leave him, and some day there would be no longer for him even the job that was so hard and old age and hunger and pain would be his lot. And why, because some other human beings, no more the sons of God than the coal diggers, broke the commandment of God which says, “Thou shalt not steal.” and took from the toiler all the wealth which he created, all but enough to keep him alive for a period of years through which he might toil for their advantage.
“You pity yourselves, but you do not pity your brothers, or you would stand together to help on another,” said “Mother” Jones. And then in an impassioned vein she called upon them to awaken their minds so that they might live another life. As she ceased speaking men and women looked at each other with shamed faces, for almost every one had been weeping, and suddenly a man pushed his way through the crowd. He was sniveling on his coat sleeve, but he cried out hoarsely:
“You, John Walker; don’t you go tell us that ‘ere’s ‘Mother’ Jones. That’s Jesus Christ come down on earth again, and saying he’s an old woman so he can come here and talk to us poor devils. God, God-nobody else knows what the poor suffer that way.”
The man was quieted by his wife and led away, while “Mother” Jones looked after him with dilating eyes, and then broke out fiercely in one of her characteristically impassioned appeals for organization. The reporter feared the outbreak was too sacrilegious for publication. However that may be, it happened , and if a poor benighted miner thought this old woman a special messenger from God, it is not so strange that many intelligent people regard her as the woman genius of the labor movement…..
[Emphasis added]
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SOURCE & IMAGE
The Sunday Herald, Magazine Section,
-of The Boston Herald
(Boston, Massachusetts)
-Sept 11, 1904
https://www.genealogybank.com/doc/newspapers/image/v2:1386BF60B4F67060@GB3NEWS-13A614B9A77E319C@2416735-13A5D68262641C21@36-13A5D68262641C21
https://www.genealogybank.com/doc/newspapers/image/v2:1386BF60B4F67060@GB3NEWS-13A614B9A77E319C@2416735-13A5D684D931DFE7@38-13A5D684D931DFE7
See also:
John H. Walker, 1872-1955
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Walker
re John Walker with Mother Jones and John Mitchell
in West Virginia during Coal Strike of 1897:
Men and Coal by McAlister Coleman, NY 1943
https://archive.org/details/mencoal0000mcal/page/n6/mode/1up
-p59-60:
https://archive.org/details/mencoal0000mcal/page/59/mode/1up?q=1897+mother+jones+mitchell+john+walker+&view=theater
“The Coal Miners’ Strike of 1897”
-by J. E. George
Source:
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 12, No. 2
-Jan 1898, pp. 186-208
Published by: Oxford University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1882118.pdf
Mother Jones Speaks
-ed by Philip S Foner
NY, 1983
(search: “boston herald”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=T_m5AAAAIAAJ
Aug 8, 1897, The Pittsburgh Press
-Mother Jones to leave for West Virginia soon.
“…would not do for Debs to go alone there…”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/141931048/?match=1&terms=%22mother%20jones%22%20%22west%20virginia%22%20debs
https://www.newspapers.com/image/141931076/?terms=%22mother%20jones%22%20%22west%20virginia%22%20debs
Aug 12, 1897, Nashville Banner
“Mrs. Jones is at present with the striking miners in West Virginia….”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/604542606/?match=2&terms=%22mother%20jones%22%20%22west%20virginia%22%20
Aug 13, 1897, Chattanooga Daily Times
“Mother Jones…is at present assisting Eugene V. Debs in efforts to win the miners’ strike in West Virginia.”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/604734163/?match=1&terms=%22mother%20jones%22%20%22west%20virginia%22%20
Aug 30, 1897, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Debs states: “In West Virginia, perhaps, this awful condition of affairs [hunger and starvation] is most noticeable.”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/138195840/?match=4&terms=%22mother%20jones%22%20%22west%20virginia%22%20
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Children of Mother Jones – Peter Duffy, 2014
https://motherjonescork.com/2014/06/24/children-of-mother-jones-song-lyrics/