Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday September 27, 1921 Mother Jones Speaks at United Mine Workers Convention, Part I
Indianapolis, Convention of the United Mine Workers of America Sixth Day, September 26, 1921, Mother Jones Speaks, Part I of IV:
Indiana Daily Times September 27, 1921
Vice-President Murray: I understand that Mother Jones has just arrived in the convention and I am going to request Brother David Fowler to escort her to the platform. It isn’t necessary that I should introduce Mother Jones to you at this time; it isn’t necessary that I should eulogize the work she has performed for the coal diggers of America, and I will simply present to the convention at this time our good friend, Mother Jones.
ADDRESS OF MOTHER JONES
Mr. Chairman and Delegates: I have been watching you from a distance, and you have been wasting a whole lot of time and money. I want you to stop it.
All along the ages, away back in the dusty past, the miners started their revolt. It didn’t come in this century, it came along in the cradle of the race when they were ground by superstition and wrong. Out of that they have moved onward and upward all the ages against all the courts, against all the guns, in every nation they have moved onward and upward to where they are today, and their effort has always been to get better homes for their children and for those who were to follow them.
I have just come up from West Virginia. I left Williamson last Friday and came into Charleston. I was doing a little business around there looking after things. We have never gotten down to the core of the trouble that exists there today. Newspapers have flashed it, magazines have contained articles, but they were by people who did not understand the background of the great struggle.
In 1900 I was sent into West Virginia; I went there and worked for a while, taking a survey of the situation. At that time men were working fourteen hours a day and they did not get their coal weighed. They weighed a ton of coal with an aching back, dug it, loaded it and didn’t know how much was in it. However, we have moved onward and today they get their checkweighman, they get paid in cash instead of in company money as they used to; but that wasn’t brought around in an easy manner, it wasn’t brought around arguing on the floor.
I walked nine miles one night with John H. Walker in the New River field after we had organized an army of slaves who were afraid to call their souls their own. We didn’t dare sleep in a miner’s house; if we did the family would be thrown out in the morning and would have no place to go. We walked nine miles before we got shelter. When we began to organize we had to pay the men’s dues, they had no money.
At one time some of the organizers came down from Charleston, went up to New Hope and held a meeting. They had about fourteen people at the meeting. The next morning the conductor on the train told me the organizers went up on a train to Charleston. I told Walker to bill a meeting at New Hope for the next night and I would come up myself. He said we could not bill meetings unless the national told us to. I said: “I am the national now and I tell you to bill that meeting.” He did.
When we got to the meeting there was a handful of miners there and the general manager, clerks and all the pencil pushers they could get. I don’t know but there were a few organizers for Jesus there, too. We talked but said nothing about organizing. Later that night a knock came on the door where I was staying and a bunch of the boys were outside. They asked if I would organize them. I said I would. They told me they hadn’t any money. Walker said the national was not in favor of organizing, they wanted us only to agitate. I said: “John, I am running the business here, not the national; they are up in Indianapolis and I am in New Hope. I am going to organize those fellows and if the national finds any fault with you, put it on me—I can fight the national as well as I can the company if they are not doing right.”
Thirteen of them came into the house. John was there. I said: “Boys, each one of you make yourself an organizer, go at night and get your brothers together.” I went away and two weeks later I was coming to Glen Jean to get the train and the boys met me. They said they could pay for their charter then because they had organized and over a thousand had come into the union. We went up the mountains again. I requested the national organizer go up there and bill a meeting for me, Walker had gone home. The organizer came down and I asked him if he had billed the meeting. He said he had not. I asked him: “What’s the matter?” He said: “The superintendent chased me down.” “Why didn’t you chase him up?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t come over here to get killed.” “Then why did you take the miners’ money if you won’t face the guns?”
I took a couple of young fellows and went up there. I don’t care for these old fellows because they are worn out. I went up to Thayer on Saturday night and stayed there. The next morning I lined up ten or twelve trapper boys and we went up the mountain. We walked six miles. I sent the boys down to the town to tell the men to come up to the meeting. I told him to ask the general manager and the superintendent to come up, that we wanted to see them, and they came. The men sat down and talked. The company sent up one of their lap dogs, a colored fellow, and he rode a horse. The boys tipped me off to who he was. I told him to come over too, and he did.
I made him sit down at my feet and said to him: “Now I want to put everything in your skull the superintendent wants and you take it home to him.” He wanted to get away but I held him by the hair. We organized every single man there that afternoon and from that day on they remained organized. A couple of years ago I went up there and the superintendent asked me to come into his office and sit down. I think they go along nicely together. You have got to use judgment and diplomacy today. This is a diplomatic age politically, religiously and industrially. You must use common sense and judgment.
I had to go again to one of Paddy Rend’s mines. He lived in Danville, Ill. We had the place organized but the boss told me the fellows wouldn’t take the jobs he gave them. There were four of them getting $10 a week. I went down one night and waited until the secretary made his report. I asked what the $10 was for. He said those fellows were on strike. I said: “But the mine is open; everybody can get work. They can get work and are not going to get ten cents. You fellows can not rob the miners while I am around. You fellows go to work or I’ll clean hell out of you!” We stopped that swindling and holdup, and those who didn’t go to work got out.
When we began organizing in 1903 the battle royal began. The companies began to enlist gunmen. I went up the Stanaford Mountain and held a meeting with the men. There wasn’t a more law-abiding body of men in America than those men were. While they were on strike the court issued an injunction forbidding them to go near the mines. They didn’t. I held a meeting that night, went away and next morning a deputy sheriff went up to arrest those men. He had a warrant for them. The boys said: “We have broken no law; we have violated no rules; you can not arrest us.” They notified him to get out of town and he went away. They sent for me and I went up. I asked why they didn’t let him arrest the men. They said they hadn’t done anything and I told them that was the reason they should have surrendered to the law.
That very night in 1903, the 25th day of February, those boys went to bed in their peaceful mining town. They had built their own school house and were sending their children to school. They were law-abiding citizens. While they slept in their peaceful homes bullets went through the walls and several of them were murdered in their beds. I went up next morning on an early train. The agent said they had trouble on Standifer [Stanaford] Mountain, that he heard going over the wires news that some people were hurt. I turned in my ticket, went out and called a couple of the boys. We went up the mountain on the next train and found those men dead in their homes, lying on mattresses wet with their blood and the bullet holes through the walls.
I want to clear this thing up, for it has never been cleared up. I saw there a picture that will forever be a disgrace to American institutions. There were men who had been working fourteen hours a day, who had broken no law, murdered in their peaceful homes. Nobody was punished for those murders.
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