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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 29, 1901
Indianapolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks to Miners, Part II
January 25, 1901-Convention of United Mine Workers of America:
In New York they are going to give a charity ball. I suppose it is a kind of restitution to the people they have been robbing for years. They will spend thousands and thousands of dollars for decorating their old carcasses, and they go into a hall and admire one another; and if we were to sit up in the gallery and venture to look at them they would wonder what such a lot of Wops wanted in the world anyhow. Then some smart newspaper man will take his gilt pen and sit down and write of the beautiful Mr. So and So who was there, and of the beautiful Mrs. So and So who was there, and how they were dressed, and how splendid it all was.
Splendid! Yes, my friends, but they are dancing on the minds and hearts of the men and women they have robbed, dancing on the hearts of the little children who are working in their factories and of the boys and girls working everywhere.
In Freeland [Pennsylvania] I held a meeting for the boys and girls from the silk mills. They were on a strike and one morning they tried to keep the scab children from working. The children went into the factory to work, and the poor little outside ones entered a protest and called them “Blackleg,” and “scab,” and a burly policeman took one girl by the hair of the head and dragged her to the police station and she was put under three hundred dollars bond. The bond was furnished and they took her home, but the fright and ill treatment had made her ill, and she had three hemorrhages of the lungs. There was not a dollar in the house to get food or medicine or a doctor for her. Think of that.
When the children stood on the platform of a hall we had hired for them to expose the corporations one little boy of twelve came to the front and told us that he worked thirteen hours at night, that they paid him one cent an hour; but that these same people had gone to the church and put in a magnificent stained glass window in it. Did you ever hear a minister say one word about the condition of these children? We did not find one minister to defend these children.
In the Scriptures they can see where the Master said, “Suffer little children to come unto me.” My friends, I believe we should clasp our hands and come out together in defense of these little children. I can see an appeal in their eyes which seems to ask what they have done that they should be battered and knocked about as they are. There are children under age in those factories.
You know they have factory inspectors that are like some of your mine inspectors. The inspector, you know, walks in with the superintendent, and down Avenue A in the mine, but never enters Smoke A at all. He would not go in there at all, because the superintendent has put a bottle of champagne into his stomach and the gas might not agree with him. Then he goes out and writes his report in this fashion, “Everything in good condition. The mine is entirely free from gas.” That was what the inspector said of the Red Ash mine two days before those fifty men were murdered.
That is what the factory inspector does. While the factory inspector is being taken over the mill there are children hidden in closets and locked up there until he leaves. These things are all wrong. We don’t believe in the murder of these helpless little children. This is the reason we are joining hands with you.
Take your women as an auxiliary organization; let them help you out; with their assistance you can solve the problem. You know that no business man in days gone by succeeded in business when he kept his business from his wife. The trusts have got ahead of us there, however. Your wives and your daughters can make your organization much more entertaining and interesting than it is.
I will stop here to say that you have reached the danger point in your organization. You have grown to be one of the greatest organizations of labor in the world. Now every grafter is going to begin looking to you for offices. Don’t you know that? They will all be out, and they will want the oflices. Watch those fellows! Watch them in your organizations, and if you don’t watch them I will. Keep your eye on the grafters. Sometimes they will put their names down for four or five oflices, so that if they lose one they will be sure to get another out of you. Be sure, my friends, the man who is true to you is not after every oflice you have to give. The man who is sincere does not care whether you give him an office or not. He is willing to work out his own salvation and help you work out yours. When I see those grafters reaching out to take from you, who go under the earth and delve ten and twelve hours a day, those offices, I am one of those who want to take them by the throat and choke them. I believe that the time is here for us to work. I believe the time is here to throw aside our own personalities. You must go out and work for the benefit of the whole and for the love we bear the children.
It saddens me when I see your little boys going out in the early morning and going down into the mines as I saw them in Virginia. I asked one miner why he took such a little fellow into the mine, as he was not able to work, and he said, “No, he is not able to work, but he can get a turn.” I want to say to you that the man or woman who would undertake to sell and rob and plunder those children is not fit to be classed with human beings. The man or woman who would witness such scenes as I have witnessed in West Virginia would betray God Almighty if he betrayed those people. Ah, my brothers, I shall consider it an honor if, when you write my epitaph upon my tombstone, you say, “Died fighting their battles in West Virginia.” You may say what you please about the West Virginia miners being “No good.” Every dirty old miner out there is not a Virginian. He is very apt to be an old scab that the rest of you hunted out of your fields. I met in Virginia some of the noblest men I have met in the country.
I wanted to hold a meeting at Red Ash, and stood on the track just above the place. A fellow there said I could not cross over, and when I asked him why he said because he owned half the river, and I told him God Almighty owned the other half and I stood in with Him. Well, we went over and we held a meeting and as those big fellows stood around I felt as though I wanted to take every one of those twenty-five young drivers and caress them. I wanted better conditions for them; that it would make them nobler men, and I determined that every effort we could put forth must be put forth there.
I realize that the robbers there don’t want us to organize. They did not want me to help organize those young men, but they could not prevent us from organizing; we organized anyhow. They locked the school houses and the churches against us, but we got the boys together and organized them. We brought them together there, and it can be done in other parts of the state, and I feel that before another year West Virginia will be lined up and every miner in it will be with you. Those poor fellows in West Virginia realize that they have been neglected. You have not dealt fairly with them; you cannot find fault with them; the conditions that surround them are very unfavorable, We have to go over the hills and mountains to find some of the bands of slaves.
I wish you could see how some of them live. The conditions that surround them are wretched. The women have to take their buckets and bring coal down from the pit mouth; and when they want water they have to go three blocks for it and pay a dollar a month for it at that. They have pluck-me stores and every invention known to robbery and rascality to contend with. Why, the Czar of Russia, tyrant that he is, is a gentleman compared with some of the fellows there who oppress these people.
Now, my friends, we propose to go back there again. They told us to go out; but you know that when a woman is ordered to do anything she will do just the reverse. Those operators are not slick at all, for if they were they would say, “Stay in.” But they told us to go out, and said their courts were issuing injunctions. I am going back there. Do you understand that? I will tell you why. Patrick Henry said in that old State House in Philadelphia that I was guaranteed the right of free speech while I lived; I am not dead yet. If those fellows put me in jail, I trust I have friends enough in the United States to see that the law is tested, and maybe we will put the judge in jail before we get through. That is more than you fellows will do. You know you will run when they tell you they will put you in jail. No battle was ever won for civilization that the jails and the scaffolds did not hold the salt of the earth. And it is because there were women enough true to the race. They said, “Build your scaffolds if you want to, and hang us; but our dangling bodies will tell the people that we died for principle.” We live in America, and we are going to fight for American principles.
Before you meet here again it may be that I shall have gone home; that I may be at rest in my grave. I may never again meet you in convention; but I plead with you to be true, to be men, not cringing serfs, and above all, not traitors to your organization. Go deep down into your heart and look into its secret recesses, and if you have betrayed your organization swear on the altar of this convention that you will go home and undo the wrong you have done, and try to do something in the future for the benefit of the human race. Stop a moment and think of what I say before you become traitors to your organization, before you give the secret workings of your organization to the enemy.
Think of the thousands and thousands of children you are helping them to slaughter, and think that you will be held more guilty of their murder than the capitalistic class you are aiding. The man who betrays his organization is a demon incarnate. The man who sells those children into slavery has not a particle of manhood in him. When you find one of those traitors in your organization, one of those who are in there for the benefit of the corporations, you just give him a coat of tar and feathers and march him down the streets with the word “Traitor” on him, and he will never sell you out again.
This is the most important convention in your history, and it is the greatest. I want you to be reasonable. I don’t want you, on account of the victories you have won, to get up and think you have it all. It took thirty years to get that victory for you. Don’t be in a hurry; be a little slow. Use your reason and your better judgment. Don’t ask for too much-not but that I want all I can for you—but I know we cannot get it all at once; that we have to get at the capitalists a little slow because they are consolidating and organizing their forces, they are getting together everywhere and controlling everything.
Why, they are even discharging the professors in the colleges who dare to speak for the right. I had a letter from California. The letter said that Mrs. Stanford had discharged some of the professors because they had been teaching socialism. The boy who wrote the letter said, “Say, Mother Jones, will you bring your McAdoo women here with their brooms to sweep the scab professor when he comes?” You see the students are beginning to think.
It is an industrial revolution, my friends, that has been going on for one hundred and fifty years unnoticed by the masses and the classes; but now the pressure has been brought to bear so hard upon the shoulders of the toilers that they are beginning to think and reason; they are putting away their prejudices and saying to themselves, “Why is it? We produce and yet we have nothing.” When they have solved that question they have solved the riddle of the ages.
The people the world over are thinking. In Austria not long ago they had a textile strike, an enormous strike. They called the militia out, as they sometimes do in this country. The leader of the strike said, “You are iron men, we are human men; we made those irons, we call on you to lay those arms down,” and they did lay them down, and all the crowned heads in Europe trembled. That did not get out through the press, however, but the result was that the strike was settled.
We made those fellows at Panther Creek ground arms the morning we met them; they didn’t bayonet anyone that morning. We are the bayonets; we are the people. We produce the wealth of the nation; we support the President and the Cabinet and the National Government—and you bet your life that gang that are in there now won’t be there when we women can vote. We will have Mark Hanna digging coal.
Now, boys, listen to me. This year the Chinese Exclusion Act expires. The politicians took good care that your attention was not called to it before election. Let me tell you, my friends, that you are up against it. If you don’t get your organization solidly in line you are going to be confronted with the conditions that confronted you before, and for that reason I plead with you to stand by your organization, and each and every one of you go home shaking hands with each brother saying, “By the eternal stars of heaven, we are cemented together, never to separate until we win out!” I know something of the Chinese. I was in California when that question was agitating the people there, and I have had the hose turned on me for helping to agitate it. Five or six of us used to get together and keep talking, and gradually more joined us, a few at a time, and at last it became a national question. Then the fight went on at that end of the nation to save you; now you have got to do the fighting at this end of the nation, and you will have to save yourselves.
Notwithstanding that you are paying Powderly an enormous salary they are sending in the Italians in enormous numbers. They go through by the thousands, and his old “Nibs” never says a word about it. I want you to pass a resolution asking him to either give up his salary or attend to his business.
Now, my boys, I want you to be good, and I want you to be true, and I want you to be men. I have seen the rise and fall of organizations; I know the danger [ahead?]. I know the capitalistic class looks upon us with a little bit of fear. I know they feel they could buy your leaders; that you are secure as far as they are concerned; but I also know that they will put in your midst those who will try to disrupt your organization and get up factional fights. Let me tell you one thing to do. When men get up factional fights in your organization expel them immediately. They are dangerous; they have wrecked organizations in the past; they will do it in the future. I believe in you, and I believe that at heart the great majority of you are right, and I believe that you want your organization to go on, and grow, and I believe that nearly all of you will stick to it or die.
Bear this in mind, however, my boys, that the men who fought your battles bravely have always stood alone while you have thrown at them stones of calumny. They stood serene, because they saw down the future. I want to say to you younger men here, and I say as one who stands here for perhaps the last time, that I plead with you to build your organization and to stay by it at the risk of your lives. It is for the future civilization. I don’t say that it will do everything for you; but it is the school, the college, it is where you learn to know and to love each other and learn to work with each other and bear each other’s burdens, each other’s sorrows and each other’s joys. I say again, be true to your leaders and to your organization.
[Photograph, emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, UMWC Ipl IN, Jan 25, 1901
MJ Speeches, Steel, p13
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
Part II
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/32/mode/2up
IMAGE
Mother Jones, at Her Lecture Stand, Detail, Phl Iq p1, Sept 24, 1900
https://www.newspapers.com/image/167226270/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 28, 1901
Indianapolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks to Miners, Part I
January 25, 1901-Convention of United Mine Workers of America:
“You have traveled over stormy paths.”
Minutes of the Twelfth Annual Convention of the United Mine Workers of America, Indianapolis, Indiana, January 21 to 30, 1901
(Note: held at Tomlinson’s Hall, sadly not found online thus far)
https://libraries.catholic.edu/special-collections/archives/collections/finding-aids/finding-aids.html?file=mitchell#series2
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 21, 1900
Mother Jones News Round-Up for October 1900, Part III
Mother Jones and Miners’ Army March from McAdoo to Hazleton
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday November 29, 1900
Mother Jones News Round-Up for October 1900, Part IV
Found with Strikers and Army of Mining Women Marching on Panther Creek
Mark Hanna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hanna
Chinese Exclusion Act
(Sadly, supported by UMWA, AFL, and most labor leaders of the day; IWW, founded in 1905, was notable exception.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
Terence V. Powderly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_V._Powderly
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Dorsey Dixon- Babies In The Mill