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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 19, 1920
West Virginia – Mother Jones Speaks at Princeton, West Virginia, Part III
August 15, 1920 – Princeton, West Virginia
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting, Part III of III:
I am going to pay McDowell County a visit. They can put me in jail if they want to, but I don’t care, as I can always command more respect when I am in jail.
I knew young Al Baldwin 20 years ago. There were two Baldwins that I knew well, and if anything went wrong, they would come and tell me. One time when I went to Pocahontas the woman didn’t want to give me a room in the hotel, and young Baldwin said, “Yes, you will, give her my room.” I shall always appreciate those two men, but I want to tell you, since you became murderers—since these men are being robbed out of the coal they dig, so that we and our children have been deprived of the necessaries of life, and out of the money of which you are robbed, these Baldwin-Felts men are paid. That wasn’t done in the slavery days. The black slaves were fed and protected, and if they were sick, they were taken care of. [With all due respect to Mother Jones, this is an absurd statement: the enslaved were under the watchful eye of their master, not to protect them, but to maintain their enslavement; they were fed and cared for only in as much as that care profited their master.]
When you have as much American blood in you as the mule has, then you will be a man. I am ashamed of you. You miserable cowards. When you—you miserly un-American fellows making your living this way. You are staying where your brothers were murdered. You have to be a man to protect your brothers.
By God, I am not afraid of the Baldwin-Felts thugs. I would tell Uncle Sam straight that if he doesn’t clean them up, we will.
In 28 years the voice from labor was never raised [at Homestead]. I said to the boys, we have got to go in, and they told me they would put me in jail, and I told them that we built the jails and we had a perfect right to be put in them. Three of us went in to the steel workers. One fellow got up and told us that we were under arrest and told us to get out. I said, “Don’t you know that God Almighty never made a man that knew how to coop a woman up.” They didn’t know that anyone in the world would dare talk to the Chief of Police like that.
We were taken up to jail [August 20, 1919] and 8,000 steel workers gathered around the jail in about eight hours. There were 8,000 men there. I told them to hell with old Carnegie and all the robbers of the country. I went up to headquarters at Boston and told them not to fear the Bolsheviks, the Reds or the I. W. W. because the trouble was that the police were serving the capitalists.
But I don’t bother with them fellows.
I talk to Uncle Sam. It is up to you men not to be afraid of the newspaper men. Stand up like Americans. Join the union. Do you belong to the United Mine Workers? Say, “Yes, I do.” Put on your hat like an American.
(Pointing to a reporter.) He can write this in his paper tomorrow morning, that from the hair of my head down to my toes, I am a Bolshevik, and I want the world to know it. Tell the Senate and the Congress about it. The White House already knows it.
Yes, I took a whole lot of Bolshevik stuff and sold it, and the money I got out of it, I sent to the men in jail. Uncle Sam knows everything I do. No secret service man had a damn thing to tell on me, because I got ahead of him. He is playing the lap-dog, while I am playing American Womanhood.
The Chief of Police sent nine of his men, and they decided to let us talk, because they were afraid I would go to Washington, and I told him I understood he was there. I told him to take down every statement I made, and send it to the Supreme Court tonight so they could get it in the morning.
I am American enough to fight for my countrymen. You are fighting for the interest of the steel robbers. That is what you are doing, Mr. Chief of Police. I am an American from my head to my toe, and if Bolshevism come to America, then I am a Bolshevik.
The money you are robbed of to pay the Baldwin-Felts men must come back to your pockets. It must nourish and feed your child. I want to say to you, my friends, that we will stay with you. Some day this question will come up and it will be settled. In that grand array to come, a man who will stand up in these brutal days, when these murdered babes from the altar of your Gods, is in that great age to come, that we are so near now, which is breaking in the sunlight, you will get your reward. The voice of freedom is coming across the world’s waters. The dawn is breaking.
The paper made a grand mistake. I walked over my 90th milestone on the 1st day of May. I spent seven months in a military prison. I was arrested and locked up behind iron bars in Duquesne. The warden told me that some manager of the steel workers was to see me, and one fellow said, “Mother Jones, if you could just speak, the good you could do, but the agitation is dangerous.” That is the way of you today. The man that discovered America was an agitator. Did it do any harm? He was an agitator, and a pretty rapid one too. Washington and Jefferson were agitators, and Lincoln too.
They have no answer to give. The bosses have no answer to give when you stand up and say that you are an American, and you are not going to enslave me. Join the Union and don’t be afraid of anybody. This is our fight; we have got to fight them. We have got to save them and we have got to educate them.
I am going to McDowell County, and they can put me in jail, but you know a woman 90 years old in jail will scare the hell out of them.
During the steel strike, I got a telegram from the miners in Europe, and they said, “We send you greetings. You are not asking for near as much as we now have, even though you live in America.” That is in England. When they went to load a steamer to take ammunition and stuff over to Poland, the men found out that it was to fight the Bolsheviks, and they took it off, and the men said, “We don’t steer your ship.”
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Princeton WV Speech, Aug 15, 1920,
Steel Speeches, p230
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
-Pages 224-231 (246 of 361)
Speech at Princeton WV from
Army Intelligence Report of Aug 15, 1920
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/246/mode/2up
Part III
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/252/mode/2up
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 17, 1920
West Virginia – Mother Jones Speaks at Princeton, West Virginia, Part I
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 18, 1920
West Virginia – Mother Jones Speaks at Princeton, West Virginia, Part II
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 23, 1919
Homestead, Pennsylvania -Mother Jones and Steel Organizers Arrested
Hellraisers Journal –Wednesday October 29, 1919
Mother Jones News for September 1919, Part I
Duquesne, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Arrested for Organizing Steel Workers
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The Rebel Girl – Hazel Dickens