Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 23, 1920
Williamson, West Virginia – Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting, Part II
Williamson, West Virginia – Sunday Evening June 20, 1920
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting in Front of Courthouse.
SPEECH OF MOTHER JONES at WILLIAMSON, PART II.
[Mother Jones on Agitators.]
The West Virginian June 22, 1920
I went to a meeting and the secretary of the steel workers went with me. He got up to speak. They took him. The next fellow got up; they took him. I got up. They arrested me. I wouldn’t walk. They had to ride me. A big old Irish buck of a policeman said, “You will have to walk.” “No, I can’t.” “Can you walk?” “No, I can’t.” “We will take you down to jail and lock you up behind the bars.”
After a few minutes the chief came along.
“Mother Jones?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There is some of the steel managers here want to speak to you.”
“All right, let the gentlemen come in. I am sorry gentlemen, I haven’t got chairs to give you.” (Laughter.)
One good fellow says, “Now, Mother Jones, this agitation is dangerous. You know these are foreigners, mostly.” “Well, that is the reason I want to talk to them. I want to organize them into the United States as a Union so as to show them what the institution stands for.”
“They don’t understand English,” he says.
I said, “I want to teach them English. We want them into the Union so they will understand.”
“But you can’t do that. This agitation won’t do. Your radicalism has got to go.”
I said, “Wait a minute, sir. You are one of the managers of the steel industry here?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t the first emigrant that landed on our shore an agitator?”
“Who was he?”
“Columbus. Didn’t he agitate to get the money from the people of Spain? Didn’t he agitate to get the crew, and crossed the ocean and discovered America for you and I?
“Wasn’t Washington an agitator? Didn’t the Mayflower bring over a ship-full of agitators? Didn’t we build a monument to them down there in Massachusetts. I want to ask you a question. Right today in and around the City of Pittsburgh I believe there has assembled as many as three hundred thousand people [bowing the knee to Jesus during Easter season.] Jesus was an agitator, Mr. Manager. What in hell did you hang him for if he didn’t hurt your pockets?” He never made a reply. He went away.
He was the manager of the steel works; he was the banker; he was the mayor; he was the judge; he was the chairman of the city council. Just think of that in America—and he had a stomach on him four miles long and two miles wide. (Laughter.) And when you looked at that fellow and compared him with people of toil it nauseated you.
[Right to Speak in Pittsburgh.]
We went into Pittsburgh.
“How old are you, Mother Jones?”
“I will be ninety the first day of May, 1920.”
“Where do you live?”
“In the United States of America.”
“What part?”
“Wherever there is a fight for justice and freedom against the wrong, and particularly right now against the steel men.”
“Did you get permission to make a speech there?”
“Sure.”
“Who did you get that permit from?”
“I got it a hundred and forty-three years ago from Patrick Henry, and Jefferson, and Adams, and Washington. That was before God Almighty ever thought of sending you here, and I have been using it for sixty or seventy years, and am going to use it as long as I am here.”
I didn’t have any lawyer; I didn’t pay a penny to the court, nor a fine. I didn’t pay any lawyer to hold me up. I had the goods on them.
[Visiting Prisoners in California.]
I went to California. I went to San Francisco. I said to one of the wardens of the penitentiary, “It is very sad to see the faces of so many young people.”
“Yes, it is.” And he said, “We have 1850 more. Mother Jones, do you see that door? Every man that has crossed that door in the last year has been a young man.”
I want young men to pay attention to that, and I want you women to pay attention to it, because a man is the reflex of the mother. Now, there is an indictment against us. There is an indictment against us, men, that every one that entered that door was a young man. There is something wrong in our social make-up, when we make criminals out of the youths, put them in jail, hire wardens and guards and pay them to take care of them and tax the people. Your whole system, my friends, is wrong. You have 120,000 lawyers in this country; you have got 133,000 in the penitentiary. I am not speaking of the local jails; I am speaking of the State and Federal prisons.
Do you ever stop to think why that is? You take the paper and see the murders and robberies. Don’t you see, my friends, that there is something wrong in the social structure that must be removed to save the nation?
[The Woman’s Ballot and the Women and Children of Ludlow.]
There is another phase to this that I want to call your attention to. The mother today is away from the home; she is out with a club. The child is raising itself. You go on the cars today, or go anywhere else, you let a lot of young boys and girls swing you aside. I saw a couple the other day knock down a man with crutches. They are not developed because the woman is out playing parlor politics instead of raising the children of the nation. I see this thing from all over. I have been down in Mexico, and have had talks with Madero and Huerta and with others, and have studied the thing, and there is a danger our nation is facing.
You talk of the woman’s ballot. Let me say to you, my friends, I have got no confidence, and I will tell you why. I have been in Utah, where women and babies were turned out on the highways; I have been in Colorado, when two hundred men were bridled like dogs, put onto box cars, sent out of the State, and landed in the desert, walked twenty miles without a drink of water. I have seen it all. I am one myself that landed out there in the dead of night with five cents in my pocket—those human monsters. And never until the heart of woman changes can you get that human development in the hearts of men and women.
I have in my home the pictures of fifteen coffins filled with innocent babies murdered in Ludlow, and the women had had the ballot twenty-eight years. I have got some story. I don’t belong to the women’s club nor your social settlement gang. I belong to the fighting army of the working class that is going to break those chains, and, by God, we have got to do it. (Applause.)
[The Fight for Freedom.]
Now, if you had the brains of a little boy out in Chicago you would be all right. A fellow came along one morning and asked a boy, “How far is it to the B. & 0. Station, do you know?”
“Oh, yes, I know, sir. Go down to that corner, look up that way, you see a tower with a clock on it. It is the B. & 0. Station.”
“Thank you, my boy. Let me give you a ticket to a lecture tomorrow night. You are a fine boy. Let me give you a ticket to a lecture. I am going to lecture. I will show you the way to heaven.”
The boy said, “How in Hell can you show me the way to heaven if you don’t know the way to the B. & 0. Station?” (Laughter.)
The boy used the gray matter in his head. He knew nobody could show him the way to heaven, and he had some sense and wisdom.
Nobody can show you the way to freedom, and I wouldn’t free you tomorrow if I could. You would go begging. My patriotism is for this country to give to the nation in the day to come highly developed human citizens, men and women. We have the greatest nation in the world; but we have got a lot to do. You fellows have stood here; you have had gun men; you make the guns; they take them and they shoot you. You bring out the stuff to make the guns and go into the shops and make them, and when you get them made the other fellow takes them and hires professional murderers to keep you subdued. That is modern Christianity!
I am one of those that believes in a different system. It is coming. In the coal regions we have sent the children to school and made better citizens of them. We have given the nation better citizens. But here you are with gunmen, robbed. I don’t believe in asking the Governor for anything. He has got enough to do. The fight is yours and not the Governor’s, and nobody has any respect for a beggar. You say, “We will see what the Governor can do,” and the poor fellow can’t sleep at nights. Damn you, why don’t you Americans put a stop to this thing, clean up your rotten gunmen, put them out of business; let them go over to the Kaiser, or King George the Third, or some of those people that need them? We don’t need them in America.
[The Traitor’s Whip.]
Another game they are playing. I read one of your papers yesterday morning, about the miners. I went through the mines in Pennsylvania, from Pittsburgh to Brownsville along the Monongahela River. I helped to organize them in the early days. We made no discrimination between the colored man and the white man. The colored man is not responsible for having a black skin. He didn’t make that skin himself. Nature did it, and if you were born where the colored man’s ancestors were born you would be black, too. He is not at fault. And let me say to you I have found more of the human in the black man than we give them credit for. I have had my experience in the civil war.
In the New River when they were thrown out in the rain there wasn’t a white man offered shelter. I walked twelve miles with a baby on my back, the mother with another in her arms, a little boy who hadn’t seen eleven years, and had two years in the mines. We counted the ties for twelve miles in the rain with those babies, and a black mammy gave us shelter.
I want to make a statement here. There is no race in the world that has made the progress the black race has made in the last fifty years. (Applause.) I know it. I have been to their colleges; I visit their homes. And I want to say, my friends, the newspaper man, this is not the time to sow poison. This is the time to sow harmony. If you are an American don’t sow poison today in your press. Don’t take the traitor’s whip and use it to poison these workers against each other. I want to say to you newspaper men, “Arise like a man. Don’t bother about the dollars the companies give you. If you can’t make a living out of the paper, go out and work. Carry to your grave a sense of honor.”
[“You can’t make me take back water.”]
I understand there is a superintendent here has some goods on me. I want to tell the superintendent—I don’t know who you are and I don’t care (applause)—you are not the first I got wind of. I have walked over my ninetieth milestone. I have met every President of the United States since President Lincoln down. I have had talks with them with regard to conditions in certain places. I meet cabinet officers. I meet the Attorney-General. I meet them all.
I have been in jail. I have been in bull pens, and my only crime was trying to get a better citizen for the nation in the days to come, to feed the child and send the child to school, so that he would be intellectually, physically and morally developed. I want to say to the superintendent here that it was not the type of a woman who mothered you who would get up and slander an old gray headed woman. I am used to that slander. You don’t make me take back water. I am not of that type. I am a fighting American. (Applause.) You can’t make me take back water. I don’t know whether you are here or not. I don’t care. You have got to realize this, that every man is a duplicate of his mother. If he has had a filthy rotten mother, he can’t be anything else but the same. (Laughter.)
I go back to Palestine. I didn’t see a welfare worker; I didn’t see a church paper; I didn’t see a club woman or a Sunday School teacher kneeling at the feet of Christ in Palestine. Not one. It was that woman cursed by economic wrong, when he gave her the right to a grander civilization and better economic age, it was she who knelt at His sacred feet and wiped them with her hair. It was on the hand of that woman Christ placed his hand. It was she who went to the tomb in early dawn.
Mr. Superintendent, I am not afraid of your slimy tongue or slimy hand. Go to it. You can’t bother Mother Jones. She is one of the type of American of the Revolution. I don’t belong to the modern capitalists. I belong to the revolutionary age where men and women stood and fought. I belong to that type of woman who stood in Boston when they said: “If you don’t stop working for the emancipation of slavery we will shoot you dead.” The woman said, “Shoot now. We don’t believe in actual slavery.” And I say to you Mr. Superintendent, throw out your slime now. I don’t live in industrial slavery, and by the God that reigns above I will fight you and every damned robber in America. (Great applause.) I am not afraid of God when I go up there, and if I am not afraid of Him I am not afraid of your slimy tongue.
[“Let’s do away with gunmen and professional murderers.]
Now, men, I ask you to get together for the protection of the nation. I ask the mine owners for the safety of their industry, to let these men organize. You don’t take a dollar of your money with you. Let your men organize. Discuss the affairs with them. I know and you know and we all know we don’t agree all at once. You must remember you have crushed them. Let’s make West Virginia the greatest state of the Union. Let’s do away with the gunmen, professional murderers, and let the officers enforce the law, and not do as you have been doing. Use the force of law and let us make a great state and put a stop to this thing. I want to tell you men here, don’t you let one of them professional murderers stay in this country. Get them out.
[“We are going to clean up West Virginia.”]
In Logan County during the war you were paying for twenty-five deputy sheriffs to keep Mother Jones out, and you said to the Government’s representatives that the only way she could get in was over that hill, she could cut the wires and get in before you knew it. I want to say to the robbers of Logan that Mother Jones is going in, and she is not going to cut the wires, but she will cut hell out of you.(Applause.) We are going to clean up West Virginia. We are going to put her on the map in Washington as the leading state of civilization and Americanism, and we are going to take the flag that was bought by blood away from the blood-sucking robbers and murderers and we are going to raise it and live under the flag. We are going to take something out of your damned skulls and put something inside. We are going to fight for the Nation and State. Get out here in the fight. This is where the fight is. Not in politics. I don’t care who you elect in Washington or in the State. We will civilize the people and we will get more money for you, and we will get shorter hours for you, and we will get better homes, and there will be no fellows coming to throw you out of houses, I will tell you that now.
Now, I want to pay my respects to your officers here. I want to say to the lawyers, “Get a move on you. There is 120,000 of you in this country and you put 133,000 in the jails and penitentiaries. Pretty good for you.” (Laughter.)
There are four or five or six hundred men here. You are going to organize. Don’t be afraid of anybody. Get a move on you. I am not going out of West Virginia, now, until I organize every working man in it. I am going to stay with you, and then when I get you all organized we are going to have a general dinner and we are going to invite the general manager to eat with us. Be good boys. Then we will go into Pennsylvania to the steel robbers. I am going back to this Norfolk and Western, and I am going into Logan. I am not going to take any guns. I am going in there with the America flag; that is my banner, and no rotten robber or gunman can meddle with me, because I will just raise Hell with him. (Applause.)
Note: Source for speech was Army Intelligence Records
-the agent made the following notation:
Mother Jones spoke from an automobile in the public square in front of the court house, the reporter being seated at an upstairs window. There was great confusion in the street at all times during the address, and the greater portion of the time the speaker had her back toward the reporter. For this reason it was practically impossible to report the address and the report is necessarily very incomplete and disconnected. However, the following is a transcript of such notes as were taken.
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