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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 30, 1910
Indianpolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks at Mine Workers’ Convention
From Stenographic Report of Convention by Mary Burke East:
[Eighth Day-Wednesday, January 26th, Morning Session]
President [Thomas L.] Lewis—We have with us this morning a person who has visited our convention for a number of years, and who is probably known to a great number of the delegates present. To those who have worked in the non-union districts Mother Jones needs no introduction. To those who have attended our conventions for a number of years she needs no introduction. To the new delegates who are here I may say she has done a great deal of work for this organization, especially during strike periods. I take pleasure in presenting to you Mother Jones.
[Mother Jones]-Mr. President and Fellow Workers—The struggle of the workers down the ages has been that of blood; it has been that of hunger. Today the struggle is reaching its final crisis. The forces are lined up against us. Today we are waiting for the last great battle of man with man, and when this battle is over humanity will be free, there will be no robber class and no working class. I heard a speaker who represented the steel industry portray the conditions of the workers in his organization. It is well to consider where we stand today. We are up against a condition unknown to the industrial bodies of this nation in its past history. Go over to China and you will find 20,000 men working in one mill alone, and for his work each one receives 7 cents a day. You can see they have almost crushed out the organization of steel workers, and they are reaching out to crush other organizations. Therefore it is necessary for us to unite our forces. I agree with the Vice-President of this organization and with the president of Illinois that the time is here when the steel workers, the mine workers and the railroad men must join hands and say to the pirates of the human race that they can no longer rob us and murder us.
When we come to consider that the American capitalists are investing in China with the idea of crushing out the unions of America it is time for us to wake from our slumbers. It is not alone in China they are doing this, but across our borders in Mexico you will find a $50,000,000 steel plant and a million dollar smelter. All along the line they are making moves. They do not go there to establish schools to make good mechanics. Modern ingenuity has made it possible for a child to run some of the machines, and the child will get the job while the man must tramp. There are two forces in this and in every other nation of the world today. One force is the taker and the other force is the maker. The taker manufactures criminals and destroys womanhood and childhood.
When I went to the federal prison in Leavenworth this spring to get some documents to carry to the President in regard to an in justice that was done the revolutionists of Mexico, I stood in the corridor with the chaplain of the institution, and before us marched 800 men from their lunch to their different posts. I said to the chaplain, “We are neither civilized not christianized when we will build an institution and support a condition that manufactures criminals.” When I looked into the faces of those men I concluded there were not forty among the whole number who could not have been made good citizens under a proper civilization. You remember that when France turned over her criminals to DeLesseps he was told, “Kill those devils in the trenches! Don’t let one of them ever come back alive!” DeLesseps took the chains off the prisoners and said, “Men, you are in a new world under new conditions; you will have no master, and I will give you four dollars a day. All I ask of you is to be men.” In four weeks the earnings of those men were going home through the post office to their children. It is a wrong form of government we are living under, and we, the workers, stand for the overthrow of the whole damnable institution.
I carried those documents to the President of the United States and presented them to him in the presence of Mr. Powderly. He took them from me, and I made a statement of what they contained. He said, “Mother Jones, if I gave you the pardoning power there wouldn’t be any one left in the penitentiaries.” I said, “Mr. President, if this nation spent half the money and half the energy to give men a chance to keep out of the penitentiary it does to force them in we would not need any penitentiaries.”
When you fellows met in Pittsburg and talked the steel combination over a few weeks ago Mr. Morgan went up to see Mr. Taft and talked to him. He served notice on Taft of what he should do in the case, and Taft did it. We have been beggars too long. If I had my way about it every blamed one of you would go to Washington today and tell old Joe Cannon to get out and we would get in. I hear you complain about the jails. What is the matter with the jails? Don’t we build them? They are the national reception parlors for the working class. A lot of us were in jail and we will go again. A lot of us who are here went to jail but when we came out we did not me-ow about it, we said we would raise the flag of revolt and we would face the guns and the courts and the jails again, and the whole infernal bunch of robbers and thieves and plunderers. We haven’t taken any backwater yet and we don’t intend to. Put that down, Mr. Newspaper Man.
A Delegate—Tell us about the Civic Federation, Mother Jones.
Mother Jones—Don’t mention it! I have been watching it for ten years and I have had the guns ready. All the [National] Civic Federation members have done is to fill their stomachs until every one of them has a paunch on him as big as old Taft’s.
A Delegate—You are right.
Mother Jones—Of course I am. Isn’t it interesting to see a lot of labor leaders going to Mrs. Harriman’s and after they have filled their stomachs hearing Mrs. Harriman say, “I have received such an inspiration from you.” Why didn’t she send some of the money her husband robbed the people of to Cherry. If you will vacate the chair for two weeks, Mr. President, I will attend to it. I will take the matter to Congress and say, “You have stood for the murder of four hundred of our men; now put up $4,000,000.” If you men want to take any more of that medicine go home and put on mother hubbards and we women will go out and give them hell!
Now I can’t stay much longer. I have got to take a train. You had a McKees Rocks case, where men were slaughtered and shot down. You had an anthracite strike where men were shot, but Roosevelt came in there and stuck his finger in that pie. Then you had a Colorado strike, but he sent the thugs out there to shoot us down, and your Morgan’s Civic Federation never said a word about it; it stood for our being shot. What good is that Federation? Where does the money come from that runs it? It comes from Morgan, Belmont, Harriman and old Oily John.
Think of the shirt waist makers, those little girls of sixteen who are on strike in New York, who took the contract the Civic Federation wanted to make for them and tore it up on the platform. That Civic Federation is a job making business. Get a move on you because if you don’t you will have to.
The government is running a Department of Labor and Commerce in Washington. It was trying to take off the pressure from the cities where scabs were found and put them on the farm, and the Civic Federation stepped in and demanded of the government to surrender the Department of Labor and Commerce. It has been surrendered. You see, step by step, what they are doing. They don’t tell those things, but I will if I am hung for it.
The trouble with us in this: We put men in office, we pay them, we eulogize them. There never was a labor leader on the face of the earth who won a strike—not even you, Mr. Fairley. I will tell you who win the strikes. The women who go hungry, the men who march into jails, the men who go to jail and do not carry their cases to the Supreme Court. When the representative of the shoe workers said the other day that you went home and gave your money to your wives and they went out and bought scab goods for them, I wanted to ask him how much money the women get to spend whose husbands did not work all last winter in the anthracite region? The operators went to the banks to see who had money there so they could collect their rents. How much money can a woman spend foolishly who gets five or six dollars a week to support five or six children and send them to school. You haven’t a banker in this nation who is such a financier as that woman is. Don’t find fault with the women. If you stand for a system that robs them and degrades them you are no better than Morgan.
I don’t stand for the jails, but I am not grumbling about them, although I am liable to go in at any time. I went to Washington at the request of the brewery workers. I went into the breweries and looked after the condition of the women workers. Those women and girls are getting three dollars a week. They put men out of work, but they do not get enough to support themselves. I am going to Milwaukee to organize those girls in the breweries. We are also going to organize them in the breweries in St. Louis. After that I am going into the anthracite region and bring on another war if you don’t move up.
I want you to pass a resolution here and make a demand and send it to President Taft telling him we cannot be civilized, that we are trampling on all the conditions for which our fathers fought long years ago when we allow conditions to exist such as we have in the Southwest where they are allowed to take those Mexicans and put them in jail without a just cause and keep them there. To the ever lasting disgrace of the American people they stood for it, and applauded when Taft shook hands with the greatest tyrant that ever lived on earth. A greater murderer never lived than Diaz.
Turn the jails into school rooms, take the children out of the mills and factories and sweat shops and allow them to develop their bodies and their minds. I am in favor of putting the jailer to do an honest day’s work instead of turning keys on us. I want to congratulate you on the step taken here today, the amalgamation of the forces. We are facing a mighty crisis, and it behooves us all to clasp hands together and say we are in one fight. I was not opposed to your discussions here. They were healthy discussions, they cleared up any doubts we had, and when this convention closes every man within these walls should clasp hands and pledge themselves to go forth and fight for a nobler civilization, for a collective ownership of the mines and railroads, the telegraph, telephone, newspapers and everything else. We stand for the ownership of all these things, and then we will get what belongs to us and not until then.
At 12:20 the convention was adjourned to reconvene at 2:00 p.m.
[Emphasis and photographs added.]
Note: Photographs above are from Indianapolis Star, Mother Jones from January 25th edition, and Union Officers from January 22nd.
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Last Great Battle, UMWC p420, Jan 26, 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA420
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Convention of the
United Mine Workers of America, Indianapolis IN,
-Jan 18-Feb 2, 1910
Stenographic Report by Mary Burke East
https://books.google.com/books?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC
Page 377-Eighth Day-Wednesday Morning Session
-Called to order Jan 26 at 9 AM
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA377
Page 420-Mother Jones Speaks
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA420
IMAGES
Mother Jones, Ipl Str p3, Jan 25, 1910 copy
https://www.newspapers.com/image/15337941/
UMW Officers, Ipl Str p3, Jan 22, 1910
https://www.newspapers.com/image/15337825
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 29, 1910
Indianpolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks to Her Boys at Indianapolis Convention of United Mine Workers of America
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
For more on the various struggles mentioned by Mother Jones,
See:
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
Kerr, 1925
https://www.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography
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There Is Power in a Union – Street Dogs
Lyrics by Billy Bragg