No matter what your fight don’t be ladylike!
God Almighty made women
and the Rockefeller gang of thieves
made the ladies.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday February 28, 1917
Chicago, Illinois – Mother Jones Jumps into Garment Strike
From The Day Book of February 27th:
MOTHER JONES URGES STRONG ACTION
IN GARMENT STRIKE
The same old Mother Jones, with her scream of hatred for the bosses who grind their workers, jumped into the garment ladies garment strike yesterday. Twice she addressed the strikers and twice the crowd of workers yelled back in answer when she shouted for more vim in the strike.
“Picket,” she screamed at the packed hall at 180 W. Washington st.,
Picket! Let them arrest you. Don’t picket in ones or twos. Go in hundreds-five hundreds of you. Get out there, and if they arrest one they’ll have to arrest all of you.
When they start taking you to cells by the hundreds, taxpayers will begin asking questions. Pretty soon they’ll find out what this is all about and your strike will be won.
The substance of Mother Jones’ talk yesterday, which is as yet unprinted, follows:
They call me a radical agitator. They call your organizers radical agitators. Let me tell you that the most radical agitators we have ever had were those who founded our government. It was founded on a mighty revolt against tyrants. Let us keep up our revolt against indecent labor conditions until we clean up the bosses in Chicago.
They served me with a copy of an injunction Sunday as I came into the city. I thought it was the Salvation Army because it was handed me on the Sabbath. Then I read the name of one of your judges and I knew it was an injunction sent in violation of the Lord’s commandments. Why I’ve had enough injunctions served on me to fill 99 coffins when I go to meet my master.
I hope that Judge Baldwin has his lap dog here because I want to give him a message to carry back. I want him to hear what I have to say about this strike that I am butting into.
They say you girls are crying for bonds when you are arrested. The women of the revolution didn’t ask for bonds when they were jailed. They went to cells without a whimper. This is no pink tea party. It’s a bitter strike. Don’t wait for bonds.
If they put you in they have to feed you and that saves you the money. When the citizens have to pay taxes to feed hundreds of girls they’ll have a kick to make.
It’s a funny thing. We build the jails and they put us into them. We pay for the policeman’s club and he soaks us with it. We give the policeman his salary and authority and he uses it to put us in jail and beat us.
They don’t arrest the manufacturers. If you kept your eyes open at election time you could put some men in office who would jail the bosses.
I suppose they will put me in jail. I’ll go. I’ll not cry to be taken out on bonds. You can tell this Judge Baldwin that I was in America before he was and I have a right on Chicago’s street whether there is a strike on or not.
We don’t want charity. We want what belongs to us. We produce the wealth. They take it from us and then send charity workers to feel our stomachs to see how long it will take before we are starved. They don’t feel the stomachs of the bosses, and we paid for the fat that is found there.
Are conditions right? There was a train that went through Chicago during the last presidential campaign. It cost $2,000,000. Mrs. Havemeyer put up $10,000 and the next day sugar went up a quarter of a cent.
They said this train carried the ten foremost women in America. On their necks were gems bought with the blood of thousands of working girls’ bodies.
They preach what we will get when we are dead. We want what we have coming now, while we are alive. If the women of charity spent as much time, money and energy improving conditions of the working girls as they use in getting suffrage they would bring some results to the nation.
They can do away with the red-light district by raising wages. Then the girls will not be forced to sell themselves to get enough to live on.
Don’t be afraid of their jails. Go to them. But go four thousand strong. The country will look at Chicago and ask what you have been jailed for. The people will ask who did it. We’ll tell them it was Judge Baldwin. They will ask why. We’ll tell them it was because we struck for better conditions.
Tell Judge Baldwin that I am here on the platform. Tell him to send his dogs of war if he wants me. But I’m going to give you this message:
“Don’t violate the law. Don’t hurt anybody. But stick to it. If you see some girl taking your job, taking the bread from your mouth, walk up to her and tell her what she is doing.”
[Photograph added is of Mother speaking to Chicago Garment Strikers of 1915.]
From today’s Chicago Day Book:
PETITION ASKS THAT COURTS BE FORBIDDEN
TO ENJOIN PEACEFUL PICKETING
Signed by several hundred “neutrals,” a long petition asking the legislature to pass a law forbidding the courts from enjoining peaceful picketing of shops where a strike is on was forwarded to Springfield yesterday.
True to the predictions of Mother Jones last Monday, the wholesale arrests of strikers on orders of Judges Baldwin and Smith aroused public opinion.
The measure they ask is very much like the federal Clayton act.
Meanwhile a committee from the signers of the petition are trying to settle the strike differences between the workers and manufacturers.
Some of the most prominent neutrals who put their names down under the protest against the use of the injunction, are: Ex-Gov. Dunne, Prof. Ernst Freund, Bishop C. P. Anderson, George E. Hooker, Prof. Graham Taylor, Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, Mrs. Mary H. Wilmarth, Miss Mary E. McDowell, Dr. John Henry Hopkins, Prof. James H. Tufts, Prof. James A. Field, Prof. H. A. Millis, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Harriet L. Hale, Mary F. Balcomb, Dwight H. Perkins, E. J. Davis, Mrs. Willoughby Walling, Walter C. Hately, Harry W. Barnum, Francis E. Hinckley, Prof. Albion W. Small, H. H. Newman. Prof. William Gardner Hale. Rob’t E. Park, Belle B. Simpson, Ellen Gates Starr. F. H. Deknatel, Prof. John M. Coulter, Harold L. Ickes, Prof. S. P. Breckenridge, Sigmund Zeisler, Edith Abbott and Grace Abbott.
———-
[Photograph added.]
SOURCE
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Feb 27, 1917
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1917-02-27/ed-1/seq-30
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1917-02-27/ed-1/seq-31/
-Feb 28, 1917
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1917-02-28/ed-1/seq-29/
IMAGES
Mother Jones Speaks to Chg Garment Strikers, ISR Dec 1915
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA334
Ellen Gates Starr in 1914
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Gates_Starr
See also-
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday February 27, 1917
Mother Jones Arrives in Chicago, Served with Injunction, Declares, “What a lot of rot!”
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-mother-jones-arrives-in-chicago-served-with-injunction-declares-what-a-lot-of-rot/
Re: the train costing “$2,000,000”..
-here Mother is referring to the so-called “Golden Special”
https://archive.org/stream/californiahistor65cali#page/92/mode/2up
Clayton Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Antitrust_Act
Mary McDowell
http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/mcdowell-mary/
Edith and Grace Abbott
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0810/features/legacy.shtml
For more on Chicago Garment Strike of 1915:
“The Garment Workers’Strike”
-from International Socialist Review of November 1915
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA260
“Under the Stars and Stripes” by Leslie Marcy
-from International Socialist Review of December 1915
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA332
For more on Mother Jones in Chicago Garment Strike of 1915:
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday October 21, 1915
Mother Jones Testifies Before Chicago City Council, Urges Girls to “Go to it.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/21/1436508/-Hellraisers-Journal-Mother-Jones-Testifies-Before-Chicago-City-Council-Urges-Girls-to-Go-to-it
Hellraisers Journal, Friday October 22, 1915
Mother Jones, Suffrage, Feminism, & the Struggles of Working Class Women
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/22/1436663/-Hellraisers-Journal-Mother-Jones-Suffrage-Feminism-the-Struggles-of-Working-Class-Women
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday October 24, 1915
Mother Jones Leads Parade of 5,000 Women of the Great Chicago Garment Strike
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/24/1438564/-Hellraisers-Journal-Mother-Jones-Leads-Parade-of-5-000-Women-of-the-Great-Chicago-Garment-Strike
Tag: Garment Workers Strike of 1915
http://www.dailykos.com/news/ChicagoGarmentWorkersStrikeof1915