Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks: “Was it fair of Rockefeller to burn up my babes so he could enslave those men?”

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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 23, 1914
Mother Jones Speaks on Behalf of the Brooklyn Colorado Relief Committee

From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of May 19, 1914:

MOTHER JONES MOVES
BIG TEMPLE CROWD
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Bids Defiance to Rockefeller as She Pleads
for “Her Boys” of the Mines.
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DENOUNCES GOV. AMMONS.
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Brooklyn Colorado Relief Committee
Protests Against Outrages.
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From The Socialist and Labor Star, February 13, 1914

Mother Jones, the angel of the miners, who has given almost every day of her 82 years to the fight for improved industrial conditions for the workers in all forms of trade and in all parts of the country, last night [May 18th] appealed to an audience of several hundred at the Masonic Temple to aid the striking miners in Colorado and based her appeal on a graphic and forcefully told tale of conditions in the mining district as she herself had seen them and taken part in.

Clad in a plain black dress, with a touch of color only, down the front, at her waist and around the end of the sleeves, Mother Jones by her earnestness moved the large audience to applause when she bade defiance to John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil owners and the “invisible government” which she held responsible for the sufferings of “her boys” and the cruel sacrifice of “her babes” in the Ludlow tent colony disaster; held them tense and with breath caught, while she pictured the horrible deaths from smoke and fire of the women and children in that catastrophe; and moved them to laughter by her caustic epigrams about the “uniformed rats” and their superiors who she declares “oppress her boys.”

“If I were that fellow’s mother I’d disown him,” she declared of Governor Ammons (Democrat of Colorado) after telling how he and the members of the Senate had only smiled after hearing the tale of a miner who because he had refused to leave the postoffice in the mining camp without his mail, had been taken out by the militia and made to dig his own grave until, weakened by their taunts and cruelty, he fell unconscious into it.

[She declared, while the audience cheered:]

The Revolution was not fought because of taxation without representation. It was fought because of military despotism on the part of King George III. And when King George only sneered at the warning of Benjamin Franklin that unless the despotism stopped there would be a revolution, the answer our forefathers gave was Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Let John D. Rockefeller take care lest we have another Bunker Hill and Yorktown. He says he won’t recognize the union. King George said he would never recognize the union but he had to. And Mr. Rockefeller will have to, too.

Says Pen and Brain, Not War,
Must Settle Industrial Troubles.

Colorado, she said, was the key to the present industrial war in this country and she made an earnest appeal for its right and proper solution.

It must not be settled by the sword but by the pen and brain and I stand here today appealing for your assistance in the fight. We want to bury the bayonet. We are appealing to the mothers of the race, for no nation is ever greater than its mothers; and no man is more humane than his mother. If there were not among the women so much talk of temperance and foreign missionaries, if we did missionary work at home and let other nations do theirs, these conditions of which I speak would have been changed long since. The women of Colorado have had the ballot twenty-one years and yet see the horrible happenings that they have permitted in their State. It is because they have busied themselves too much with social settlements and other such things that are given to the industrial class to satisfy them and not with the real things in life about them.

Theodore Roosevelt, she said, refused to see a group of miners’ children she had once brought down to Oyster Bay so he could see for himself their maimed hands and the other effects work in the mines had on them.

Roosevelt, like Ammons, refused to see these children; Roosevelt, whom you think, is next to God Almighty, refused to see them because they were mine workers and not mine owners’ children.

[Speaking of the Ludlow catastrophe, she asked:]

Was it fair, was it fair of Rockefeller to burn up my babes so he could enslave those men? Can’t we find some other way of settling the question? Has this nation reached that stage in its history when babes have to pay the penalty-when on the altar of greed, we place the helpless infant and roast it to death for more coin?

The meeting was under the auspices of the Brooklyn Colorado Relief Committee, and was presided over by Mrs. James P. Warbasse. Mrs. Fola La Follete Middleton had a number of letters from Colorado written by Miss Helen Schloss, Max Eastman and Frank Bohn. When Mrs. Middleton read the passage from a letter signed by Frank Bohn and Max Eastman in which they quoted some of the church women of Colorado as saying that the miners were cattle and deserved to be shot down by the authorities, the audience showed its disapproval by persistent hissing. After the speeches motion pictures of Ludlow before and after the catastrophe were shown, and Tom Burns, one of the miners in the pictures, explained them.

In introducing Mother Jones, Mrs. Warbasse said:

Mrs. Warbasse’s Address.

The whole history of mankind records the struggle of the people to maintain their rights against a law and government that sought to suppress them. The struggle of the miners in Colorado for justice and human rights is no new thing. Law and government, backed by force, lashed the backs of the children of Israel in Egypt’s brickyards, but the rebel Moses broke the law and led them out. Law and government crucified Christ on the Cross of Calvary. Law and government burned Bruno at the stake, where today his statue proudly stands.

Today in Colorado, law and government, under the plea of necessity, have set aside the ordinary courts of justice and established martial law. Under its fearful sway have been committed outrages against humanity and justice that should form a nine days wonder. To us liberty-loving citizens did our patriotism have a real ethical basis and concert in something more than jingoism.

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of governments. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy and despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the Government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence.

Recently, in Colorado, the militia, instigated by the mine owners, boarded the train where Mother Jones was peacefully traveling as a passenger from Denver to Trinidad, arrested her without warrant, held her a prisoner incommunicado for three moths. Trial by jury was denied her, though the courts were sitting, the right to face her accusers refused her, and, in a word, all the constitutional guarantees of the country ignored-deliberately broken.

Call of the United States Senate for Mother Jones has come East to Washington to testify in another on of their farcical-like investigations.

We meet tonight to show our honor and respect for this dear, white-haired woman, who has been an advocate of human justice and liberty since before the Civil War. A woman who, though 82 years old, is even more feared, even more loved, today, than she was fifty years ago.

The meeting adopted the following resolutions:

Be it resolved, That this meeting expresses indignation and horror at the illegal actions of the coal mining companies of Colorado in their dealings with the striking miners and their families.

That we protest against and pledge ourselves to arouse public opinion against the employment of armed strike-breakers in labor districts.

That the President of the United States be and he is hereby petitioned to take over the mines of Colorado in the strike zone and to operate them in behalf of the miners and the people of Colorado until such time as an equitable adjustment of the industrial dispute between the coal companies and the miners is reached, or, failing that, that the United States permanently operate the coal mines in behalf of the people.

That copies of these resolutions be sent to the President, Vice President, Speaker of the Senate and House of Representatives, to the Secretary of Labor and to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and to the press.

[Photographs and emphasis added]