You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday January 26, 1907
From Chicago, Illinois – Mother Jones Writes to Mrs. Palmer
The following letter, from Mother Jones to Mrs. Potter Palmer, Chicago socialite, was published in the January 24th edition of the Miners Magazine, official organ of the Western Federation of Miners.
43 Welton Place, Chicago, Ill.,
January 12, 1907Mrs. Potter Palmer,
100 Lake Shore Drive,
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Madam:
By the announcement of the daily press I learn that you are to entertain a number of persons who are to be present as representatives of two recognized classes of American citizens-the working class and the capitalist class, and that the purpose of this gathering is to choose a common ground on which the conflicting interests of these two classes may be harmonized and the present strife between the organized forces of these two classes may be brought to a peaceful and satisfactory end.
I credit you with perfect sincerity in this matter, but being fully aware that your environment and whole life has prevented you from seeing and understanding the true relationship of these two classes in this republic and the nature of the conflict which you think can be ended by such means as you are so prominently associated with, and with a desire that you may see and understand it in all its grim reality, I respectfully submit these few personal experiences for your kind consideration.
I am a workman’s daughter, by occupation a dress-maker and school teacher, and during this last twenty-five years an active worker in the organized labor movement. During the past seventy years of my life I have been subject to the authority of the capitalist class and for the last thirty-five years I have been conscious of this fact. With the years’ personal experience-the roughest kind best of all teachers-I have learned that there is an irrepressible conflict that will never end between the working-class and the capitalist-class, until these two classes disappear and the worker alone remains the producer and owner of the capital produced.
In this fight I wept at the grave of nineteen workers shot on the highways of Latterman [Lattimer], Pennsylvania in 1897. In the same place I marched with 5,000 women eighteen miles in the night seeking bread for their children, and halted with the bayonets of the Coal and Iron police who had orders to shoot to kill.
I was at Stanford Mountain, W. Va., in 1903 where seven of my brother workers were shot dead while asleep in their little shanties by the same forces.
I was in Colorado at the bull pens in which men, women and children were enclosed by the same forces, directed by that instrument of the capitalist class recently promoted by President Roosevelt, General Bell, who achieved some fame for his declaration that “in place of Habeas Corpus” he would give them “Post Mortems.”
The same forces put me, an inoffensive old woman, in jail in West Virginia in 1902. They dragged me out of bed in Colorado in March, 1904, and marched me at the point of fixed bayonets to the border line of Kansas in the night-time. The same force took me from the streets of Price, Utah, in 1904, and put me in jail. They did this to me in my old age, though I have never violated the law of the land, never been tried by a court on any charge but once, and that was for speaking to my fellow workers, and then I was discharged by the federal court whose injunction I was charged with violating.
The capitalist class, whose representatives you will entertain, did this to me, and these other lawless acts have and are being committed every hour by this same class all over this land, and this they will continue to do till the working-class send their representatives into the legislative halls of this nation and by law take away the power of this capitalist class to rob and oppress the workers.
The workers are coming to understand this and the intelligent part of that class while respecting you, understand the uselessness of such conferences as will assemble in your mansion.
Permit me to quote from Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” where he says:
“Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”Quite appropriate to this fair land to-day.
Sincerely yours, for justice,
Mother Jones[Photographs added.]
Today’s Appeal to Reason reports on the Palmer Mansion Meeting:
PINK TEA PALAVER.
—–
Leading capitalist papers are making much of the recent attempt by Mrs. Potter Palmer, of Chicago, to solve the industrial problem by having representatives of labor and capital meet at social functions and getting on opposite sides of a pink tea table where they could look each other squarely in the eye. Mrs. Palmer took the initiative last week by having the first function pulled off at her elegant home on Lake Shore Drive. Among those who attended were some well-known slave-driving representatives of the capitalist system, and several very obsequious gentlemen who hold high positions in the world of organized labor.
W. D. Mahon, president of the street car workers, was particularly felicitous in his remarks. Many years ago Mr. Mahon was known in labor circles as “Bill,” and at that time he was poor in both person and purse. Perhaps no labor organizer had a harder time trying to get working men to stand together than did Mahon, nor were there any more ripe for a revolution than he. He posed as a Socialist, associated with Eugene V. Debs, and looked with suspicion upon any man who would compromise the principles of the labor movement. In those days he was a proletarian and was proud of it. Latterly, however, Mr. Mahon has grown fat and prosperous, and his organization of street car workers is one of the most powerful in the land. With his changing fortune has come a [different attitude toward participation?] in civic federations, pink tea functions for the agents of capital and labor, and is not ashamed to be caught in company with the Belmonts and Easleys and others of the patrician crowd.
Quite a number of labor leaders were present, all of whom constitute a class of which Mr. Mahon is a typical representative. They hung enraptured on the words of Franklin MacVeigh and August Belmont and acquiesced when these captains of industry declared that labor and capital are brothers who should get together instead of fighting each other.
Some one has said that the man with a graft is never a revolutionist. This statement sounds especially true in the light of the Potter Palmer meeting. The labor gentlemen who attended that affair are now beyond the necessity of working for a living. They have passed out and away from the wage-working class. They can no longer see the industrial problem through the eyes of the man who sweats under a lash, and who ever stands in the presence of want. They are not labor leaders; they are theorists and dreamers and visionaries who would vainly try to precipitate heaven upon earth without having first changed the conditions that make for hell. They are impossibilities in the most literal sense of that term.
Such meetings as the one held in the Potter Palmer mansion on Lake Shore Drive will never settle the problems of poverty and capitalism. The Civic Federation, in all probability, will bring the heads of labor and capital together, and through this coalition an understanding will be reached whereby the proletariat will continue to get it in the neck; but the problems they are pretending to solve will never be solved except through Socialism.
———-
[Photograph added.]
SOURCES
The Correspondence of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
https://books.google.com/books?id=EZ2xAAAAIAAJ
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Jan 26, 1907
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67586802/
IMAGES
Mother Jones, Mar 11, 1905, AtR
http://www.newspapers.com/image/66992169/
Lattimer Massacre of 1897, Locomotive Firemen’s Mag, Nov 1897
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015075056435;view=2up;seq=806
William D Mahon, Hx of ATU, 100 yrs after fdg in 1892
http://www.atu.org/atu-pdfs/conventiondocs/convention-docs/History-of-the-ATU.pdf
Lattimer Massacre, PA, Sept 10, 1897, Plaque with Names
http://www.pogues.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11706
See also:
Lattimer Massacre
http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=44136
http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-3BA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre
Lattimer Massacre Project
(Many great photos.)
https://lattimermassacre.wordpress.com/page/2/
Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine of November 1897:
-article about Lattimer Massacre
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015075056435;view=2up;seq=802
Feb 23, 1903: Mother Jones and the Massacre of the Raleigh County Miners
(About the Stanford Mountain Massacre of 1903-also Stanaford in some accounts.)
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/17/1256099/-Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Feb-23-1903-Mother-Jones-and-the-Massacre-of-the-Raleigh-County-Miners
National Civic Federation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Civic_Federation
WE NEVER FORGET
The Lattimer Massacre, September 10, 1897
Lattimer Massacre by Van Wagner