You, the wives of the strikers,
ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday October 7, 1916
New York, New York – Mother Jones Speaks, Blamed for “Riot”
On Thursday October 5th, Mother Jones spoke to the wives of the striking street carmen of New York City. She spoke at Mozart Hall where she told the women:
You, the wives of the strikers, ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes
A few women left the hall and attacked one of the surface cars of the New York Railways Company resulting in a few arrests. This was termed a “riot” in blaring headlines from The New York Times and others of the kept press.
The Address of Mother Jones
During her speech at Mozart Hall, Mother spoke of the lives of the street car workers and the effect of the long hours of labor upon family life. She advised the women to stop being “sentimental” and to put on their “fighting clothes.”
I know something of what life is like for street car workers. I have talked to men who work on the cars from one end of the country to the next and I know how terribly exploited they are. But none are more exploited than the carmen in this, the leading city of the United States. You know and I know that your husbands have to work seven days a week with no provisions for days off; that their basic work day consists of ten hour time actually spent on a car run, but that it frequently takes 15 hours of working time to receive their ten hours pay. No provision exists for any overtime pay. It is not unusual, as you know, for your husbands to spend upwards of 80 hours a week on the cars. The car runs are frequently not consecutive but are split by three-or four hour breaks. When do your husbands have time for you and your children? The church and the press are worried about families breaking up, but when the workers go on strike to have the time to keep their families together, these same lackeys of the employers denounce them for doing so. And on top this, the wages your husbands bring home for the longest work week of any car workers in the country are the lowest earned by men in this trade anywhere.
So is it any wonder they are on strike? A few months ago I told the wives of the car strikers in El Paso, Texas to raise hell. I want to say the same thing today. Women can win this strike just as they won it in El Paso. If necessary I will organize a hundred thousand women out of town and bring them to New York City to lick the cops and the scabs. You can’t beat the women.
But it should not be necessary.
But it should not be necessary to do this. You, the wives of the strikers, ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes. America was not discovered by Columbus for that bunch of bloodsucking leeches who are now living off of us. You are too sentimental.
From The New York Times of October 6, 1916:
CAR RIOT STARTED BY ‘MOTHER’ JONES;
—–
Women Relatives of Strikers Heed Aged
Agitator’s Plea to “Raise Hell.”
—–
WRECK SECOND AV. CAR
—–
Police Reserves Forced to Use Clubs
to Quell Their Fiercest Fight
Since Strike Began.
—–Two hundred women, wives and relatives of striking carmen, heard “Mother” Jones, the aged labor agitator, deliver an inflammatory speech against the traction officials of the city yesterday afternoon, and then attacked one of the surface cars of the New York Railways Company…
The attack on the car occurred at Eighty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, less than 300 feet from Mozart Hall, where “Mother” Jones had delivered her tirade. The meeting, one of several attended during the day by the aged agitator of violence in labor disputes, had been called to arrange a parade and demonstration by the wives and women relatives of the strikers on next Tuesday, when the women plan to march from Union Square to the City Hall to demand that Mayor Mitchel-that “two by four little Mayor,” as Mother Jones called him-settle the traction strike.
Calls on Women to Aid Strike.
Mother Jones, who had been accompanied to the meeting by William B. Fitzgerald, general organizer of the carmen [of the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electrical Railway Employes of America], and Melinda Scott and Margaret Hinchey of the Women’s Trade Union League, had told the 200 women that it was “up to them” to go to the rescue of the carmen in their losing traction fight.
[Mother Jones told them:]
You ought to be out raising hell, this is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes. America was not discovered by Columbus for that bunch of bloodsucking leeches who are now living off of us. You are too sentimental.
The appeal was effective and the women were in a fighting mood when they left the hall at the end of the meeting….
[Emphasis added.]
—–
From the New York Sun of October 6, 1916:
300 WOMEN IN CAR RIOT.
—–
“Mother” Jones incites Outbreak;
Police Make Nine Arrests.Mother Jones who two days ago came out of the west to aid the striking carmen at a meeting in Mozart Hall, Eighty-sixth street and Second avenue, yesterday scored 300 of the carmen’s women folk for their inaction.
[She berated them:]
You are too sentimental. You stay at home and think of dress and trinkets when you ought to be out raising hell. I would rather be known as “that old devil” than as that dear old lady…
She related how in the West Virginia strike she had advised the union men to stop drinking so they might save their money and buy guns.
Speaker Assails Police.
[She exclaimed:]
The strike breakers in this town are rats, vermin. They peep out of the holes in the front of their cages. They are protected; they have policemen with them. In fact, the police of this town have answered the strikers with pistol bullet and club…
It was a meeting of women arranged ostensibly for the purpose of planning a parade next week. “Mother” Jones referred to the parade.
Go down and make that two by four Mayor give you what you want…This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
For an hour she played upon the temper of the women. She talked of pulling the strike breakers from the cars. Many of the women were almost hysterical when they left the meeting hall….
[Emphasis added.]
—–
From the New York Tribune of October 6, 1916:
Women Stone Cars; Clubbed by Police
—–Baby Snatched from Arms of Bystander in Yorkville Riot-
500 Strikers’ Wives Obey Mother Jones’s Words-
Nine Persons Arrested.
—–
By BLANCHE BRACE.Five hundred striking car men’s wives yesterday rushed from Mozart Hall, where Mother Jones had urged them to “play hell with the scabs,” and obeyed her injunctions to the letter.
She had told them to “get their fighting clothes on.” They did. Within five minutes, a mob, led by a woman, had broken every window on an Eighty-sixth Street crosstown car at Second Avenue, had incited the biggest riot of the strike, and had so incensed the astonished patrolmen in charge that unoffending bystanders and women with babies in their arms were clubbed with the rest. They had learned their first strike lesson so well that reserves had to be called from the east Eighty-eighth Street station to quell them.
Six women and three men were hustled haphazardly into the patrol wagon by Patrolman Adolph Finken, on strike duty in the partly demolished car. The men were quiet, but the women fought and screamed as they were driven away. One, Mrs. Patrick Slattery, of 686 East 162d Street, cried out that she had nothing to do with the strike, that she didn’t know what it was all about, and that they had torn her away from her year-and-a-half-old baby girl, now alone in the mob. At a late hour last night the child had not been found. One of the men, M. Tompkins, protested that he was a strike breaker, on his way to his work on the Third Avenue “L”, and that he had been drawn by accident into the maelstrom of the strikers.
From Conservative to Striker.
That is the straight news version of a riot which, I dare say, might seem a good deal like the other disturbances of the strike to a casual observer. It didn’t seem at all the same to me. But then I wasn’t a casual observer. I was a rioter, converted instantaneously into one by the magic wand of a policeman’s club.
When I walked out of Mozart Hall with 500 striking carmen’s wives, I was a conservative, filled with a distaste for strikes and mobs, loud talk and violence. Five minutes later I was a striker, the most ardent one of them all.
It was a quick conversion, but a lot had happened in those five minutes. I had seen women clubbed, for one thing, and I had been one of the women. It isn’t an altruistic admission, but that was the argument that counted most with me. There’s something revolutionizing in the smooth, chilly feel of a patrolman’s club in the small of your back.
It’s disconcerting to realize when you’ve seen women throwing stones when you’ve seen their garments torn and blood upon their faces, and when you’ve seen little children rigid with terror and heard them scream with pain that the thing that impressed you most was the grip of the patrolman’s hand upon your arm, as he propelled you toward the patrol wagon.
When Mother Jones, that fiery white-haired leader of so many strikes, turned her war-women loose from Mozart Hall, when she told them to “wake up”; to go “get the men who were riding roughshod over the quivering hearts of the women,” to “get their fighting clothes on,” I don’t suppose she thought they’d be able to change their garments so quickly-being women. But the lightning artists of vaudeville couldn’t have done it more quickly than that crowd of car men’s wives. They got into their war togs as they filed through the door.
“Now, we’ll go throw stones at the cars,” some one called laughingly to C. C. Shea, chairman of the meeting. “Good enough!” he said laughing, too. To both it was only a joke. But I hadn’t taken a dozen steps before I knew that it was a grim enough jest to those 500 women, challenged to fight for their men and babies. The wifely whine about loss of wages, that was all I heard when I went into the hall, was gone. Not one said, as they had before, that the car men would do better to mind their own business and look out for their own families. All about me was a low, menacing buzz of anger, in which I could just distinguish some thing about “the dirty scabs” and something about “they’d see.”
Auto Truck Ties up Car.
It was unfortunate, of course, that the women found the stage all set for them in their Roman mob scene. Half way down the block I saw an auto truck, stalled on the track at Second Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, tying up the ‘cross town car, run by “scabs” and filled with passengers, presumably not in sympathy with the strikers. The car men’s wives saw it before I did, I suppose, for before I really realized what had happened we were all running toward the corner where the car stood.
Then I saw a stone whizz through the air, and the sudden shower of splinters of glass. A panic-stricken group of passengers poured out of both doors, and stood not in the least upon the order of their going. They were led by a big man in uniform, who marshaled them all to safety, very cleverly, I thought. A moment later I was regretting my moment of involuntary admiration, for the big man in uniform had jumped back into the crowd of women, some of them belligerent and some of them merely bewildered, and was letting fly right and left with his club. It hit me, too, and I was hence forth a striker.
Herded by that convincing club into a doorway, with screaming women all about me, I watched a women in a brown dress and three men go steadily on beating in the windows of the car with bits of its demolished woodwork. A minute later they had been driven back into the same doorway, Patrolman Finken almost on their heels. The first man to come carried the impromptu club with which he had been despoiling the car. A woman threw her arms about him and sobbed.
One Man, Arrested, Flees.
“I won’t let them take you! I won’t! I won’t!” she shrieked.
“Shut up!” he said. “Come on.”
They dropped over the railing to the basement steps below, and through the door that twenty hands pushed open for them. Later I found out, with a thrill of savage delight, that this was the only man arrested who had escaped. His little flaxen-haired girl, left behind him on the doorstep, held herself rigid in the arms of a neighbor and continued to scream with terror. No one paid the slightest attention to her shrieks.
I kept wondering where Mother Jones was-I didn’t see her once after she left the platform. Miss Melinda Scott and Miss Maggie Hinchey, who had addressed the women in the hall, appeared now and pleaded with them to be quiet-not to make things worse for themselves. But you might as wall have soothed a November gale.
Meanwhile, the efficacious clubs were busy. When I saw one in the hands of Patrolman Finken glance across the shoulders of a howling towhead, who couldn’t have been eight years old, I forgot all about being a conservative.
Seized by Patrolman.
“You quit that!” I yelled, like any Irish washerwoman.
He took hold of my arm, and I knew then what was meant by the iron grip of the law you’re always hearing about.
“Come right along!” he said, in a casual, this-is-my-busy-day tone. That was the thing that made me most indignant, I think. He didn’t even look at me as he swung toward the patrol wagon. But some one is always taking the joy out of life. A frenzied man at my elbow explained that I was a reporter, and I had to watch the patrol wagon drive off without me.
Mother Jones’s inspiration had waned by the time I reached the station house. The women were sobbing-a bedraggled and helpless looking group, in their torn, dirty clothes. Mrs. Slattery tore her hair and begged for her baby, alone in the crowd.
“Sure, and I was only goin’ along home, and doin’ nothin’ to no one,” she said. “I saw the rush, and thought I’d see what it was about. My husband ain’t a car man, and I ain’t a car man’s wife, and I want my baby.”
“Meeting Didn’t bring Riot.”
The other prisoners said they were Mrs. Nora Herlihy, of 184 East 102d Street; Mrs. Kate Whittaker, of 1515 Lexington Avenue; Mrs. Anna Dolan, of 1697 Lexington Avenue; Mrs. Teresa Healy, of 154 East 112th Street; James McCabe, a striking “L” guard, of 118 East Ninety-eighth Street; Thomas Mulhall, a striking motorman, of 385 East 184th Street, and P. Tompkins, who refused to give his address, but said he was on his way to work on the Third Avenue “L” when he had fallen in with the crowd.
I asked Miss Hinchey and Miss Scott if they had had anything like this in mind when they counselled the women to go out and help their men and they denied it, emphatically.
“The meeting hadn’t anything to do with this,” said Hinchey, who at the hall had declared that every laundry-worker in New York would scorch Mayor Mitchell’s shirts as often as he sent them to the laundry, just by way of a “sympathetic strike.”
“This is only and unfortunate coincidence,” said Miss Scott. “We’ll have our big parade to the City Hall next Tuesday, just the same as if nothing had happened.”
Lieutenant John Berries set the prisoners down in the blotter as charged with attacks of violence. I listened to them make their subdued answers, the women who had so recently screamed with frenzy, as they were brought up by Lieutenant Cooney and Detectives Wiessner, Pohndorf and Vincent. And I reflected that but for the grace of a police card I would doubtless have been making the most subdued answer on record.
With their babies in their arms, all of the women except Mrs. Slattery stood before Judge Barlow last night in Night Court, to learn that their cases would be taken up on Tuesday.
Inspector Cohen at Police Headquarters last night said he hadn’t heard of any riot, but that he had learned of several arrests.
“If more force was used than is necessary, the department regrets it greatly,” he remarked. “We have been trying to keep our heads in this strike, and we’re rather proud of our record. We don’t want to lose it now. The men are instructed not to take sides, and not to use more force than is absolutely necessary. It ought not to be necessary to club prisoners after they are in the patrol wagons, except in extreme cases.”
—–
[Emphasis added.]
SOURCES
Mother Jones speaks: collected writings and speeches
-Philip Sheldon Foner
Monad Press, 1983
Note: Foner took the text of Mother’s speech from several sources, but, unfortunately did not specify the source for each part of the speech. It appears that most of the text came from the New York World which I could not find on-line for Oct 6, 1916. More research needed.
https://books.google.com/books?id=T_m5AAAAIAAJ
The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Oct 6, 1916
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B0CE4D6153AE633A25755C0A9669D946796D6CF&legacy=true
The Sun
(New York, New York)
-Oct 6, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/207202291/
New York Tribune
(New York, New York)
-Oct 6, 1916, page 1 & 7
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1916-10-06/ed-1/seq-1/
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1916-10-06/ed-1/seq-7/
IMAGE
Mother Mary Harris Jones, Logansport, IN, Sept 27, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/32403158/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Arrives in New York City to Assist Street Car Strikers
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-mother-jones-arrives-in-new-york-city-to-assist-street-car-strikers/