Hellraisers Journal: Part I: “Mother Jones & Her Methods -Personality & Power of This Aged Woman”-Boston Sunday Herald

—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday September 13, 1904
Part I of III: “Mother Jones & Her Methods”-Her Power Proved

From the Boston Sunday Herald of September 11, 1904:

(FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.)

NEW YORK, Sept. 9, 1904

If there is a woman of these modern times worthy of being classed with the grand characters of history, the heroic women of the ages-Hypatia, Deborah, the Mother of the Gracchi, Veronica, Joan of Arc-that woman, in the minds of thousands of the common people of America, is the good, gray-haired woman affectionately known to them as “Mother” Jones. To the cultivated and conservative such an estimation of a woman whom they have commonly heard derided as a troublesome mischief-maker may seem an absurdity, yet history has a way of making fools of the critics.

Susan B. Anthony long ago rose above the clouds of derision and Mrs. Booth-Tucker has become a sainted memory. Frances Willard came to be called “America’s uncrowned queen” yet none of these noble and beautiful women ever possessed that large consciousness of the ebb and flow of human emotions, that sympathy with the sinful as well as the virtuous, with the drunkard as well as the ascetic, with man as with woman and with woman as with man, as does this woman labor agitator. The appeal of these other great women was limited, to sinners against faith, to drunkards and to helpless femininity. The appeal of “”Mother” Jones is avowedly to the soul of the race. She would have all men brothers, not under any especial creed or political system, but with the universal consciousness of one beating heart.

The world does not know this old woman of the people, and perhaps never will know her. Her personality may be obliterated on the pages of history. Even today she passes from place to place unheralded, makes a temporary sensation, and passes on. But her ideas quicken the ideas of others, what she makes her listeners feel is the truth which they knew before she came and which they unconsciously yearned to hear expressed. Through her lips brave notions of a higher life are set free in the thought void, and immediately become universal conceptions of humanity’s possible embodiment.

She does not force upon you the creed of “Mother” Jones, for certainly as an individual she has a creed. But she cries aloud to a careless, indifferent world, that humanity has one destiny, one goal to which it is struggling; that one nation cannot go there and leave behind another; that one sex cannot stand upon the other; that one class may not live by the other’s misery; that the elect may not find heaven alone; that sinners may not be damned and forgotten; that we may not escape by death from the earth life’s travail; but that all together must conceive the race born into freedom with the one pulsating consciousness of a divine organization.

And this vision of “Mother” Jones as one of the great souls of the world summoning men and women to the “grand roads of the universe” can only be had by seeing her under many aspects, at many times and places, watching her at the tables of the rich, in the homes of the poor, on the highway under sun or falling rain, or in those rare moments when the “intellectuals” corner her for a love feast and beg from her a crumb of wisdom.

—–

Power of “Mother” Jones Proved.

To be sure, this is extreme claim to make for any limited human life, for any individual however great its genius. And the mere thought of calling “Mother” Jones a genius will sound to the critical, fastidious, cultivated world as an absurdity or stupidity. But it is upon the testimony of events and incidents in a career that one may most safely rest a claim of this sort. One incident alone is sufficient to prove the power of “Mother” Jones to bring the sublime to the hearts of the lowliest, an incident which might thrill the comprehension of the most jeering of sceptics.

In West Virginia, during the first great anthracite strike [most likely the Bituminous Coal Strike of 1897], the United Mine Workers of America had placed some of its organizers. Among these was “Mother” Jones, the only woman organizer employed by the trades unions, by the way. She had travelled through the mountain roads by night and day, toiling up the passes, tramping the railroad tracks, riding in farm wagons, on push carts, or in whatever way seemed easiest to get from camp to camp to preach the doctrine that workingmen must unite, the slogan of the trades unions.

She had had a great measure of success, and the fame of her power as a trouble maker had spread among the mine owners. She was detested and feared by half the state, wondered about and gaped over by the other half. She was sleeping under any sort of shelter, eating the coarsest of food, stripping herself of clothing to give away right and left. Though she was earning a fair salary, she could not use it to make life easier for herself in this environment.

Reaching a town one morning which was practically dominated by the influence of a rich young mine owner, she applied for permission to the authorities to hold a mass meeting. She was refused the permit unless she could gain the consent of the mine owner himself, who held a position of local political authority. Two reporters who had been sent out to watch the progress of events in this part of the state believed that no speechmaking would occur in this town. “Mother” Jones thought differently. She sought the mine owner in his home. She told him that she had come to make a request which she saw in his face he would grant. He smiled and asked who she was and what she desired. With the benignity of the most gentle kindliness and simple dignity the old lady replied demurely that she was “Mother” Jones, and wished to have a talk with his employes.

“You, ‘Mother’ Jones,” said the rich man, astonished; “you are surely not in earnest?”

“Yes, I am ‘Mother’ Jones, the wicked old woman,” replied the supplicant with her steadfastly radiant expression and her almost subtle smile; so quiet, so gentle, so intelligent, it made the words she uttered so whimsically of herself a patent libel and insult upon her character. It was an irony that disturbed the judgment of the rich young man.

The mine owner studied the face, the attitude, the folded hands of the woman before him, and then inquired what she would like him to do. “Mother” Jones said she would like to have him send word through his mines that she was there, and grant her permission to talk on Sunday in an open space near the pit mouth on his own property. Though it seems incredible, the young mine owner consented. The inscrutable smile had been too much for his resistance.

The word was accordingly sent out through the mines that “Mother” Jones was to speak by permission to the operator. The foreman and bosses could scarcely believe their ears, and the ignorant miners, the foreign element that could scarcely speak English, did not believe. They feared it was some trap to compass their economic ruin, or, more simply, to cost them their jobs. On Sunday morning only a few persons gathered at the meeting place designated, and “Mother” Jones, seated on a rock, watched and waited.

—–

The Local Labor Leader Surprised.

“This is going to be a frost,” said the local labor leader, one John Walker.

“Wait a little,” said “Mother” Jones.

Gradually it was apparent what the old lady was watching with her smiling eyes. Men were climbing up through mountain passes and hiding behind huge bowlders; they were peeping over the tops and around the sides of their hiding places, and women were lurking in the thickets.

“Come nearer, comrades; don’t be afraid, brothers,” said “Mother” Jones, standing-up, and she began to talk. In a few minutes about 700 men and women gathered in front of the rocky platform. The mine owner himself sat on a rock some paces away.

Has any one ever told you, my children, about the lives you are living here, so that you may understand how it is you pass your days on earth? Have you told each other about it and thought it over among yourselves, so that you might imagine a brighter day and begin to bring it to pass? If no one had done so I will do it for you today. I want you to see yourselves as you are, brothers and sisters, and to think if it is not time you took pity on yourselves and upon each other. Let us consider this together, for I am one of you, and I know what it is to suffer.

So the old lady, standing very quietly, in her deep, far-reaching voice, painted a picture of the life of a miner from his young boyhood to his old age. It was vivid picture. She talked of the first introduction a boy had to those dismal caves under the earth, dripping with moisture, often so low that he must crawl into the coal veins; must lie on his back to work. She told how miners stood bent over until the back ached too much to straighten, or in sulphur water that ate through the shoes and made sores of the flesh; how their hands became cracked and the nails broken off in the quick; how the bit of bacon and beans in the dinner pail failed to stop the craving of their empty stomachs, and the thought of the barefoot children at home and the sick mother was all too dreary to make the home-going a cheerful one.

And at home how often when the wife lay helpless in bed the miner must follow a day’s toil by domestic chores. there was no one to rub the liniment on the aching bak, with Mary sick in bed. He must fetch the water and put the kettle to boil, and try to wash off the coal dust that stuck into the pores of his skein. He must search the bare cupboard for a pinch of tea, the end of a stale loaf and the bit of cold potato. He might sit on the doorstep and smoke his pipe for an hour after tending the children, while Mary told him of what the doctor had said she must have for medicine and nourishment, which they both knew they could not afford. Other nights there was no place to go for a bit of amusement but the saloon, and sometimes he was too tired and too poor to go there.

And so, while he smoked, the miner thought how he could never own a home, were it ever so humble; how he could not make his wife happy, or his children any better than himself, and how he must get up in the morning and go through it all again; how that some day the fall of rock would come or the rheumatism cripple him; that Mary herself might die and leave him, and some day there would be no longer for him even the job that was so hard, and old age and hunger and pain and loneliness would be his lot. And why, because some other human beings, no more the sons of God than the coal diggers, broke the commandment of God which says, “Thou shalt not steal,” and took from the toiler all the wealth which he created, all, all but enough to keep him alive for a period of years through which he might toil for their advantage.

“You pity yourselves, but you do not pity your brothers, or you would stand together to help one another,” said “Mother” Jones. And then in an impassioned vein she called upon them to awaken their minds so that they might live another life. As she ceased speaking men and women looked at each other with shamed faces, for almost every one had been weeping. And suddenly a man pushed his way through the crowd. He was sniveling on his coat sleeve, but he cried out hoarsely:

You, John Walker; don’t you go to tell us that ‘ere’s “Mother” Jones. That’s Jesus Christ come down on earth again, and playing he’s an old woman so he can come here and talk to us poor devils. God, God-nobody else knows what the poor suffer that away.

The man was quieted by his wife and led away, while “Mother” Jones looked after him with dilating eyes, and then broke out fiercely in one of her characteristically impassioned appeals for organization. The reporters feared the out break was too sacrilegious for publication. However that may be, it happened, and if a poor benighted miner thought this old woman a special messenger from God it is not so strange that many intelligent people regard her as the woman genius of the labor movement.

[Emphasis added.]

SOURCES & IMAGES

The Sunday Herald, Magazine Section,
-of The Boston Herald
(Boston, Massachusetts)
-Sept 11, 1904
https://www.genealogybank.com/doc/newspapers/image/v2:1386BF60B4F67060@GB3NEWS-13A614B9A77E319C@2416735-13A5D68262641C21@36-13A5D68262641C21

See also:

The Commonwealth of Toil
Lyrics by Ralph Chaplin

They have laid our lives out for us
To the utter end of time.
Shall we stagger on beneath their heavy load?
Shall we let them live forever
In their gilded halls of crime,
With our children doomed to toil beneath their goad?