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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 16, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for December 1911, Part II
Found in Los Angeles, Interviewed by Estelle Lawton Lindsey
From The Los Angeles Record of December 21, 1911:
“MOTHER JONES” PREDICTS BRIGHTER DAY;
MEN NATURALLY GOOD IS HER BELIEF
By Estelle Lawton Lindsey.
“Some day men will go into the bowels of the earth and bring out lead to be made into type to enlighten the minds of their fellows, instead of bullets to brutalize. In that day we shall be civilized.”
The speaker was Mrs. Mary Jones, known through this land as “Mother Jones,” saint or revolutionist according to your point of view, a woman loved to adoration by 400,000 organized miners of the U. S., and who has been described as “the walking wrath of God.”
In conversation this woman, who will be 80 years old the first day of next May, and looks like a well-preserved and vigorous woman of 50, speaks little of wrath and much of love, understanding and education.
WOMEN MUST UNDERSTAND
My work is to prevent violence, to settle, peaceably, differences between employer and employed. Wherever there are strikes, wherever there may be violence—which I abhor—wherever feelings of revenge are rampant, there I go. My work is to teach men the causes of their difficulties, to show them how to remedy conditions by changing the laws and the system. My field of activity is the world.
The trouble with the average woman is that she is a sentimentalist. She is ignorant of the causes of our industrial disturbance. She cannot realize that as long as we have oppression we shall have violent reaction in the minds and feelings of the oppressed; and that such feelings are the root of violence. The thinker who understands the cause knows all violence can be done away with. Soon women will understand, then they will give the world better men.
My work is to keep people from getting into conflicts to get them to think instead of fighting; and to show others how to think. I believe in education; and through education I believe we can so change our forms of government that feelings of revenge will die of inanition.
In that day we will not devote millions, wrung from those least able to pay, to chaining human beings like beasts for being what the government has made them.
“Made them?” I asked. “Mother Jones” raised her hand.
MEN NATURALLY GOOD
Yes, made them, made them by permitting them to grow up in ignorance, suffering and want, by permitting conditions that do nothing but brutalize.
Why, do you realize that every government in the world today is founded on force? When governments are founded on reason and equality of opportunity they will be human governments, where now they are brute governments.
“But,” said I, “as long as men are naturally brutal, naturally greedy—”
[Mother Jones interrupted:]
They are not, they have been made so by conditions, and wherever the profit system is inoperative the true and beautiful nature of men is shown up. Take the instance of the San Francisco earthquake. For three weeks that city enjoyed, in the midst of all its ruin, such a humane government as the world has never seen. Men could not exploit each other and they turned and did for each other and had a condition of civilization unequaled in history, with the monster, Profit, shut out of the gates. But as soon as the machinery of profit-making was in order again, they forgot love and brotherhood because the idea was in their minds that only profits stood between them and destruction.
MASTER CLASS WISH VIOLENCE
Profit getting grows until it becomes a disease; and to justify their oppression it has been the policy of the master class to create conditions that will force violence, and that violence is used as an excuse for calling for more force.
Now, I go where violence is threatened and point out to the men that violence is just what the master class hope to force; it keeps men from thinking of the causes of the industrial difficulty and so from voting sanely. The master class wish to cloud men’s minds; I wish to keep them cool and clear.
“But people are so stupid,” I said, “they are so easily fooled; they think so reluctantly.”
[Said the “walking wrath of God”:]
We have only been reading 200 years. Be patient. Two hundred years is only a day in the lifetime of the race. I look with a beautiful philosophy into a brighter, better day, the day when we shall have a system of government that will allow men to be as good as their impulses prompt them to be.
“Tell me,” I said, “where were you educated. Did you go college?”
The white-haired woman nodded and replied slowly:
A GRADUATE OF THE COLLEGE OF LABOR
Yes, I went to college; I graduated. I went to the great college of labor; I was among the exploited. I have worked in every kind of factory in the United States. I served 14 hours a day in the southern cotton mills by the side of children of 7; my back has ached in the Pennsylvania silk mills and the jute mills of Virginia.
[Said Mother Jones:]
How could I describe the ache in another’s back if I had not felt it in my own?
Oh, yes, I graduated in the college of human pain and I know the men who create the conditions that make all this pain are at heart good. They are the victims of the system.
But they are gradually waking up; they are understanding causes and more and more we are raising the percentage of the intelligent vote. One day in the near future we shall vote violence out and place the profit system in the museum of antiquities.
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From the Denver United Labor Bulletin of December 21, 1911:
From every quarter comes favorable reports of the great strike on the Harriman lines and Illinois Central.
[…..]
Los Angeles, Cal.-Ninety-four engines are out of commission here; twenty-five engineers have been laid off. Five and six engines are being used on all trains over the mountains. Conditions fine for the strikers. “Mother” Jones has been here speaking to the strikers, and as strengthened their determination to win.
[…..]
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From The Los Angeles Record of December 27, 1911:
A mass meeting of the strikers [Federated Shopmen’s Strike] was held in social hall of the Labor Temple Wednesday morning. The meeting was addressed by Mother Jones. Wm. Atkinson and J. J. Jones. The men were much encouraged by the talks….
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A grand rally of the strikers will be held at the Labor Temple Saturday to celebrate the third month of the strike. Stanley B. Wilson will deliver an address. Other speeches will also be made by labor leaders.
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Wm. Atkinson, sixth vice president of the boilermakers, returned to Los Angeles Wednesday from Salt Lake City…
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SOURCES & IMAGES
The Los Angeles Record
(Los Angeles, California)
-Dec 21, 1911, p4
https://www.newspapers.com/image/677905184/
-Dec 27, 1911, p7
https://www.newspapers.com/image/677905291/
United Labor Bulletin
(Denver, Colorado)
-Dec 21, 1911, p1
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91052295/1911-12-21/ed-1/seq-1/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for December 1911
Part I: Found in Berkeley, California, Receiving News of McNamaras’ Confession
Tag: McNamara Brothers
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mcnamara-brothers/
Tag: Illinois Central and Harriman Lines Strike of 1911 to 1915
https://weneverforget.org/tag/illinois-central-and-harriman-lines-strike-of-1911-to-1915/
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I Am A Union Woman – Deborah Holland