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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday March 28, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1912, Part II
The Four Score Hard Winters of Labor’s Heroine by Lawrence Todd
From The Tacoma Times of February 14, 1912:
Four Score Hard Winters Has Mother Jones Seen,
and She Is a Heroine in Labor’s Ranks Still
———-BY LAWRENCE TODD.
“Where do you live, ‘”Mother Jones?” asked the chairman of a Congressional investigating committee of a little old woman in rusty black.
She had kindly, determined Irish features and the most piercing and confusing of blue Irish eyes. Brave, kindly, faith-inspiring eyes the old woman had, and a motherly way of speaking when she was not aroused. But this chairman was trying to defend the steel barons from the charge of enslaving their men.
“I live in the United States, sorr,” she replied.
“But where-in what state have you a home?”
“Where the big thieves are wringing their dollars out of the blood and bone of my poor, miserable people, sorr,” came back the reply, in a voice like that of an accusing judge. “Sometimes it is among the slaves of the Alabama iron mines; sometimes with the gold and silver miners of Arizona, where the Southern Pacific has fastened itself on their throats; sometimes with the boys on the northern copper range, and often in the coal miners’ shacks in Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Where you send your militia where men are shot and women driven from their homes at night by armed bullies, there I stay.”
“Mother” Jones is nearly 80 years of age. What she told the corporation congressman is literally true. For more than a generation she has been an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and for their brothers, the United Mine Workers. Strikes she has seen and taken a part in, since she was a little girl in a southern cotton mill. Once she led 1,500 women of the coal miners’ families against a Colorado sheriff and his deputies. The sheriff for once was driven back from the strikers picket line.
At another crisis, when the children of the Philadelphia factories were crying for protection, “Mother” Jones shocked the community by organizing a great parade of 7,000 crippled and maimed boys and girls, ragged and pale, underfed and haggard as factory children always become, to march through the streets of the fashionable shopping quarter. Always she is making a fight against social wrongs. Usually she is dramatic about it. Always her warm heart and her fearless tongue, and her white forehead that has more than once been pressed by the muzzle of a deputy’s gun, endear her to the wretched people who spend their days in factories and mines.
Just now the miners have lent “Mother” to the striking stoop employes of the Harriman railroads in the western country, where she is making appeals to the women to do picket duty. Incidentally she visited the convention of the California State Building Trades council at Fresno, and urged the delegates to stand by their officials, Tveitmoe and Johannsen, indicted in connection with the alleged dynamiting conspiracy.
[Says Mother Jones:]
Most governments are based on brute force. Those obey who must. The economic conflict is becoming so bitter every day in this country, because the workers are awakening to a realization that private ownership of the means of production is the underlying cause of their misery and their weakness. You can’t reconcile the exploiter and the exploited; they must struggle.
Men are cruel when greed urges. At Hazleton we saw 22 poor wretches shot down as they were peacefully marching across the country during a strike. On a mountain side in West Virginia I addressed a group of the boys one night, and all was peaceful. Next morning I came back up the mountain, to find them lying in blood-half a dozen brave men shot in their sleep by the mine owners and their sons, who had riddled those poor shanties with rifle bullets without one word of warning. No man was ever punished for that murder.
Now, you think of those things day after day, and you see the deaths of hundreds of babies as we did in the coal strike last winter in Westmoreland county, Pennsylvania, and you begin to see what is meant by the class struggle.
Force begets force. The people will revolt as individuals at first, but as a unit finally. In this grand uprising, which is not going to be one of blood but one of industrial action, the women among the workers are going to have their share. Yes, the women are coming with this revolution of ours. Oh, I wish you could see them as they make the fight in their homes all through the mining regions! How they cheer their men on, how they economize, how they teach their children and their sisters to be brave and never cringe! Among the forty nationalities of the coal miners we have as many heroic women as there are anywhere on the face of the earth. Those women would alone make a better order of things sure.
Talks like this have led “Mother” Jones to jail and often to insult. When deported from Colorado she spoke to a bumble brake-man, who smuggled her back to Denver. There she sent this message to Peabody “Governor, I’m back; what are you going to do about it?”
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[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Mother Jones, No Abiding Place,
WDC Hse Com Testimony, June 14, 1910
(search: “no abiding place”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=DNQuAAAAMAAJ
The Tacoma Times
(Tacoma, Washington)
-Feb 14, 1912, p3
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88085187/1912-02-14/ed-1/seq-3/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 27, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1912, Part I
Found in Colorado, Wyoming, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana
Autobiography of Mother Jones
Kerr, 1925
(for more on events describe above)
https://archive.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/
Note: Todd’s description of events, not completely accurate, see tags below for more information.
Feb 13, 1912, Evansville Press, IL
-re Mother Jones, Labor’s Heroine, by Lawrence Todd
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/98490225/feb-13-1912-evansville-il/
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No More Deaths for Dollars – Ed Pickford