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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 13, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1910, Part II:
-Found in Indianapolis Speaking at Mine Workers’ Convention
From The Indianapolis Star of January 25, 1910:
From Hellraisers Journal of January 29, 1910
-Indianpolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks to Her Boys:
From The Indianapolis News of January 26, 1910:
Mother Jones Speaks.
After music by the Lianelly Royal Welsh choir, which was applauded with a warmth that showed thorough appreciation. President [Thomas L.] Lewis introduced Mother Jones, who misses no convention of the miners. Mother Jones arraigned capital and set forth the claims of labor to better treatment. She referred to the anthracite strike and the Colorado strike.
She spoke of the financeering ability of the woman that attends to the purchasing for a large family and said such a woman does not get the credit she deserves. She criticised the National Civic Federation and said she would rather die in jail than to die eating a meal with the civic federation.
She said she was going to Milwaukee to organise the girls in the breweries and then she was going to St. Louis and then she was going to the anthracite field to “start another war if you don’t move up.”
She said she was in favor of the destruction of jails and turning them into school houses, and making the jailers “do an honest day’s work.”
She congratulated the delegates on the action taken in relation to the Western Federation of Miner, and said that the time had come when “we should clasp bands together.”
Before her talk she had greeted a number of her old friends, even kissing one or two toward whom she had an especially warm feeling of regard.
From The Fort Wayne News of January 26, 1910:
Kissed By Mother Jones
—–INDIANAPOLIS, Ind, Jan 26-Impetuous “Mother” Jones, whose hair has grown white in leading strikes for the United Mine Workers, was so rejoiced to see her old fried, W. R. Fairley, of Alabama, who has also grown gray in the same cause, at the convention today that she seized him and gave him three kisses right before the assembled 1,500 delegates. Fairley, blushing like a schoolboy, embraced the veteran agitator and planted a kiss on her cheek.
From Hellraisers Journal of January 30, 1910
-Indianpolis, Indiana – Mother Jones Speaks at Mine Workers’ Convention:
From Stenographic Report of Convention by Mary Burke East:
[Eighth Day-Wednesday, January 26th, Morning Session]
[Mother Jones]-Mr. President and Fellow Workers—The struggle of the workers down the ages has been that of blood; it has been that of hunger. Today the struggle is reaching its final crisis. The forces are lined up against us. Today we are waiting for the last great battle of man with man, and when this battle is over humanity will be free, there will be no robber class and no working class…..
I carried those documents to the President of the United States and presented them to him in the presence of Mr. Powderly. He took them from me, and I made a statement of what they contained. He said, “Mother Jones, if I gave you the pardoning power there wouldn’t be any one left in the penitentiaries.” I said, “Mr. President, if this nation spent half the money and half the energy to give men a chance to keep out of the penitentiary it does to force them in we would not need any penitentiaries.”…..
A lot of us who are here went to jail but when we came out we did not me-ow about it, we said we would raise the flag of revolt and we would face the guns and the courts and the jails again, and the whole infernal bunch of robbers and thieves and plunderers. We haven’t taken any backwater yet and we don’t intend to. Put that down, Mr. Newspaper Man…..
Think of the shirt waist makers, those little girls of sixteen who are on strike in New York, who took the contract the Civic Federation wanted to make for them and tore it up on the platform. That Civic Federation is a job making business. Get a move on you because if you don’t you will have to…..
The trouble with us in this: We put men in office, we pay them, we eulogize them. There never was a labor leader on the face of the earth who won a strike—not even you, Mr. Fairley. I will tell you who win the strikes. The women who go hungry, the men who march into jails, the men who go to jail and do not carry their cases to the Supreme Court. When the representative of the shoe workers said the other day that you went home and gave your money to your wives and they went out and bought scab goods for them, I wanted to ask him how much money the women get to spend whose husbands did not work all last winter in the anthracite region? The operators went to the banks to see who had money there so they could collect their rents. How much money can a woman spend foolishly who gets five or six dollars a week to support five or six children and send them to school. You haven’t a banker in this nation who is such a financier as that woman is. Don’t find fault with the women. If you stand for a system that robs them and degrades them you are no better than Morgan…..
I went to Washington at the request of the brewery workers. I went into the breweries and looked after the condition of the women workers. Those women and girls are getting three dollars a week. They put men out of work, but they do not get enough to support themselves. I am going to Milwaukee to organize those girls in the breweries. We are also going to organize them in the breweries in St. Louis…..
I want you to pass a resolution here and make a demand and send it to President Taft telling him we cannot be civilized, that we are trampling on all the conditions for which our fathers fought long years ago when we allow conditions to exist such as we have in the Southwest where they are allowed to take those Mexicans and put them in jail without a just cause and keep them there. To the ever lasting disgrace of the American people they stood for it, and applauded when Taft shook hands with the greatest tyrant that ever lived on earth. A greater murderer never lived than Diaz…..
I was not opposed to your discussions here. They were healthy discussions, they cleared up any doubts we had, and when this convention closes every man within these walls should clasp hands and pledge themselves to go forth and fight for a nobler civilization, for a collective ownership of the mines and railroads, the telegraph, telephone, newspapers and everything else. We stand for the ownership of all these things, and then we will get what belongs to us and not until then.
Note: emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Last Great Battle, UMWC p420, Jan 26, 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WyH1VOBn6BsC&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA420
The Indianapolis Star
(Indianapolis, Indiana)
-Jan 25, 1910
https://www.newspapers.com/image/15337941/
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 29, 1910
Mother Jones Speaks to Her Boys at Indianapolis Convention of United Mine Workers of America
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 30, 1910
Mother Jones Speaks to Mine Workers “We haven’t taken any backwater yet and we don’t intend to.”
IMAGE
Mother Jones, Ipl Str p3, Jan 25, 1910
https://www.newspapers.com/image/15337941/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 12, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1910, Part I:
-Found with the Miners of Northeastern Pennsylvania
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Worker’s Song – Dropkick Murphys