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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 22, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1912, Part II
Found in Fresno at State Convention of Building Trades Council
From The Fresno Morning Republican of January 17, 1912:
[Delegates to the California State Convention of the Building Trades Council.]
The picture contains most of the prominent labor leaders attending the sessions of the B. T. C. Olaf A Tveitmoe, seated in front can be picked out by his cane. On his right is President McCarthy, ex-mayor of San Francisco, and on McCarthy’s right, J. B. Bowen, first vice president and acting president during McCarthy’s mayoralty. Anton Johannsen, state organizer, and under indictment with Tveitmoe, is seated on the extreme right of the picture. The picture was taken yesterday noon by a representative of the Western Panoramic company of San Jose.
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UNION MEN URGED TO VOTE AS CLASS
———-
Resolutions Propose Minimum Wage Scale
of $2 and 8-Hour Day
———-According to the official report given out yesterday from the session of the California Sate Building Trades Council, the reports from the different local councils give promises of support, both financial and moral, for the fight growing out of the recent indictments returned by the federal grand jury of Los Angeles against Olaf A. Tveitmoe and Anton Johannsen. This information was given out by Tveitmoe, who as secretary is the press bureau of the convention…
The second day of the eleventh annual convention of the California State Building Trades Council which is being held at the Union hall, was marked by speeches by Job Harriman, defeated candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, and Alexander Irvine his campaign manager, urging the banding together of all union men for political purposes. These two speakers are themselves socialists, and would probably prefer to have organized labor fall into the ranks of the Socialist party, but nothing definitely suggesting this was made in their speeches. They urged co-operation between unions and Socialists, probably leading to a Labor-Socialist party.
[…..]
PUBLIC MEETING TONIGHT
In order to allow the general public an opportunity to hear the prominent labor leaders who are now here, a mass meeting of all delegates and visitors will be held at the Barton opera house tonight at 8 o’clock, to which the general public is invited and urged to be present. Olaf A. Tveitmoe, the indicted secretary-treasurer; P. H. McCarthy, ex-mayor of San Francisco; Job Harriman, candidate for mayor of Los Angeles and Alexander Irvine, one of the henchmen of Harriman in his fight for the mayoralty, will all speak…
“Mother” Jones eighty years old and for many years connected with the labor movement of all branches, arrived in Fresno last evening and will probably be one of the speakers of the public mass meeting…..
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From The Fresno Tribune of January 18, 1912:
MOTHER JONES MILITANT
IN TALK
———-BY LAURENCE TODD
I have seen so much of the blood of the workers shed by the bullets of the masters during my 80 years; I have known so many fine brave fellows shot down, clubbed, driven from their homes in the dead of the night at the end of bayonets, while their wives and children begged and sobbed for mercy that met only curses and dishonor—that many a time I have wished that I had a gun in my own hand to deal out justice!
So declared “Mother” Jones, the marvelous old woman of the Western Federation of Miners and United Mine Workers’ organizing corps, in the convention of the State Building Trade Council here yesterday afternoon. With an oratory that moved the delegates alternately to cheering and to tears, she painted modern industrial conditions and pointed them the way out.
Murder of scores of union coal miners in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, torture and outrage of metal miners and their wives in Colorado, driving of thousands of girl operatives in eastern factories to prostitution and suicide because their daily wages would not allow them to help support their families—these horrors she set forth in burning phrases that set the hall in an uproar of emotional shouts.
[She continued:]
And yet there are some weak-kneed ones among you who have cried and howled with the masters against the McNamaras. I say, “may God give us more of the McNamaras!”
The way out, which was received with long-continued applause, she stated to be
Your getting together and fighting like men for one fraternal principle—the principle of social ownership of all the means of production.
[She pleaded:]
You can make the masters in Wall street tremble; you can take California and set your children and your brothers’ children free; you can be free yourselves if you will use your ballot for a revolutionary class-conscious purpose, like men, and not like cringing cowards.
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From the Everett, Washington, Commonwealth of January 19, 1912:
Mother Jones on Strike Duty.
Mother Jones is undertaking an extensive trip all through the country affected by the Harriman strike. Needless to say she is out for the “boys” and not for the bosses.
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From the San Jose Mercury of January 23, 1912:
LARGE AUDIENCE HEARS
“MOTHER” JONES’ ADDRESS
———-
Spoke to Striking Railroad Shopmen
at Labor Temple Last Night.
———-
Says Time Is Coming When Government
Will Be With Wage-Earners.
———-At times intensely dramatic and with voice and every emotion in the most tense attitude, “Mother” Jones held in the grasp of her thought last night an audience which filled every available seat in the Labor Temple, while more than 100 of those who had assembled to hear her message were obliged to remain standing throughout the two and a half hours which she occupied in the delivery of her address. The meeting was held under the auspices of the striking railroad shopmen, and Clarence C. Rigden, Secretary of the System Federation officiated as presiding officer.
“Mother” Jones declared that the trade unions had done more to permeate the hearts of men with Christian philosophy and brotherly love than all the other institutions which had come into existence. The trade unions, she said, were born out of agony and persecution but they are marching onward to claim their own. She emphasized the statement that she did not “belong to the temperance brigade nor the suffragette, but to the fighting army of the working class,” and expressed her willingness to die with the wage-earners if necessary for them to win their victory. She gave it as her opinion that government of America in city, State and nation was in the hands of capitalistic class, and that the only salvation for the workingman and workingwomen was to get the reins of affairs into their own hands.
Strikes Order of the Day.
The declaration was made that strikes are the order of the day and that “we will have strikes just so long as capital is master.”
[Said the speaker:]
The nation was founded on a strike, and we struck and struck and struck for seven years and struck and struck again for five years, and we will strike for 75 years longer until we wrest the control of the government from the capitalist class. Fight is a part of the disease that is on, and no strike was ever lost. We can get what we want if we only cement our forces together. The future is ours, the past has been yours and we will no longer permit our womanhood to be robbed and our childhood to be starved.
If women were not spending their time in the W. C. T. U. and the temperance brigades, we would have a different class of men in this country today and they would not have to witness 400 coal miners in Westmoreland County, Penn., to go to jail at one time with mothers and babies two and three months old under sentence of 30 days for the offense of fighting for their daily bead. When a nation takes its babes and incarcerates them for no reason in the world but because their mothers were fighting for an honorable livelihood, it is time to call a halt. There are more brutal things performed in civilized America than in any other nation in the world today and the stirred condition of economics causes this.
Defends McNamaras.
“Mother” Jones offered a defense for the McNamaras by saying that they did what they thought was right to do under our system of persecution, of robbery.
Human life is of no value to the capitalist and when I witnessed 23 men murdered in the mountains of [West] Virginia on the 23rd day of February, 1903-shot in the back-I felt like blowing somebody up and if I had had dynamite close to me, would have blown those murderers to h—. I would tell Mr. Taft, tell the Supreme Court I had done it, for I felt justified in taking such action when I saw those fatherless babes and those widowed mothers.
In speaking of the striking shopmen, “Mother” Jones spoke in part as follows
When the strike was declared, the helpers were working for 15 cents per hour and I would like to know how long the wives of the official of the Harriman line would live with their husbands if they earned but 15 cents per hour? The capitalistic class are men of cunning but not men of wonderful brains, and if the working class knew how cowardly they are they wouldn’t suffer over night.
The speaker decried the eight-hour law for women in this State by saying that the law was working a hardship on women as they were either compelled to do 12 hours’ work in an eight-hour day or suffer the penalty of having men displace them. “Mother” Jones said the law should be made to apply to both males and females, and pathetically recited how little children are made to work in the factories in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama and Georgia who she asserted are “ground into profit 14 hours each day for 25 cents per week.” She closed her appeal for all the labor forces to join hands and said the time demanded another Lovejoy, a John Brown, a William Lloyd Garrison and a Patrick Henry.
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SOURCES & IMAGES
The Fresno Morning Republican
(Fresno, California)
-Jan 17, 1912, p3
https://www.newspapers.com/image/607032932/
The Fresno Tribune
(Fresno, California)
-Jan 18, 1912, p1
https://www.newspapers.com/image/696389685
The Commonwealth
“A Socialist Weekly”
(Everett, Washington)
-Jan 19, 1912, p3
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025731/1912-01-19/ed-1/seq-3/
San Jose Mercury
(San Jose, California)
-Jan 23, 1912, p12
https://www.genealogybank.com
See also:
Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for January 1912
Part I: Found in California Speaking on Behalf of Striking Railroad Shopmen
-re Indictment and Trial of Olaf Tveitmoe, see:
Los Angeles Times Bombing
-Big Trial in Indianapolis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times_bombing#Big_trial_in_Indianapolis
Tag: Westmoreland County Coal Strike of 1910–11
https://weneverforget.org/tag/westmoreland-county-coal-strike-of-1910-11/
WE NEVER FORGET: Feb 25, 1903-Mother Jones and the
Massacre of the Raleigh County Miners at Stanaford Mountain
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They’ll Never Keep Us Down – Hazel Dickens