———-
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 15, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1910, Part II:
-Found in Ohio Speaking in Cincinnati and Columbus
From the Wilkes-Barre Evening News
of September 23, 1900:
“Mother” Jones after recuperating her health in Hazleton, returned to Cincinnati, Ohio, today.
—————
From The Cincinnati Post
of September 23, 1910:
‘MOTHER JONES’ TO BE SPEAKER
AT OUTING
——-“Mother Jones,” known as the “Angel of the Miners,” will address the Woman’s Union Label League at an outing at Chester Park Sunday. Mrs. May Wood Simons, one of the editors of the Chicago Daily Socialist; E. L. Hitchens, Wm. Tateman and Mrs. Etta Knatt Behrman also will speak.
—————
[Photograph added.]
From The Cincinnati Post of September 26, 1910:
WRECKS AND GRAFT DUE TO CORPORATIONS’ RULE
-MOTHER JONES.
—————
Corporation oppression of workers was declared by “Mother Jones,” the “Angel of the Miners,” Monday to be the cause of disastrous rail wrecks. Economic conditions, resulting from corporation influences, she added, were responsible for scandals like that produced by the police graft charges in Cincinnati.
The grandmotherly leader of workers, who is known personally to almost every miner in the country, is resting at the Grand Hotel after a day passed as the guest of Cincinnati Socialists to whom she spoke Sunday.
[She asked:]
Do you know who is responsible for traction and railroad wrecks which have destroyed nearly 100 lives and injured 117 the past week?”
Moral Effect Disastrous
Well, I’ll tell you. You are. So am I. So is everybody who allows these corporations to exist which overwork and underpay their employes until they are unfit to have human lives in their charge.
It’s the corporations that are wrecking and maiming men, women and little children right and left.
When they do not kill men outright they wreck them morally.
That’s why you are having the present Police Department scandal in Cincinnati.
There isn’t an honest police force in the whole United States, and there won’t be until society is reorganized.
Women Must Uplift
The wives and daughters of working men must study these economic questions and educate their children in what they must do to reorganize society. That is our main hope.
“Mother Jones” will leave Tuesday for Columbus, where she intends to offer the full strength of her support to the striking street railway men.
“Brutal” and “hypocritical” are the terms the white-haired woman applied to Roosevelt’s recent speech in that city. “If he really cared for my boys he could never have turned the bayonets on them as he did in Colorado,” she said.
From Ohio’s Marion Daily Mirror of September 26, 1910:
“Mother” Jones on Hand.
Columbus, O., Sept. 26.-“Mother” Jones of Chicago, of country-wide reputation as a friend of labor, is in Columbus today and is preparing to take an active part in the streetcar strike.
—————
From the Miner’s Magazine of September 29, 1910:
“MOTHER” JONES has been in Pennsylvania for some time gathering data for a book which she intends having published in the near future . A history of the labor movement penned by “Mother” Jones will be a volume that will be treasured by countless thousands of men and women in America who know of the heroic service which this dauntless woman has rendered to the working class. Though she has passed the three-score-and-ten mile-post in life, though her hair is whitened by the snows of age, though her eye is losing its luster and her step the elasticity of youth, yet she is still in the conflict to wrest from greed the priceless heritage of liberty which the conspiracy of the ages has stolen from humanity. The coming book from the pen of “Mother ” Jones will be welcomed by the union men and women of this continent.
———-
IN THE IRWIN coal mining district of Pennsylvania, hundreds of strikers have been and are now living on berries and mushrooms that are gathered from the hillsides. Thousands of families are in tents who have been evicted from the hovels of the coal barons, who in their haughty pride and dignity declare: “We have nothing to arbitrate.” The miners have been on strike since last March because they concluded that it was as easy to die striking as it was to die working for their masters. Though evicted from rented hovels, though haunted by hunger, though confronted with the weapons of thugs and an armed state constabulary they have refused to continue to be the abject slaves of corporations in the Keystone state; that can command armed might garbed in the uniform of legal authority to shoot down human beings who protest against the misery and wretchedness that are involved in starvation wages.
———-
IN THE IRWIN coal mining district of Pennsylvania the miners have been on strike since last March. They have been subjected to every outrage and insult which the devilish ingenuity of capitalism could suggest. They have been clubbed and maimed by a brutal state constabulary and imported thugs. They have been evicted from the hovels of the coal barons and fully ten thousand people have been forced to live in tents. They have been arrested, fined and flung into jails for trespass, whenever by accident or otherwise they have been found walking on the property of the coal companies, and now, that thousands of children through lack of clothing can not be sent to school, the coal barons have instructed their official chattels to arrest all parents who fail to comply with the provisions of the compulsory educational law. During normal conditions many of these children were slaves at the mines, and the compulsory school law received no consideration from these “captains of industry.” But when the fathers of these children, through unbearable conditions, are forced to declare a strike for a sufficient wage to keep body and soul together, the heartless exploiters discover that there is a school law which insists that children of school age shall find seats in the public temples of education. Under the guise of law a coal baron, in this glorious Republic, can persecute the slave.
—————
Note: emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
The Evening News
(Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania)
-Sept 23, 1900
https://www.newspapers.com/image/174971502/
The Cincinnati Post
(Cincinnati, Ohio)
-Sept 23, 1910, page 11
-Sept 26, 1910, page 9
https://www.genealogybank.com/
The Marion Daily Mirror
(Marion, Ohio)
-Sept 26, 1910
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88077573/1910-09-26/ed-1/seq-2/
Miner’s Magazine
(Denver, Colorado)
-June 3, 1909-Jan 19, 1911
Western Federation of Miners, 1911
https://books.google.com/books?id=hT8tAQAAMAAJ
-Sept 29, 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=hT8tAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA71-PA1
-page 4
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=hT8tAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA71-PA4
IMAGE
Mother Jones, WDC Tx p5, June 18, 1910
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1910-06-18/ed-1/seq-5/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for September 1910, Part I:
Found in Pennsylvania Denouncing John Mitchell
Tag: Westmoreland County Coal Strike of 1910–11
https://weneverforget.org/tag/westmoreland-county-coal-strike-of-1910-11/
For more info on song/poem below, see:
Tag: James Coles
https://weneverforget.org/tag/james-coles/
Correspondence for September 1910:
The Correspondence of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
U of Pittsburgh Press, 1985
https://books.google.com/books?id=EZ2xAAAAIAAJ
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735057897435
-pages 79-81 (130 of 416):
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735057897435/viewer#page/130/mode/2up
Sept 1, 1910
–Letter to Mother Jones from William Parker of DuBois, PA:
-Parker joins Mother Jones in lamenting state of Socialist Party of America: “there is something rotten with our National Secy [J. Mahlon Barnes] also the N. E. C. and I for one worked hard, to have them defeated.” Parker asks Mother to come to DuBois to speak to comrades there.
Note: following source states that Parker was state organizer for SPA in PA and delegate to 1908 and 1912 national conventions.
Letters of Eugene V. Debs, Volume 1
-ed by J. Robert Constantine
University of Illinois Press, 1990
(search: William Parker)
https://books.google.com/books?id=6i3PS8RLEygC
Sept 9, 1910
-Letter from Mother Jones (at Hazleton, PA) to Thomas J. Morgan of Chicago:
Mother states that some of the Socialists (SPA) are attempting to silence Morgan and “to kill any influence that the Provoker may have.” Mother further states: “I want to say that is as cold blooded a gang at the head of the Socialist movement as any gang of capitalist combination you can find.”
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“Westmoreland Miner’s Strike” -by Striking Miner James Coles
-written about August 1910; tune was not given for Coles’ Song/Poem
but Auld Lang Syne seems to work:
