Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for August 1901, Part II: Found in Indianapolis at Headquarters of United Mine Workers

Quote Mother Jones, Capitalists should surrender gracefully, AtR p2, Sept 14, 1901 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 8, 1901
Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1901, Part II
Found at United Mine Workers’ Headquarters in Indianapolis

From The Indianapolis Journal of August 30, 1901:

“Mother” Jones Here.

“Mother” Jones, an official organizer of the United Mine Workers, is in the city for a few days, resting after a long campaign among the miners and children in the factories of the East and South. She will leave to-morrow for Cleveland, O., where she will deliver an address Labor day.

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[Photograph added.]

From the Evansville Journal-News of August 31, 1901:

(Indianapolis Journal.)

“Mother” Jones, the friend of the miners, was at the headquarters of the United Mine Workers in the Stevenson building yesterday. She arrived from the coal fields of West Virginia, where she has been assisting in organizing the miners into unions. “Mother” Jones said her trip to Indianapolis had no significance, as she only came around this way to see her friends. She will leave for Cleveland to-morrow, where she will deliver a Labor Day speech. From there she will go to Carbondale, Pa., to make a similar address.

[Said Mother Jones:]

The coal operators are making desperate efforts to keep the miners from organizing, but they might as well sit down and sing the psalms for all the good they are doing. We are meeting with remarkable success in effecting organizations among the miners.

CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM.

[And , waxing enthusiastic over the subject nearest her heart, she said:]

The issues of the day are capitalism and Socialism. We have our rights and I will I fight for them until the bitter end. We are now in a great industrial battle with the two armies of labor and capital arrayed against each other. We want to bring harmony out of chaos. A great industrial war is on. There is no question about it. We will have a number of strikes and other uprisings, but the workers are educating themselves. While they are producing they are reasoning. They will resort to the ballot and not to the bullet. Out of this industrial chaos they will bring industrial harmony. They will not be begging their masters to give them a day’s work or a loaf of bread, They will simply take that which is theirs by rights. They produce it, and in producing it, they should own it. We are after the machinery of production, distribution and exchange.

STRIKE OF STEEL WORKERS.

“What do you think of the great strike of the steel workers?” was asked.

[Mother Jones replied:]

The great steel strike is really the first great war with the powerful combine of capitalists. Both labor and capital are in a fearful struggle for supremacy. The steel strikers will win out if every industry in the nation has to be closed to accomplish this. It may seem at the present time that the capitalists are getting the best of it, but it will not end that way. In the days of the war for right and justice, when freedom was at stake-I mean the civil war-at first the slave owners seemed to be winning, but in the end justice ruled. This industrial war will end in the same way. The strikers may be defeated in the present contest, but that does not speaking anything in favor of the exploiting class this is only the beginning of the end. It is the money of the world against labor.

ERA OF SOCIALISM COMING.

The era of Socialism is dawning. From the records I find that in 1850 the wealth of the American nation was $8,000,000,000. The share of the working people was 62½%, and the people who exploit had but 37½%. In 1880 the producer’s share went down to 24%, while the wealth of the nation had increased to $48,000,000,000, and the share of the non-producers had increased to 76%. In 1901 the nation’s wealth is estimated at $100,000,000,000, and the exploiters have 90% of that amount, and the producers only 10%. After $22,000,000 were raked in on the first of July as dividends, the workers had not even 10%.

Here is the point I am getting at: The capitalist class can do but little more exploiting in America. The people are disinherited, but they do not seem to realize it.

WHAT THE FUTURE WILL BE.

Inside of the next ten years the capitalists will have reached into eastern nations for new fields, and the middle class capitalists will have disappeared from society. The proletariat of nations will have molded its parts together and will come on the field as the conscious revolutionary party for the first time in the history of the world and will demand the surrender of the keys of nature’s storehouse. If the ruling class takes notice of the past it will surrender gracefully.

I look for the possible solution of the industrial problem in the dawn of the era of Socialism. Then will the masses of oppressed men and women of the nations of the earth rally to its bright banner and hail the advance of the Co-operative Commonwealth when all laborers will be capitalists and every capitalist will be a laborer, and industrial harmony will at last have come to a patient, long-suffering people.

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