———-
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday September 25, 1920
-Mother Jones News for August 1920, Part I
Found in Princeton, West Virginia, Speaking Near Baldwin-Felts HQ
From The Richmond Daily Register of August 6, 1920:
“Mother” Jones has reached the West Virginia mines and is said to be responsible for much of the recent trouble started there.
August 15, 1920 – Princeton, West Virginia
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting:
[Part I]
My friends, in all the ages of man the human race has trod, it has looked forward to that mighty power where men could enjoy the right to live as nature intended that they should.
We have not made millionaires, but we have made billionaires on both sides of the house. We have built up the greatest oligarchy that the world has ever known in history.
On the other side, we have the greatest slaves the world has ever known. There is no getting away from that.
I am not going to abuse the operators nor the bosses for their system. The mine owners and the steel robbers are all a product of the system of industry. It is just like an ulcer, and we have got to clean the ulcer.
(Hissing from the audience.)
God—they make me sick. They are worse than an old bunch of cats yelling for their mother.
Today, the world has turned over. The average man don’t see it. The ministers don’t see it and they don’t see what is wrong. They cannot see it. But the man who sits in the tower and his fortune of clouds clash, knows there is a cause for those clouds clashing before the clap of thunder comes. All over the world is the clashing of clouds. In the office, the doctor don’t pay attention to it. The man who watches the clouds don’t understand it. People want to watch the battle.
I cannot understand why the student don’t understand it. But he takes his life in his hands and goes out and operates it, but he don’t own one product of it, and then the men say when there is an invention, “Why don’t I get a fair share of this invention?” Well, it belongs to all the world to make the world happy, but you know the hog who is always grabbing the dollar. You have got to clean house on that person. You can do without dollars, but not without men and women to produce the wealth of the nation.
I am here today, and I may be criticized, but that don’t worry me. The hired newspapers don’t worry me. I am still Old Mother Jones, raising hell with the agitators. I don’t go to sleep. I am not a suffragette, for I have been suffering all my life.
I am busy getting this working man to understand what belongs to him, and his power to take possession of it, and then we will use the ballot.
Get this into you! I don’t bother about politics. I don’t care. What I want is to get you solidified. If we don’t give the bosses what they want, they will raise hell. The politicians know this very well. The question lies here in the ownership of my bread, and I cannot eat until I ask that brute for the right to eat. Now I have got to work or steal.
If you ever saw a policeman with a club in his hand, I want to ask you, did you ever see that policeman club a millionaire? But it is “Get out of here, damn you, go on to jail, damn you,” if it is a working man.
You go to hear a minister, and the sky-pilots will yell “Hurrah for Jesus.” They have a system.
Now, men, I want to tell you there is a rotten system. We have got to do away with it. I came into this State 21 years ago, when Mr. Houston referred me to Mr. Watson, and I went into his work. I met his men. The men who came to meet me were beat up by the guards that night, and why I wasn’t beat up, I never have known. But they beat those men up and would have murdered them had I not been there. Twenty-five years ago, those men were under the rule of gunmen, crushed and robbed, and their children were being brought up that way. Two years ago, we went in and organized those fields, and no one was hurt. Schwab and Watson were the only ones hurt.
We are not fools or cowards, and we must demand the same rights in industry.
We had a fight in Colorado and I went from here. I left our men at Cabin Creek organized when I went away. When I came back there wasn’t an organized man in it. I went up one morning facing the militia and the Baldwin-Felts gunmen and the mine owners, and I organized those men and we are organized today.
Their children are getting educated, and are going to better schools, and the miners get their money every two weeks. They are not paid in scrip, and can buy where they please.
I want you to understand that when I went up New River 20 years ago, I had to walk 19 miles of the night and count the railroad ties. I could go up there everywhere now and stay in a miner’s house, and nobody comes to bother me.
[Mingo County]
We had some men murdered in Mingo. It is very sad. I do not like it. We had enough murder during the war.
To the millionaires that were made during the war, 25 or 26 for every millionaire that was made during the war, the bones of American youths are bleaching on the other side. They went over to destroy Kaisers, and they have come home to find more Kaisers than they ever found in Germany. Poor old Kaiser.
We have got it at home. They own the press, the pulpits and every avenue. You know that. You know that! (pointing to a gentleman in the audience) You know I am telling the truth. You have got on a white collar, and I know you are not a working man.
Our mission now is to clean up the monied Kaisers at home. You cannot do it by law, because they will declare the law unconstitutional.
I am out to do away with this, for it is a disgrace to the pages of American history. I am not a church worker or a Sunday School teacher, but I am one woman that will not stand to see the blood of babes lost.
[“By God, I am not afraid of the Baldwins.”]
By God, I am not afraid of the Baldwins. I licked hell out of them up Cabin Creek. They turned machine guns on us, but they didn’t shoot me, damn them, by Jesus Christ.
I want you to see this. (Exhibiting a photograph.) Do you see it? It is a rapid firing gun, a machine gun. This went across seven states of this nation. The Baldwin-Felts—I am going to talk plain. I know that in a few miles from here is their headquarters [at Bluefield]. I know they are in this audience, but I don’t take water when they are here; regardless of the Supreme Court, I am going to defend the honor of this nation.
Here is another one. (Exhibiting another picture.) They crossed seven states. There is the funeral of the fifteen babes that they murdered in Ludlow, Colorado. I have the pictures. Here are some more of the dead that were murdered by those machine guns. Here is some more of them.
(In a low, pathetic tone.) These were noble characters. They never violated laws. They were just asking for more bread to feed their children.
Here, I want to show you. Here is Baldwin-Felts men that left West Virginia and went to Colorado and put the State uniform on them.
Now, men, I don’t care whether you are an operator, or who you are. Is that to the honor of the American nation in the days to come? When future generations read it, what will they think?
They took two machine guns across seven states. They sent the Baldwin- Felts thugs to murder babes in Colorado. The Baldwin-Felts are a product of a brutal system—the brute force development.
[Part II.]
Now I am going to talk, men. I have come up against those things [the brutalities of the Baldwin-Felts gunthug system], perhaps, more than any other one person. I was up in Raleigh, and these Baldwin-Felts turned two machine guns on me—two here, and one here (pointing to each side of her head and her forehead). It was on Sunday and they put their guns against my head, but I took no back water, and they didn’t shoot them. They didn’t pull the trigger.
These Baldwin-Felts men, when they had that machine gun up there in Cabin Creek, turned that machine gun to murder thirty-six men that didn’t even have a pen-knife, and were coming down to meet me. The men screamed, and I jumped out of the buggy and went up and put my hands on the guns and told them not to shoot a bullet. They told me to take my hands off and I told them I had a right to examine them. They made me wade a creek the next day up to here (pointing), but I came back and organized the men.
I am not like you, a pack of damn measly cowards. Damn you. They are so afraid of the operators—so afraid of the managers.
Did you ever watch a mule in a mine. If a mule turns his head around and the boss goes on, the mule takes to his hind legs and says “Get the Hell out of here.”
Here is the thing. We are after this. This paper said today that I came in here and there is always trouble. Well, we are not after trouble. We are not looking for trouble. We are going to do this. The newspaper men are organized. The mine owners are organized and have their Union. The lawyers are in their Union. The sky-pilots are in their Union. The judiciary are in their Union. The merchants are in their Union. Don’t you think we have the same rights they have? Now if you don’t think so, we are going to show you, and we are not going to offer you or your press apology for doing it.
It is so sickening and nauseating to hear men talking today. We are moving.
I was along the Coast and after I had gone, the men sent for me to come back. Everywhere there is that unrest. Now, what is the cause of this unrest? It is injustice.
You cannot stop this thing with police. You cannot stop it with deportation, nor with the assassination of the press. It is the awakening. The night bell of the worker is ringing in the dawn of that new day. Hanging, deporting and shooting them is not going to stop it. There is nothing that will stop it but industrial and social justice.
That is the cause of the unrest. See what the miners are getting. They say, “You ought to see the fine homes they have.” We don’t howl at the fine homes they have got. They robbed us. We paid for their homes and we pay for our own.
They threw them out here at Matewan. Threw the children out—these Baldwin-Felts. Suppose somebody would go to throw them out, they would have all of Baldwin-Felts taking care of them. These children, whose fathers created the wealth, are thrown out on the highways. A Baldwin- Felts-
(Here the speaker was interrupted.)
You muzzle that damn mug of yours up—if you don’t, I will. I am not afraid of 9900 of you. I would clean you up just like a sewer rat.
The time is here. Don’t beg the masters. Don’t be afraid of them. If you want the organization you have got that right, and assert that right. Don’t fear their bullets. How many Baldwin guards have they. I could take an army and clean the whole bunch out. Yes, I could. I could do it so quick you would be asleep while in the game.
The question lies here. The year is here. It is time to line up in our Union, to show no fear of no man. There is nobody that can come in to save you, unless you want to be saved. What would the black man do in slavery? Why is the Union so dangerous today? If it was safe in the days of Lincoln, who took the chattel slavery off your back, why shouldn’t you, the industrial slave, take a lesson? He didn’t shirk. That old black slave went like a man over to the Union.
When I got in town today, you were afraid to look at me. You bunch of damn cowards.
Look at that (showing another picture). This is the blood of the babes that stained the mountain. These babes struck for industrial freedom, for better homes, for better schools, for better manhood, for better womanhood, and you took their blood.
They put $60,000,000.00 into it. How long does it take to make $1,000,000.00? It takes 548 years to make one million dollars, working every day, seven days a week, and off the 4th of July every 25 years, at $5.00 per day.
These fellows put sixty million dollars in it, and they never worked a day in their lives. Where did they get it? They stole it out of the blood of the men they starved and shot.
I was put out of the State [Colorado] in the dead of night. They put me out of the State with five cents in my pocket. In the middle of the night. I got a document from the Governor [James H. Peabody] not to come back in the State. I asked the conductor on the Santa Fe train to take me and he said he would. I told him that I didn’t have any money, and he said that didn’t make any difference. The next morning [March 26, 1904] I didn’t wait to eat my breakfast. I sat down and wrote a letter. I said,
Mr. Governor: You notified your Gods of War by their bayonets to put me out of the state. You sent me a document not to return to the State. I want to notify you that you don’t own this State. If I break the law, the civil courts that Washington and Jefferson established will deal with me. But you have no authority. After eight hours, I am right back in four blocks of your office. What in the hell are you going to do about it?
He is dead now, and I don’t know whether he went up or down, and I don’t care a damn which.
They call us agitators. If it wasn’t for us, we would be in the stone ages. It is the fearless convictions of honest men and women that fear no slander of the press.
I want to say to you in the crucial hour of a trying day, America stands with her arms open to her children. Where will you go? Come with me to old America. Will you come back to the days of Patrick Henry, Jefferson, Lincoln, or will you stay with Schwab and Rockefeller? Which are you going to take? That freedom was not purchased by dollars. It was purchased by the blood of men who believed in justice, and for which seven long years they fought. They did get discouraged sometimes, but they said they would go back. They drove them from the American shore, and it is up to you to say whether you are going to bring back the old America, and not let Baldwin-Felts run it.
I have gone in the factories. I have walked in cotton factories with little children that hadn’t seen their sixth year, working 14 hours a day and eating corn bread. I worked in there until I got the information that appointed the Child Labor Law. I fought it alone. I took children out of the factories in Philadelphia and marched them through to New Jersey. I had to bear the slimy burden of the corporation wrecks. But I succeeded. When I came here, little boys worked in the mines, and went home broke at night.
You build jails and penitentiaries. You have today in the Federal and State penitentiaries and jails, 133,000. I want to ask you men, regardless of what position you hold, if there isn’t something wrong in our nation when young men are filling the jails and penitentiaries.
I am going to say to Baldwin-Felts. You had just as well get a move on you in your damnable business, because we are not going to give up West Virginia until it is all organized.
[Part III.]
I am going to pay McDowell County a visit. They can put me in jail if they want to, but I don’t care, as I can always command more respect when I am in jail.
I knew young Al Baldwin 20 years ago. There were two Baldwins that I knew well, and if anything went wrong, they would come and tell me. One time when I went to Pocahontas the woman didn’t want to give me a room in the hotel, and young Baldwin said, “Yes, you will, give her my room.” I shall always appreciate those two men, but I want to tell you, since you became murderers—since these men are being robbed out of the coal they dig, so that we and our children have been deprived of the necessaries of life, and out of the money of which you are robbed, these Baldwin-Felts men are paid. That wasn’t done in the slavery days. The black slaves were fed and protected, and if they were sick, they were taken care of. [With all due respect to Mother Jones, this is an absurd statement: the enslaved were under the watchful eye of their master, not to protect them, but to maintain their enslavement; they were fed and cared for only in as much as that care profited their master.]
When you have as much American blood in you as the mule has, then you will be a man. I am ashamed of you. You miserable cowards. When you—you miserly un-American fellows making your living this way. You are staying where your brothers were murdered. You have to be a man to protect your brothers.
By God, I am not afraid of the Baldwin-Felts thugs. I would tell Uncle Sam straight that if he doesn’t clean them up, we will.
In 28 years the voice from labor was never raised [at Homestead]. I said to the boys, we have got to go in, and they told me they would put me in jail, and I told them that we built the jails and we had a perfect right to be put in them. Three of us went in to the steel workers. One fellow got up and told us that we were under arrest and told us to get out. I said, “Don’t you know that God Almighty never made a man that knew how to coop a woman up.” They didn’t know that anyone in the world would dare talk to the Chief of Police like that.
We were taken up to jail [August 20, 1919] and 8,000 steel workers gathered around the jail in about eight hours. There were 8,000 men there. I told them to hell with old Carnegie and all the robbers of the country. I went up to headquarters at Boston and told them not to fear the Bolsheviks, the Reds or the I. W. W. because the trouble was that the police were serving the capitalists.
But I don’t bother with them fellows.
[“Stand up like Americans. Join the union.”]
I talk to Uncle Sam. It is up to you men not to be afraid of the newspaper men. Stand up like Americans. Join the union. Do you belong to the United Mine Workers? Say, “Yes, I do.” Put on your hat like an American.
(Pointing to a reporter.) He can write this in his paper tomorrow morning, that from the hair of my head down to my toes, I am a Bolshevik, and I want the world to know it. Tell the Senate and the Congress about it. The White House already knows it.
Yes, I took a whole lot of Bolshevik stuff and sold it, and the money I got out of it, I sent to the men in jail. Uncle Sam knows everything I do. No secret service man had a damn thing to tell on me, because I got ahead of him. He is playing the lap-dog, while I am playing American Womanhood.
The Chief of Police sent nine of his men, and they decided to let us talk, because they were afraid I would go to Washington, and I told him I understood he was there. I told him to take down every statement I made, and send it to the Supreme Court tonight so they could get it in the morning.
I am American enough to fight for my countrymen. You are fighting for the interest of the steel robbers. That is what you are doing, Mr. Chief of Police. I am an American from my head to my toe, and if Bolshevism come to America, then I am a Bolshevik.
The money you are robbed of to pay the Baldwin-Felts men must come back to your pockets. It must nourish and feed your child. I want to say to you, my friends, that we will stay with you. Some day this question will come up and it will be settled. In that grand array to come, a man who will stand up in these brutal days, when these murdered babes from the altar of your Gods, is in that great age to come, that we are so near now, which is breaking in the sunlight, you will get your reward. The voice of freedom is coming across the world’s waters. The dawn is breaking.
The paper made a grand mistake. I walked over my 90th milestone on the 1st day of May. I spent seven months in a military prison. I was arrested and locked up behind iron bars in Duquesne. The warden told me that some manager of the steel workers was to see me, and one fellow said, “Mother Jones, if you could just speak, the good you could do, but the agitation is dangerous.” That is the way of you today. The man that discovered America was an agitator. Did it do any harm? He was an agitator, and a pretty rapid one too. Washington and Jefferson were agitators, and Lincoln too.
They have no answer to give. The bosses have no answer to give when you stand up and say that you are an American, and you are not going to enslave me. Join the Union and don’t be afraid of anybody. This is our fight; we have got to fight them. We have got to save them and we have got to educate them.
I am going to McDowell County, and they can put me in jail, but you know a woman 90 years old in jail will scare the hell out of them.
During the steel strike, I got a telegram from the miners in Europe, and they said, “We send you greetings. You are not asking for near as much as we now have, even though you live in America.” That is in England. When they went to load a steamer to take ammunition and stuff over to Poland, the men found out that it was to fight the Bolsheviks, and they took it off, and the men said, “We don’t steer your ship.”
[Photographs and emphasis added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones Princeton WV Speech Aug 15, 1920, Steel Speeches, p230
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
The Richmond Daily Register
(Richmond, Kentucky)
-Aug 6, 1920
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86069168/1920-08-06/ed-1/seq-1/
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
-Pages 224-231 (246 of 361)
Speech at Princeton WV from
Army Intelligence Report of Aug 15, 1920
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/246/mode/2up
IMAGE
Mother Jones w Workman, Hatfield n Fry, UMWJ p11, July 15, 1920
& Detail of Mother Jones
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2hg5AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PT328
See also:
For notes re Mother’s Speech at Princeton, see:
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks at Princeton, W. V.
-Near Headquarters of Baldwin-Felts Gunthugs, Aug 15, 1920
Part I + Part II + Part III
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for July 1920
Part I + Part II
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They’ll Never Keep Us Down — Hazel Dickens