The future of this country is
in the hands of the women,
but they must wake up
and they must demand.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday September 21, 1916
Mother Jones Interviewed During July Visit to Atlanta, Georgia
From The Atlanta Constitution of July 9, 1916:
“Mother” Jones Will Reach Atlanta
Monday on a Secret Mission
—–“Mother” Jones, famous internationally for her work for miners, will arrive in Atlanta Monday morning on a mission, the nature of which she refuses to disclose in advance, and for a visit of indefinite duration.
She is coming directly from Washington, D. C., and will be met upon arrival by a party of local friends, headed by Jerome Jones, who Saturday received a telegram from William Green, Chicago, secretary of the United Mine Workers of America, announcing “Mother” Jones intention to pay this city a call.
The visit of “Mother” Jones to Atlanta while the general assembly is in session would in itself be somewhat significant, because she is noted as a lobbyist and worker for laws which are intended to brighten and lighten the lot of the laborer. Many take her visit just at this time, with a factory inspection-child labor and factory labor bill on the calendar for debate and vote in the house during the week, as especially significant, and in all probability the week’s legislative grind will be materially enlivened by her presence in the city, if not in the lobbies and the galleries at the capitol.
“Mother” Jones-she is known by no other name-is a unique and at once an extraordinary American woman. About 80 years old, she has devoted the greater part of her life thus far to the cause of labor, and most of her years have been spent in the mining camps of the west, although she is equally well-known among the underground workers of every other section of the country and in Canada.
—–
[Photograph added.]
From The Atlanta Constitution of July 11, 1916:
“MOTHER” JONES FAILS TO
ARRIVE ON MONDAY
—–“Mother” Jones, champion of organized labor, had not put in her appearance in Atlanta at a late hour Monday night in spite of the fact that labor leaders of the city were looking for her. Every train from Washington, D. C., was met by Atlanta labor officials and many telegrams addressed to her were received here.
From The Atlanta Constitution of July 12, 1916:
Mother Jones, Laborers’ Friend,
Confers with Local Leaders
—–
Picturesque Character Here on Flying Visit-
Is Her Visit Inspired by Pending
Legislation Before General Assembly?-
She Will Not Answer.
—–
Note: the above article was reprinted in the July 18th edition of Hellraisers Journal.
From The Atlanta Constitution of July 13, 1916:
Women to Blame for Attitude Of Men
Toward Them in Georgia,
Says One and Only Mother Jones
—–
By Isma Dooly.“The women of Georgia are to blame for the attitude of the men of Georgia toward women. Women make men what they are, whether they live in the state of Georgia or any other state. They bear the children who grow to be men, and if they implanted into the minds of their children the right ideals, the boy, when he becomes the man, would know how to deal fairly with a woman, and there would be less prostitution among girls and women,” said Mother Jones very firmly as she reached over the counter of the Ansley hotel, glanced carefully at the bill she had asked for, and removed exactly the right change from her bag. She arrived in Atlanta Tuesday on business of her own, which she kept to herself.
She continued to talk at that most complex moment of all others in a woman’s life when she is getting ready to “catch a train.” She did not drop her bag, her handkerchief or her umbrella, nor did she have to adjust her hat in any way. It was a small close-fitting one, that projected just enough to shade her eyes, and it could have braved the brim-lifting force of a gulf storm. Her shiny white hair was drawn so smoothly back she needed no net to stay it, and the color in her cheek was like the petal of pale pink rose.
Yes, women have a power they have never even dreamed of yet, but they do not use it. They talk about independence, and are becoming more dependent every day in their boasted evolution.
Why, if you women in Georgia used your power the Georgia legislature would not have dared to kill the bill which prayed that the post-graduate course of your university be opened to women-thus driving from your state to other states hundreds of young women, who, for one reason or another, must carry the pack of labor on their backs. Whether a woman earns her wage in the professions, in business, in the sweat shop or in white slavery, it is labor. It has come to the woman without a home and the woman who must help support the home.
Mother Jones here stopped to inhale the air, which was refreshing, as she left the lobby of the hotel, and she smiled a good wholesome sort of smile at the gentleman who had arrived to be her escort to the train.
No Taxi for Her.
“I will call a taxi, ‘mother,'” he said. “You must ride to the train.”
“Ride to the train? Why ride?” said Mother Jones. “Won’t I be riding the rest of the day and night on the train? Why begin riding before I get there? I will walk.”
Right here I saw the value of leadership. She inspired me with a certain confidence in myself I had not felt.
“Let her walk,” I said as firmly as she could have done it to the gentlemen carrying her bag. “I wish to talk to her!”
“Certainly, ladies,” he said gently, and walked along quietly and did not interrupt except to acquiesce in everything Mother Jones said.
Mother Jones knows labor, because, as she says her home is where labor is in trouble. She is not motherly in the sense that the world uses the term She has the mother spirit measured by the power of its extension through the very trenches of humanity rather than by a personal intensity. Sex does not enter apparently into her reasoning and reckoning. She thinks of people as individuals and in groups, and she is impatiently intolerant of what she called the “cant and sentimentality of things.”
Education the One Way to Reform.
She throws a great deal of responsibility of today’s civilization on the mother part of humanity, and believes that education is the one way to reform-the kind of education that would make people see the duty nearest them, and the common sense things in life.
She believes that the world needs the education which would bring them nearer to the problems of life and society as they are and not as studied in the confines of the reform club, in the temperance league or in what she termed “so-called welfare workers,” or “fad workers in the slums.”
She laughed when she mentioned the “visiting committee” going from the tea table to the social settlement to help humanity.
[She asked aggressively:]
What do they know about it? What do they know about the home which produces sweatshop workers and the armies of human beings maimed and crazed by unceasing labor? You would know what I mean if you had lived in the trenches of these conditions and lived with and through them as I have.
When women with their God-given power take up the cudgels in the right way and use that power, when as mothers they cease the cringing which is their attitude toward men in their sentimentality and nonsense; when they tell their sons the meaning of a good woman, and rear them to respect women and their rights, then you will find your legislators in this and every other state voting as just men on all proposition affecting men and women.
Talking temperance or studying oratory to preach suffrage is not going to make better men or better women. It is the spiritual training men and women get when they are children that makes them what they ought to be.
Every sane man and woman knows that temperance in all things is a great factor in civilization, but these people-men and women who preach it-what are they giving the men and women they would save? What are they putting into their lives? In what way are they lightening the pack of labor on the back of the woman who is breeding men for the nation, but must see them chained in a relentless system, destructive to civilization, just when civilization is demanding the most?
About women voting? Why, I do not know what they would do with the ballot if they got it. Those that have it-
But here the gentleman with us ventured to suggest to Mother Jones it was nearly train time, and I said a hurried good-by.
The only thing which makes me doubt that which impressed me as a superb sincerity and fearlessness of purpose in her was the glib way she told of her age-84 years. She not only does not look it, but I have always believed, with the British playwright, that a woman who would tell her exact age is a little to be distrusted. She is apt to tell anything.
From The Macon Daily Telegram of July 16, 1916:
“MOTHER JONES” PUTS BLAME FOR
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS
ON SHOULDERS OF WOMEN
—–
“If They Would Only Wake Up,”
Says “Guardian Angel” of Labor,
“Oppression Could Be Exterminated.”
—–
But “Mother Jones” says Fight Will Be Won
When People Become Sane and
Forget Money Madness.
—–By EMMA T. MARTIN.
If you haven’t heard “Mother Jones” in the flesh, you have missed something more than worth while. When asked over the phone if I might interview her, “Yes,” was the prompt reply.
“When may I come?”
“Come now,” and zip went the phone. Her every tone, every word vibrates with strength and power, even command. I stood not upon the order of my going, but went. She was sitting by the table reading. As I entered, she glanced up and eyed me from head to foot-and with disfavor, this I instinctively felt, and for a few seconds there was no conversation, but the scrutiny continued, the scales were being balanced and I wondered if my end would go down with a thud. Meanwhile I looked at her. She simply oozed strength and human power, with unconcealed scorn for shams, weaknesses and the powers that be.
Our eyes met. I smiled, but hers were as steady as the sun. Presently, however, they twinkled, and I asked:
“Do you travel alone?”
“CERTAINLY!” and her eyes snapped. “I am not one of those parlor ornaments that heave to have an escort. Cool evenings you have here, exceedingly like the Pacific coast,” and her voice was as cool as the evening, eyes likewise.
“Won’t you talk to me, saying things about your life and your work that you know people want to hear?”
“I am too tired,” but her voice was soft, and there was silence for the space of, well, seconds. How could I make her talk?
“Tell me why you first became interested-” both hands went up.
Born to Fight for Humanity.
Don’t you ask that question; don’t you dare! They all ask it. Don’t you know that NATURE produces people to fight for humanity, that the principle is inborn, and that all through life that withinness is growing and developing, forming into a steady purpose and preparedness, so that when the time comes, when the call is heard, the response is instantaneous, with no questions asked and no reasons given?
-and she was off.
It is the natural instinct of those who love humanity to fight for the extermination of all oppression. The trouble is with the women. If they would only wake up! If they would only see the need and go en masse and demand that wrongs be righted!
“Aren’t the women working? For years they have been begging-”
Yes, that’s just it-begging, and only a few of them at that. Do you ever get anything from a man by begging? You’ve got to demand, and do it as a whole, or some fool will say, “Oh, only a few females are asking this; we will pass it by,” and they do. Yes, I blame the women; they are so afraid they will lose man’s “respect” that they sit idly by and see the children of the land grow up in ignorance, depravity and deformity. The mothers and the would-be mothers could control the situation if they would, but they must do it as a whole, a few can’t. If the women were awake to their duty and their responsibility, there would be no children working in your factories, there would be no illiteracy, there would be no degraded homes, no drunkenness, no poor, half-starved girls and boys with deformed bodies and weak minds driven to absolute ruin and despair by economic conditions. The future of this country is in the hands of the women, but they must wake up and they must demand. We did it in Pennsylvania and you can do it in Georgia.
No Real Economic Fight.
I worked in your Georgia factories twenty years ago, and I know conditions now-there has never been a fight made on economic conditions. Yes, there has been some dabbling around the edges, but never any effort to get at the root of the matter. The efforts made have been to cure effect instead of to remove causes. That palliates, but it does not cure. All the temperance unions, women’s clubs, suffrage associations, church guilds, etc., will never bring about proper conditions; this can be done only by a complete change of base. Here again I blame the women. They degrade labor by their physical and mental attitude toward it. If someone does my housework and does it well, she is worthy of my respect. How many women really respect labor or the laborer?
When these so-called philanthropists, these female cats come prowling around the homes of working people, lift their paws laden with the life-blood of human beings, and say, “oh, how dirty they are, and how filthy the homes, and the wretched creatures drink, ough!” I feel like scratching their eyes out. They have done nothing all their wretched lives but help the money pirates squeeze the very soul out of the future men and women of the nation. Some of them then want to build rescue homes and homes of correction, brand the children of the land and send them there.
Talk about drink, talk about degradation, talk depravity-what else is left to those who have never known a decent bed, palatable food or sufficient clothing to hide their nakedness? I’d stake my life on the assertion that if the working class was paid a living wage, paid enough to enable them to feel self-respect, enough to make them feel that they were people and not brutes, dissipation and degradation, sickness and sin would disappear, or diminish to comparative nothingness, for the laborers’ whole mental attitude would be changed. Men and women go into sin and dissipation through hopelessness.
“What about those who have been reared in the atmosphere to which you refer, in homes of refinement?”
Not Reared, They Just Grew.
They weren’t reared, they just growed. The fathers were too busy getting money and the mothers too busy spending it and in being shocked at conditions they themselves produced to attend to the mental and moral and physical development of their children. And yet I blame the women, not many men would build up multi-millions without the encouragement of women. And the preachers, poor things. I feel sorry for them. If they see and realize they don’t dare open their lips in protests for fear of the damned old cats. Every one of them would lift her shining paws and say: “The idea! Did you hear the horrid thing? How dare he talk to us that way, to us? I’ll never go to hear him again,” and so Mr. Preacher’s job is gone.
And oh, God, these women who have dog-babies. I followed one a whole block in New York city. The dog was dressed up in a most wonderful way-like she’d dress a baby if she had one, poor thing-and every few minutes she would kiss dog-baby. Even the dog looked at her in disgust. There is something wrong with the character of the women who do such things.
Have you ever studied factory conditions? Don’t do it unless you want your soul to bleed. Did you ever taste the food of these working people? Rotten stuff. At its best it produces only muscle, never nerve and brain-the “system” sees to that.
Believes In Personal Liberty.
There are many sides to the temperance question-the liquor question. When I was in San Francisco I heard a young girl ranting on the subject, and if you could have seen how she had that poor body of hers arrayed.
Here Mother Jones again looked at my dress, poor old dress, two years old, but Mother Jones doesn’t “dress,” she just wears clothes.
[Continued this humanity-lover:]
They told me this girl was educated, had been to all the fine colleges in America and in Europe, but she had only book learning, her soul had never been touched. If people are given homes and firesides, given a chance to live so as to have self-respect, they will never develop vicious tastes. But money! Money! the world is mad about money. What do you suppose has become of Hetty Green? With all her getting, do you suppose she can buy a seat in heaven? God Almighty doesn’t want her money. If she offered it to Jesus he would kick her out, yet how she oppressed, how she oppressed to get it.
And Carnegie-the would-be philanthropist. What about those tombstones in Homestead? He burned and starved and robbed us, and now he is becoming a so-called philanthropist on our bones, on the bones of those whose souls and bodies he murdered, victims who never know a moment’s sunshine or a descent meal. There are many sad [stories?] could be written, will be written, of the black deeds of these money pirates. Some day the world will know how they got their wealth.
“Why don’t you write it?”
I haven’t the time. People in the trenches make history, the onlookers write it. Some day when we meet again, or, perhaps, I’ll write you, yes, when this rush of business is over I’ll write you, of some of the things I’ve lived through, and you may tell the world about it. But I must fight, I must fight until the end. We are told that it isn’t “lady-like” to fight in the trenches, but it is very womanly when one is fighting for home and children-fighting for a chance to live.
“How long will the fight last?”
Until men and women become sane, my dear; at present they are mad-mad for gold.
“Were conditions as bad in Colorado as portrayed by the papers?”
Brutalized, Not Civilized.
The half was never told. It would take a Hugo to depict those horrors, and America has never yet produced a Hugo. But that was no worse than many other fights we’ve had, just more publicity was given it. If the horrors of these strikes could be put into print, it would not be believed that a nation could be so brutal in the interest of dollars. I have seen unborn children kicked to death, yet we think we are civilized-brutalized, I say. We will never be civilized until there is brotherly love, until men and women can have homes-not dens-until mothers can carry their children in peace and quiet, bear them in decency, rear them in a self-respecting atmosphere, and educate them to “love their neighbor as themselves.”
When children are bred born and reared under the nerve-wracking whiz of machinery, can they be expected to have sound minds and bodies? They are conceived and brought forth under deformed conditions? What can the result be? Is it any wonder we “strike?” Is it any wonder we fight? The world doesn’t realize it, but we are fighting for the life of the nation, and it’s a great fight. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. It is the greatest fight the world has ever known; it’s a fight to the finish, and we will win-that is, Right will win.
Once I was kidnaped, taken away from my home after dark, put on the train and at midnight put off in a strange place without a cent of money or a change of clothes. Another time I was locked in a cellar on a cement floor for twenty-six days. No, I didn’t die, that’s too easy, the fight was to live, and if I never die until they kill me that way, I’ll live to see the whole “system” in hell. But it’s a great old game and we are making progress. We have been held in bondage through ignorance, but in spite of ’em we are learning. The labor organizations have done more for the uplift of humanity during the last thirty years than all the churches have ever done. I know-
-and she snapped her fingers as well as her eyes.
Full Freedom For All.
My law of life would be full freedom. It is always the prohibited thing we want, we never think of it until we are told we “musn’t.” If every gutter in Atlanta was running with liquor and every man had a cup, not a soul would touch it-too common. I don’t want any body of men telling me what to eat or drink or wear, I know what I want, and I want to fight when the social settlement cats raise their eye brows and say, “Oh, how horrible” when one of our poor pathetic girls takes a drink. These cats drink when they want to and they have nothing but smiles for the capitalist who builds homes, yachts and places on the backs of these poor girls.
Do you know the greatest time I ever had, the only real fun, real sport of my life? It was that time in New York when I saw “society” for the first time, saw how the rich behave themselves. It is the greatest circus on earth, and yet, how pitiful! They looked down on me with contempt, with scorn-do you wonder I enjoyed telling the whole damn business to go to hell?
And through it all I blame the women. If they spent less time slandering and more time educating, if there were fewer banquets and more women-women, you know, don’t go to banquets, “ladies” may-things would be better. If the women would put less on their fool heads and more into them, with considerably more on their bodies a change would come. I often look at the way they decorate their carcasses-$400 hat on their skulls and not a d—- thing inside.
With conditions as they are, is it any wonder that we have deficients, incompetents, deformities, idiots, imbeciles? Is it any wonder that girls go to ruin and boys to the penitentiary or the gallows, every one a sacrifice upon the altar of accursed gold? But the light is breaking, and some day, some day, the people, the women, will wake up.
—–
SOURCE
The Atlanta Constitution
(Atlanta, Georgia)
-July 9, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916039/
-July 11, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916161/
-July 12, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916175/
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916180/
-July 13, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916212/
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones in Atlanta, Georgia, Where Legislation on Child Labor Is Pending, Gives Interview
https://weneverforget.org/7-18-1916-hellraisers-journal-mother-jones-in-atlanta-georgia-where-legislation-on-child-labor-is-pending-gives-interview/
The Macon Daily Telegram
(Macon, Georgia)
-July 16, 1916, page 12
http://www.genealogybank.com/
IMAGE
Mother Jones, Atlanta Constitution, July 12, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/26916175/
See also:
Autobiography of Mother Jones
-ed by Mary Field Parton
Kerr, 1925
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/autobiography/autobiography.html
Chp V. Victory at Arnot, Pennsylvania
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/autobiography/autobiography.html#V
Chp XII. How the Women Mopped Up Coaldale
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/autobiography/autobiography.html#XII
Hetty Green
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Green
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