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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday July 25, 1920
-Mother Jones News for June 1920, Part II
Found Speaking in Williamson, Mingo County, West Virginia
From Hellraisers Journal of June 23, 1920:
Williamson, West Virginia – Sunday Evening June 20, 1920
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting in Front of Courthouse.[Excerpts from Part II of Speech of Mother Jones]
[Mother Jones on Agitators.]
I went to a meeting and the secretary of the steel workers went with me. He got up to speak. They took him. The next fellow got up; they took him. I got up. They arrested me. I wouldn’t walk. They had to ride me. A big old Irish buck of a policeman said, “You will have to walk.” “No, I can’t.” “Can you walk?” “No, I can’t.” “We will take you down to jail and lock you up behind the bars.”
After a few minutes the chief came along.
“Mother Jones?”
“Yes, sir.”“There is some of the steel managers here want to speak to you.”
“All right, let the gentlemen come in. I am sorry gentlemen, I haven’t got chairs to give you.” (Laughter.)One good fellow says, “Now, Mother Jones, this agitation is dangerous. You know these are foreigners, mostly.”
“Well, that is the reason I want to talk to them. I want to organize them into the United States as a Union so as to show them what the institution stands for.”“They don’t understand English,” he says.
I said, “I want to teach them English. We want them into the Union so they will understand.”
“But you can’t do that. This agitation won’t do. Your radicalism has got to go.”
I said, “Wait a minute, sir. You are one of the managers of the steel industry here?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t the first emigrant that landed on our shore an agitator?”
“Who was he?”
“Columbus. Didn’t he agitate to get the money from the people of Spain? Didn’t he agitate to get the crew, and crossed the ocean and discovered America for you and I?“Wasn’t Washington an agitator? Didn’t the Mayflower bring over a ship-full of agitators? Didn’t we build a monument to them down there in Massachusetts. I want to ask you a question. Right today in and around the City of Pittsburgh I believe there has assembled as many as three hundred thousand people [bowing the knee to Jesus during Easter season.] Jesus was an agitator, Mr. Manager. What in hell did you hang him for if he didn’t hurt your pockets?” He never made a reply. He went away.
He was the manager of the steel works; he was the banker; he was the mayor; he was the judge; he was the chairman of the city council. Just think of that in America—and he had a stomach on him four miles long and two miles wide. (Laughter.) And when you looked at that fellow and compared him with people of toil it nauseated you.
[The Woman’s Ballot and the Women and Children of Ludlow.]
There is another phase to this that I want to call your attention to. The mother today is away from the home; she is out with a club. The child is raising itself. You go on the cars today, or go anywhere else, you let a lot of young boys and girls swing you aside. I saw a couple the other day knock down a man with crutches. They are not developed because the woman is out playing parlor politics instead of raising the children of the nation. I see this thing from all over. I have been down in Mexico, and have had talks with Madero and Huerta and with others, and have studied the thing, and there is a danger our nation is facing.
You talk of the woman’s ballot. Let me say to you, my friends, I have got no confidence, and I will tell you why. I have been in Utah, where women and babies were turned out on the highways; I have been in Colorado, when two hundred men were bridled like dogs, put onto box cars, sent out of the State, and landed in the desert, walked twenty miles without a drink of water. I have seen it all. I am one myself that landed out there in the dead of night with five cents in my pocket—those human monsters. And never until the heart of woman changes can you get that human development in the hearts of men and women.
I have in my home the pictures of fifteen coffins filled with innocent babies murdered in Ludlow, and the women had had the ballot twenty-eight years. I have got some story. I don’t belong to the women’s club nor your social settlement gang. I belong to the fighting army of the working class that is going to break those chains, and, by God, we have got to do it. (Applause.)
[The Traitor’s Whip.]
Another game they are playing. I read one of your papers yesterday morning, about the miners. I went through the mines in Pennsylvania, from Pittsburgh to Brownsville along the Monongahela River. I helped to organize them in the early days. We made no discrimination between the colored man and the white man. The colored man is not responsible for having a black skin. He didn’t make that skin himself. Nature did it, and if you were born where the colored man’s ancestors were born you would be black, too. He is not at fault. And let me say to you I have found more of the human in the black man than we give them credit for. I have had my experience in the civil war.
In the New River when they were thrown out in the rain there wasn’t a white man offered shelter. I walked twelve miles with a baby on my back, the mother with another in her arms, a little boy who hadn’t seen eleven years, and had two years in the mines. We counted the ties for twelve miles in the rain with those babies, and a black mammy gave us shelter.
I want to make a statement here. There is no race in the world that has made the progress the black race has made in the last fifty years. (Applause.) I know it. I have been to their colleges; I visit their homes. And I want to say, my friends, the newspaper man, this is not the time to sow poison. This is the time to sow harmony. If you are an American don’t sow poison today in your press. Don’t take the traitor’s whip and use it to poison these workers against each other. I want to say to you newspaper men, “Arise like a man. Don’t bother about the dollars the companies give you. If you can’t make a living out of the paper, go out and work. Carry to your grave a sense of honor.”
[“You can’t make me take back water.”]
I understand there is a superintendent here has some goods on me. …..
I want to say to the superintendent here that…I am used to that slander. You don’t make me take back water. I am not of that type. I am a fighting American. (Applause.) You can’t make me take back water….
I go back to Palestine. I didn’t see a welfare worker; I didn’t see a church paper; I didn’t see a club woman or a Sunday School teacher kneeling at the feet of Christ in Palestine. Not one. It was that woman cursed by economic wrong, when he gave her the right to a grander civilization and better economic age, it was she who knelt at His sacred feet and wiped them with her hair. It was on the hand of that woman Christ placed his hand. It was she who went to the tomb in early dawn.
Mr. Superintendent, I am not afraid of your slimy tongue or slimy hand. Go to it. You can’t bother Mother Jones. She is one of the type of American of the Revolution. I don’t belong to the modern capitalists. I belong to the revolutionary age where men and women stood and fought. I belong to that type of woman who stood in Boston when they said: “If you don’t stop working for the emancipation of slavery we will shoot you dead.” The woman said, “Shoot now. We don’t believe in actual slavery.” And I say to you Mr. Superintendent, throw out your slime now. I don’t live in industrial slavery, and by the God that reigns above I will fight you and every damned robber in America. (Great applause.) I am not afraid of God when I go up there, and if I am not afraid of Him I am not afraid of your slimy tongue.
[“We are going to clean up West Virginia.”]
In Logan County during the war you were paying for twenty-five deputy sheriffs to keep Mother Jones out, and you said to the Government’s representatives that the only way she could get in was over that hill, she could cut the wires and get in before you knew it. I want to say to the robbers of Logan that Mother Jones is going in, and she is not going to cut the wires, but she will cut hell out of you.(Applause.) We are going to clean up West Virginia. We are going to put her on the map in Washington as the leading state of civilization and Americanism, and we are going to take the flag that was bought by blood away from the blood-sucking robbers and murderers and we are going to raise it and live under the flag. We are going to take something out of your damned skulls and put something inside. We are going to fight for the Nation and State. Get out here in the fight. This is where the fight is. Not in politics. I don’t care who you elect in Washington or in the State. We will civilize the people and we will get more money for you, and we will get shorter hours for you, and we will get better homes, and there will be no fellows coming to throw you out of houses, I will tell you that now.
Now, I want to pay my respects to your officers here. I want to say to the lawyers, “Get a move on you. There is 120,000 of you in this country and you put 133,000 in the jails and penitentiaries. Pretty good for you.” (Laughter.)
There are four or five or six hundred men here. You are going to organize. Don’t be afraid of anybody. Get a move on you. I am not going out of West Virginia, now, until I organize every working man in it. I am going to stay with you, and then when I get you all organized we are going to have a general dinner and we are going to invite the general manager to eat with us. Be good boys. Then we will go into Pennsylvania to the steel robbers. I am going back to this Norfolk and Western, and I am going into Logan. I am not going to take any guns. I am going in there with the America flag; that is my banner, and no rotten robber or gunman can meddle with me, because I will just raise Hell with him. (Applause.)
[Photograph added.]
From The Cincinnati Enquirer of June 29, 1920:
POLICE FEAR RIOT.
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Miners in West Virginia Town
Are Expected To Clash.SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE ENQUIRER.
Bluefield, W. Va., June 28- Two hundred special Deputy sheriffs are patrolling the streets of Panther tonight, a mining town 50 miles west of this city, as a result of the expected visit of “Mother Jones” and other organizers of the United Mine Workers Union.
Mohawk and Wharncliffe mines were organized recently and the management of the mines closed the mines and discharged every man and ordered every family to vacate the houses.
Organizers and union miners are expected hourly at Panther, and more than 100 officers are on the scene to prevent a clash between organizers and miners not in sympathy with union organizers.
Feeling between factions are tense, and should organizers and union miners arrive in force a clash with terrible loss of life, as in the Matewan fray, might result.
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From The Washington Times of June 30, 1920:
“MOTHER JONES” MAKES VISIT TO WHITE HOUSE
“Mother Jones,” known for more than a score of years as “The Angel of the Miners,” and a picturesque figure in most of the strikes, accompanied by Edgar Wallace, formerly legislative agent of the United Mine Workers in the Capital, called at the White House today and discussed politics with Joseph P. Tumulty, Secretary to the President, for more than a half hour.
“You know there is a great campaign in progress and I am intensely interested in the re-election of that great man, Woodrow Wilson,” said the aged agitator after the conference. “We need a friend of all the people in the White House during these trying times, and not some puppet of the capitalistic interests.”
“Mother Jones” said that she got no hint as to the President’s views in regard to any of the vital questions before San Francisco convention. She said she had hoped to find out whether he President would run for a third term, but had been unsuccessful, Secretary Tumulty refusing to say-if he knew….
Note: Emphasis added throughout.
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Every Damned Robber, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel p222
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735035254105/viewer#page/1/mode/2up
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting
in Front of Court House at Williamson, West Virginia
-Sunday Evening June 20, 1920, Part II
The Cincinnati Enquirer
(Cincinnati, Ohio)
-June 29, 1920
https://www.newspapers.com/image/34848759/
The Washington Times
(Washington, District of Columbia)
-June 30, 1920
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1920-06-30/ed-1/seq-17/
IMAGE
Mother Jones, NYC Dly Ns p12, May 7, 1920
https://www.newspapers.com/image/391486555/
See also:
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
https://books.google.com/books?id=vI-xAAAAIAAJ
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for June 1920, Part I: Found in Mingo County, WV: “Workers Must Be Waked From Their Sleep.”
For Letters to and from Mother Jones, June 1920, see:
Pages 202-205
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/viewer#page/254/mode/2up
June 15, 1920, to MJ from Terence V. Powderly:
TVP wishes Mother would come home and rest. Note: TVP kept a room in his house at WDC for Mother Jones.
June 18, 1920, from MJ in WV to John H. Walker in IL:
“We are having some hot times over in West Virginia…..”
June 25, 1920, to MJ in WV from JHW:
Family has moved to Springfield, hopes MJ will make up her mind to come and stay with him and his family. Note: JHW prominent in UMWA and IL Federation of Labor.
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The Matewan Massacre – Hammertowne