Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for May 1920, Part I: Found in Washington, DC: Age 90, Still Fit to Battle “Wall Street Sewer Rats.”
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 19, 1920
-Mother Jones News for May 1920, Part I
Found in Washington, D. C., Age 90 and Fit to Fight Another 40 Years
From The Washington Times of May 4, 1920:
“SISSIES”
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Mother Jones on 90th Birthday Pays Respects
to Prohibition Advocates.
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‘SUFFS” GIVE HER PAIN
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Wants to Live Forty Years More
to Fight “Wall Street Rats.”
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The Topeka Daily State Journal May 4, 1920
Mother Jones came to town today breezily announcing that she had just observed her ninetieth birthday and was fit for forty more years of battle against “them Wall Street sewer rats.”
It was suggested that she might live long enough to see a woman President of the United States.
“May God save us!” she said.
She looked sharply at the reporter.
[She said:]
Maybe you’re one of them fools who’s worrying about the women not getting the ballot. It won’t hurt the country any if they don’t. It’ll help. Colorado elected some good men until them women out there got to voting.
The women of today give me a pain. Whining for the ballot like sick cats! Do you find ’em at home rearing their babes in fine ideals. No, you find ’em at the club uplifting the nation smoking cigarettes or dancing the fol-de-rol, looking like naked hussies. Ask ’em why they don’t put their nightgowns on and they get insulted. Say ‘Hell’ before them like an honest woman and they faint with shame. And where d’ye find their babes? At the picture show.
Reminiscing, she lamented the passing of the era “when the America of Patrick Henry was still on the throne and people were clean and fine and you got pure whiskey.”
“That was seventy-five years ago,” she said. “None of them prohibition sissies running around taking nourishment out of the mouths of honest working men.”
[Newsclip added.]
From the New York News “Picture Newspaper” of May 7, 1920:
From the Washington Evening Star of May 10, 1920:
Mother Jones Arrives Here.
Mother Jones of the United Mine Workers, known throughout the United States as an exponent of labor, arrived in Washington today to address a meeting tonight at Typographical Temple.
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From the Washington Evening Star of May 11, 1920:
TAXI MEN PROTEST AT MASS MEETING
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International President Predicts They
Will Have Equal Privileges.
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Before July the individual backers in the District will be enjoying equal privileges with the taxicab companies in front of Union station and other public places, L. A. Sterne, local organizer for the American Federation of Labor, predicted at a mass meeting of chauffeurs and teamsters in Typographical Temple last night. The meeting was under auspices of the local branch of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen and Helpers and was called primarily to hear Daniel J. Tobin of Indianapolis, president of the international.
President Tobin told the chauffeurs that in every other large city in the country their comrades have the privileges at the depots and other places for which the Washington hackers are now fighting.
Interest at Capitol.
Members of Congress are beginning to take an interest in the rights of the individual hackers, the international president said, because they are becoming tired of paying the rates charged by the taxicab companies and would like to see competition.
Both Mr. Tobin and Mother Jones, the veteran feminine leader of the mine workers, indulged in scathing denunciation of conditions which, they said, prevail in this country today.
“Decisions being rendered in our courts,” Tobin asserted, “would cause revolution in France or Germany and destruction of property in England.”
The speaker said he has great respect for religious and fraternal organizations, but he has failed to see where either of them won equality or justice for workingmen until the trade union movement came into existence.
Mother Jones Speaks When Ninety.
Although Mother Jones celebrated her ninetieth birthday anniversary a week ago, she was full of vigor and life last night as she denounced capitalism and the action of the courts in jailing labor leaders. Referring to the stories of radicalism and red propaganda in this country, the white-haired champion of organized labor said:
I am red enough to want this country brought back to the America that was ushered in by Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, and not the America of Wall street.
Turning from the national to the local labor situation, Mother Jones took the breath of her audience when she said she never did care much for the trade unionists of Washington. The labor movement in the District, she said, “has always been too d—– respectable. I like fighters.”
Samuel De Nedrey of the Typographical Union and James P. Egan of the A. F. of L. also spoke.
Note:I have been unable to determine what subject Mother discussed with Tumulty. The papers were more interested in her row with suffragists and prohibitionists. But in a letter to W. V. Governor Morgan, Dec 27, 1921, she expressed “deep appreciation” to Mr. Tumulty, secretary to President Wilson. See pages 238-9: The Correspondence of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M. Steel
U of Pittsburgh Press, 1985 https://books.google.com/books?id=EZ2xAAAAIAAJ
He was the most courteous, kindly man I ever met in that position… Some one asked Mr. Tumilty one day, what brought me so often to the White House, and he replied, “the doors are always open-she never comes for herself, it is always for some poor suffering person or the safety of the nation”.
Note:Mother associated the suffragist and prohibitionist movements with upper class club women who “know nothing of how the other half lives”. In May of 1914, she came to New York City fresh from battlefield of Colorado, and found that mostly what an audience of upper-class women wanted to discuss with her was The Vote for Women, a subject which meant next to nothing, at the time, to the men, women and children slaughtered at Ludlow.
See:
The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-of May 23, 1914 Mother Jones Speaks to 500 Women in NYC
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