Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 13, 1922 West Virginia Miners and Their Families Are Destitute and Suffering
From The New York Times of February 12, 1922:
ASK AID FOR 35,000 STRIKING MINERS. ———- West Virginia Labor Committee Here Seeks Food, Clothes and Medicines for Idle Men. ———-
Thirty-five thousand striking miners and their families are destitute and suffering in West Virginia, according to a statement yesterday by a committee of West Virginia labor officials who came to New York seeking food, clothing and medical aid for the unemployed workers and their dependents.
The committee said it also would appeal to the national Red Cross organization at Washington and to the convention of the United Mine Workers at Indianapolis next Tuesday for emergency help. The committee consisted of William T. Harris, President of the West Virginia State Federation of Labor; Fred Mooney, Secretary-Treasurer, District 17, United Mine Workers, and Frank W. Snyder, editor of The West Virginia Federationist.
The committee said a survey of conditions showed that more than 70,000 West Virginia miners were out of work, many of them since the signing of the armistice.
High wages had nothing to do with the unemployment, the committee said, pointing out that coal was being sold in the unionized Kanawha fields at lower prices than in the non-union Guyan region. Kanawha coal, they said, was selling at $2.15 a ton f. o. b. mines last week, and in Guyan at $2.35.
In the face of the unemployment, the commutes said, the operators were attempting wholesale evictions. Many miners and their families had been forced out of their homes, but these evictions had been checked by the intervention of the Department of Labor at Washington.
“In the mining fields,” said Mr. Mooney, “there are 35,000 destitute families. They are without food and clothing. The bread winners in some of these families have not worked more than three months since the armistice. The families have been living from hand to mouth on charity furnished by their neighbors and friends.”
The committee arranged with the American Civil Liberties Union here to raise a relief fund here in New York.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 12, 1912 New York, New York – Children of Lawrence Strikers Welcomed by Socialists
From The New York Call of February 10, 1912:
From The New York Times of February 11, 1912:
150 STRIKE WAIFS FIND HOMES HERE
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Great Throng Waits in Cold to Give Warm
Welcome to Children from Lawrence, Mass.
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BANNERS OF RED WAVE ———- And Crowd Sings the Marseillaise
–Children Answer with Strikers’ Cry –Homes Offered to Many More. ———-
The Grand Central Station was the scene of a great demonstration last night when 150 boys and girls, ranging in age from 2 to 12 years, arrive here from Lawrence, Mass. They are the children of the striking textile workers, and they come here to be cared for by working people of New York, who have promised to feed and house them until peace has been restored in Lawrence and the great mills there are again in operation.
More than 700 persons applied for one or more of the children. Among them, it is said, were Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, Miss Inez Milholland and Rev. Dr. Percy Stickney Grant. The children, however, were all given into the care of the families of laboring men or members of the Socialist Party.
To greet the children a crowd of 5,000 men, women, and children packed the Grand Central Station concourse, singing the “Marseillaise” in many tongues. They waved red flags, some with black borders, and all bearing Socialistic mottoes. It was noticed that not one in that crowd waved aloft the Stars and Stripes.
The men that waved the big red flags said they were not anarchist but Socialist flags, but, whatever they were, they were red everywhere except the lettering and the black borders. The black borders, it was said, were marks of mourning for those of the strikers who have lost their lives in Lawrence. Besides the flags, there were banners, also red, on which were displayed in big type what the crowd called “mottoes.” One painted in gold letters on a long, red streamer, read:
Ye exploiters, kneel down before the of your victims.
Another banner announced that the “libertarians of New York affirm their solidarity to the strikers of Lawrence.” Still another banner bore the same message, except that instead of “libertarians,” it read “the Liberians of New York,” &c. There was also another flaming piece of bunting on which was painted the information that certain Harvard students favored “a free country.”
Long Wait For the Children
The train on which the children were expected to arrive was due at 3:30 P.M., but it was an hour late, and it came in without any of the Lawrence Children. When it did roll in a brass band was playing in the concourse, and the crowd was lined up against ropes that were stretched for the purpose of preventing a too hearty welcome being given to the children.
The crowd did not understand why the children were not on the 3:30 train, and so great did the excitement become that the police had an inquiry made all along the New Haven line to Boston. It was learned that the children missed their train in Boston, and it was announced from the bulletin board that they would arrive on the train that was due at 5:42 P.M., but which would not get in until 6:50 P.M.
It was about 4 o’clock when the unwelcome information was bulletined and the crowd, which had stood for two hours in the bitter cold waiting for the train, dispersed to gather again about 6 o’clock in still greater force. At 6:30 P.M. the Grand Central concourse was packed to capacity, and the reserves of the East Fifty-First Street Station formed lines behind which the crowd was forced to stand until after the children had come out of the station.
At 6:50 the searchlight of the electric engine that pulled the train from Highbridge was sighted coming into the train shed. Then the excitement started in earnest. Slowly the hum of the “Marseillaise” started, gradually gathering in volume.It ended when the train came to a stop and then ensued a series of frantic shouts and yells in a dozen languages. In all the medley there was not heard a single English word except the sharp commands of the police and the station men who were assisting.
Announce Themselves as Strikers
Orders had been issued that the children were not to leave the train until the other passengers had left it and were safely out of the shed. When the children were escorted from the cars they were in charge of fourteen men and women from Lawrence, one of whom was a trained nurse. The children were formed in columns of twos, and at a signal from a young man who was one of those in charge they announced their arrival with a yell.
This is the way the yell goes, and the children shouted it all the way out of the station:
Who we are, who are we, who are we! Yes we are, yes we are, yes we are. Strikers, strikers, strikers.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 11, 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts – Strikers Children Sent to New York City
From The Boston Daily Globe, Evening Edition, of February 10, 1912:
Upper Picture-Strikers’ Children from Lawrence in South Station [Boston], Waiting to Board a New York Train. Lower Left Hand-Child of a Striker. Lower Right Hand- Miss Florence Sawyer, with One of the Youngest in the Party. ———-
One hundred and seventy-five boys and girls, children of textile strikers in Lawrence, were brought to Boston this morning on their way to New York city, where they are to be cared for by different families until the strike is settled. The children left at noon for New York. They were to have departed on the 10:03 train out of the South Station, but they reached the North Station too late to make the connection. They went to the South Station by an elevated train, and from the time of their arrival at 10:30, until their departure, at 12, made the waiting room of the great terminal building lively with their songs and pranks.
The children were in charge of five women and 10 men. The man who conducted the party described himself as being Henry Lindworth, a Frenchman, who said he was “a comrade” and was “secretary in charge of the party.” Lindworth had a pocket full of letters from Socialist Democrats and plain Socialist in New York applying for one or more of the juveniles, whom they promised to give homes during the pendency of the strike. Each of the children had pinned to his or her garments a slip of paper on which was written the name, age and address of the child.
The children ranged in age from 4 to 14, and all of them seemed to be comfortably dressed, although the clothing of most was of rather poor quality, and some of them wore patches, but the little ones all seemed happy, and looked upon their trip as a great lark. They were ever ready to burst into song when Lindworth called on them to do so, which he frequently did. The song they most sang at the South Station was “La Internationale,” which Lindworth said was the hymn of those who are opposed to society as it is now constituted.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 10, 1922 Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1921, Part III Found Speaking to Delegates at Convention of United Mine Workers
Indianapolis, Convention of the United Mine Workers of America Sixth Day, Afternoon Session, Monday September 26, 1921
“I can fight…”
Indiana Daily Times September 27, 1921
Vice-President Murray: I understand that Mother Jones has just arrived in the convention and I am going to request Brother David Fowler to escort her to the platform. It isn’t necessary that I should introduce Mother Jones to you at this time; it isn’t necessary that I should eulogize the work she has performed for the coal diggers of America, and I will simply present to the convention at this time our good friend, Mother Jones.
ADDRESS OF MOTHER JONES
Mr. Chairman and Delegates: I have been watching you from a distance, and you have been wasting a whole lot of time and money. I want you to stop it.
All along the ages, away back in the dusty past, the miners started their revolt. It didn’t come in this century, it came along in the cradle of the race when they were ground by superstition and wrong. Out of that they have moved onward and upward all the ages against all the courts, against all the guns, in every nation they have moved onward and upward to where they are today, and their effort has always been to get better homes for their children and for those who were to follow them.
I have just come up from West Virginia. I left Williamson last Friday and came into Charleston. I was doing a little business around there looking after things. We have never gotten down to the core of the trouble that exists there today. Newspapers have flashed it, magazines have contained articles, but they were by people who did not understand the background of the great struggle…..
I walked nine miles one night with John H. Walker in the New River field after we had organized an army of slaves who were afraid to call their souls their own. We didn’t dare sleep in a miner’s house; if we did the family would be thrown out in the morning and would have no place to go. We walked nine miles before we got shelter. When we began to organize we had to pay the men’s dues, they had no money.
At one time some of the organizers came down from Charleston, went up to New Hope and held a meeting. They had about fourteen people at the meeting. The next morning the conductor on the train told me the organizers went up on a train to Charleston. I told Walker to bill a meeting at New Hope for the next night and I would come up myself. He said we could not bill meetings unless the national told us to. I said: “I am the national now and I tell you to bill that meeting.” He did.
When we got to the meeting there was a handful of miners there and the general manager, clerks and all the pencil pushers they could get. I don’t know but there were a few organizers for Jesus there, too. We talked but said nothing about organizing. Later that night a knock came on the door where I was staying and a bunch of the boys were outside. They asked if I would organize them. I said I would. They told me they hadn’t any money. Walker said the national was not in favor of organizing, they wanted us only to agitate. I said: “John, I am running the business here, not the national; they are up in Indianapolis and I am in New Hope. I am going to organize those fellows and if the national finds any fault with you, put it on me—I can fight the national as well as I can the company if they are not doing right.”
[…..]
When we began organizing in 1903 the battle royal began. The companies began to enlist gunmen. I went up the Stanaford Mountain and held a meeting with the men. There wasn’t a more law-abiding body of men in America than those men were. While they were on strike the court issued an injunction forbidding them to go near the mines. They didn’t. I held a meeting that night, went away and next morning a deputy sheriff went up to arrest those men. He had a warrant for them. The boys said: “We have broken no law; we have violated no rules; you can not arrest us.” They notified him to get out of town and he went away. They sent for me and I went up. I asked why they didn’t let him arrest the men. They said they hadn’t done anything and I told them that was the reason they should have surrendered to the law.
That very night in 1903, the 25th day of February, those boys went to bed in their peaceful mining town. They had built their own school house and were sending their children to school. They were law-abiding citizens. While they slept in their peaceful homes bullets went through the walls and several of them were murdered in their beds. I went up next morning on an early train. The agent said they had trouble on Standifer [Stanaford] Mountain, that he heard going over the wires news that some people were hurt. I turned in my ticket, went out and called a couple of the boys. We went up the mountain on the next train and found those men dead in their homes, lying on mattresses wet with their blood and the bullet holes through the walls.
I want to clear this thing up, for it has never been cleared up. I saw there a picture that will forever be a disgrace to American institutions. There were men who had been working fourteen hours a day, who had broken no law, murdered in their peaceful homes. Nobody was punished for those murders.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 9, 1922 Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1921, Part II Found Denouncing Government by Gunthug in the State of West Virginia
From The New Castle Herald of September 6, 1921:
MOTHER JONES HAS SOLUTION
DECLARES FORCE OF RIGHT MUST SUPPLANT RIGHT OF FORCE IN WEST VIRGINIA ———-
By HARRY HUNT
WASHINGTON Sept. 6.-“The secretary of war doesn’t understand. The president doesn’t understand.”
There is a great wrong being perpetrated in West Virginia. This wrong will not be corrected by jailing miners or shooting them. It will be settled only by social and industrial justice.
It was ”Mother” Jones speaking. She had just left the office of Secretary of War Weeks, where she had gone to protest against the sending of federal troops into the zone of the West Virginia mine war.
“Just what is the situation?” she was asked. “You were there last week. What is the trouble?”
[Mother Jones replied:]
The miners under arms in West Virginia are not fighting the government, either state or nation. But they are determined to defend themselves from the oppression and domination of the hired gunmen of the mine operators who constitute a private army of the interests in West Virginia.
Companies Obdurate
The government rendered a decision on the wage question in this district in 1919. But the mine companies have not recognized the authority of the government in that decision and have not followed it.
The men, being Americans, revolted. They sent out word asking to be organized.
Then they were thrown out of the miserable company shacks in which they lived.
The mine workers in this district are robbed to pay an army of professional murderers, maintained to keep the workers in subjection.
The money that ought to go to the miner who slaves underground is diverted to maintain gunmen to enforce the demands of greedy overlords of industry.
The fathers want that money, which they earn, to help educate their children, to improve their homes, to get churches and schools and the rights of American citizens.
Force of Right
The trouble in West Virginia must be settled by the force of right, not by the right of force.
You can shoot down these men in West Virginia, but they will rise again against the outrage of being robbed to pay a private army to enforce the brutal demands of coal operators.
If the employers can form their army, the workers naturally think they can do the same. That’s logical, isn’t it?
And that situation is the ulcer from which flows all the poison. Until it is removed, there will be no peace.
Fought Same Battle
We fought this fight out in the Kanawah and New River fields 23 years ago. We had a few battles. A good many of us were put in jail. I was carried 84 miles to jail myself, to get me out of the zone where it was thought I would be troublesome.
But we got the whole of these fields organized. The gunmen had to leave. The men began to get their pay in Uncle Sam’s currency, not in company money that could only be spent at company stores.
They are living in peace today in the Kanawha and New River fields and in the Fairmont district. Their homes are happier, their work better, the relations of the men and their employers more just.
But along the Norfolk & Western in the Mingo fields, a private army rules.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday February 8, 1922 Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1921, Part I Found Celebrating Labor Day in Indiana, Pennsylvania
From Pennsylvania’s Indiana Evening Gazette of September 3, 1921:
Labor Day.
The local committee announced this morning that the arrangements for the Labor Day celebration had been practically completed and that all that was lacking for a proper observance of the occasion was the promise of fair weather. “We expect all organized labor to join in the parade on Monday,” said the chairman of the committee this morning.
There will be hundreds of visitors for the occasion, music by four bands and a drum corps and talks from three well-known speakers-President John Brophy of Clearfield, President of District No. 2, United Mine Workers of America; Mother Jones, and John Ghizzoni, international board member. It was stated that Mother Jones would probably arrive here on Sunday afternoon, direct from the scene of the conflict in West Virginia.
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[Photograph added.]
From the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel of September 4, 1921:
“Labor Day and the Closed Shop” -Ad from The Employers Association of Fort Wayne:
From the Pennsylvania’s Indiana Evening Gazette of September 6, 1921:
Labor’s Holiday.
With the presence of three notables of the international association of the United Mine Workers of America in attendance-John Brophy, president of District No. 2: John Ghizzoni, international board member & “Mother” Jones-organized labor held its annual celebration under the most favorable auspices at the Fair Grounds yesterday. Members of organized labor and their families, to the number of several thousand, came into Indiana for the celebration, the events of which were carried out with a minimum of confusion and no trouble worth mentioning…..
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday February 6, 1912 The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: “God Did It” by Phillips Russell
From the International Socialist Review of February 1912:
A NEW YORK jury composed of capitalistic cockroaches has absolved Harris & Blanck of the murder of 147 young workers in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of March 25, 1911.
Harris & Blanck, the two bosses, were tried only for the death of one girl worker, according to the crooked ways of capitalist courts, and since “it couldn’t be proved” that they were responsible for this one girl’s death, they were freed.
A member of the jury afterward expressed himself as follows:
“I can’t see that anyone was responsible for the loss of life, and it seems to me that it must have been AN ACT OF GOD.”
Poor God! The capitalists have got him just where they have the working class-cornered! They tell us He can do all things. But there is one thing God can’t do, it seems-He can’t answer back. Else the moment this pitiful squirt uttered these words He would have rent the sky open, would have hurled His scepter aside, thrown off His robe, stepped down from His awful throne, taken this petty capitalist croaker by the throat, and rammed his statement back down him again.
Hasn’t God any manhood at all? How long will He continue to allow Himself to be made the goat for capitalist crimes? Or is His eternal silence a confession of guilt? If so, then it is time we were knowing. Is it God who has been up to the deviltry of all these years? Is it God who traps the worker in blazing factory or buries him in tomblike mine, without providing him with even one means of escape? Is it God who sends the sailor abroad in a rotten hulk of a ship and drowns him before he can leap from his foul bunk? Is it God who hurls the iron worker from his lofty perch a thousand feet to the stones below and mangles the brakeman and the machine hand into an unrecognizable mass, telling the weeping wives and children that He is very sorry but the dead men were guilty of contributory negligence? Is it God who takes into His tender care all that the worker produces and hands him back just enough to live on?
The capitalists say so. Their priests and preachers, their professors and editors, their teachers and other kept men, say so.
But we have begun to suspect. We have begun to see that the capitalists have created God in their own image. And He is running up a terrible account which some day He will have to settle with the working class of the world.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 5, 1922 First Hand Account of the Release of Eugene Debs from Atlanta Penitentiary
From The Liberator of February 1922:
The Uncaging of Debs
IT was Christmas morning. By the President’s order a man was to be released from prison in Atlanta some time that day and proceed to Washington-no one seemed to know just when.But at six o’clock we newspaper men were tipped off to go to the warden’s house, where Debs was said to be having his breakfast.We waited. An hour passed and then Debs, in his blue denim prison raiment, was ushered out a side door of the Warden’s house into a car and shot back to prison. We then were certain the President had not succeeded in getting his prisoner past our lines during the night. That was something, for few men have left prison supposedly free under circumstances as mysterious as these which attended the release of Eugene V. Debs. And, perhaps, no handful of reporters ever faced so strange a task as that of watching a prison so the President of the United States couldn’t sneak a prisoner up to Washington without anybody knowing it.
Playing this curious game against Presidential secrecy, we had to chase every car that came from the prison, overtake it, look in, satisfy ourselves Debs was not there, and then return to our station in the road two hundred yards from the prison. And this all morning, until eleven o’clock, when we boarded the train that took Debs to Washington.And this, we learned, waswhat happened at the prison.
One by one they came to say good-bye to Debs. One man, a hospital patient, fainted in his arms. Sam Moore, the life-term Negro murderer made over by Debs, wept, and Debs kissed him and promised him he would constantly advocate his freedom. Moore has been in prison thirty years, since he was twenty. A lawyer, also a lifer, imprisoned for killing his wife in a fit of drunken jealousy, embraced the man he said was the best friend he ever knew. The way over from the hospital to the great prison building was choked with men in blue denim, all with outstretched hands. There were tears, and there were smiles, according to temperament. Up the corridors they blocked his way, crowded about him, followed him as he advanced. The warden had suspended all rules. All, all, could come to the front. On every tier they rushed forward to the great barred windows of the building that is as broad as a city block. From the outside, out beyond the prison foreground and beyond the gates, those windows now were pictures of bars and faces, faces, faces.Debs reached the end of the corridor by the warden’s office and the big front door. It opened. Then the shout went up, and as Debs was going down the granite steps it resounded through the vast place and carried out over the free air to the ears of those away out in the road.
But it was no longer a shout. For it would not die. It steadily increased in volume. It was twenty-three hundred caged men crying to see the one who was loose. He walked away out over the grass foreground where he could see them all and they could see him. Cheers mingled with fanatical screams, and yells of his name. For a half a minute he stood with his hat high in air. Then his hand fell, then his head and he wept. He walked back to the warden’s automobile, and away he went with the great noise in his ears.
We all got in the train with Debs and rode with him to Washington, and not yet do any of us know why it was that the President of the United States took so great an interest in this man, whom he does not think worthy of the rights of citizenship.
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—————A NEW YORK jury composed of capitalistic cockroaches has absolved Harris & Blanck of the murder of 147 young workers in the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of March 25, 1911.
—————IT was Christmas morning. By the President’s order a man was to be released from prison in Atlanta some time that day and proceed to Washington-no one seemed to know just when. But at six o’clock we newspaper men were tipped off to go to the warden’s house, where Debs was said to be having his breakfast. We waited. An hour passed and then Debs, in his blue denim prison raiment, was ushered out a side door of the Warden’s house into a car and shot back to prison. We then were certain the President had not succeeded in getting his prisoner past our lines during the night. That was something, for few men have left prison supposedly free under circumstances as mysterious as these which attended the release of Eugene V. Debs. And, perhaps, no handful of reporters ever faced so strange a task as that of watching a prison so the President of the United States couldn’t sneak a prisoner up to Washington without anybody knowing it.