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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday September 18, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1910, Part II:
-Found Speaking to Mine Workers at Shenandoah, Pennsylvania
From the Shenandoah Evening Herald of August 27, 1910:
MOTHER JONES WAS IN SCOLDING MOOD
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“Mother” Jones was the big noise at the open air mass meeting of mine workers at Main and Centre streets last night, and despite her seventy-five years of terrestrial pilgrimage she was in excellent physical trim.
“Never felt better In my life,” she said to a friend who commented upon her fine appearance, and added,
You know I’m good for seventy-five more years. I don’t think I’ll ever die, so long as I want to live.
“Mother” Jones was in fine voice and the verbal lambasting she administered to John Mitchell, former head of the United Mine Workers of America, ex-President Roosevelt and President Taft caused her hearers “to sit up and take notice,” as the phrase goes when something surprising and unexpected is sprung on an unsuspecting audience. There were other speakers, but “Mother” Jones was the attraction, and she certainly furnished the necessary entertainment, but her denunciation of John Mitchell as a traitor to the cause of labor did not gain her many sympathizers. She excoriated Mitchell for hobnobbing with Roosevelt and declared that both Mitchell and Roosevelt were the “two biggest bluffs at large.” She found fault with Bishop Hobin, of Scranton, for a humorous reference of the Bishop’s at a dinner to Roosevelt and Mitchell that it was the first time he had the honor of sitting between two presidents. She was quite emphatic in utterance and her oratory was attended by the usual gesticulations so familiar during the troublous times of some years ago.
She was more rabid of utterance last night than on any former occasion in this region, and she waved red-flag sentiments with defiance.
Speaking of the State Police she declared they were patterned after the Irish Constabulary.
[She fairly shrieked:]
I was six years old when I was driven from home at the bayonet point by the constabulary in Ireland, and I have never forgot it, and never shall.
I’d sooner go to heaven with a union card as a passport than as a pious Christian of the employer class who have accumulated their millions by grinding the lives out of the down trodden women and children.
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