Hellraisers Journal – Saturday March 25, 1899
New York, New York – Eugene Debs Speaks on Prison Labor
On Tuesday March 21st, Comrade Eugene Debs came before the wealthy members of the Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico’s to lecture them on the evils of prison labor. The Indianapolis Journal quotes the speech in part; the full speech can viewed below.
From The Indianapolis Journal of March 22, 1899:
DEBS ON PRISON LABOR.
—–
Terre Haute Agitator Talks to Business,
Professional and Scientific Men.
—–
San Francisco Call – January 30, 1898
NEW YORK, March 21.-About 230 members of the Nineteenth Century Club gathered at the ballroom of Delmonico’s tonight to listen to an address to the organization by Eugene V. Debs, the labor agitator. There were a number of substantial business, professional and scientific men present. The interest in Mr. Debs’s words was rather out of the ordinary and the speaker was applauded mildly several times during his remarks. Mr. Debs spoke on “Prison Labor, Its Effects on Industry and Trade.” Among other things Mr. Debs said:
Here in this proud city, where wealth has built its monuments, grander and more imposing than any of the seven wonders of the world named in classic lore, if you will excavate for facts you will find the remains, the bones of toilers buried and imbedded in the foundations. They lived, they wrought, they died. In their time they may have laughed and sung and danced to the music of their clanking chains. They married, propagated their species and perpetuated conditions, which, growing steadily worse, are to-day the foulest blots the imagination can conceive upon our much vaunted civilization, and from these conditions there flow a thousand streams of vice and crime which have broadened and deepened until they constitute a perpetual and ever increasing menace to the peace and security of society. Jails, workhouses, reformatories and penitentiaries have been crowded with the victims, and the question how to control these institutions and the unfortunate inmates is challenging the most serious thought of the most advanced nations on the globe.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 19, 1909
New York, New York – Lewis Hine Speaks to Social Problems Club
From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of February 15, 1909:
CHILDREN IN COTTON MILLS
—–
Lewis Hine Tells Social Problems Club
About Conditions in the South.
—–
Noon hour at Newberry Mills of South Carolina. All these children are working here. Witness, Sara R. Hine. —–
Before the Social Problems Club of the Young Women’s Christian Association, yesterday afternoon. Lewis Hine gave a lecture on the “Children in the Southern Cotton Mills.” The lecture was illustrated with lantern slides. Mr. Hine has worked in the Ohio valley and in the South investigating child-labor conditions. His camera has played an important part in his investigations, and the pictures shown yesterday were taken in mills of North and South Carolina and in Georgia. The speaker said that no little trouble is experienced with the superintendents and overseers of the factories in gaining admission and permission in take pictures. They are suspicious of all Northerners and are afraid that conditions existing in the mills will be exaggerated.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 13, 1909
Silk Mills of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region Investigated
From the Everett Labor Journal of February 11, 1909:
DISGUISED AS FACTORY GIRLS
That actual knowledge might be obtained of the conditions in the factories two graduates of Bryn Mawr College prominent in social circles in Philadelphia, Miss Fanny T. Cochran and Miss Florence L. Sanville, found employment in silk mills of the anthracite region of Pennsylvania.
In the itinerary of three weeks these college girls visited sixteen towns, and when the days’ work was done went home with the girls with whom they toiled and got glimpses into their life and the influences that surround them. The project was planned by Miss Cochran and Miss Sanville without consulting their friends.
This work was performed in the interest of the child labor bill, which has been prepared at the instance of the Consumers’ League, of which both young women are members and, of which Miss Sanville is executive secretary.
[Said Miss Cochran:]
What we wanted to get at was these four things: First, the workers; second, the wages paid; third, the hours of employment, and fourth, the environment of the girls in the factory. We visited twenty-eight factories, and in many of them the conditions were very bad.
About 60 per cent of the silk throwing mills are in the Pennsylvania anthracite region, and this is due to the cheap labor obtainable. I could not help being impressed by the youth of most of the girls. Most of them were under twenty years of age.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 11, 1899
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for the Year 1898, Part II
Kansas City Star October 9, 1898
In the pages of the Appeal to Reason of July 2, 1898, Mother Jones was found as “Mary G. Jones” on the list of delegates who bolted the Convention of the Social Democracy, held in Chicago during June of 1898. The disgruntled delegates immediately set about to establish a rival organization called the “Social Democratic Party of America,” and are now calling for “every loyal supporter of socialist principles” to “promptly come to the front and join” the new party. Mother Jones finds herself in good company as Eugene V. Debs and his brother, Theodore, are among the prominent Socialists who have joined the newly founded S. D. P.
July 1898 also found Mother Jones speaking in Omaha to packing house strikers. It was reported that she was speaking as “a traveling representative of the paper known as the “Appeal to Reason.”
In October 1898, Mother Jones was found in the “two Kansas Citys” preaching socialism along with Mrs. Anna Ferry Smith of San Diego. It was reported that the two women had traveled by a horse-drawn wagon from Chicago, speaking on street corners along the way.
In December 1898, Mother Jones was found leaving Kansas City and heading towards Texas “in a prairie schooner drawn by one white horse.” She was next found in Fort Scott and Mound City, Kansas. The Mound City Torch reported:
She is on her road to Texas, traveling in a private carriage alone. She is distributing literature and lecturing on needed reforms as she goes.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 10, 1899
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for the Year 1898, Part I
The St. Louis Republic May 12, 1898
During February of 1898, Mother Jones was found in St. Louis, Missouri, preparing for a Conference of Labor and Labor Reform Organizations scheduled to be held in that city on May 2nd. She was also found advocating for Domestic Workers in that city who were seeking to establish “a home of their own.”
Mother departed St. Louis in early March and headed out on a tour of Eastern cities in order to “stir up sentiment among the several reform organizations in behalf of the reform convention” to be held in May. Mother was back in St. Louis in time to present at that convention which was, sadly, not well attended. Nevertheless, Mother was soon busy attempting to organize factory girls, of whom, she declared:
The factory girls should be organized because their condition should be improved. This can be effected by organization, and by no other means. The girls are, as rule, underpaid, kept in cramped, unhealthy quarters, and ground down till their young lives have been dwarfed and stunted. Through the children the world is made what it is. In the unions they could be educated how to better themselves.
I have been all through the factories of this and other cities, and find conditions in them such that the lives of these children will be shortened many years by having worked in them. We have war abroad and war at home. The conflict with Spain is not half so grinding upon humanity as the battle for bread. A few hundred go down in a naval battle; thousands perish beneath the grinding tread of greed every day. We have reconcentrados in our own country-they are the poor, without wealth or friends, who perish in sight of plenty.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday December 26, 1908
National Elections Pass into History; Hardships Continue for Toilers
From the Charleston Labor Argus of December 24, 1908:
Trade Union Are Toilers Only Hope
—–
Only Protection and Safety for the Working
Masses is Organized Labor
-Politicians Are But Tools of the Trusts.
—–
Now that another national contest has, passed into history and the working people can take a sober view of the economic situation, the Cleveland Citizen calls attention to the fact that the labor problem was not solved on Nov. 3, 1908.
While the unsuccessful politicians are now in the dumps and the victors are celebrating their acquaintance of the spoils of office, the workingmen are confronted by exactly the the same conditions that they were to face the day before election.
The problem of unemployment for some and overwork for others, the evils for cheap women and child labor, the introduction of labor-displacing machinery, the threats of wage reductions, the attacks of union smashing open shoppers and similiar questions are here today just as they were here last week, and they must and considered for the reason that they cannot lie dodged.
Since there is no likelihood that the victorious politicians will establish the millennium week after next or next year or the year following, what are the working people going to do for their own betterment? Sit on their haunches and suck their thumbs. Go into a trance and give up the few advantages that they still possess?
We believe not. Down in their hearts the workingmen and women know that their only protection and safety lies in organizing-in combining the toilers into trade unions for offensive and defensive purposes.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 23, 1908
Report on Recent Legislation from the National Child Labor Committee
From the Duluth Labor World of November 21, 1908:
EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS CHILD LABOR EVILS
—–
Nine States Have Passed Remedial Measures
and Entire Country is Aroused.
—–
But Much Yet Remains to be Done
to Protect American Children.
—–
Mr. A. J. McKelway, secretary of the National Child Labor Committee for the southern states has recently published a report of the years’ progress in child labor legislation, from which we glean the following excerpts.
Progress in 1908.
The year 1908 was an off year in state legislative sessions, as thirty-eight states have their legislatures meet in 1909. The national child labor committee reports progress in nine states, in addition to the passage of the District of Columbia child labor bill, which had been agitated for several years. This act of federal legislation was not all that was hoped for by the friends of the cause, as the pages of the senate, though not of the house, and the children of dependent parents are exempted from the operation of the law. In other respects the law approaches the standard of the more advanced states.
New York State.
An important amendment to the New York child labor law was the transferring of the enforcement of the mercantile child labor provisions from the local boards of health to the state labor department, and the provision for a bureau of mercantile inspection. This amendment was bitterly contested by interested parties and Governor Hughes sent two special messages to the legislature concerning the necessity of this change in the law.
New Jersey and Ohio.
In New Jersey, the effort to forbid night work for children under 16 years of age failed, but a compulsory education amendment requires children from 7 to 17 to attend school, except that children of 15 who are regularly employed are excused from such attendance.
In Ohio two efforts to weaken the child labor law failed and an eight-hour law was passed for boys at work under 16 and for girls under 18. This puts Ohio abreast of the most advanced states in this regard.
You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 10, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – 5,000 Children Go to School Hungry
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
American School Children Starving
Chicago Tribune of October 5, 1908
When we are talking of the number of men who are tramping the country looking for work—hungry, broken-spirited, abject creatures, who once thought themselves men, as good as any of their kind—let us not forget the women, and the little children of these men.
Last winter in Chicago after the first flurry of the panic, I had occasion to visit a number of the “homes” of those who had been thrown out of work. In every case the men were out, hunting feverishly for the chance to make even a little money by any kind of hard labor. And in every case my heart ached and my soul grew sick when I thought of the future of the women and children of those families.
“It is awful when the children cry for food, and we cant give it to them,” said one woman who had never before known what it was to be down and out. Another mother, about thirty, and strong and handsome, had to sit by and watch her seven-year-old daughter burning with fever, and without the care of a doctor because she had lost her job in a department store, and there was no money even to buy food. She had applied for work at all the large stores again and again. She had tried everywhere—and was told that they might need her during the holidays. But the holidays were weeks away. Already she had moved into a questionable quarter because rent was cheap. And unless that mother got work within two weeks, there was but one resource left her, if she would save herself and her child from death through starvation. And that was the sale of her body.
It was for a charitable institution I was working—and I knew that those institutions were crowded to their utmost with destitute cases.
Such, indeed, was the condition of the poor in Chicago last winter, that the superintendent of compulsory education, W. Lester Bodine, took up the case of hungry school children, followed his investigations for six months, and finally ascertained that there are 5,000 starving children, and 10,000 that are underfed, in the schools of the city.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 9, 1908
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for October 1908
Found in Kansas: “working with her sleeves rolled up…”
Other than a brief appearance in St. Louis, Missouri, at a campaign event for Eugene Debs, Mother Jones was found, during the month of October, mostly in the Girard area of Kansas campaigning for the Socialist candidates of the Third District. The Kansas Edition of the Appeal described her activities there as “working with her sleeves rolled up.”
From the Appeal to Reason of October 31, 1908:
[…..]
MOTHER JONES MEETINGS.
Mother Jones is in the third district. She is working with her sleeves rolled up and is going after the democrats and republicans in her usual way showing them both to be the tools of an exploiting class. At Galena the opera house was full and a good spirit prevailed; but the meeting at Scammon was great. Mother was in her element, having a hall crowded to the doors with miners, and you may be sure that she delivered the right kind of goods and the democrats that thought that the party for which he works, stands for labor, was disillusioned by the recital of the terrible conditions in democratic Alabama. Mother is to spend the time in the mining and industrial centers until after election and expects to see Ben Wilson come in under the wire a winner.
———-
———-
———-
———-
—–
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
