Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 25, 1913
Cleve Woodrum, Martyred Union Miner by Cabin Creek Striker
From the Shawnee County Socialist of August 23, 1913:
CLEVE WOODRUM AN HUMBLE MARTYR
TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR.
———-
The Washington Herald July 26, 1913
There are some who would wish us to believe that the West Virginia outrages have ceased since the Senate Committee and the Socialist Party Committee have made their report, but they still go on.
Cleve Woodrum was picking berries for his sick wife, but had with him his rifle, when two hired murderers of the mine owners attacked him. Woodrum killed both of them, and was himself wounded.The other hired assassins, finding the two did not return from their murder, hunted and found one of the guards mortally wounded and the other dead.The wounded guard, Don Slater, they sent to the Hospital where he died, but, [finding] Woodrum, these [gunthugs] tortured the wounded man and then mutilated his body and left it in the bush where it was afterward found by his friends.
This was a cowardly assassination and then a brutal savagery of which only [gunthugs] are capable, and yet no paper but a few labor papers will mention it.
Read this letter from a Cabin Creek striker and remember that the mine owners, whose money hires these [gunthugs] are mostly pious church members, and they pay some of this blood money to the preachers to preach as they the mine owners demand.
This may be Christianity, but it has nothing to do with the gentle and loving Jesus.
Our Comrade, Cleve Woodrum. Eskdale, West Virginia.
Cleve Woodrum, the martyr to the cause of human liberty, born October 12, 1884, killed July 24, 1913, entered the coal mines at the early age of 11, denied an education by the same class that hired the gunman to kill him. The departed comrade leaves a father, mother and eight brothers and sisters, an invalid wife with six little children, the eldest being eight years old and Mrs. Woodrum soon to become a mother. Cleve met his death while just out of hearing from home and was picking berries for his sick wife who had just returned from the hospital after undergoing surgical treatment. A plot between the coal operators and the military thugs to put Slater out of the way as Slater knew too much about the dirty work, murders and sluggings the coal operators had ordered and which had been carried out to the letter and the operators taking the advantage of the jealousy existing between the old line of Baldwins and the military Baldwins and Slater was ambushed by his own crowd.
Comrade Woodrum immortalized this great fight for the cause of justice and the freedom of his class from wage slavery, as much so as the John Brown martyrdom immortalized the scaffold for his opposition to chattel slavery.
I knew the deceased when he was a little trapper boy in the mines years ago. Standing in water cold as ice up to his knees while the young bones were trying to develop and powder smoke so thick you could hardly see. Long weary hours of toil, and food that was kept in a dinner pail closed in tight for several hours which was not nutritious or fit to eat. Even at that Cleve was manly, honest, upright, square, hard working man.
He had been in the Socialist movement about two years when he saw the light, his honest heart just responded to the working class’s philosophy of reason that the worker should receive the full product of his labor just like the rose to a spring shower.
This was his creed, this was his religion. He professed the religion of humanity, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and to attain that end he had the highest of motives first taught by a union carpenter and Social Revolutionist by the name of Jesus, put to death by the ruling class for his radical teachings and would not recant one iota.
The union miners of this field should place suitable shaft over his tomb and ae well provide for his widow and little helpless children. Why not? The capitalist class pension their uniformed hired murderers for shooting down their own class and calling them heroes. So it is to the Socialist and union miners to provide for these widows and keep the grave green of working class heroes, as the coal barons forgot Slater as soon as the last breath went out.
A CABIN CREEK STRIKER.
This is the class war. Comrade Woodrum’s tortured and mutilated body is the dumb witness to the class war, and should rouse us slaves to class consciousness.
We should resolve over the mutilated body of this humble and faithful comrade to unite, organize and resolve that this class war shall end in the coming Co-Operative Commonwealth.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 15, 1903 Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1903, Part II -Speaks at Miners’ Convention, Meets with Socialists
From The Indianapolis Journal of January 22, 1903:
TRIP LIGHT FANTASTIC
———-
MINERS’ DELEGATES ATTEND BALL
AT TOMLINSON HALL. ———- Early Adjournment of the Convention
in Order that the Auditorium
Could Be Cleared. ———-
MOTHER JONES MAKES SPEECH
———-
[…..]
The dance of the Indianapolis garment workers in Tomlinson Hall last night interfered with the session of the mine workers’ convention that was to have been held during the afternoon. In order that the Janitors might prepare the floor of the hall for the dance the convention adjourned at noon until 9 o’clock this morning, after a motion to omit the afternoon session had carried.
The morning session was a busy one during the earlier hours, but toward noon had resolved itself into speech-making. Mother Jones, the woman friend of the miners, who was enjoined by Judge Jackson’s order prohibiting inflammatory speeches in the coal-mining district, was called on for an address. Her speech was typical of the woman and socialistic in tone. Her recommendation to the miners was that they use their votes as citizens to change conditions In the trade. Mother Jones was pessimistic in her views on the possibility of friendly relations between capital and labor. She thinks there is such a gulf between the two classes that it can never be bridged except by a change in government. The miners could adjust the conditions by their vote, she said, if they voted right. Now miners in America are existing as miserably as the serfs in Russia, and will continue so until all of the changes are made in the government which she suggests, she insinuated in her speech…..
[Photograph added.]
From The Indianapolis News of January 22, 1903:
SOCIALISM’S VOICE IN MINERS CONVENTION ———-
EXPRESSION ON GOVERNMENT
OWNERSHIP WANTED. ———-
INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM ———- Miners Voted Unanimously Not to Incorporate Their Organization -Question of Co-Operative Stores ———-
At the opening of the United Workers’ convention this morning, there was the first clash of the year between the conservatives and the Socialistic factions. It originated in a resolution from an obscure local union, favoring an expression of Government ownership of coal mines and railroads.
A motion on the part of the conservatives to table it brought on a long discussion, and many leaders of the two factions were heard.
The socialistic faction based its arguments on the anthracite strike and the combination of coal companies and railroads and that a tendency not to treat with miners “according to the laws of man or God” made it necessary for the Government to take some such action.
Delegate Walker, of Illinois, in a long speech, said that the coal companies and railroads were now in a combination injurious to the interests of the people, and were holding back coal to boost prices.
Delegate Lusk, of West Virginia, also charged heartless attitude of coal operators and railroads not only to the miners, but to the people.
The controversy was finally ended for the time, on a motion of Chris Evans, of Ohio, to refer the matter back to the committee.
[…..]
William R. Fairley, executive committeeman for the Alabama district, in a speech of some length, laid before the convention a grievance of the Alabama miners on the speech made yesterday by Mother Jones, in which, he claimed, she held them responsible for the appalling child labor conditions in Alabama. Mother Jones made a reply in which she said she did not hold the miners responsible only in so far as they cast votes for and elected members of agricultural classes to the Legislature, who permitted the infants to be worked and murdered by mill and mine owners. She ripped the State of Alabama up and down. At the close of the discussion Patrick Dolan, president of the Pittsburg district, moved that Fairley and Mother Jones kiss and make up. There was a great deal of laughter but no vote was taken…..
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 7, 1903 Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic
From the InternationalSocialistReview of February 1903:
Socialism Versus Fads.
[-by Father Thomas Hagerty] ———-
[Part II of II]
I remember, a little over a year ago, with what amazement I listened to a lecturer on Socialism who, with evident relish, quoted this sentence from Dr. Paul Carus: “The essential feature of existence, of that which presents itself to the senses, is not the material, but the formal; not that which makes it concrete and particular, but that which constitutes its nature and applies generally; not that which happens to be here, so that it is this, but that which makes it to be thus; not its Thisness but its Suchness.”* The discourse itself was vaguely soothing, like James Jeffrey Roche’s Concord love-song:
“Ah, the Ifness sadd’ning, The Whichness madd’ning, And the But ungladd’ning That lie behind!
When the signless token Of love is broken In the speech unspoken Of mind to mind!”
But imagine the flood of pure white light which such a discourse poured into the brains of the non-Socialists of that audience! At the worst, however, it was Socialism only in the Pickwickian sense and did not roughly antagonize any one’s private beliefs. The lecturer was deeply interested in things occult and could not resist the opportunity, which an audience gathered to hear of Socialism gave him, to expound his favorite doctrines concerning the Nirvana.
On the other hand one frequently meets with the man who prefaces his explanation of Socialism by insisting, like Büchner in matters of science, that the mind must first be emptied of all ideas of God and the supernatural before it is in a proper condition to receive the philosophy of Karl Marx.He wanders far afield to attack this church or that dogma and leaves his hearer under the impression that Socialism is essentially atheistic. He blames all the misery and ignorance in the world upon religion and seems never to have learned that a materialist conception of history puts beyond doubt the fact that the social organism is, in a very large measure, conditioned by its interaction with industrial environment, and that a comparative study of religions shows the influence of economic factors in much of their development. Such a man does positive harm to the cause of Socialism; and he is just as unreasonable and as unscientific as the preacher who insists on basing the science of economics upon his own particular creed.
There is, furthermore, the utterly inconsistent fad of “Christian Socialism,” whose upholders put forth the dogma of the Fatherhood of God as the ground-work of economic science and then proceed to build upon it a superstructure as much out of plumb as the leaning tower of Pisa. They contend that Labor and Capital must recognize their mutual rights,—that, in other words, the lamb must lie down in the lion’s belly and rely upon its coat of wool to protect itself from the searching acid of the gastric juices thereof. They would have men led into the highways of industrial righteousness by the allurement of Gospel texts, unmindful of the fact that nineteen centuries of such blandishment have failed to soften the granite heart of the ruling classes. The New Testament was never designed to serve as a treatise on Socialism any more than it was intended to teach the first principles of Biology. With profound reverence for its beautiful pages, I find it vastly inferior to Huxley and Martin’s “Practical Biology” and Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital,” for the same reason that I find Homer’s “Iliad” inferior to Remsen’s “Chemistry,” for when I want to study either of these sciences I can discover no knowledge of the protoplasm in St. Matthew and no guides to quantative analysis in Homer. This fact, however, does not hinder me from giving full value to the letters of St. Paul nor from appreciating the rhythm and swing of the lines that carry that ancient swashbuckler Achilles.
But when the crazy charge of infidelity is urged against us and a bishop forces a Father McGrady to resign because of his advocacy of Socialism, we may rightly say with Thoreau: “Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches.” Surely, it is a flagrant infidelity which denies all Truth which does not bear the approval of a bishop’s imprimatur. It is a subtle atheism which admits the existence of God and then in His Name refuses economic salvation to millions of His creatures; which prays to Heaven and builds churches for worship and then tacitly sanctions the Capitalism which burns the marrow out of orphans’ bones.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 6, 1903 Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic
From the InternationalSocialistReview of February 1903:
Socialism Versus Fads.
[-by Father Thomas Hagerty] ———-
[Part I of II]
A LACK of what Whewell so aptly calls “the habit of geometrical thought” is noticeable in much of the confusion which upsets men’s judgment of Socialism.Many persons, earnest in their work for the co-operative common wealth, have only one measure for all problems. From their iron prejudices they forge a Procustean bed upon which they stretch every event too small to fit it and foreshorten every long-limbed fact which has the misfortune to stick over its rigid limits. Thus, as Locke has observed, “some men have so used their heads to mathematical figures, that in giving a preference to the methods of that science, they introduce lines and diagrams into their study of divinity or political inquiries, as if nothing could be known with out them; and others accustomed to retired speculations run natural philosophy into metaphysical notions and the abstract generalities of logic; and how often may one meet with religion and morality treated of in the terms of the laboratory, and thought to be improved by the methods and notions of chemistry?” *
Evidences of the effect of this method abound in every age. Thales of Miletus, the founder of Greek philosophy, based his teachings of Nature on the theory that out of water all things are made. Water is the primal matter and the earth itself floats upon water. The great Philo of Alexandria taught, after the manner of Plato, that the stars are persons endowed with reason and akin to the Divinity. The early churchmen took the Bible as the sole measure of scientific truth and, in consequence, fell into the most childish errors. Many of them denied the sphericity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes. The learned St. Augustine declared that no men live on the other side of the earth because “Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam.”
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 18, 1903 “Bishop Spalding and Socialism” by Editor Algie M. Simons
From the International Socialist Review of January 1903:
Bishop Spalding and Socialism.* [by A. M. Simons] —————
[Part II of II]
Again, in [Bishop Spalding’s] recognition of the class character of our present law, he comes very close to Socialism. Speaking of punishment for crime, he says:
The delinquents who are incarcerated are chiefly the poor, who had they money to pay the fines would escape punishment. The heaviest punishment is inflicted on the most helpless, and frequently on the least guilty; and thus the morally weak, the victims of unfortunate environments, are degraded, hardened, and made habitual offenders.
I do not wish to push the matter too far and to ascribe too great a comprehension of or favorable attitude towards Socialism on the part of Bishop Spalding. But on page 58 we see some thing that reads very like a description of the rise of proletarian class consciousness. He says:
The laborers, who in proportion as their minds have been awakened, have become conscious of the hardships and limitations to which they are subject, feel this more keenly than any other class, and hence they have formed in numerable organizations to protect their rights and promote their interests.
Finally, we would seldom find a harsher indictment against the capitalist system than is to be found on pages 173 and 174:
The political and social conditions which involve the physical deterioration and the mental and moral degradation of multitudes are barbarous, and unless they are improved must lead to the ruin of the State. From this point of view, which is the only true point of view, our present economic and commercial systems are subversive of civilization. They sacrifice men to money; wisdom and virtue to cheap production and the amassing of capital. They foster greed in the stronger and hate in the weaker. They drive the nations to competitive struggles which are as cruel as war, and in the final results more disastrous; for their tendency is to make the rich vulgar and heartless, and the poor reckless and vicious. As stratagems and lies are considered lawful in war, so in the warfare of commercial competition opinion leans to the view that whatever may be done with impunity is right. The adulteration of food and drink, the watering of stocks, the bribing of legislators, the crushing of weaker concerns, the enforced idleness of thousands, who are thereby driven to despair and starvation, are not looked upon as lying within the domain of morals, any more than the shooting of a man in battle is considered a question of morality. The degradation and ruin of innumerable individuals are implications of the law of competition, just as in the struggle for existence there is a world-crushing and destruction of the weak by the strong.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 17, 1903 “Bishop Spalding and Socialism” by Editor Algie M. Simons
From the International Socialist Review of January 1903:
Bishop Spalding and Socialism.* [by A. M. Simons] —————
[Part I of II]
OWING to the prominence which Bishop Spalding has attained in the recent coal strike and in other matters relating to labor, his recent book on Socialism and Labor is worthy of more attention than it might otherwise merit. But the book itself is well worthy of examination. The introductory paragraphs are, on the whole, a very fair statement of the Socialist argument; and we therefore quote them at length:
The interest which all who think take in the laboring classes, whether it spring from sympathy or fear, is a characteristic feature of the age.
Their condition seems to be the great anomaly in our other wise progressive and brilliant civilization. Whether when compared with the lot of the slaves and serfs of former times that of the laborer is fortunate, is not the question. He is not placed in the midst of the poverty and wretchedness of a rude and barbarous society, but in the midst of boundless wealth and great refinement. He lives, too, in a democratic age, in which all men profess to believe in equality and liberty; in an age in which the brotherhood of the race is proclaimed by all the organs of opinion. He has a voice in public affairs, and since laborers are in the majority, he is, in theory, at least, the sovereign. They who govern profess to do everything by the authority of the people, in their name and for their welfare; and yet, if we are to accept the opinions of the Socialists, the wage-takers, who in the modem world are the vast multitude, are practically shut out from participation in our intellectual and material inheritance. They contend that the poor are, under the present economic system, the victims of the rich, just as in the ancient societies the weak were the victims of the strong; so that wage-labor, as actually constituted, differs in form rather than in its essential results from the labor of slaves and serfs. And even dispassionate observers think that the tendency of the present system is to intensify rather than to diminish the evils which do exist; and that we are moving towards a state of things in which the few will own everything, and the many be hardly more than their hired servants. In America they admit that sparse population and vast natural resources that as yet have hardly been touched helped to conceal this fatal tendency, which is best seen in the manufacturing and commercial centers of Europe, where the capitalistic method of production has reduced wage-earners to a condition of pauperism and degradation which is the scandal of Christendom and a menace to society.
The present condition of labor is the result of gradually evolved processes, running through centuries.
The failure of the attempt of Charlemagne to organize the barbarous hordes which had overspread Europe into a stable empire was followed by an era of violence and lawlessness, of wars and invasions, from which society sought refuge in the feudal system. The strong man, as temporal or spiritual lord, was at the top of the feudal hierarchy, and under him the weak formed themselves into classes. The serf labored a certain number of days for himself, and a certain number for his lord. In the towns the craftsmen were organized into guilds which protected the interests of the members. The mendicant poor were not numerous, and their wants were provided for by the bishops and the religious orders.
Then the growth of towns and the development of trade and commerce brought wealth to the burghers, who became a distinct class, while domestic feuds and foreign wars, especially the Crusades, weakened and impoverished the knights and barons. The printing press and the use of gunpowder in war helped further to undermine the feudal power, while the discovery of America, the turning of the Cape of Good Hope, and the Protestant revolution threw all Europe into a ferment from which new social conditions were evolved. The peasants who had been driven from the land by the decay of the great baronial houses, and the confiscation of the property of the church, flocked into the towns or became vagabonds. The poor became so numerous that permanent provision had to be made for them, and poor laws were consequently devised.
The master-workman, who in the middle ages employed but two or three apprentices and as many journeymen, gave way to a class of capitalists, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the church, by the treasures imported from America and the Indies, and by the profits of the slave traffic, who at once prepared to take advantage of the stimulus to industry given by the opening of a vast world market. As late as the middle of the last century, however, manufacturing was still carried on by masters who employed but a small number of hands, and had but little capital invested in the business; and the modern industrial era, with its factory system, properly begins with our marvelous mechanical inventions and the use of steam as a motive power. Machinery made production on a large scale possible, and threw the whole business into the hands of the capitalists, while laborers are left with nothing but their ability to work, which they are forced to sell at whatever prices it will bring.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 5, 1902 Father Hagerty Corrects the Record: Is as Much a Catholic as the Pope Himself
From the International Socialist Review of October 1902:
A Correction. ———-
Van Buren, Ark., Aug. 25, 1902.
A. M. Simons, Editor International Socialist Review.
My Dear Comrade : The Cincinnati Enquirer, of the edition of August 22d, publishes a scare-head article anent my so-called resignation from the Catholic priesthood and asserts that “the reason assigned for his withdrawal from the ministry and communion of the Catholic Church, Father Hagerty states, is the church’s stand against Socialism and the incompatibility of her teachings with the doctrines of his economic creed.” I have never made such a statement. While it is true that I have with drawn from the technical work of the ministry, the withdrawal implies no derogation of my sacerdotal character. I am as much a priest to-day as I ever was. I have not separated myself from the communion of the Catholic Church ; and I hold myself as much a member thereof as the Pope himself.
The enemies of Socialism will stop at nothing to discredit its mission. The political bigot seeks always some prejudice or pretext of religion to warrant his attack upon the adversaries of his party; and the lines of Boileau need no new rendition for our day:
“Qui mèprise Cotin n’estime point son roi, Et n’a selon Cotin, ni Dieu, ni foi, ni loi.”
I have no economic creed. A creed supposes faith; and faith is the receiving of doctrine upon authority. Knowledge, on the contrary, is the direct recognition of truth by the intellect. One may have a religious belief, but not an economic creed. I do not believe in any economic creed, but I know the definite philosophy of Socialism. It is the utmost absurdity to speak of the incompatibility of Catholicism and Socialism. No one would dream of going into a meat market and asking for a Catholic beef steak, a Methodist mutton chop, or a Presbyterian ham. Religion has no more to do with Socialism than it has with meat and bread. Socialism is an economic science, not a system of dogmatic beliefs. It is wholly beyond the scope of the church’s mission to deal with questions of social economy, just as it is beyond the purpose of the Republican party to advance a new exegesis of the Davidic Psalms.
Bishops and priests exceed their authority when they use the influence of their position to oppose a movement whose highest purpose is the industrial liberation of the wage slaves of the world. According to the strictest interpretations of moral theology, Catholics are not bound to pay any attention to them in such matters. The Pope’s encyclicals on the question have no more authority than that which attaches to the opinions of any private theologian. The function of his office is confined strictly to matters of faith and morals. His judgment upon a canvas of Fra Angelico or a fragment of the Tel-el-Armana tablets is as much open to criticism as that of any other scholar.
It is to be regretted that a few bishops and priests, out of the abundance of their ignorance, have seen fit to attack the principles of Socialism, but it does not, therefore, follow that the doctrines of the church, as such, are in conflict with the truths of Socialism. The churchmen of the primitive days were genuine Socialists—men like St. John Chrysostom, who denounced the Capitalism of his day in the most acid words of the wondrous Greek in which he preached. With Whittier, rightly may
“Whittier.
“I sigh for men as bold As those bearded priests of old.
“Now too oft the priesthood wait At the threshold of the state— Waiting for the beck and nod Of its power as law and God.“
Nevertheless, I thank God that such men as Father McGrady are gradually opening the eyes of Catholics to a sense of their rights in the field of industry and to a recognition of their individual freedom in all things outside of the fixed lines of dogma and revelation.
THOS. J. HAGERTY, A. M., S. T. B. [Artium Magister, Sacrae Theologiae Baccalaureus Master of Arts, Bachelor of Sacred Theology]
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 4, 1902
“How I Became a Socialist” by Father Thomas Joseph Hagerty
From The Comrade of October 1902:
How I Became a Socialist.
VII. [of Series]
By Rev. T. [J]. HAGERTY.
A CONVICTION grew upon me in my boyhood days-which has broadened and deepened with the out-going years—that human nature is inherently good. In the old Hebraic records, composite of earlier documents which register the world’s notion of creation, I was caught by the reiteration of the idea of the goodness of all things. The after-development of tribe and nation, however, seems to give the lie to this primal verity. Prophets and philosophers in the cuneiform script and Vedic hymn of Egypt and India, singers and sculptors in the psalm and glistening marble of Palestine and Greece, throughout the centuries have sought to keep alive the sense of goodness in the brain of man. Yet all the time murder and rapine, disease and wretchedness flaunted denial in the face of truth. Pariah, slave, and bond-servant groaned in hopeless toil the while Kung-fu-sdu and Gotamma the Buddha proclaimed kindness and justice and David and Homer sang of high emprise.
Christianity came, with a catholic breadth of goodness, teaching the brotherhood of man, gathering up the treasures of foregoing ages wherewith to enrich the race, and sending messengers of peace through all the turbulent highways in every land. Far-reaching deeds of love marked its growth in palace and hovel: yet the clash of swords and the snarl of the slave-driver’s lash broke in upon its holiness; and, ever and anon, hunger drove some mother to insane slaughter of the anæmic babe at her breast. The rich in high places rose up against a Savonarola and a Sir Thomas More and tried to silence the reproach of their goodness in death:
“And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.”
Within reach of every banquet’s savor crouched the gaunt figure of Poverty; and the shadows of the Universities swept athwart the bleak paths of Ignorance and intensified the darkness. Gradually, through all the travail of the earth’s growth, came the machine to lift the burden from the straining muscles of men; and its only effect was to change the servitude of the many into an equally galling wage-slavery without surcease of misery and hate and crime. Meanwhile, the inherent goodness of human nature asserted itself in large heroism and patient bravery. Republics were builded out of the strength of the common people; and fine philosophies of liberty were engrossed upon the parchment of history, but humanity failed to reach the heights where gladness holds her breathing-places. The goodness of human nature seemed to be spent in the Sisyphus-like task of rolling some needless burden up the hill of Time and falling ever backward to the bottom in a futile renewal of toil.
As I read the annals of civilization in books and traced their later chapters in field and shop and factory, my early conviction of the inherent goodness of human nature was sharpened by its contrast with the physical evils everywhere so blatant. I saw the tragic waste of life wherewith the commerce of to-day stands crimsoned in the blood of the proletariat. I noticed little children slowly murdering by the loom and sewing-machine. In the disease-sodden tenements of the slums I saw hundreds of men and women dragging out a living death their lives foreshortening by the vilest adulteration of food and drink and by the foul air and reeking bodies of their fellow-men in the low, narrow rooms in which they huddled together. Drunkenness, insanity, and sexual perversions were all too common: nevertheless self-sacrifice, kindness, and wondrous patience were equally in evidence.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 9, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for December 1909, Part I:
-Found in New York City Speaking to Shirtwaist Strikers
From the New York Call of December 10, 1909:
“This is not a play this is a fight!”
With these ringing words, Mother Jones, the valiant agitator for the freedom of the workers, struck the keynote of the enthusiastic mass meeting, in behalf of the waist strikers, held by Local New York, of the Socialist party in Thalia Theater yesterday afternoon. The big crowd applauded this sentiment to the echo……
Mother Jones Speaks.
Mother Jones, the friend of the miners and champion of all oppressed, was greeted with a very hearty reception by the big crowd. She was in excellent conditions. As she scored the system with sledge-hammer blows of logic and wit, the enthusiasm of the crowd broke into storms of applause.
[Said Mother Jones in opening:]
Through all the ages you have built a wonderful monument of civilization, but you don’t own it. You make all the fine waists, but you do not wear them. You work hard and are poorly paid, and now you have been forced to strike for better conditions of labor, shorter hours and higher wages.
You ought to parade past the shops where you work and up the avenues where the swells who wear the waists you make live. They won’t like to see you, they will be afraid of you!
If I belonged to a union and was on strike I would insist that we parade past the shops and homes of the masters.
You must stick together to win. The boss looks for cheap workers. When the child can do the work cheaper he displaces the woman. When the woman can do the work cheaper he displaces the man. But when you are organized you have something to say about the conditions of labor and your wages. You must stand shoulder to shoulder. The women must fight in the labor movement beside man. Every strike that I have ever been in was won by the women.
Last Great Fight of Man.
[Declared Mother Jones, as she concluded amid storms of applause:]
Whether you know of it or not, this is the last great fight of man against man. We are fighting for the time when there will be no master and no slave. When the fight of the workers to own the tools with which they toil is won, for the first time in human history man will be free.
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