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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 16, 1914
Walsenburg, Colorado – Mother Jones Held in Cold Cellar Cell
From the Appeal to Reason of April 11, 1914:
Detail:
Note: Kostas (Gus) Marcos was the name of the striking miner who died as a result of being held in the cold cellar cell beneath the Huerfano County Courthouse at Walsenburg, Colorado.
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday March 22, 1914
Denver, Colorado – Mother Jones Arrives After Deportation from Trinidad
-Meets with John Lawson and Horace Hawkins
From the Denver United Labor Bulletin of March 21, 1914:
“Mother” Jones and John R. Lawson.
Remarkable likeness of the 82-year-old Camp Angel, telling her story to John R. Lawson, Executive Board member U. M. W., Monday [March 16th] after arrival in Denver from Trinidad, where she was detained as military prisoner for 9 weeks.
From The Denver Post of March 16, 1914
-Statement of Mother Jones after Deportation from Trinidad:
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Hellraisers Journal – Friday December 5, 1913
Mother Jones Opines on Churches, Labor Unions and Christianity
From the Chicago Day Book of December 1, 1913
-Mother Jones Interviewed by Jane Whitaker:
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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.
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday December 19, 1900
Mother Jones News Round-Up for November 1900, Part III
Found in Giving Ringing Speech to Large Audience in Vandling, PA
From the Carbondale Leader of November 24, 1900:
Mother Mary Jones was given a rousing reception in Vandling last night. The famous female friend of the miners came to this city on the 3 o’clock train and was met at the station by a number of people. Early in the evening she went to Vandling. Quite a number of Carbondalians went up to hear her. So large was the crowd which wished to attend the lecture, it was found that Mr. Closkey’s hall would not accommodate all. Rev. Clarke and the trustees of the Methodist church kindly offered its use and this large edifice was filled to overflowing. The audience was an attentive one and for over two hours and a quarter Mother Jones held the listeners’ close attention. She is a woman of about sixty-five and her hair is very white. She speaks in a very straight forward positive manner leaving no doubt as to the meaning of what she says. With “Mother” Jones there were on the platform Thomas Davis, J. Johns and Rev. Mr. Clarke.
SCORED WALL ST.
“Mother” Jones began by scoring the Wall street men whom she characterized as a lot of idling robbers. Then she cut into the coal operators. She told an incident where to save a piece of wood valued at two and one-half cents the corporation sacrificed a mans life. That was held of less value than a piece of wood. In part the speaker said:
We believe we live in a Christian nation and yet why do we take our children from the school and put them in the mills and breakers. The Christian church never murdered. Christianity means the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; it means that all men should be fed; it means that our schools should be populated. But look at the vile language the children learn in mill and factory. Look, and see what the coming generation will be. You and I will have to render an account for our life’s work here below. How can you expect justice then if you wont give it now.
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 15, 1920
Altoona, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Speaks at Mishler Theater, Part II
From the Altoona Times Tribune of January 12, 1920:
Mother Jones Elucidates Theories To Altoona Audience
[Part II of II.]
OVERWORK AND UNDERPAY
She scored the conditions which permit men and women to be overworked and underpaid and results in riots and strikes when women and children are shot by brutes. Under her own personal observation at a time like this in the south, she said, was a case of a woman run down by mounted police who gave birth to a child as she was being taken to the morgue.
[She passionately declared:]
You have no Christianity. If you had conditions like this would not exist.
However, the speaker gave it as her opinion that the workers are becoming educated, getting a different vision; they feel the pulse of the world beating and different days coming. In West Virginia 65,000 men are organized since the inception of the union movement in that section a short time ago. Recently 10,000 of these men marched in a parade which the mayor of the city characterized as the most orderly parade he ever saw. All of which is a good omen.
BRUTALITY COVERED UP
[She cried:]
We want to give America a well fed humanity, intellectually, morally and physically. If the ministers do not wake up they will be thrown on a scrap heap.
At this point she derided the idea of saying “Your honor” to the governor of a state, who has permitted the murder of women and children in industrial uprisings.
This is the most insidiously brutal age that ever was, but it is covered up.
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 6, 1920
Braddock, Pennsylvania – Father Kazincy Stands with Strikers
From the Topeka Kansas Trades Unionist of January 2, 1920:
STEEL OWNERS FEAR POWER
-PASTOR ST. MICHAEL’S CHURCH[by Edwin Newdick.]
The steel strike has revealed no more glorious devotion to the cause of workingmen than that of Reverend Father Adalbert Kazinci [Kazincy], pastor of St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church at Braddock, Pa., where one of the huge mills of the Carnegie Steel Company is situated and near which are also the big mills of Homestead and Rankin. Today there probably are many more than 10,000 men on strike who would have been cajoled, discouraged or frightened back into the mills but for the clear, fearless stand of Father Kazinci in the teeth of everything which the steel companies could devise to calumniate him, destroy his influence and wipe out his parish.
The end is not yet. The despots of steel never forgive and never forget. Father Kazinci at this moment is calmly facing the possibility that the steel-companies will, whatever the outcome of the strike, employ discrimination and discharge to disperse his congregation. He is too clear visioned not to have realized this possibility from the first; but he is too courageous to waver from any consideration of expediency or personal comfort.
Only a part of the story of blackmail, intimidation and every device or conscienceless desperation employed by the steel magnates against him and his parishioners can be told in the space available. Every friend of labor who reads it should engrave indelibly in his memory the name of an apostle of applied Christianity, a hero-in labors struggle for freedom, Father Kazinci.
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 8, 1919
Buffalo, New York – Mother Jones Speaks to Striking Steel Workers
Mother Jones spoke Thursday evening, October 2nd, at Miller’s Harmonia Hall and said in part:
The revolution is on and nothing can stop is now. Old George III didn’t think the Americans would rise and lick h— out of him, and Gary thinks the same way. They call me an agitator well, the United States was founded on agitation by radicals, and we will make no apologies for that name if that is what they want to call us until we clean the whole lot of them out. American liberty was bought not by the money of men like Gary, but by the blood of men like you, who have left you that glorious emblem, the Stars and Stripes, of which the first stripe is red the color of the blood they shed.
The labor union represents the only Christianity of the present time. The labor union has done more of humanity than all the churches, universities, Y. M. C. A. and other institutions of capitalism. When the miners’ union took the children out of the mines and put them into the school the cry of anarchy went up. The master class has a new word now-Bolshevism-for those who do not agree with the capitalists. If Bolshevism makes the world any better for the workers, I am for the Bolsheviki. I want the spies who have followed me all day today to know this.
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[Photograph added is from New York Daily News of October 1, 1919.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday July 25, 1909
Spokane, Washington – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Devoted to Downtrodden
From the Spokane Spokesman-Review of July 8, 1909:
GIRL, 19, FIGHTS IN CAUSE OF LABOR
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Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Industrial Agitator,
Devotes Life to Downtrodden.
—–STARTED WHEN ONLY 15
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Young Woman Believes in Evolution and
Socialism and Rejects Christianity.
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I will devote my life to the cause of the downtrodden wage-earner.
My father was a victim of the master class and my brothers and sisters and myself have felt the pinch of poverty as the result of industrial tyranny and I am in the fight to a finish.
My sole aim in life is to do what lies in my power to right the wrongs and lighten the burdens of the laboring class.
In these words Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, not yet 19 years old, explained how she came to take to the lecture platform in the interests of the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization which conceives all capitalists to be its deadly enemies.
Only Slip of a Girl.
She is only a slip of a girl, tall, pale and slender, but she has strong convictions and a will to stick to a purpose.
Taking the lecture platform before she was 16 years old, at the completion of her high school course in New York city, she has followed her work persistently for more than three years and is regarded as one of the most effective apostles of the organization.
She has appeared in nearly every city in the country.
She sat for nearly an hour last night telling of her work and its purpose.
There was no bitterness in her words as she spoke of industrial conditions as she sees them, in fact, she smiled several times and her eyes sparkled with a kindly light.
There was no denunciation, no venom, only regret that things are not better than they are.
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday March 6, 1919
The Messenger, A. Philip Randolph, “The Truth About Lynching”
From The Messenger of March 1919, the Cover:
From page 23: Ad for “The Truth About Lynching”
