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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 30, 1914
Spokane, Washington – Mother Jones Talks with Reporter While Waiting for Train
From The Seattle Star of May 29, 1914
-Mother Jones Speaks on Christians and Savages:
A MODERN HEROD, “MOTHER” JONES
CALLS ROCKEFELLER
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Aged Angel of Organized Labor,
En Route to Seattle, Talks to Star
Correspondent of Colorado WarBy Staff Correspondent.
SPOKANE, May 29-Mother Jones talked with a reporter during a short stop here today, while she waited for her train to speed on toward Seattle, where she will take part in the Memorial Day labor parade and exercises.
With the horror of the Ludlow massacre of women and children by the hired gunmen of the mine owners still noticeable in its effect on her, she is hurrying coastward to tell the story of the modern butchery.
She wants the Northwest to know the awful details of that terrible day at Ludlow.
[Said Mother Jones:]
I wish I could stop in every city and hamlet on the Coast and throughout the West and tell the story of Ludlow as I know it. The world outside of Colorado still fails to realize the full extent of Colorado’s red history.
This charming old lady of 80 comes to the Northwest fresh from her imprisonment in Colorado for participation in the miners’ strike there.
She has written to John D. Rockefeller, jr., asking him to see her when she returns East, and let her tell him the grievances of his former employes.
She has dreamed a dream of acting as an unofficial mediator between Rockefeller and the strikers in Colorado.
[She said sadly:]
I’ll never hear at all from the young man. He hasn’t even a polite excuse for an old woman. I might have known, though, that the man who would permit his gunmen to shoot down women and boil babies in oil wouldn’t want to hear the miners’ side.
Likens Him to Herod.
But you see I’ve just come from Colorado-from the strike zone.
I have a photograph of the little boy [Frankie Snyder] whose head was shot off while he was getting a drink of water for his dying mother. I haven’t been able to get my mind off the horror of Ludlow.
I thought just for a minute that perhaps Rockefeller was not as bad as he has been painted. But I’ll never hear from him. I know it now. Why, a mother might just as well have written to Herod to ask him why he ordered the slaughter of the innocents! THAT’S ALL ROCKEFELLER IS-ANOTHER BUT CRUELER HEROD!
[Mother Jones continued, in the deep, booming voice that shows the astonishing triumph of an ageless spirit over age:
They’re all alike, those capitalists.
They’re All Savages.
They’re all Christians in China and savages in their own country.
The reason they all give so much money to foreign missions is because they wast to keep Christianity where it can’t do any harm-where it can’t interfered with BUSINESS. BUSINESS IS THEIR GOD! They all worship it.
I tell John D Rockefeller and all others like him that the men Christ scourged from the temple, the money-changers, were men LIKE HIM and MORGAN and CARNEGIE.
And I warn them that another scourging of the money-changers is close at hand!
[Emphasis added]
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