Hellraisers Journal: From The Day Book: Mothers and Babies, Victims of Barbarous West Virginia by Mary Boyle O’Reilly

18th June 202323rd June 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Poem for Child of Cesco Estep, Clifford Allan Estep, by Walter Seacrist, wvgw net —————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 18, 1913
Charleston, West Virginia – Wives of Miners Testify before Senate Committee

From the Chicago Day Book of June 17, 1913:

MOTHERS AND BABIES WERE VICTIMS OF THE WAR

IN THE KINGDOM OF WEST VIRGINIA

By Mary Boyle O’Reilly.

Charleston, W. June 17.-The laws of war among all civilized nations and most savage tribes prescribe the removal of all women and children from the peril of the firing line.

For a year West Virginia has been in a state of war, the war of the twentieth century struggle of workers and organized capital.

The U. S. Senate sub-committee on labor, now hearing testimony concerning the Paint Creek coal mine war, sits in a long, low banquet room in the Kanawha Hotel here. Pale blue walls without, decoration, cheap deal tables for the committee and the various counsel, indicate the grim business-like atmosphere of the place.

The room is crowded to suffocation with blue-shirted miners, standing, for once, shoulder to shoulder, with burly railway detectives and rat-faced mine guards whose hunched-up coats indicate the holsters holding loaded arms.

About the tables on either side gather the opposing counsel the sleek, tame solicitors of great coal corporations summery in pale gray and fawn-colored clothes; the half-dozen alert, coatless young lawyers of the United Mine Workers of America whose team-work under their chief, Judge Monnett, former attorney general of Ohio, is the one bright spot in the proceedings.

And at the committee table, facing the room, sit the senators-Martine, the living portrait of a cavalier, whose tongue is a rapier; Swanson, the senator long on corporation concern, but short on human sympathy, and Kenyon of Iowa, on whose calm judgment the troubled citizens of Kanawha county instinctively have their hope.

* * * * * * *

[Friday, June 13th, afternoon session:] The packed hearing room was insufferably hot. Long, familiar evidence dragged. A witness testifying of outrages perpetrated on unoffending strikers by the coal corporations mine-guards used the word, “Thugs.” A florid “company counsel” protested. A junior among the miners’ lawyers seemed to acquiesce. Then-

“Mrs. Parker,” he called.

“Mrs. Estep-Mrs. Seville.”

They came at once-three miners’ wives, typical women of the coal valleys, arid tidy and self-respecting, in heavy, long-sleeved shirtwaist belted with pleated alpaca skirts.

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Hellraisers Journal: John W. Brown on Coal Miners’ Strike in West Virginia: “This Is War and War Is Hell”-Part III

17th October 202217th October 2022 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones re Get Rid of Mine Guards, Charleston WV, Aug 15, 1912, Steel Speeches p95 —————

Hellraisers Journal –Thursday October 17, 1912
“This Is War and War Is Hell” by John W. Brown, Part III

From The Coming Nation of October 12, 1912:

[Part III of III]

Killing Unborn Babes

The most heart rending testimony was that given by Mrs. Taney Sevillis [Gianiana Seville, Mrs. Tony Seville] who told how her baby was born dead after the brutal mine guards fired bullets through her house. This poor mother terrified, fled for safety to the home of Mrs. Waters, the wife of the mine foreman. Mrs. Waters, in testifying before the commission, said: “She was as white as a ghost when she ran into my house. She fell on her knees before me and made the sign of the cross. ‘Oh save me, save me, my baby, my baby, my poor baby,’ she cried, and I took her in and a month later the baby was born dead. The doctor said it had been dead several weeks.”

Mrs. Charles Fish, the wife of a miner, testified to how she and sixty-three others, men and women and children, had hid from the guards in a cellar for twenty-four hours after they had been driven from their homes by the fiendish guards, and how at length they fled over the hills, hungry, dirty, unkempt and sick from their long fast in the dark cellar. She told how she was beaten and choked by the guards when she informed the strike-breakers at the railway station that there was a strike on at that place to which they were being shipped.

The prices charged the miners at the “Pluck-me-stores” which are owned by the coal barons and the difference between these prices and the price of the same article in Charleston furnish another chapter in the evidence being taken. Potatoes which sell in Charleston for 85 cents per bushel are sold to the miners for $2.60. Arbuckle Coffee which can be bought anywhere for 25 cents per pound costs the miner 40 cents. Flour, sugar, bacon, beans and everything else which goes to make up a miner’s diet is sold on the same basis.

When one stops to consider that the miners on Paint Creek and Cabin Creek are mining coal for 19 cents per ton less than the miners get in union fields; that in union fields 2,000 pounds constitutes a ton while in the non-union fields the coal barons exact 2,240 pounds for a ton, and not only that, but in the non-union fields they do not even weigh the coal; on the contrary, the miner has to load a car which is supposed to hold 2,240 pounds, but which in fact holds anywhere from 2,500 to 3,000 pounds, the wonder is not that the miners have revolted against such inhuman conditions; the wonder is that they have stood it as long as they have. However, the revolt is on and not only the miners but the people as a whole are aroused.

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Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “The Battling Miners of West Virginia” by Edward H. Kintzer, Part I

2nd October 20222nd October 2022 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Sleep Guard House, ISR p295, Oct 1912 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 2, 1912
“The Battling Miners of West Virginia” by Edward H. Kintzer, Part I

From the International Socialist Review of October 1912:

———-

[Part I of II]

WEST VIRGINIA is living under martial law in the mining war that has been raging in that state for several years. Mother Jones, the veteran of many labor battles, is the central and inspiring figure. In her eightieth year she is today leading the fight in the strike, which started last April. In her characteristic way, she has has more than once defied the military authorities who are making and executing the mine-owner-made laws. When informed that the militia were endeavoring to arrest her for what they called inflammatory speeches, she said:

If they want the chance, I will give it to them. I’d just as soon sleep in a guard house as in a hotel.

At Pratt and Holly Grove Junction guard houses are being filled with miners for the slightest offenses. The militia has taken control, making and executing the laws without regard for the civil code, in all favor to the mine owners, just as have the judicial courts since Capitalism has ruled in the mining industry.

Martial Law Welcomed.

Fierce were the conflicts of 1897 when Eugene V. Debs led the striking miners in the Fairmont district and in 1902, when Mother Jones played a prominent part in that great strike. But never before has any part of the state been under martial law.

When it came it was welcomed by the strikers, for they had suffered such outrages at the hands of a private army in the employ of the coal barons that anything was preferable-even death-to a continuation of the horrors they had perpetrated.

Governor Glasscock appointed a commission to “examine” into the private army system and the wages and working conditions of the miners. The United Mine Workers demanded that the intense over-capitalization of the companies also be considered.

Later the governor issued a proclamation, ordering the mine guards and the strikers to lay down their arms. This was resented by the strikers who claimed that if they obeyed this order the guards would not and they would be helpless before armed thugs. In reply to this proclamation Mother Jones led 10,000 miners to Charleston, where they demanded that the governor order the mine guards out of the region. She declared that he would be to blame for any trouble that might follow if the guards were not sent away. So horrible had been the acts of the guards that the miners were ready to kill on sight.

America has no better example of the conflict between the two important economic classes than this one in the Kanawah coal mining district. Here Capitalism has mocked the sentiment of the founders of the state and by force of a private army abrogated the constitution this new state adopted. Born in the stress of a civil conflict over a question of bondage, the native coal miners of West Virginia have never learned to submit tamely to an interference with their liberties. .

And yet no people have been more thoroughly exploited than the workers of West Virginia. Mine workers that have been on strike since April are desperate over their frightful condition of starvation and disease. Yet every one is loyal and will die rather than submit to the mine guards.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Russia May Be Bad But Look at Darkest West Virginia!-Gunthugs Brutalize Men, Women and Children

9th August 202223rd August 2022 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

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Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 9, 1912
Kanawha County, West Virginia – Gunthugs Brutalize Women and Children

From the Evansville Press of August 7, 1912:

Small picture at top: Thomas Cairns, president district No. 17, United Mine Workers; James M. Craigo (right), secretary-treasurer, official leaders of the strikers. The larger picture shows four mine guards around the machine gun; militiamen are back of them. Lower picture shows five guards snapped at Mucklow, where big battle was fought. Second man from left is Ernest Goujot (holding hand before his face) leader of guards

———-

BY E. C. RODGERS.

Staff Special.

CHARLESTON, W. Va., Aug. 7.-The bloody conflict now raging in West Virginia started with the violation by the coal mine operators of an agreement to pay 2 1-2 cents a ton increase to the miners. Today, with dead men’s bodies in the valleys and in the mountains and with thousands of miners thirsting for blood and refusing to be denied, it is as much a war as that which reddens the soil of Mexico or the sands of Tripoli.

Every lead of my investigation of causes leads directly to the guard system, to the conduct of the army of guards the Baldwin-Felts concern of Staunton, Va., put into the field the minute the strike started.

Early one morning in June a company of guards came down on the Italian settlement at Banner. Lining up the ignorant foreigners the leader said: “If you don’t go to work we’ll blow your brains out!”

The guards then began the work of eviction. From house to house they went. “Go to work or get out!” they yelled, and threw furniture and all out of windows and doors.

Half the village was at break fast. Every meal was thrown into the road. To Tony Seviller’s cabin they came. “Get out!” they roared. Mrs. Seviller [Seville] was in bed. Roughly they ordered her out. “

“My God! Can’t you see I am sick, just let us stay here until my baby is born,” she pleaded.

Ernest Goujot was the guard leader. “I don’t give a damn,” he explained. “Get out or I’ll shoot you out!” Mrs. Seviller’s baby was born soon after in a tent furnished by the national mine workers.

Six other babies have been born in those tents down at Holly Grove, the only land not owned by the mine companies, and where several thousand people live in tents.

I have looked up the record of this Goujot, captain of the guards. He was in the West Virginia penitentiary for murder, and was paroled. Then he joined the Baldwin-Felts gang of labor fighters. In the 1902 strike he, with a squad of guards, shot up Stanford. Three women, seven children and a score of men were killed in their beds.

Now he leads the mine guards in the dare-devil campaigns. His men are on the average about like him. Many are proved ex-convicts. Once in a while a respectable man gets to be a mine guard. One such, Davison by name, quit. Handing his guns to Noah Farrell, Mucklow mine storekeeper, he said:

“I got my belly full of this business. I got a mother of my own and I’ll starve before I’ll abuse any woman or kid like you wanted it done here.”

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