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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 12, 1912
Kalamazoo, Michigan – Union Women Jailed Include Josephine Casey and Bella Yount
From The Coming Nation of June 8, 1912
-“A Familiar Strike Story” by Gertrude Barnum:
Josephine Casey, General Organizer International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union, seated, and Bella Yount, member Executive Board,
Corset Workers’ Union No. 82 in jail at Kalamazoo, Mich.
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday April 30, 1922
Mingo County, West Virginia – Miners’ Tent Colony Saved, for Now
From the Duluth Labor World of April 29, 1922:
TENT-SMASHING JUDGE CHECKED
BY HIGH COURT
———-
Circuit Court Stays Order to Drive Miners
and Families From Tented Homes.
———-RICHMOND, Va., April 27.—Federal Judge McClintic’s injunction to smash the Mingo tent colony has been ordered held up by Hon. Martin A. Knapp, judge of the federal court of appeals, fourth circuit.
Judge Knapp’s decision stays this order until it can be heard by the court of appeals. McClintic is also ordered to scrap his injunction machine until the court of appeals reviews his acts.
Several years ago this federal court of appeals set aside the notorious “yellow dog” decision by Federal Judge Dayton, since deceased. This decision legalized the individual contract whereby each worker accepting employment agreed not to join a trade union. The reasoning of the court of appeals was rejected by the United States supreme court, which upheld the “yellow dog.”
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CHARLESTON, W. Va., April 27. —In holding up Federal Judge McClintic’s injunction to destroy the Mingo tent colony and stop union organizing, the federal court of appeals at Richmond has temporarily clipped the wings of a judge who is openly charged with receiving his present position as a reward for subserviency to coal owners while he was a member of the West Virginia state senate.
McClintic is recognized as the author of the West Virginia jury law which permits the prosecution to take a man charged with crime out of his county into another county for trial.
Under this law, which is now in effect, the trial of a striking miner can be transferred to a county like Logan, which is under the complete domination of Baldwin-Feltz gunmen.
When McClintic was appointed last year the A. F. of L. made strong objection because of his bias in favor of coal owners. The latest exhibition of this bias was shown by his issuance of an injunction that would oust hundreds of miners and their families from the only homes they have and which are located on land leased by the union.
The trade, unionists, made no progress in blocking McClintic’s indorsement by the senate because he was supported by the two West Virginia senators-Messrs. Sutherland and Elkins.
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[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 12, 1902
Eugene Victor Debs Recalls Bloody Scenes of Battle in Class War
From the Social Democratic Herald of January 11, 1902:
The War for Freedom.
By Eugene V. Debs.
The country we inhabit is generally supposed to have been in a state of peace since the close of the Civil War, excepting the brief period required to push the Spaniards off the western continent. And yet during this reign of so-called peace more than a score of bloody battles have been fought on American soil, in every one of which the working class were beaten to the earth, notwithstanding they outnumber their conquerors and despoilers at least ten to one, and notwithstanding in each case they asked but a modest concession that represented but a tithe of what they were justly entitled to.
To recall the bloody scenes in the Tennessee mountains, the horrors of Idaho, the tragedies of Virden, Pana, Buffalo, Chicago, Homestead, Lattimer, Leadville, and many others, is quite enough to chill the heart of a man who has such an organ, and yet above the cloud and smoke of battle there shines forever the bow of promise, and however fierce the struggle and gloomy the outlook, it is never obscured to the brave, self-reliant soul who knows that victory at last must crown the cause of labor.
Thousands have fallen before the fire of the enemy and thousands more are doubtless doomed to share the same fate, but
“Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
Though baffled oft, Is ever won.”The struggle in this and other lands by the children of toil is a struggle between classes which in some form or other has been waged since primitive man first captured and enslaved his weaker fellow-being. Through the long, dark night of history the man who toiled has been in fetters, and though today they are invisible, yet they bind him as securely in wage slavery as if they were forged of steel.
How the millions toil and produce! How they suffer and are despised! Is the earth forever to be a dungeon to them? Are their offspring always to be food for misery? These are questions that confront the workingmen of our day and a few of them at least understand the nature of the struggle, are conscious of their class interests, and are striving with all their energy to close up the ranks and conquer their freedom by the solidarity of labor.
In this war for freedom the organized men in the Western states have borne a conspicuous and honorable part. They have, in fact, maintained better conditions on the whole than generally prevail, and this they have done under fire that would have reduced less courageous and determined men. But, notwithstanding their organized resistance, they must perceive that in common with all others who work for wages they are losing ground before the march of capitalism.
It requires no specially sensitive nature to feel the tightening of the coils, nor prophetic vision to see the doom of labor if the government is suffered to continue in control of the capitalist class. In every crisis the shotted guns of the government are aimed at the working class. They point in but one direction. In no other way could the capitalists maintain their class supremacy. Court injunctions paralyze but one class. In fact, the government of the ruling class today has but one vital function, and that is to keep the exploited class in subjection.
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Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 27, 1911
Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1911, Part II
Mother Jones Accompanies Samuel Gompers on Visit to Jailed Miners
On Sunday, August 20th, Mother Jones accompanied Gompers on his visit to the miners jailed by Injunction Judge Whitford, which visit was described in the August 29th edition of The Joliet News (Illinois):
President Gompers [while in Denver] en route to the Pacific coast expressed a desire to visit the coal miners who have been made the victims of the abuse of the injunction writ in the strike in the northern coal fields of the state. The committee in charge made suitable arrangements and a trip was made to the quarters of the miners in the jail, where Mother Jones, on behalf of Mr. Gompers, presented the prisoners with a large bouquet of flowers. An informal and impromptu meeting was held and a few remarks made by Mr. Gompers. The prisoner have been accorded the privileges of the court yard and following the meeting inside the jail all retired to the court yard where, with the grated windows of county jail serving as a background, a group picture was taken, President Gompers and Mother Jones being the central figures.
[Photograph added.]
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From The Denver Post of August 21, 1911:
GOMPERS VISITS MINERS IN JAIL
———-“Distortions of law” and “byplays of justice” were terms applied to the injunctions issued by District Judge Greeley W. Whitford in the miners’ trouble of northern Colorado by Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in a speech at Eagles’ hall in the Club building at 2 o’clock Sunday afternoon [August 20th].
Later in the day he visited the miners in jail and told them they were martyrs to labor’s cause and deserved to be ranked with Lincoln and Jefferson in their devotion to the people. He told the men thy suffered no moral stigma and the good their imprisonment is doing for labor could not be measured in words…..
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 25, 1911
Mother Jones News Round-Up for July 1911
Found at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Where Miners Meet to Call Off Strike
From Pennsylvania’s Latrobe Bulletin of July 3, 1911:
The Calling Off of the Strike Is
Declared To Be In Sight
———-Greensburg the Scene of Special Convention.
Ten Delegates Are Present From the Local Union
Behind closed doors, with Francis Feehan presiding, with Mother Jones, Van Bitner and others prominently identified with the strike present, the convention of miners is now on in full swing in Tonkay’s hall, at Greensburg…
The Greensburg Tribune claims to have received authentic information from Indianapolis to the effect that the executive board decided that the strike should end.
Mother Jones, who is at the convention, was in attendance at the International board meeting, last week, and it is said that she made a plea for the strikers…..
[Photograph added.]
From the Pittsburgh Gazette Times of July 6, 1911:
The long and bitter labor struggle of the coal miners in the Irwin-Greensburg field for recognition of the union was brought to a close yesterday. Locals of the United Mine Workers of America met and adopted a resolution to return to work. This action was taken under instructions from the international executive board of the United Mine Workers, which held a special meeting last Monday that resulted in the decision to call a meeting of the locals and order the return to work.
It is believed the miners welcomed the instructions from their executive board. They had been idle for 16 months, during which time many hardships were endured. When notice was served that the payment of strike benefits would cease next week, the men realized that their cause was lost and the struggle hopeless…..
The abrupt ending of the long strike resulted in a divided sentiment among union miners. When it became known yesterday that the locals had concurred in the action of their international executive board, the following circular was sent out to the various locals, signed by Robert Gibbons, Abe Kephart and Andrew Puskar of the miners’ organization of District No. 5:
The miners throughout the Irwin-Greensburg fields today held local meetings at which in every case a vote was taken to call off the strike which has lasted for 16 months. This was compulsory for these poor, misguided brothers, as the International Executive Board in session at Indianapolis headquarters last week voted to discontinue paying strike benefits to them and directed Francis Feehan to call their leaders and arrange to have the strike terminated without recognition or concessions whatever.
Meeting of Leaders.
A meeting of these leaders was held in Greensburg on Monday. International Board Members A. R. Watkins of Ohio, George Dagger of Western Pennsylvania, and Thomas Haggerty of Central Pennsylvania had been delegated to represent the International Union. Mother Jones told the International Board at Indianapolis that it had been a lost cause since last summer. But it was continued until there had been the loss of 18 lives and the useless expenditure of a $1,000,000 of the miners’ money, besides large donations from many of our people and others in sympathy……
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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 12, 1901
Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1901, Part I
Grants Interview in Cleveland, Speaks at Labor Day Celebration
From the Cleveland Plain Dealer of September 2, 1901:
“Mother” Mary Jones, who has been associated with the miners and silk workers in their strike, arrived in Cleveland on the Big Four yesterday afternoon [September 1st]. She is registered at the Forest City house. Mrs. Jones was met at the train by a committee of four and conducted to her apartments at the hotel. The committee consisted of two members of the Central Labor union and two of the Woman’s Labor union.
An address will be given by Mrs. Jones this afternoon at Scenic park to the members of the Central Labor union. The theme of her lecture will be “The Necessity for Organization in the Field of Labor.” A reception will be given her after the address.
Mrs. Jone came to Cleveland from the New river district in West Virginia, where she has been working among the miners for the past two months. In the evening she will leave for Carbondale, Pa., where she will give a lecture. From there she will return to West Virginia.
“Come right in!” called Mrs. Jones in a hearty, motherly voice, in response to a rap at the door, “I like to talk to newspaper men. They belong to the workers.”
What do I think of the present steel strike? I believe all strikes are good. They are bringing us nearer the goal we are striving for, that is, equalization of wealth.
I don’t believe that the Amalgamated association struck merely to show its power. The men had real grievances. If they weren’t dissatisfied they wouldn’t have quit work. Perhaps they won’t win, but whether they do or not a great deal will be accomplished.
[She continued:]
We are a nation of strikers. We inherited the disease from our revolutionary fathers, and have been striking ever since. We will continue to strike and strike until the laboring men are emancipated.
I don’t know when that time will be, but it won’t be as long as most people think. Something will have to change before long or we will have another French revolution. The poor people who are oppressed will not stand being trodden upon too long. “The worm will turn.”
In the West Virginia mines there are boys six years old who work ten hours a day, and this is in order that a few may live without work.
[She exclaimed, her eyes flashing:]
It’s a shame and an outrage. We call ourselves Christianized and civilized, and such things in our midst. It’s a mockery.
The whole system of labor is wrong and must be changed. I hope at the ballot box, but-well-it must be changed.
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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 17, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part IV
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.[Part IV of IV.]
On our journey up to Berry, where Mother Jones addressed a mass meeting just at the end of the railroad trestle on this side of Sewell, we saw a man crawl from under the rods of a freight train that had slowed up for water. He was barefooted and his clothes were in tatters. He sat down beside the little spring that bubble up behind the water tank and Mother Jones divided our luncheon with him. He was a miner hunting for work, 43 years old, with a family back in Alabama, glad to sell himself for the miserable pittance of a West Virginia coal digger. He had traveled all the way from Alabama, sleeping on the rods of freight cars. He was going up Quinnimont on the scent of a job. The whistle blew, he drank another cup of cool water, swallowed the last bite of sandwich and all in the twinkling of an eye swung under the moving train.
We encounter most difficulty when it becomes necessary for Mother Jones to cross the river. Most of the ferries are the property of the companies who control the adjacent mines. Where Mother Jones identity is discovered the ferrymen refuse to carry her. I took a snap shot of an altercation which she had with an operator when she was about to cross to the tipple of the Sunday Creek Coal company of Ohio.
The local ferry had refused to carry her, and she was just about to step into the rowboat of an obliging colored man when the operator of one of the companies rushed up. “I tell you I own half this river, and I dare you to cross,” he shouted.
“Huh, you own half the river, do you?” retorted Mother Jones. “Well, it’s a pretty long river for a man like you to own the half of. However, I believe God Almighty owns the other half, and maybe He has a block or two of stock in your half, so I think I’ll cross, come along, uncle,” to the awe-stricken colored man.
Needless to say Mother Jones crossed the river and talked to the little company of black smeared diggers gathered behind the tipple.
The dignity of this woman is awe-inspiring. When the constable and squire met us at North Caperton the other night she treated them with the indulgence with which a grandmother looks upon the practical jokes of her grandsons. She was not at all nonplussed, but calmly sat on a pile of railroad ties awaiting her time, and after a quarter of an hour’s parley between the squire and the constable (Mother Jones never parleys with a petty law officer) they decided to ride across the mountain to Fayetteville, the county seat, and look up the law.
They have not returned thus far, and Mother Jones held her meeting that night and numerous others since.
Sitting on the river bank near Hawks Nest, Mother Jones computed that every miner in the West Virginia coal fields must dig twenty tons at the very lowest estimate to pay the various company assessments before he has anything for food and clothing and powder. He receives a wage that will average anywhere from $1.00 to $1.80 per day.
Out of this comes house rent of not less than $5 a month, water, $1 per month; squibs, 25 cents per month, two gallons of oil per month at 50 cents per gallon, which can be bought anywhere on open market for 25 cents per gallon; powder, of which he uses between three and four kegs per month in order to mine enough coal to pay him $1.00 per day, at $2.25 per keg….[there continues documentation of expenses for blacksmith, for company doctor, for hospital, whether or not doctor or hospital care are needed].
All he has left he is at liberty to spend for food and clothing at the “pluck me,” the miner’s vernacular for the company store. It is pretty well named. The prices charged for everything are exacerbated in the extreme [examples given of prices for flour and salt at the pluck-me versus at stores in “free” towns-towns not under company control-where the miners are forbidden to shop].
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 16, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part III
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.[Part III of IV.]
But back again to the miners’ shack at St. Clair. The coal digger’s children are restless. They sleep, six of them, in the same tiny, moonlit room where Mother Jones lies and I write. They roll their heat pricked bodies first on one side, then on the other. Little naked legs are thrown out over the counterpane, in the adjoining and smaller room the younger children and their father are trying to sleep, while the mother hushes the fretful baby.
This room, too, is flooded with light. Not moonlight, however, but the fierce glare of the coke ovens.
But there is no rest to the West Virginia coal miner or his helpless children in this valley of dreadful night. I have been in the crowded tenements of New York on nights of record-breaking heat, but even there I have never seen the misery that is here to-night. From Quinnimont in the east to Raymond in the west the New river valley unwinds 137 miles of burning labyrinth.
From its torture none can escape; the long processions of rumbling freight trains, the shrieking of the shift engine whistle, the heat and glare and belchings of the coke ovens.
The valley is a narrow, precipitous gorge, every foot of level surface being occupied by the railroad tracks. In many of the camps that Mother Jones and I traveled through this week these tracks lay but three feet from the doors of the miners’ dwellings. All along the valley the houses on the inner side of the railroad abut against the cliffs, and on the outer side perch upon piles driven into the steep, sloping banks running down to the river. On the inner side of the tracks and between them and the row of houses are the coke ovens.
The shack usually consists of three rooms-two bedrooms and a kitchen The company that employs the coal digger receives from $5 to $8 per month rental for these three rooms, which does not include the additional $1 for water, which they must carry themselves from the company well.
The water supply is the most pitiful of all the tragedies to be found here. The family with whom we are spending the night use the river water, as many others are forced to do who cannot pay the requisite $1 per month.
It is at all seasons of the year thick and muddy as chocolate, and is bad to bathe in, to say nothing of drinking. Mother Jones hired a passing colored woman to walk up to the company well, about a quarter of a mile up the tracks, and bring us a bucket of clear water, for we were very thirsty after our long tramp in the hot sun.
A bucket of clear, pure water, not as cold as can be drawn rom any New York city hydrant, but clear as crystal. The children rushed to it like bees to a clover blossom. They fought for the dinted old dipper. They scrambled for cups and tins, and a neighboring baby came toddling in with an empty the tin can.
It is to better just such conditions as these that Mother Jones has come down into this country. She holds meetings at the coal tipples in the evening at 6 o’clock. Then the men slide down the rails on the incline that leads to the mouth of the mine in the mountain above. She urges them to join the union and preserve their liberties. She tells them of the good times that have come to the miners of Illinois since the awful object lessons at Pana and Virden. How they work eight hours there, instead of ten, as they do here. How there is no dockage there. How they have done away with the company shack, and the company store, and the company blacksmith and church and doctor. How the miners there buy their powder for $1.75 per keg instead of $2.25; how the coal companies are obliged to pay them their wages in cash, without any dockage, and how they enjoy the boon of spending their earnings where they please.
At night she holds meetings, usually aided by some one of the four men organizers who are in that country to help her. Every means possible is used by the coal companies to intimidate those in favor of organization. Immediate discharge is the penalty should an employe be discovered to have joined the United Mine Workers. Of the 28,000 miners in the state only about 3,000 are union men. The companies are very independent, because every incoming freight brings only too many idle men searching for work, who are glad to step into the job left vacant by the union recruit and to move into the shack from which his family was evicted.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 15, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part II
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.[Part II of IV.]
A week ago last Sunday I met this wonderful woman for the first time. It was in her own room at the Washburn hotel, at Charleston, whence I was to set out with her the next day on her mission up the Kanawha and New River valleys.
I saw a neat, trim, comfortable looking woman of 60 years, just tall enough and stout enough to be motherly in appearance. She wore a black silk gown, her platform dress, never donned, as I afterward discovered except on rare occasions. Mother Jones must have been a handsome young girl. Her skin, even yet, is soft and white, and there are few wrinkles in her broad, thoughtful brow. Her eyes are deep set, clear, shining blue gray, shrewd, alert, tender. While she talks they flash by turns indignation, scorn, surprise, amusement, merriment.
She was engaged in the very prosaic task of putting a new velvet binding upon her walking skirt, but she now dropped her work, laid off her glasses, settled herself comfortably back in her rocking chair, and asked if I had heard any news on my trip down regarding the steel strike.
[She said:]
It means so much to us all. Everything depends upon the success or the failure of the striking steel workers. This great strike is the beginning of the end of the campaign begun at Homestead just nine years ago, and which numbers Lattimer and Hazleton in Pennsylvania and Pana and Virden in Illinois among its blood-stained battlefields. Whatever may be the outcome of this, the greatest strike we have yet instituted, its immediate effects will be but temporary. Won or lost, it means a long step forward in industrial evolution. If the union forces lose their fight it will only precipitate the crisis.
It will take but a spark from the revolutionary torch to start a conflagration that will spread from one end of the country to the other. Ten years ago I found the miners and the mill workers timid and wavering and easily subdued. Now I find them bold and firm and uncompromising. They are becoming educated in economics. While they have been using their muscles for their masters they have been training their brains to think and reason for their own advancement.
The people are patient, infinitely patient. Oppressed people have always been patient until patience ceased to be a virtue. They will sweat at the furnace, they will crawl on their bleeding knees through the dark coal caverns, they will even see their young children broken under the wheel of commercial greed. All this they have borne for a long time, with only occasional mutterings of discontent. It is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The wage slave must be ground down just a little more, his yoke made only a little heavier.
When the cataclysm comes the people of this country cannot expect anything different from what has befallen nations that have allowed the classes to exploit the blood and brawn of the masses. Human nature is not different to-day from the human nature of 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago. In the bosom of the hard oppressed toiler in the mine and the mill and at the furnace there is slumbering a long suppressed vindictiveness. This spirit I find in the workers everywhere.
Mother Jones’ voice, clear and ringing when she addresses a crowd, is soft and low in conversation. It is the voice of the gentle nuns of he Canadian convents where she was educated and whose schools she taught prior to her marriage. While yet a very young women there came the great tragedy of her life. Her husband and four little children were swept away by yellow fever in less than one month’s time.
For more than thirty years Mother Jones has been a student of economics and participator in the leading industrial movements of the nation. She is numbered among the agitators of the famous “Sand Lots Movement, ” in San Francisco many years ago.
She was one of the orators who were wont to address the mobs that gathered about the mint in that city, howling for Chinese exclusion. She has taken and influential part in every great strike within the last decade. Her title was bestowed upon her by the 500,000 American Railway union men during the great railroad strike at Chicago in 1897.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 14, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part I
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.[Part I of IV.]
OF IMMEASURABLE importance as a factor in the unit of organized labor is the mission that Mother Jones has been delegated to bear to the 28,000 toilers in the coal mines of West Virginia. To her the United Mine Workers of all America now look for a solution of the problem that has long baffled and harassed not only themselves but all interdependent bodies of organized labor. That problem is the unionization of the West Virginia forces and their alliance with the federations of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
For Mother Jones the state of West Virginia is a forbidden land. She enters its borders as an outlaw and in defiance of the federal judiciary. Under the ban of the perpetual injunction issued by Judge Jackson in 1897, forbidding and restraining organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the confines of the state forever, this gentle apostle of industrial emancipation is liable to arrest and imprisonment any moment that vested interests deem it expedient to enforce that dangerous and obnoxious law.
It is my privilege to accompany Mother Jones into this forbidden land and to journey with her on foot through the enemy’s country. Constables and squires meet us at every turn and serve all manner of papers and warrants and restraining injunctions on Mother Jones, which she, with fine contempt, chucks into her black silk hand-bag, and then goes ahead and does as she pleases. Only day before yesterday, as we walked into North Caperton at dusk, the constable and squire challenged Mother Jones and forbade her the right of addressing a meeting of miners on the opposite side of the river that night.
Only this morning the miner at Mount Carbon who sheltered us last night was discharged and his family evicted from the wretched company shack they called home. The West Virginia coal miner speaks to Mother Jones at the risk of losing his job, and his family harbors her under certain penalty of eviction should the fact reach the ears of the mine superintendent.
Wherever we go there is no room for us in the company inn, and thus we are only too often obliged to partake of the hospitality of a friendly coal digger and thus it is that Mother Jones lies fast asleep to-night upon the hard, bare, moon-washed floor of a hovel at St. Clair. Our host’s family cannot afford the luxury of a lamp. I am writing in the moonlight that streams through the sashless windows and the low, open doorway and whitens the snow of Mother Jones’ hair. Her head is pillowed on her hand-bag.
Mother Jones is dead tired. Up the high mountain side, down the dark ravine, through the fastnesses of the West Virginia wilderness, along the hot, dusty railroad track in the valley, by rock and by stream for many along, hot mile, she and I have trudged this day.
But before I go into an account of our journey through this awful valley, allow me to say a word about the good old woman whom more than 500,000 sweat-dripping toilers call and reverence by the name of “mother.” Let me tell you something about the personality of this heroine of a hundred strikes.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
