You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 10, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – 5,000 Children Go to School Hungry
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
American School Children Starving
Chicago Tribune of October 5, 1908
When we are talking of the number of men who are tramping the country looking for work—hungry, broken-spirited, abject creatures, who once thought themselves men, as good as any of their kind—let us not forget the women, and the little children of these men.
Last winter in Chicago after the first flurry of the panic, I had occasion to visit a number of the “homes” of those who had been thrown out of work. In every case the men were out, hunting feverishly for the chance to make even a little money by any kind of hard labor. And in every case my heart ached and my soul grew sick when I thought of the future of the women and children of those families.
“It is awful when the children cry for food, and we cant give it to them,” said one woman who had never before known what it was to be down and out. Another mother, about thirty, and strong and handsome, had to sit by and watch her seven-year-old daughter burning with fever, and without the care of a doctor because she had lost her job in a department store, and there was no money even to buy food. She had applied for work at all the large stores again and again. She had tried everywhere—and was told that they might need her during the holidays. But the holidays were weeks away. Already she had moved into a questionable quarter because rent was cheap. And unless that mother got work within two weeks, there was but one resource left her, if she would save herself and her child from death through starvation. And that was the sale of her body.
It was for a charitable institution I was working—and I knew that those institutions were crowded to their utmost with destitute cases.
Such, indeed, was the condition of the poor in Chicago last winter, that the superintendent of compulsory education, W. Lester Bodine, took up the case of hungry school children, followed his investigations for six months, and finally ascertained that there are 5,000 starving children, and 10,000 that are underfed, in the schools of the city.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday November 8, 1908
Tour of Red Special Ends in Home Town of Eugene Debs
From The Indianapolis News of November 3, 1908:
TERRE HAUTE WELCOMES
“GENE” DEBS BACK HOME
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BIG DEMONSTRATION FOR THE SOCIALIST CANDIDATE.
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REGARDS TO BRYAN AND TAFT
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(Special to The Indianpolis News.)
TERRE HAUTE, Ind., November 3.-“Gene” Debs came home last evening in his “Red Special,” and had a welcome surpassing in enthusiasm any political demonstration seen in Terre Haute in many years. His train was three hours late, owing to a breakdown at Cayuga, but the crowd waited for him, cheering for “Gene.” when he appeared on the stage at the Colosseum 3,000 persons, who had each paid 10 cents admission, packed the place, and as great a crowd outside listened to other speakers. At the Armory another big audience waited for him until after 10 o’clock. Besides paying the admission at the Colosseum there was a liberal contribution when collectors, some of whom were women, wearing red sashes, went down the aisles.
Debs began with a feeling acknowledgment of the personal note in his welcome, referring to the fact that he was born in and always had lived in Terre Haute, where, if any one had ever said an unkind word about him, he never heard of it.
Refers to Rockefeller.
[He said:]
All great movements in their incipiency are unpopular and are led by “undesirable citizens.”
[T]he reference to the designation of him by President Roosevelt causing laughter and applause. He said the two old parties stand for the same system, which has reached the climax of its existence. He declared that Rockefeller “was not born yesterday”; that he knew better than any one else how unpopular he is and the effect of his interview for Taft. The interview, he said, was the shrewdest move in the campaign. He knew that he had exhausted the usefulness of the Republican party to him, and desires Bryan.
You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday November 24, 1916
Washington, D. C. – Investigation of Hunger to Commence
From the American Socialist of November 18, 1916:
INVESTIGATING HUNGER.
Attorney General Gregory announces that he will investigate the “abnormal and suspicious increases in the prices of the various necessities of life, especially coal.”
If it is found that such increases are due “to conspiracy and other unlawful action,” the department will invoke the severest penalties which the law prescribes.
When hunger stalks abroad in the land, when America is starved to pile up profits for private gamblers who feed the war in Europe, the attorney general promises an investigation that will change nothing whatever in the general situation and will not put one single piece of bread into one hungry mouth. There is no law passed by any old party that prevents any business man from charging for his goods what “the traffic will bear.”
