Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 24, 1920
Mother Jones News for September 1920, Part II Found in Stone Cutters’ Journal: Los Angeles Speech of March 7th
From The Stone Cutters’ Journal of September 1920:
Mother Jones Speaks in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Times March 11, 1920
Mother Jones spoke to the workers in the Labor Temple in Los Angeles recently. She said in part:
Fellow Workers:-I came here to rest, but I never allow rest to interfere with an opportunity to spread my religion among the workers. First of all, I want to say to you secret service men, get out your books and pencils and come right up here on the platform, and listen closely to every word I say. You might learn something for your own good-some new ideas might percolate through your thick skulls, and you might form a desire to lead a cleaner, better, more useful life.
Fellow workers, you are today in a most critical position. You are either facing liberty and emancipation or else if you don’t wake u , you are going into the blackest, most abject slavery ever known by man in the history of this world.
We whipped the Kaiser abroad and all his autocrats; now, let’s clean ’em up at home.
The inhuman way in which the workers were dealt with in, the steel strike is a fair example of the Prussianism of big business. They tell you that the steel strike was lost, but I say to you that the steel strike was one of the greatest victories ever won by labor in this country—great, because 350,000 workers of all nationalities, and different tongues, stood shoulder to shoulder, and demonstrated what “solidarity” means. They paralyzed one of our strongest industries, and the supply of steel will not be normal for six months yet.
There’s a great cry going up now to Americanize these foreigners—that’s the trouble with them now, they are Americanized. Most of them were imported here 20 years ago or more by those patriotic profiteers, Carnegie, and Gary, to act as scabs during the Homestead strikes— they scabbed then, and broke that strike, but they’re Americanized now and there’s no scabs in their families any more. You can bet on that.
They have learned what true “Americanism” means, and they want it; they want freedom and decent working conditions and they’ll get it some day.
They’ve been slaving 12 and 14 hours a day, with a 24-hour shift every other Sunday. That’s not Americanism, and that’s why they struck. They are not machinery or animals; they’re human beings and they want a square deal.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday October 9, 1900 Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Interviewed by Olivia Howard Dunbar
From the New York Evening World of September 25, 1900:
EVENING WORLD WOMAN INTERVIEWS “MOTHER JONES.” —————
Strikers Friend Tells Some Plain Truths About the Great Struggle Between the Miners and Operators. ——-
NO. IX. OF THE SERIES. BY OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR.
MOTHER JONES, THE STRIKERS’ FRIEND
(Special to The Evening World.)
MAHANOY CITY, Pa., Sept. 25.-“Please tell all the readers of The Evening World for me that we have succeeded in crippling the operators, that the situation is most encouraging, and that we expect an early victory.”
This was the message that “Mother” Jones intrusted to me to-day, and she smiled hopefully as she said it. Ceaselessly vigilant, she had come to Mahanoy City to dull any possible echo of the carnival of strife and slaughter that has resounded so menacingly through Shenandoah.
The situation was tense when she arrived, but there had been no outbreak. Outwardly the little city was unruffled. Early in the morning I had found a group of swarthy, eager-eyed Hungarian women applauding an effigy of a non-union workman that had been bound to an electric-light pole on Eighth street.
Their voices were shrill, their gestures violent. The suggestive spectacle had aroused all their fury against the class that they consider selfishly retards the movement that means life or death to them.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday August 28, 1910 Fresno, California – Fellow Workers Arrested for Speaking on Street
W. H. Little, secretary of Local 66, his wife, Emma Little, brother, Frank Little, and one other Fellow Worker, were arrested Wednesday evening, August 24th, for street-speaking. A call for assistance has been issued.
Sept 15, 1913 – Trinidad, Colorado
Convention of District 15 of the United Mine Workers of America
The delegates opened their convention by singing The Battle Cry of Union:
We will win the fight today, boys,
We’ll win the fight today,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Union;
We will rally from the coal mines,
We’ll fight them to the end,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Union.
The Union forever, hurrah boys, hurrah!
Down with the Baldwins and up with the law;
For we’re coming, Colorado, we’re coming all the way,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Union.
The miners faced the grim prospect of going out on strike against the powerful southern coalfield companies, chief among them, John D Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The coal operators had steadfastly refused to recognize the Union and had ignored all attempts at negotiation.
The miners had had their fill of dangerous working conditions, crooked checkweighmen, long hours, and low pay. They lived in peonage in company towns, were paid in company scrip, and were forced to shop for their daily needs in high-priced company stores which kept them always in debt. But, mostly they hated the notorious company guard system. Every attempt to organize had been met with brutality on the part of the coal operators.
Mother Jones addressed the convention for over an hour, urging the men to:
Rise up and strike! …Strike and stay with it as we did in West Virginia. We are going to stay here in Southern Colorado until the banner of industrial freedom floats over every coal mine. We are going to stand together and never surrender…
Pledge to yourselves in this convention to stand as one solid army against the foes of human labor. Think of the thousands who are killed every year and there is no redress for it. We will fight until the mines are made secure and human life valued more than props. Look things in the face. Don’t fear a governor; don’t fear anybody…You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say, “Let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will.”
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday February 11, 1920
Youngstown, Ohio – Mary Heaton Vorse Visit the Home of a Striker
From The Outlook of January 21, 1920:
BEHIND THE PICKET LINE
THE STORY OF A SLOVAK STEEL STRIKER
-HOW HE LIVES AND THINKS
BY MARY HEATON VORSE
[Part I of II.]
[Leaving the Picket Line in Youngstown, Ohio:]
It was seven o’clock. The morning vigil was over; the strike was unbroken. The deluge had not occurred. The men, weary with watching, broken with inaction and with suspense, drifted to their homes.
“You’re cold, ma’am,” my guide said to me, gently; “I want you should come to my house to get breakfast; my house it ain’t far.”
It seemed to me an imposition to appear in a strange woman’s house at that hour in the morning, especially as Mike let fall casually that he had eight children. A strike and eight children and a husband seemed to me quite enough for any woman to cope with, but he would not let me go without a cup of coffee. We walked past little detached dwellings, small frame houses and some of concrete.
These have been lately built. They show the modern impulse toward better housing. Here and there a rambler was planted over a door; there were porches, and plots of ground surrounded the houses. This was the most meritorious community, from the point of view of decency, that I have seen in any steel town.
Later we met a handsome lad coming out of the gate—Steve’s oldest boy on his way to high school. Then we went into the kitchen, and my first impression was of rows and rows of brightly polished shoes all ready to be hopped into—any amount of brightly polish-little shoes standing neatly two by two.
Now, any student of domestic life will know what this means. How many families are there who can get the boys to black their shoes the night before? I can’t in my household—indeed, it takes savage pertinacity to st shoes blacked at all. Just the sight of those shoes made me realize that my hostess was no ordinary woman. In the meantime Mike was calling up the stairs:
Mother, come down and see who’s here! Come down and see what I’ve got in the kitchen!” To hear him one would have supposed that I was a birthday present. And when “mother” appeared there was nothing that could have shown a third person that I was not an old friend. The owners of the shiny shoes came into the room with their shy “good mornings.”
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday February 10, 1920
Youngstown, Ohio – Mary Heaton Vorse Observes the Picket Line
From The Fresno Morning Republican of February 8, 1920:
Mary Heaton Vorse can see-and tell what she sees. Her study of a Slovak steel striker is mighty well done, entitled “Behind the Picket Line,” in the Outlook for January 21.
[Emphasis added.]
From The Outlook of January 21, 1920:
BEHIND THE PICKET LINE
THE STORY OF A SLOVAK STEEL STRIKER
-HOW HE LIVES AND THINKS
BY MARY HEATON VORSE
[Part I of II.]
[Note: see Introduction by “The Editors” below.]
When I got out of the street car, he detached himself from the darkness and murmured:
“Ma’am, I come to meet you.”
It was not yet five, and black as midnight, except as the fiery salvos of the newly started blast-furnace of the Ohio plant shattered the night with glory. No need to ask how he knew me. Women do not usually get off the cars at five in the morning at this point.
On my way to the picket line I had been alone, with the exception of two uneasy-looking scabs. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t like to. The right of the individual workman to work when and how he wished seemed a rather hypocritical theory to me at that moment. It seemed about as tenable as the right of the individual citizen to desert to the enemy in war time.
For weeks I had been immersed in the strike. I had gone merely as an observer, rather skeptically even, and the thundering immensity of the thing had caught me up.
The people—that is to say, the public, those not directly interested—look on strikes as unchancy occurrences, violent manifestations which interfere with the ordered flow of existence. Something that wouldn’t happen at all if it were not for “outside agitators”—that most slippery of all explanations.
What had happened to me was that I had looked at the strike close to, and it had resolved itself into the lives of human beings—thousands of human beings thinking the same thing, thousands of human beings hoping the same thing, thousands and thousands of human beings hoping and willing the same thing, with the terrible patience of the simple. It is a dramatic thing when thousands of men all through the country, men in eight different States, men in fifty different towns and communities, all decide to stay home, all decide to do nothing, because they wish to alter certain conditions.
Men who never saw each other, men who never will see each other, many men who couldn’t understand each other if they were to meet, all doing the same thing, sitting quiet—abstaining violently from action, all bound together by the same thought—the men in all these widely sundered communities thinking together about the same thing. That is one of the things a strike resolves itself into when you look at it close to.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 5, 1910
Trinidad, Colorado – Primero Mine Disaster Leaves 300-400 Children Fatherless
From The Fort Collins Express of February 3, 1910:
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THE REPORT OF THE EXPLOSION REACHED HERE AT SIX O’CLOCK TONIGHT BY A MESSENGER AND TELEPHONE THE WIRES WERE PURPOSELY CUT OR WERE BROKEN BY SOME UNKNOWN CAUSE BETWEEN HERE AND THE SCENE OF THE DISASTER, FOR JUST AFTER THE EXPLOSION THE WIRES PUT OUT OF COMMISSION AND ONLY MEAGER NEWS HAS BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE MINE.
At 11:30 tonight a messenger reported from a point about half way between here and Primero that fifteen bodies bad been recovered and that 135 more were in the mine with no hope of being rescued alive.
The cause of the explosion is unknown. A rescue party that left this city is expected back about 2 o’clock in the morning with complete reports of the disaster.
The criticism being directed against the company owning the mine is very severe as there is an apparent attempt to prevent the details from being made public. A large number of men who worked in the mine live in Trinidad, going back and forth on miners’ trains each morning and evening. Great excitement prevails in this city among the wives and children of the entombed men.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 4, 1920
Mary Heaton Vorse Reports from Front Lines of Great Steel Strike
From The Liberator of January 1920:
The Steel Strike
By Mary Heaton Vorse
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AT the beginning of the fourth month of the strike, at a moment when the newspapers have definitely decided that there is no strike, the strike still cripples production of steel 50 per cent. These are figures given by the steel companies to the financial columns of the daily press. One would think that the strike would have been definitely battered down and the account closed for good in at least a few towns.
One would think that the might of the steel companies, backed by the press, reinforced by the judiciary, local authorities and police, and self-appointed “citizens’ committees,” would have finished this obstinate strike. One would think it would have been kicked out, smothered out, stifled out, bullied out, brow-beaten out, stabbed out, scabbed out, but here they are hanging on in the face of cold weather, in the face of abuse and intimidation, in the face of arrests, in the face of mob violence-and these are dark days too.
These are days when the little striking communities are steeped in doubt, when the bosses go around to the women and plead with them almost tearfully to get their husbands to go back to work before their jobs are lost. These are the days when in these isolated places every power that the companies know is brought to bear upon the strikers to make them believe that they and they alone are hanging on, that the strike is over everywhere else and that this special town will be the goat.
People talk of the steel strike as if it were one single thing. In point of fact, there are 50 steel strikes. Literally there are 50 towns and communities where there to-day exists a strike. The communication between these towns is the slenderest, the mills and factories which this strike affects line the banks of a dozen rivers. The strike is scattered through a half a dozen states.
This is something new in the history of strikes-50 towns acting together. Pueblo acting in concert with Gary; Birmingham, Alabama, keeping step with Rankin and Braddock, Pennsylvania. How did it happen that these people; so slenderly organized, separated by distance, separated by language, should have acted together and have continued to act together?
Some of the men have scarcely ever heard a speaker in their own language. Some of the men are striking in communities where no meetings are allowed. Sitting at home, staying out, starving, suffering persecution, suffering the torture of doubt, suffering the pain of isolation, without strike discipline and without strike benefits, they hold on. What keeps them together?
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday December 20, 1919
Mary Heaton Vorse on Organizing Steel Workers in Youngstown
From the Pittsburg [Kansas] Workers Chronicle of December 19, 1919:
THEIR WEAPONS AND OURS.
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(By Mary Heaton Vorse.)
Not long ago a friend of mine came to Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania] who wanted to know about the strike. He wanted me to tell him first of all what had impressed me most. My answer was the answer that anyone who had watched the strike must have given. What had impressed me the most was the courage of the men; what had impressed me the most was their endurance; what had impressed me most was their uncomplaining patience.
It had seemed almost a miracle to me that men of a dozen or more nationalities and half a dozen states, separated into isolated communities, should one fine day have struck altogether, 350,000 strong.
The longer I stayed and the more knew about the strike, the more in credible did the strike seem, for as I went from town to town staying a few days now in one community and now in another, I realized how little organization they had before the strike started.
Take Youngstown for instance. No one had ever organized Youngstown and everyone said that Youngstown never could be organized.
In Youngstown and East Youngstown and the nineteen small communities surrounding it where steel is made, there are about 70,000 steel workers. The first large meeting ever held of the National Committe occurred in January of this year. Between that time and September 22 there was never a larger force of organizers in this whole district than six. Six men organized Youngstown and the surrounding country. Six men and that was all.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 29, 1909
Cherry, Illinois – Heartbreaking Scenes Described by Luella Twining
From the Appeal to Reason of November 27, 1909:
From page 5:
MINERS MURDERED.
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Owners of St. Paul Mine Guilty of Manslaughter.
-Cherry Under Martial Law.
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BY [LUELLA] TWINING
Special Correspondence to the Appeal.
Cherry, Ill., Nov. 17.-To stay in Cherry, Ill., one half an hour is to be convinced that the miners entombed there were murdered as surely as though the mine owners had taken them into the road and shot them down one by one.
“Why were the miners kept at work two hours after the fire had broken out in the mine?” is the question asked by the bereaved widows. It is not put in that form. I heard it asked in many different ways. A German woman looked at me wildly and asked, “What for they no tell my man? He work two hours by the fire. Now he die. They murder my man.” These poor women do not wait for the mine owners to answer. “They care for mine and no for man,” a Lithuanian said to me and indeed one is forced to believe it. They do not state the question as clearly as Karl Marx’s exposition of the profit system, but it is equally as illuminating. If the United Mine Workers should murder 500 mine owners would they not be punished?
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It was seven o’clock. The morning vigil was over; the strike was unbroken. The deluge had not occurred. The men, weary with watching, broken with inaction and with suspense, drifted to their homes.
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