Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 23, 1920
Williamson, West Virginia – Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting, Part II
Williamson, West Virginia – Sunday Evening June 20, 1920
-Mother Jones Speaks at Public Meeting in Front of Courthouse.
SPEECH OF MOTHER JONES at WILLIAMSON, PART II.
[Mother Jones on Agitators.]
The West Virginian June 22, 1920
I went to a meeting and the secretary of the steel workers went with me. He got up to speak. They took him. The next fellow got up; they took him. I got up. They arrested me. I wouldn’t walk. They had to ride me. A big old Irish buck of a policeman said, “You will have to walk.” “No, I can’t.” “Can you walk?” “No, I can’t.” “We will take you down to jail and lock you up behind the bars.”
After a few minutes the chief came along.
“Mother Jones?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There is some of the steel managers here want to speak to you.”
“All right, let the gentlemen come in. I am sorry gentlemen, I haven’t got chairs to give you.” (Laughter.)
One good fellow says, “Now, Mother Jones, this agitation is dangerous. You know these are foreigners, mostly.” “Well, that is the reason I want to talk to them. I want to organize them into the United States as a Union so as to show them what the institution stands for.”
“They don’t understand English,” he says.
I said, “I want to teach them English. We want them into the Union so they will understand.”
“But you can’t do that. This agitation won’t do. Your radicalism has got to go.”
I said, “Wait a minute, sir. You are one of the managers of the steel industry here?”
“Yes.”
“Wasn’t the first emigrant that landed on our shore an agitator?”
“Who was he?”
“Columbus. Didn’t he agitate to get the money from the people of Spain? Didn’t he agitate to get the crew, and crossed the ocean and discovered America for you and I?
“Wasn’t Washington an agitator? Didn’t the Mayflower bring over a ship-full of agitators? Didn’t we build a monument to them down there in Massachusetts. I want to ask you a question. Right today in and around the City of Pittsburgh I believe there has assembled as many as three hundred thousand people [bowing the knee to Jesus during Easter season.] Jesus was an agitator, Mr. Manager. What in hell did you hang him for if he didn’t hurt your pockets?” He never made a reply. He went away.
He was the manager of the steel works; he was the banker; he was the mayor; he was the judge; he was the chairman of the city council. Just think of that in America—and he had a stomach on him four miles long and two miles wide. (Laughter.) And when you looked at that fellow and compared him with people of toil it nauseated you.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 25, 1910
Eugene Victor Debs on the Pious Pickets of Capitalism
From the Appeal to Reason of April 23, 1910:
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It may be set down as a rule that the gentry who constitute the self-appointed protectorate over the domain of religion and who charge socialists with being infidels and socialism with attacking religion are themselves hypocrites who are profiting by the ignorance and superstitions of the people and who use the cloak of religion to conceal their evil practices. Their pretended solicitude for socialism is a sham. What they really fear is not that religion will be destroyed, but that hypocrisy and false pretense will be discovered.
Those pious misfits who do not know what real religion is are one in raising the cry against socialism in the name of religion. Most of them have never read a chapter of socialist economics and are utterly ignorant of what socialism really means, or else, knowing what it means, deliberately misrepresent it to receive the “well done” and the stipend from their masters.
It is so much safer for the average clergyman to speak against socialism than for it, so far as his charge is concerned, his income and his position in society. Some of them are by reflex so imbued with the hostility for socialism of the capitalists who pay their salaries that they deem it their special duty to denounce socialism as an attack upon the church and a conspiracy against religion. Of course they speak in the name of religion, the religion of Jesus Christ, the homeless wanderer who sympathized and associated with the poor and lowly, and whose ministrations were among the despised sinners and outcasts.
These pious pickets of capitalism prostitute religion in the service of Mammon. Of all men on earth they are the least fit to speak in the name of religion. They have no religion or they would not serve in such a degenerate role.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 15, 1920
Altoona, Pennsylvania – Mother Jones Speaks at Mishler Theater, Part II
From the Altoona Times Tribune of January 12, 1920:
Mother Jones Elucidates Theories To Altoona Audience
[Part II of II.]
OVERWORK AND UNDERPAY
She scored the conditions which permit men and women to be overworked and underpaid and results in riots and strikes when women and children are shot by brutes. Under her own personal observation at a time like this in the south, she said, was a case of a woman run down by mounted police who gave birth to a child as she was being taken to the morgue.
[She passionately declared:]
You have no Christianity. If you had conditions like this would not exist.
However, the speaker gave it as her opinion that the workers are becoming educated, getting a different vision; they feel the pulse of the world beating and different days coming. In West Virginia 65,000 men are organized since the inception of the union movement in that section a short time ago. Recently 10,000 of these men marched in a parade which the mayor of the city characterized as the most orderly parade he ever saw. All of which is a good omen.
BRUTALITY COVERED UP
[She cried:]
We want to give America a well fed humanity, intellectually, morally and physically. If the ministers do not wake up they will be thrown on a scrap heap.
At this point she derided the idea of saying “Your honor” to the governor of a state, who has permitted the murder of women and children in industrial uprisings.
This is the most insidiously brutal age that ever was, but it is covered up.
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday March 30, 1918
From The New York Call: A Letter from the Atlanta Pen
The New York Call on March 24th published a letter written by Ammon A. Hennesey who, having been convicted of distributing literature against the draft, is now serving a two-year sentence at the Atlanta Federal Prison. Hennesey began serving his sentence on July 31, 1917. He hales from Columbus, Ohio, and is described as an “Irish America Socialist.”
Imprisoned with Hennesey is John T. Dunn, a Socialist from Providence, Rhode Island, who was sentenced to twenty years having been convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Described also is William V. McCoy, a “Virginia mountaineer” from big Stone Gap, West Virginia who was convicted of conspiring to seize U.S. property and oppose the government. McCoy was sentenced to five years in prison and began serving his sentence on August 17, 1917. Despite the fact that he is sixty-one years old Mr. McCoy was sent to “the hole” in January and remains there at this time.
But the young, young children, O, my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly.
They are weeping in the playtime of others.
In the country of the free.
-Anon.
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday January 19, 1898
In United States of America: Grinding Up Children for Profit
From the Appeal to Reason of January 15, 1898:
IN addition to the above it might also be stated that improved labor-saving machinery is rapidly, and at an increasing ratio, forcing children into the shops and factories, displacing the women who had previously displaced the men. In New England textile papers you will see advertisement after advertisement for help: “Spinners wanted; only those with large families, whose children are old enough to work in the mill.”
Girls in this way, fall every day,
And have been falling for ages,
Who is to blame? you know his name,
It’s the boss that pays starvation wages.
A homeless girl can always hear
Temptations calling everywhere.
-Joe Hill
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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday January 15, 1918
From Hull House, Chicago – Miss Jane Addams Speaks for “Fallen” Women
In this week’s Appeal, we find a reprint of an article by Jane Addams which previously appeared in The Survey of May 4, 1912.
From the Appeal to Reason of January 12, 1918:
A great English preacher has said that life holds for every man one searching test of the sincerity of his religious life, and that although this test is often absurdly trivial, to encounter it is to “fall from grace.” We all know these tests: a given relative or familiar friend has an irritating power of goading us into anger or self-pity; a certain public movement inevitably hardens us into a contemptuous mood of all uncharitableness; one particular type of sinner fills us with an unholy sense of superior virtue.
If we may assume that society itself is subject to one such test, if it too possesses a touchstone which reveals its inmost weakness and ultimate meanness, may we not say that the supreme religious test of our social order is the hideous commerce of prostitution, and that the sorry results of that test are registered in the hypocrisy and hardness of heart of the average good citizen toward the so-called “fallen” woman. May we of claim that in consequence of this irreligious attitude, prostitution remains today a hard, unresolved mass in the midst of so-called Christian civilization, until it has come to be regarded as a vice which cannot be eradicated, as a sin which cannot be forgiven, as a social disease which cannot be cured.
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It may be set down as a rule that the gentry who constitute the self-appointed protectorate over the domain of religion and who charge socialists with being infidels and socialism with attacking religion are themselves hypocrites who are profiting by the ignorance and superstitions of the people and who use the cloak of religion to conceal their evil practices. Their pretended solicitude for socialism is a sham. What they really fear is not that religion will be destroyed, but that hypocrisy and false pretense will be discovered.
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