Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 17, 1914
Colorado Socialists Now Lodged in the Foul Trinidad Jail
Colorado Socialists, Helen Schloss and A. Marians, are now imprisoned in the Trinidad Jail, a jail where conditions are so vile that it stands condemned by the State Board of Health. Also a guest of that foul lodging establishment is John Murray, Appeal correspondent.
No Stranger to Jail, Helen Schloss behind bars during Little Falls Strike:
From the Appeal to Reason of September 12, 1914:
Federals Imprison Trained Nurse
By telegraph to Appeal to Reason.
Trinidad, Colo.-Helen Schloss, Socialist, trained nurse in charge of hospital tents of the striking miners at Ludlow, was arrested while picketing with a number of miners’ wives at the railroad station. The gallant Southern Major Cabell of the United States army had on of his soldiers swear to the complaint, and a company just imported from Tellerville held court in the railroad station, sentencing Miss Schloss to 15 days in Trinidad’s jail.
It was this same Major Cabell and his soldiers that man-handled Miss Schloss and a score of miners’ wives a few days ago at Ludlow, the brutal attacks of the federals leaving black and blue marks upon the women. The jail in which Miss Schloss is confined has been condemned by the state board of health, and is at this time crowded with striking miners just indicted by a hand-picked grand jury, on which were a number of notorious gunmen.
Miss Schloss nursed the wounded miners in the hospital tents, and cared for their children. Her arrest has shocked the entire community.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday August 30, 1914 Trinidad, Colorado – Women’s Union Picket Squad Defies Federal Soldiers
As reported by John Murray in this week’s Appeal, the “Women’s Union Picket Squad,” will now take the place of the men on the picket line in defiance of the federal troops under the command of Colonel James Lockett.
Members of the Women’s Union Picket Squad include the widow of Ludlow Martyr John Bartolotti, who declared:
The soldiers can put me and my seven children in jail if they want to, but I am going on the picket line and keep the scabs from coming in and starving us to death.
Mrs. Petrucci whose three children perished in the Ludlow Massacre will also be found on picket duty:
I shall picket, too, but my children are all gone.
From the Appeal to Reason of August 29, 1914:
New Clash Imminent
BY JOHN MURRAY
Trinidad, Colo.-Federal troops under the command of Colonel James Lockett have driven the striking miners away from all the railroad stations in southern Colorado where non-union disembark for the coal camps. Union men are being arrested daily, but the miners’ wives are defying the military and have taken their husbands’ places on the picket line.
Members of the Women’s Union Labor Alliance, led by their president, Edith Walker, organized the Women’s Union picket squad and have met every train coming into Trinidad, in spite of the attacks made upon them by company spotters and deputy sheriffs.
Tourists heads fill every car window as the overland trains pull into Trinidad, and the eyes of the gaping crowd follow the fearless women as thy march along the platform questioning every suspicious looking stranger who they think may be on his way to the mines.
Thus far the federal soldiers on duty only stare at the women pickets, who, to make sure that there shall be no misunderstanding as to what they are doing, wear large white badges pinned across their breasts upon which are printed the words “Women’s Union Picket Squad.”
Mine Owners Get Busy.
Raging at this open defiance of what the coal operators call “Law and Order,” the daily Advertiser, mouthpiece of Rockefeller interests in Trinidad, shrieks to the United States commanding officer for help in the following front-page display, placed in a box and printed in large type:
Thus far no arrests have been made by the federals, but Captain Rockwell, the officer on duty at the Santa Fe station, has warned the miners’ wives on picket that “although human,” he “must obey orders.”
The women are prepared to go to jail if the federal soldiers force the issue.
Said Mrs. Bartoloti (Virginia Bartolotti) whose husband (Giovanni/John Bartolotti) was killed in the Ludlow massacre, “the soldiers can put me and my seven children in jail if they want to, but I am going on the picket line and keep the scabs from coming in and starving us to death.”
“I shall picket, too, but my children are all gone,” declared Mrs. Petrucci, whose three little ones met their end in the flames of the historic Ludlow “death-hole.”
Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 7, 1903 Oxnard, California – J. Murray on Unity of Japanese and Mexican Laborers, Part III
From The International Socialist Review of August 1903
A Foretaste of the Orient
[-by John Murray Jr.]
[III of III]
The San Francisco Call March 28, 1903
Frightened at the turn [the strike] had now taken, Major Driffel, of the Beet Sugar Company, asked for a joint meeting of committees from the unions, the farmers and the company. The first day’s conference came to nothing, but at the second meeting the employers realized that they were facing a labor trust that had cornered all the available labor power in the valley, and so the men’s scale of prices was agreed to, with an additional pledge that all the idle union men would be immediately employed.
Twice, after this, the company tried to import a carload of scabs from Los Angeles-even going so far as to lock the last shipment in its car and receive them at the station with armed guards-but each time the new men joined the union as soon as they reached Oxnard-the last lot escaping from the car windows.
At this juncture, the Los Angeles County Council of Labor passed resolutions favoring the organization of all Asiatics now in California. This was done upon the recommendation of Comrade F. C. Wheeler, organizer for the A. F. of L. in Southern California, who had visited Oxnard, organized the two unions, and was much impressed by their fighting qualities.
So far everything was well with the beet thinners, the company whipped in the first battle of the local class-war and the field hands unionized. But a most unexpected and disheartening blow capped the climax of their struggles-a blow from behind. Samuel Gompers, while granting the Mexicans all rights and privileges, refused to grant the Japanese union a charter, and in his letter to Secretary Lizarraras made the following remarkable statement:
It is further understood that in issuing this charter to your union, it will under no circumstance accept membership of any Chinese or Japanese. The laws of our country prohibit Chinese workmen or laborers from entering the United States, and propositions for the extension of the exclusion laws to the Japanese have been made on several occasions.
In making such an extraordinary ruling, President Gompers has violated the expressed principles of the A. F. of L., which states that race, color, religion or nationality, shall be no bar to fellowship in the American Federation of Labor.
California, alone, contains over forty thousand Japanese who, if unorganized, will be a continuous menace to union men.
“Better go to hell with your family than to heaven by your self,”said the speaker whose stirring words decided the Mexican union to send back its charter to President Gompers, along with the following letter:
Oxnard, Cal., June 8, 1903.
Mr. Samuel Gompers, Pres. American Federation of Labor, Washington, D. C. Dear Sir: Your letter of May 13, in which you say: “The admission with us of the Japanese Sugar Beet & Farm Laborers into the American Federation of Labor cannot be considered,” is received. We beg to say in reply that our Japanese brothers, here, were the first to recognize the importance of co-operating and uniting in demanding a fair wage scale. They are composed mostly of men without families, unlike the Mexicans in this respect. They were not only just with us, but they were generous. When one of our men was murdered by hired assassins of the oppressors of labor, they gave expression of their sympathy in a very substantial form. In the past we have counciled, fought and lived on very short rations with our Japanese brothers, and toiled with them in the fields, and they have been uniformly kind and considerate. We would be false to them and to ourselves and to the cause of Unionism if we, now, accepted privileges for ourselves which are not accorded to them. We are going to stand by men who stood by us in the long, hard fight which ended in a victory over the enemy. We therefore respectfully petition the A. F. of L. to grant us a charter under which we can unite all the Sugar Beet & Field Laborers of Oxnard, without regard to their color or race. We will refuse any other kind of charter, except one which will wipe out race prejudices and recognize our fellow workers as being as good as ourselves. “I am ordered by the Mexican union to write this letter to you and they fully approve its words.
J. M. Lizarraras, Sec’y S. B. & F. L. Union, Oxnard.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 6, 1903 Oxnard, California – J. Murray on Unity of Japanese and Mexican Laborers, Part II
From The International Socialist Review of August 1903
A Foretaste of the Orient
[-by John Murray Jr.]
[II of III]
The San Francisco Call March 27, 1903
[After the murder of Louis Vasquez] the unarmed union men were horrified but not frightened. They pursued and captured the fleeing Arnold, and, after disarming him, handed him over to the police. Sheriff McMartin himself told me that if it were not for the protection afforded by the union leaders, Arnold would have been hung on the spot. In twenty minutes the whole affair was over. No arrests were made, because none but “strike breakers” were guilty of assault, and the next day the daily press all over the country broke out with scare heads telling of the “Riot in Oxnard.”
Proof of the complicity of the town and county officials was quick to follow. The place of holding the inquest was twice changed from one town to another-making the summoning of witnesses a most difficult feat-and the dead man’s body hurriedly given to the unions on two hours notice in such a decayed condition that immediate burial was necessary, thereby attempting to prevent the public demonstration of a big funeral. But in spite of this most vile scheme, nearly a thousand men escorted the body to its grave. Japanese and Mexicans, side by side, dumb through lack of a common speech, yet eloquent in expressions of fraternity, marched with uncovered heads through the streets of Oxnard. On the hearse was a strange symbol to Western eyes, a huge lotus flower-an offering from the Japanese union.
From the highest to the lowest, the officials of the county acted as one man in their attempts to suppress public investigation, the final proof of which culminated in the act of the district attorney, Selby, who refused to hold a preliminary examination of Deputy Constable Arnold, although nearly a dozen witnesses testified, at the inquest, that Arnold shot an unresisting union man in the neck and precipitated the killing.
The worth of the Japanese and Mexicans as labor organizers was now put to proof. At the Japanese headquarters there was system like that of a railroad office or an army in the field. They had a well-trained corps of officers-secretaries, interpreters, captains of squads, messengers, and most complete system of information. A map of the valley hung on the wall, with the location of the different camps of beet thinners plainly marked. Yards upon yards of brown paper placards were constantly being tacked up, giving in picturesque Japanese lettering the latest bulletins, directions or orders.
Meetings of the executive committees from the two unions were constantly being held for agreement as to mutual action. I was intensely interested at the manner in which they got over the difficulties of language at the conferences. The joint committees would gather around a long table-at opposite ends sat the respective presidents, secretaries and interpreters-and first the question to be discussed would be started in English, then each nationality in turn would listen to an explanation of the affair in its own language and come to the conclusion; then the results would be again stated in English and the final agreement recorded by the secretaries. Respect for order was a marked feature of these meetings, each nationality keeping politely silent while the other had the matter before it for discussion and decision. The innate courtesy, which is always found in Spanish blood, was fully equaled by the decorum of the Japanese.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 5, 1903 Oxnard, California – J. Murray on Unity of Japanese and Mexican Laborers, Part I
From The International Socialist Review of August 1903
A Foretaste of the Orient
[-by John Murray Jr.]
[I of III]
The San Francisco Call March 25, 1903
The town of Oxnard is in Ventura county, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles, and was founded by the American Beet Sugar Company, in which Henry T. Oxnard is the central figure. On the evening of March 24, of the present year, the Associated Press dispatches announced that there was “riot” in Oxnard — that the Japanese and Mexican unions were terrorizing the town, shooting and killing peaceable non-union men, whose only desire was to exercise the right of American citizens and work for any wage they chose.
Being within a few hours’ ride of the place, the next morning’s train carried me to the gates of the sugar factory. My only companions on the car were a parcel of drummers, who were quite naturally anxious to know just how peaceful a state the town might now be in. To this end anyone who might know, and especially the conductor, was cross-questioned in a most thorough manner:
“How many men were killed-could the sheriff control the situation-was it safe for a traveling man to go about his business on the streets?” were some of the queries that received apparently confusing replies.
“Yes, there was a man killed and four others wounded-all union men-and the town is now quiet.”
“How’s that,” said a salesman for a wholesale hardware firm, “union men start a riot and only union men shot? Something queer about that! I know a house that shipped revolvers here last week-who bought ’em, that’s what I’d like to know. Couldn’t have been the unions if all the dead men are on the other side,”-which was without doubt a common sense conclusion from a purely business point of view.
Certainly the town seemed quiet, as I walked up from the station, the only noticeable thing being a little squad of Japanese union pickets that met the train and were easily recognized by their white buttons labeled “J. M. L. A.” (Japanese-Mexican Labor Association) over the insignia of a rising sun and clasped hands. Oxnard was full of those white buttons-and when the first thousand of them had been distributed, and no more obtainable, hundreds of beet thinners put red buttons in their button holes to show that they were union men.
On the presentation of my blue card, I was warmly welcomed at headquarters by J. M. Lizarraras and Y. Yamagachi, secretaries of the Mexican and Japanese unions. They had a plain tale to tell, and one which I found was fully borne out by facts known to all the towns folk-for even the petty merchants, strange to say, freely acknowledged that the men had been bullied, swindled and shot down, without reason or provocation.
The Beet Sugar Company had fostered the organization of a scab contracting company-known as the Western Agricultural Contracting Company-whose double purpose was to reduce the price of thinning beets from five to as low as four and a quarter dollars an acre, and at the same time undermine and destroy the unions. Not content with the lowering of wages, they also forced the men to accept store orders instead of cash payments, with its usual accompaniment of extortionate prices for the merchandise sold. These tricks, of course, are as old as the hills, and consequently when the men rebelled there was a great surprise among the labor skinners, who had no idea that Japanese and Mexicans would ever have wit enough to unite for mutual protection, or that if they did temporarily unite, their organization could possibly last for any length of time, with the obstacles of different tongues, temperaments and social environments to bring speedy wreck to such a union. But the men did organize, did hang together-in spite of the rain of bullets which were poured down upon them — and finally whipped Oxnard’s beet sugar company, with its backing of millions.
To Socialists it is needless to point out that to whip a capitalist to-day means nothing more than that you must fight him again to-morrow, but the significance of this particular skirmish, in the great class war, lies in the fact that workers from the Occident and Orient, strangers in tongues, manners and customs, gathered together in a little western village, should so clearly see their class interest rise above all racial feelings of distrust.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 10, 1922 Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1921, Part III Found Speaking to Delegates at Convention of United Mine Workers
Indianapolis, Convention of the United Mine Workers of America Sixth Day, Afternoon Session, Monday September 26, 1921
“I can fight…”
Indiana Daily Times September 27, 1921
Vice-President Murray: I understand that Mother Jones has just arrived in the convention and I am going to request Brother David Fowler to escort her to the platform. It isn’t necessary that I should introduce Mother Jones to you at this time; it isn’t necessary that I should eulogize the work she has performed for the coal diggers of America, and I will simply present to the convention at this time our good friend, Mother Jones.
ADDRESS OF MOTHER JONES
Mr. Chairman and Delegates: I have been watching you from a distance, and you have been wasting a whole lot of time and money. I want you to stop it.
All along the ages, away back in the dusty past, the miners started their revolt. It didn’t come in this century, it came along in the cradle of the race when they were ground by superstition and wrong. Out of that they have moved onward and upward all the ages against all the courts, against all the guns, in every nation they have moved onward and upward to where they are today, and their effort has always been to get better homes for their children and for those who were to follow them.
I have just come up from West Virginia. I left Williamson last Friday and came into Charleston. I was doing a little business around there looking after things. We have never gotten down to the core of the trouble that exists there today. Newspapers have flashed it, magazines have contained articles, but they were by people who did not understand the background of the great struggle…..
I walked nine miles one night with John H. Walker in the New River field after we had organized an army of slaves who were afraid to call their souls their own. We didn’t dare sleep in a miner’s house; if we did the family would be thrown out in the morning and would have no place to go. We walked nine miles before we got shelter. When we began to organize we had to pay the men’s dues, they had no money.
At one time some of the organizers came down from Charleston, went up to New Hope and held a meeting. They had about fourteen people at the meeting. The next morning the conductor on the train told me the organizers went up on a train to Charleston. I told Walker to bill a meeting at New Hope for the next night and I would come up myself. He said we could not bill meetings unless the national told us to. I said: “I am the national now and I tell you to bill that meeting.” He did.
When we got to the meeting there was a handful of miners there and the general manager, clerks and all the pencil pushers they could get. I don’t know but there were a few organizers for Jesus there, too. We talked but said nothing about organizing. Later that night a knock came on the door where I was staying and a bunch of the boys were outside. They asked if I would organize them. I said I would. They told me they hadn’t any money. Walker said the national was not in favor of organizing, they wanted us only to agitate. I said: “John, I am running the business here, not the national; they are up in Indianapolis and I am in New Hope. I am going to organize those fellows and if the national finds any fault with you, put it on me—I can fight the national as well as I can the company if they are not doing right.”
[…..]
When we began organizing in 1903 the battle royal began. The companies began to enlist gunmen. I went up the Stanaford Mountain and held a meeting with the men. There wasn’t a more law-abiding body of men in America than those men were. While they were on strike the court issued an injunction forbidding them to go near the mines. They didn’t. I held a meeting that night, went away and next morning a deputy sheriff went up to arrest those men. He had a warrant for them. The boys said: “We have broken no law; we have violated no rules; you can not arrest us.” They notified him to get out of town and he went away. They sent for me and I went up. I asked why they didn’t let him arrest the men. They said they hadn’t done anything and I told them that was the reason they should have surrendered to the law.
That very night in 1903, the 25th day of February, those boys went to bed in their peaceful mining town. They had built their own school house and were sending their children to school. They were law-abiding citizens. While they slept in their peaceful homes bullets went through the walls and several of them were murdered in their beds. I went up next morning on an early train. The agent said they had trouble on Standifer [Stanaford] Mountain, that he heard going over the wires news that some people were hurt. I turned in my ticket, went out and called a couple of the boys. We went up the mountain on the next train and found those men dead in their homes, lying on mattresses wet with their blood and the bullet holes through the walls.
I want to clear this thing up, for it has never been cleared up. I saw there a picture that will forever be a disgrace to American institutions. There were men who had been working fourteen hours a day, who had broken no law, murdered in their peaceful homes. Nobody was punished for those murders.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 22, 1911 Mother Jones in Mexico City, Meets with Madero Regarding Right to Organize
From the Appeal to Reason of October 21, 1911:
Mother Jones In Mexico ———-
Mexico City, Oct. 4.-Just a line to let you know I have just returned from the palace where I have had a long audience with President De La Barra. At the close of my interview the Mexican guaranteed me protection and my right to organize the miners of Mexico. This is the first time that any one has ever been granted that privilege in the history of the Mexican nation. It is the greatest concession ever granted to any one representing the laboring class of any nation.
I also spent an hour with President-elect Madero and he granted me the protection and aid from the government that I called for. I am the first person who has been permitted to carry the banner of industrial freedom to the long suffering peons of this nation.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 20, 1921 U.M.W. of A. Supports Fighting Miners of West Virginia and Alabama
From the United Mine Workers Journal of January 15, 1921:
Official Notice of Assessment Indianapolis
Indianapolis, January 4, 1921.
To the Officers and Members, United Mine Workers of America:
Brothers—For many months about three thousand miners in the Mingo county coal section of West Virginia have been locked out by their employers. In Alabama twelve thousand miners have been on strike for many months because the coal operators, who employed them, refused to negotiate an agreement based upon the award of the Bituminous Coal Commission. The locked-out and striking miners in these two fields, together with their families, who are dependent upon them, have been cared for and supported by the International Union of the United Mine Workers of America. All together about fifty thousand men, women and children have been and are now being clothed, fed and cared for by the International Union of the United Mine Workers of America.
Evicted Miners and Families Live in Tents in Mingo County, W. V.
Since the beginning of the lock-out in West Virginia and the strike in Alabama the International Union has supplied $ 1,345,000 out of the International treasury, for the support of our striking brothers and their families. The suffering which the men, women and children living in both these coal fields have undergone challenges the admiration of every member of our union. They have been thrown out of their homes; have been denied the right of free assemblage; have been subjected to the brutal treatment of a private army of gunmen, guards and thugs employed by the coal operators, and to the repressive military regulations which have been established by state and federal troops ordered into these mining communities.
The fact that thousands of men, women and children are living in tents during these bitter cold wintry days and nights, fighting and struggling for recognition, the right to bargain collectively and for justice, excites our most profound sympathy. Such heroic action calls for our full support in the struggle these brave men and women are making against the forces of corporate greed and corporate power.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 2, 1910 “Mexico Replies to the Appeal to Reason” by C. M. Brooks
From the International Socialist Review of October 1910:
HE exposures of the horrible conditions in Mexico by John Kenneth Turner, in the Appeal to Reason, are arousing a spirit of inquiry all over the United States that is going to prove increasingly embarrassing to the government on this side of the border line. Famous captains of industry who have invested heavily in Mexican industries are becoming alarmed. It is interesting to note the sudden bursts of enthusiasm experienced by some of the radical magazines and newspapers on matters Mexican these days. Evidently somebody’s palm has been crossed, or somebody’s pocket-book has been touched or somebody’s skin has been threatened. One grows curious to see just how far the epidemic will spread.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday July 19, 1910
Mother Jones News Round-Up for June 1910, Part III:
-Interviewed by Selene Armstrong in Washington, D. C.
From The Washington Times of June 18, 1910:
Thus spoke Mother Jones, the plucky little white-haired woman, whose home, to use her own words, is “wherever there’s a labor war, and the President of the United States, when she had journeyed across half a continent to lay before him for the first time the cases of a number of political refugees in prison in Arizona, Kansas, and other Western States.
Today and on other days this week, Mother Jones has been busy at the Capitol, where it said that members of certain committees before which she has appeared have gasped for breath and begged for mercy before she had finished outlining to them their duties in regard to the Mexicans whose freedom she seeks from the Government.
Meets Old Friends.
She has hobnobbed with her old friends Representatives Wilson and Nicholls of Pennsylvania, and has made new friends of many other statesmen, who, however little they sympathize with her decided views on this or that public question, cannot harden their hearts against the cheery good humor and keen wit which radiate from her.
When asked by Chairman Dalzell of the Rules Committee of the House, before which she has appeared this week, to state her place of residence, Mother Jones replied:
My home is wherever there a labor war, sir.
The life story of this little woman with the snow white hair, the childlike blue eyes, and the look of perennial youthfulness on her face, would, if it were written, be the history of the of cause of organized labor. For thirty years she has traveled throughout the length and breath of the land in order to stand by the workers in time of stress. In the roughest mining camps of the West, and in the crowded tenement districts of eastern cities, she has brought to the women of the working class a woman’s gentle counsel, and to the men sagacity and keen judgement the equal of a man’s.
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Thus spoke Mother Jones, the plucky little white-haired woman, whose home, to use her own words, is “wherever there’s a labor war, and the President of the United States, when she had journeyed across half a continent to lay before him for the first time the cases of a number of political refugees in prison in Arizona, Kansas, and other Western States.