I am loyally yours for a damn fine fight.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday December 16, 1916
Mother Jones Found in Washington D. C. During November
We pause to review the activities of Mother Jones, that fearless champion of the cause of working-class men, women and children in their struggle for industrial freedom. We first find her remembered for her work on behalf of the children of the mills when she led them on the March of the Mill Children during the summer of 1903.
From the Iowa Bayard Advocate of November 2, 1916:
TENEMENT CHILDREN WILL
VISIT WILSON
—–
Their Welcome Will Be Unlike That
Once Given at Oyster Bay.
—–
New York, Oct. 28.-Fifty mothers of New York’s east side, with their children, who have been emancipated from sweatshops by the enactment of
the child labor law, are going to Shadow Lawn, Saturday, in person to thank President Wilson.
A “kind lady,” who prefers to conceal her identity, has donated a special car to be attached to one of the trains bearing pilgrims from New York to Shadow Lawn to hear the president’s address on “Wilson day.” The children will carry armsful of artificial flowers which they used to make in the factories, before their emancipation.
No such pilgrimage of the children of the poor has been attempted since the one when Theodore Roosevelt was president of the United States and a carload of children from the Pennsylvania coal mines [textile mills] journeyed to the summer capital at Oyster Bay to petition for a national child labor law.
“Mother Jones,” who conducted that excursion, told recently in public of the refusal of the guards at Oyster Bay to allow the children to pass the outer gate, and of their return home to wait 14 years for a Woodrow Wilson to set them free.
[Photograph added.]