Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones 1898, Part I: January-May; Found in St. Louis, Missouri

10th February 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

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Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 10, 1899
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for the Year 1898, Part I

Mother Jones, Factory Girls, St L Rpb p14, May 12, 1898 — *The St. Louis Republic*
May 12, 1898

During February of 1898, Mother Jones was found in St. Louis, Missouri, preparing for a Conference of Labor and Labor Reform Organizations scheduled to be held in that city on May 2nd. She was also found advocating for Domestic Workers in that city who were seeking to establish “a home of their own.”

Mother departed St. Louis in early March and headed out on a tour of Eastern cities in order to “stir up sentiment among the several reform organizations in behalf of the reform convention” to be held in May. Mother was back in St. Louis in time to present at that convention which was, sadly, not well attended. Nevertheless, Mother was soon busy attempting to organize factory girls, of whom, she declared:

The factory girls should be organized because their condition should be improved. This can be effected by organization, and by no other means. The girls are, as rule, underpaid, kept in cramped, unhealthy quarters, and ground down till their young lives have been dwarfed and stunted. Through the children the world is made what it is. In the unions they could be educated how to better themselves.

I have been all through the factories of this and other cities, and find conditions in them such that the lives of these children will be shortened many years by having worked in them. We have war abroad and war at home. The conflict with Spain is not half so grinding upon humanity as the battle for bread. A few hundred go down in a naval battle; thousands perish beneath the grinding tread of greed every day. We have reconcentrados in our own country-they are the poor, without wealth or friends, who perish in sight of plenty.

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Social-Democrat: Anniversary of Paris Commune Celebrated by Socialists World-Wide

31st March 2018 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

C’est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous et demain
L’Internationale
Sera le genre humain.
-Eugène Pottier – Paris, June 1871

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Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 31, 1898
Paris Commune Celebrated Annually by Socialists

From The Social Democrat of March 1898:

THE COMMUNE OF PARIS.

The 18th of March, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, is annually celebrated by Socialists throughout the world. The Commune of Paris is an event unique in history. It was the first working-class government that the world had ever seen. For the first time the working people had seized the reins of government, and taken into their hands the administration of a great city. No wonder the possessing classes were alarmed; no wonder all the forces of “respectability,” of reaction and obscurantism, rallied to the government of the “little man,” Theirs, and his gang of Imperialist mouchards and Royalist ruffians at Versailles. The revolution of the Parisian proletariat was not a mere political movement, it was a menace to all those interests which live and thrive by the enslavement, the exploitation, and the plunder of the workers.

The history of this epoch-marking insurrection is an oft-told tale. Who, among Socialists, does not know of the desertion of Paris by the reactionary Assembly; of the measures for disarming the Parisian National Guards; of the attempted seizure of the guns on the heights of Montmartre in the morning of the 18th of March; how that attempt was frustrated, and how the troops sent to carry it out fraternised with the National Guards, and shot the officer who ordered them to fire upon the people?

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Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: A Shameful Picture of Poverty in “The Greatest Country in the World”

14th March 2018 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Plea for Justice, Not Charity, Quote Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Monday March 14, 1898
From the Salvation Army: A Picture of Poverty in America

From the Appeal to Reason of March 12, 1898:

A SHAMEFUL PICTURE.

Comrade Booth, of the Salvation Army gives us some facts that ought to make the “greatest country in the world” ashamed of itself. Read this and wonder no longer why socialism is growing:

The pauper world-there’s a world for you! A world with starvation. Then the vicious world, the gambler and the harlot. Last the criminal world-why, in this country alone there are 80,000 men and women who are behind bars. These are the three worlds in which our work lies. We have 415 different institutions, ninety of which are at work in the United States. We feed 250,000 hungry men, women and children every night and shelter 13,000 ragged men and women, of which 4,500 are in the United States. On cold nights the figures sometimes double. We give them hot and cold water with which to wash, and if the person is afflicted with those strange little pests-unknown, of course, in Denver-we furnish crematories for them. While the poor fellow is taking a bath we bake his garments, so that if he comes in 20,000 strong he goes out one single personality. In addition to this we furnish him with a rousing salvation meeting and give him something to think about. If a man falls we offer a hand to help him onto his feet again. We have sixty-nine institutions for the rescue of young girls. Talk of pity! Am I not talking to a people who are sending pity to that island Cuba? Yet in their midst they have objects of pity.

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