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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday February 9, 1922
Mother Jones News Round-Up for September 1921, Part II
Found Denouncing Government by Gunthug in the State of West Virginia
From The New Castle Herald of September 6, 1921:
MOTHER JONES HAS SOLUTION
DECLARES FORCE OF RIGHT MUST SUPPLANT
RIGHT OF FORCE IN WEST VIRGINIA
———-By HARRY HUNT
WASHINGTON Sept. 6.-“The secretary of war doesn’t understand. The president doesn’t understand.”
There is a great wrong being perpetrated in West Virginia. This wrong will not be corrected by jailing miners or shooting them. It will be settled only by social and industrial justice.
It was ”Mother” Jones speaking. She had just left the office of Secretary of War Weeks, where she had gone to protest against the sending of federal troops into the zone of the West Virginia mine war.
“Just what is the situation?” she was asked. “You were there last week. What is the trouble?”
[Mother Jones replied:]
The miners under arms in West Virginia are not fighting the government, either state or nation. But they are determined to defend themselves from the oppression and domination of the hired gunmen of the mine operators who constitute a private army of the interests in West Virginia.
Companies Obdurate
The government rendered a decision on the wage question in this district in 1919. But the mine companies have not recognized the authority of the government in that decision and have not followed it.
The men, being Americans, revolted. They sent out word asking to be organized.
Then they were thrown out of the miserable company shacks in which they lived.
The mine workers in this district are robbed to pay an army of professional murderers, maintained to keep the workers in subjection.
The money that ought to go to the miner who slaves underground is diverted to maintain gunmen to enforce the demands of greedy overlords of industry.
The fathers want that money, which they earn, to help educate their children, to improve their homes, to get churches and schools and the rights of American citizens.
Force of Right
The trouble in West Virginia must be settled by the force of right, not by the right of force.
You can shoot down these men in West Virginia, but they will rise again against the outrage of being robbed to pay a private army to enforce the brutal demands of coal operators.
If the employers can form their army, the workers naturally think they can do the same. That’s logical, isn’t it?
And that situation is the ulcer from which flows all the poison. Until it is removed, there will be no peace.
Fought Same Battle
We fought this fight out in the Kanawah and New River fields 23 years ago. We had a few battles. A good many of us were put in jail. I was carried 84 miles to jail myself, to get me out of the zone where it was thought I would be troublesome.
But we got the whole of these fields organized. The gunmen had to leave. The men began to get their pay in Uncle Sam’s currency, not in company money that could only be spent at company stores.
They are living in peace today in the Kanawha and New River fields and in the Fairmont district. Their homes are happier, their work better, the relations of the men and their employers more just.
But along the Norfolk & Western in the Mingo fields, a private army rules.
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[Photograph added.]
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Williamson, W. Va., Feb. 5.-This has been a day of speculation and rumors and of desperate struggle on the part of everyone, except Sid Hatfield and the 20 others on trial for the Matewan murders, to be reasonably cheerful and comfortable. Court adjourned before noon today without having added to the jury panel and left all of those in attendance upon the case with nothing to do except talk and wander about muddy streets in a dismal rain, with bare, scarred, cut-over hills rising at one’s elbows, it seemed, to press down the gloom.
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