Tag: May 1912

Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for May 1912: Speaks in Anaconda, Montana, on Behalf of the Harriman Lines Shopmen’s Strike

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Mother Jones re Wealth Power Government, Anaconda Standard p5, May 4, 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 16, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for May 1912
Found Speaking in Anaconda, Montana, on Behalf of the Shopmen’s Strike

From The Anaconda Standard of May 4, 1912:

URGES WORKERS TO JOIN THEIR FORCES
———-

MOTHER JONES ADDRESSES MEMBERS OF LOCAL UNION.
———-
IN INTEREST OF STRIKERS
———-
Speaker is well known as strike aider and
advocate of labor unions in general
-Speaks on behalf of Southern Pacific men.

Mother Jones, Tacoma Tx p3, Feb 14, 1912

Mother Jones, the strike worker and speaker for labor unions, was in the city yesterday in the interest of the strikers on the Harriman lines. She addressed the members of the Mill and Smelter Men’s union at last night’s session. Mother Jones is known the world over. Last night she made a plea for the strikers on the Southern Pacific, stating that if this strike was lost it would be much harder to win the next. She said, in part:

I am here tonight in the interest of the strikers on the Harriman lines. From time immemorial all our wars were based on economic principles. It is a conflict between classes, and always has been. It is not a struggle between parties, it is class war. The great system you are grappling with the world has never known before. We are in the midst of a great industrial war such as the world has never seen before. Everything is changing; our newspapers, ideas, ways of living, ways of thinking and everything that is connected with us. What are our newspapers? Organs in the control of the ruling class.

We are producing more wealth today than ever before. We produce more wealth than ever did Rome or Greece. There is something wrong with the people when they let this wealth get in the hands of a few. Wealth is power, power rules, consequently we have a despotic government. The power is not in the government, but in Wall Street. The president who is elected is named two years before election by the banks on Wall street. The press is controlled by that power and it molds public opinion. The magazines are the same. Religion fits in with this system of the capitalists. You did not see any Salvation Army 60 years ago. It was not needed. The Salvation Army came with the controlling class. The same is true of the temperance movements. The controlling class needs these devices to keep the working class hypnotized so they cannot think. Everything is in conflict. We are all after the dollar. We betray ourselves for the dollar, as well as for a smile from the boss.

Mother Jones continued in a similar strain at some length. 

—————

[Photograph added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: “The Prisoners’ Bench”-Poem by Arturo Giovannitti for Joseph J. Ettor

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Giovannitti, The Walker, Rest My Brother—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday May 31, 1912
“The Prisoners’ Bench In the Courtroom at Lawrence, Mass.” by Arturo Giovannitti

From the Spokane Industrial of May 30, 1912:

Prisoners Bench Poem by Arturo Giovannitti, IW p4, May 30, 1912

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Hellraisers Journal: IWW Honors Fellow Worker Joseph Mikolasek with Great Funeral Demonstration in Los Angeles

Janet RayeFree Speech Fights
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Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday May 24, 1912
Los Angeles, California – Great Funeral Demonstration Held for FW Mikolasek

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of May 23, 1912:

GREAT FUNERAL DEMONSTRATION
FOR MIKOLASCK.

(Special Telegram to the “Worker.”)

WNF Mikolasek Funeral, LA Eve Exp p17, May 13, 1912

Los Angeles, Cal., May 13.-Fifteen hundred rebels were in line at the funeral of our brave fellow worker and comrade Joseph Mikelasck [Mikolasek], who was murdered by the San Diego police on the seventh inst. It was the greatest demonstration in the history of the city. The banner of the Industrial Workers of the World led the procession and the groups which followed carried red flags. Along the line of march the “Red Flag” and “Marseillaise” were sung. Parade traversed the business district and the police were forced to aid the parade by stopping traffic. The banners carried in the parade read:

“With the suppression of free speech our liberties are gone.”

“We are organized, not for riot and disorder, but for universal peace.”

“The defenders of liberty are jailed and murdered. The vigilantes go free.”

“He had nothing to give but his life, that he gave freely.”

“Our fellow worker who was murdered in the fight for free speech in San Diego.”

“Our silence in the grave will be more powerful than the voices you strangled today.”

Going along Hill Street the procession was joined by a body of Mexicans who threw down their tools in response to the cry of  

“ONE BIG UNION FOR ALL”

J. J. McKELVEY.

[Emphasis added; newsclip added from Los Angeles Express of May 13, 1912.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for April 1912, Part III: Speaks in Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana on Behalf of Harriman Strikers

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote re Mother Jones, LW p3, Apr 20, 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 21, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for April 1912, Part III
Found Traveling  and Speaking in Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana

From The Labor World of April 20, 1912:

HdLn Mother Jones at Head of Lakes, LW p1, Apr20, 1912

Mary Jones, the little mother of the miners, and familiarly known throughout the country as Mother Jones, was a visitor in Duluth Monday and Tuesday. She delivered an address Monday evening at the Lincoln Park Auditorium in the interest of the shop employes of the Harriman lines who are on strike.

Mother Jones has been sent out by the United Mine Workers’ Union to help the striking railroad men. She is meeting with much success in soliciting funds. A fairly good collection was taken up at the Lincoln Park meeting.

During her visit to Duluth, Mother Jones spent much of her time in the office of the Labor World. We have’ known her for almost twenty years, and blamed if she does not look younger today than she did two decades ago. She attributes her youthful appearance to the fact that she has not been in jail lately nor has she been quarantined for smallpox.

Is Eighty Years of Age.

Mother Jones will be eighty years of age on May first. She is as active and as sprightly as a woman of thirty. She never looked better in her life. Her complexion is as clear as that of a baby and there is not the sign of a furrow on her kind old face.

Fight? When she is asked a question about labor conditions in the mining regions of America, her eyes flash, her mouth is set firm, her fist is clenched and she stretches out her arm with the vigor and force of an athlete. She tells a story of social injustice that reaches the heart of the most hardened.

In her speech at Lincoln Park the daily newspapers dwelled only upon the shafts she hurled at men and women of the toady type who “bend the cringing hinges of the knee that thrift may follow fawning.”

Knows the Labor Movement.

Mother Jones understands the philosophy of the labor movement. She has a peculiar way, which is distinctly her own, of driving her points right to the hearts of her listeners. For a moment she will philosophically discuss the growth and development of production; then like a flash she will clinch her argument with a militant attack upon both men and women who are responsible for injustices that have been permitted to creep into the industrial system.

Mother Jones is said to be without fear. During her strenuous life she has been cast into prison, confined in bull pens, driven at the points of bayonets, and once or twice has had a pistol aimed close to her face by willing servants of the capitalistic class…..

From The Butte Miner of April 25, 1912:

Mother Jones Ad for Lecture, Btt Mnr p10, Apr 25, 1912

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for April 1912, Part II: Speaks in Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota on Behalf of Harriman Strikers

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote re Mother Jones, LW p3, Apr 20, 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday May 20, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for April 1912, Part II
Found Traveling Through Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota

From The Butte Miner of April 1, 1912:

HdLn Mother Jones Spks, Btt Mnr p5, Apr 1, 1912

 “Mother” Jones, a national figure in labor circles, a woman who has done a life’s work in the furtherment of the cause of humanity, regardless of position or circumstance, last night, with a vigor at her 89 years that would put to shame the lassitude of her sisters with less milestones to account for, made a stirring address before the Silver Bow Trades and Labor council that, in lasting an hour or more, was considered too short.

She spoke first as an accredited representative of the federated employes of the Harriman system of railroads, now on strike. But she went further and covered details of the labor situation generally that appealed with telling force to her audience. Her talk was frequently interrupted by applause and was given with a spirit of conviction that carried weight…..

—————

From The Fargo Forum of April 9, 1912:

MOTHER JONES SCORED TEDDY
———-

NOTED INDUSTRIAL WORKER’S LECTURER WHO APPEARED AT ASSEMBLY
HALL LAST NIGHT, SCORED ROOSEVELT AND J. P. MORGAN.
———-

“Mother” Jones, 80 years of age and well known the country over as the industrial worker’s lecturer, appeared at the Assembly hall last night in a lecture on Social Conditions, which was heard by a large number of laboring men and others. “Mother” Jones is the official organizer of the United Mine Workers of America, and has traveled the world over in her efforts in this movement. Last night she was introduced “from God Knows where.”

“Mother” Jones took a fling at Col. Theodore Roosevelt in her address last night. She accused him of selling out the coal miners in the strike of 1912 [1902] soon after he came into the White House.

Then she also rapped the Men and Religion Forward movement, which she said was but another scheme of J. Pierpont Morgan to get money from the laboring men and classes he could not otherwise reach. Her speech was a firey one and she electrified her audience with her denunciations of different nation-wide movements.

She was accompanied here to Fargo by Rev. C. H. Doolittle of Chicago, called the workingman’s friend, who opened the meeting last night with prayer which he followed with a short address on the present situation of the strike on the Harriman lines.

Another speaker at the meeting was C. M. Fielder, organizer of the journeymen barbers, who has been here for several weeks, who also talked about the Harriman strikers.

—————

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for April 1912, Part I: Found as Author of Series Telling of Her Experience Among the Coal Miners

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Mother Jones, Army Strong Mining Women, Ab 1925—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 19, 1912
Mother Jones News Round-Up for April 1912, Part I
Found as Author of Series on Her Work Among Nation’s Coal Miners

From The Kentucky Post of April 1, 1912:

MOTHER JONES, 8O, SENDS WORD TO MINERS
THAT SHE WILL HELP THEM TO WIN STRIKE

Mother Jones on Train, KY Pst p1, Apr 1, 1912

Staff Special.

DENVER. COLO., April 1-Great heavy blankets of snow stretched from Rocky Mountain top to valley below as the Transcontinental Limited plowed on to Denver on its own made-to-fit-the-tracks schedule, going forward when the “beautiful” was’t hugging the streaks of steel too thickly, and standing still, when the snowplows whirled and plastered the landscape with frozen moisture vainly.

In the tourist car a little, old, motherly woman was the only person who didn’t seem to mind this helter-skelter method of running trains from snow pile to snow pile. She was sewing-mending, maybe. The silver-crowned bead bent down over the needle and thread and cloth. Presently she raised her head to thread a needle and I caught the kindly, motherly twinkle of eyes I had seen before. Where? On fields of great industrial battles.

“How are you Mother Jones?” I asked, grasping the worn, wrinkled hand. “What are you doing away up here in this snow-buried country?”

“I am well” she replied, carefully removing her “sewing” from the other half of the seat. “I am traveling along this road preaching ‘in union there is strength’ to the shopmen. You see, they have ‘borrowed’ me from the miners for a short time”

“Mother, I am going East to the coal fields, shall I carry them a message from you?”

“Tell my boys that when they strike to get justice,” replied the woman who is known as “the mother of every mother’s son” in the ‘coal mines of America, “tell them that Mother Jones will come and help them if it takes the last hour of her life!”

On May-day Mother Jones will celebrate her eightieth birthday. In the last 35 years of her life she has led the advance guard in so many strikes that the number has long since crept from her memory. Judges have sent her to jail for defying anti-labor injunctions. She has faced the Cossacks of Pennsylvania, the ‘’commercialized bloodhounds” of West Virginia, sheriffs and private detectives the country over.

Born in Ireland in 1832 she was brought to America when six years old. Before she married she taught school. At 35 she was left a childless widow. Then she became a “mother” to the wives and babies of the railway strikers at Pittsburg in the conflict of 1877. Soon the woes of the coal miners drew her to them and to them and their families she has been steadfast ever since.

“I will go to where their ranks are thinnest,” the little old woman said, as she read the strike news in the newspaper I had handed her.

“Will you tell the readers of The Post some of your experience among the coal miners?” I asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t now, it would take too long, but I’ll tell you I what I’ll do. When I get to Denver I will write down some incidents I have seen myself.”

———-

And thus was concluded an arrangement whereby The Post is able to announce a series of articles from the pen of Mother Jones, the best known person, man or woman, in American labor circles. There is hardly a workingman or woman who does not admire her, and many of them love her as a second mother. The first of her articles will appear soon in The Post.

—————

[Emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: “Blood Shed in San Diego”-The Murder of Fellow Worker Joseph Mikolasek

Janet RayeFree Speech Fights
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Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 18, 1912
San Diego, California – The Death of Fellow Worker Joseph Mikolasek

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of May 16, 1912:

HdLn Blood Shed Mikolasek, IW p4, May 16, 1912

San Diego, Calif., May 9, 1912-The climax in the free speech fight came Tuesday, May 7. as a result one unarmed worker [Joseph Mikolasek] was murdered by the police, the town was practically under martial law, workers were clubbed on the streets, and over one hundred deported.

Tuesday morning it was reported that 84 members of the Industrial Workers of the World who were coming to participate in the free speech campaign, had arrived in the city on a freight train and were at Old Town, about three miles from the heart of the city. The police excitedly sent out all the reserves and special police men, who held up the train and took from a box car 84 free speech fighters on their way to battle. The men were lined up and herded into an old schoolhouse.

At 2 o’clock it became apparent that the vigilante outrages would be repeated for the business men were hurriedly arming themselves with rifles and shot guns. At 3 o’clock Attorney Moore of the free Speech League applied for a writ requesting the sheriff to take possession of the 84 prisoners. He also presented to the court an affidavit charging that it was the intention of the police to hand the men over to the “Vigilantes.” The writ was refused, the judge stating later in the evening he might grant a writ of habeas corpus. This was done at 8:45 p. m., too late to serve it.

Late that night, under cover of darkness, the police and the Vigilance Committee escorted the 84 Socialists and Industrial Workers out to the county line, and after tying them to trees, horsewhipping them and otherwise brutally treating them, they were told to “March north and keep going.”

Among the men thus deported were several members of the American Federation of Labor and the Socialist party.

At 7 o’clock Tuesday evening the men in town decided to make another attempt to speak on the streets. Accordingly 70 men went to the corner of Fifth and E streets and started to speak. The fifth man had mounted the rostrum when the reserve squad of the police charged the crowd which had gathered, clubbing indiscriminately. One small man named Catallon was knocked down and jumped on by a vigilante. Several citizens were injured and many speakers were arrested.

During the melee on the street some policemen were heard to say that the I. W. W. hall would be raided that night, and word was sent by sympathizers to vacate the hall, which was done, and at 7:30 p. m. when four policemen appeared at the hall it was empty. The policemen came to the doors and without demanding entrance, they poured a volley of shots into the building. They then broke into the hall and finding no one present they approached a group of I. W. W. men standing on the sidewalk around the corner. These men they proceeded to “beat up” but did not arrest them.

They then went back to the hall and saw Joe Mickolasek [Mikolasek] an I. W. W. who had just entered the building. According to Mickolasek’s dying statement the police immediately opened fire on him without any provocation. Mickolasek thereupon picked up an axe and although mortally wounded, attempted to defend himself. He wounded a policeman with the axe. The policeman who was hit with the axe was named Heddon. Thereupon Policeman Stevens opened fire upon Mickolasek. Nine shots took effect in Mickolasek’s body. During the excitement Policeman Stevens was shot in the shoulder it is supposed that this was an accident, but Woodford Hubbard, a socialist organizer, was charged with attempting to murder, although he was not in the crowd at the time of the shooting.

—————

[Emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Eugene Debs Describes the Shipping of the Special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason

Janet RayeEugene Victor Debs
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Quote EVD, Law ag Working Class, AtR p1, Apr 29, 1911—————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 15, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Eugene Debs on Shipping Special Edition of the Appeal

From The Coming Nation of May 11, 1912
-April 22nd, Shipping the Special Judiciary Edition of April 27th:

AtR Judiciary Ed Apr 27, Ship Apr 22, Cmg Ntn p 14, May 11, 1912

A view of part of the great record-breaking edition of the Appeal to Reason, at the railroad station, Girard, Kansas

The photographer’s lens was not wide enough to catch all of the piles of the special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason which were delivered to one single train. The total edition was over 3,000,000.

From the Appeal to Reason of May 4, 1912:

Greed Kills Titanic etc, AtR p4, May 4, 1912

April 22, 1912, at Girard

BY EUGENE V. DEBS.

SITTING at my desk at the APPEAL office, I hear the whirl and roar of the mammoth press. The Judicial Edition is racing through it-20,000 copies an hour. “Old Chap,” the veteran pressman, is pitted against his own record.

At the rate of a quarter of a million a day it will take twelve days to turn out this marvelous edition the greatest ever issued by any paper, in any nation, since the printing art was born.

“Old Chap” and the boys are standing by the racing, roaring old leviathan to win the wager that “she will not make it” and she does not miss a throb of her swift-beating heart in all the twenty-four hours of the day and night.

All about the APPEAL today the boys and girls are tense with trial-“drinking in the breath of their own swiftness”-making the record that is to stand against the world.

There is no night in Girard this week-there is but one long day-the day of Wayland, Warren and Phifer’s defiance to Pollock, Hook and Bone-the day of the APPEAL triumphant over the criminal courts of capitalist America. 

* * *

IT is now ten-thirty in the morning. I am near the depot platform and I gaze upon a mountain raised by human hands and human hearts and human brains-in sweet and sympathetic social alliance-the like of which the eyes of man never saw before.

Piled high enough to hide the depot and extending far enough to tower like a range of mountain peaks, the APPEAL,-a thousand pouches and a million copies-is awaiting transportation. And this is but the first installment of the fabulous edition.

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Hellraisers Journal: Inquiry into San Diego Free Speech Fight Strips Mask from Army of Thugs and Brutal Vigilante Justice

Janet RayeFree Speech Fights
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Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 12, 1912
San Diego, California – Weinstock Inquiry Proves Brutality of Vigilantes 

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of May 9, 1912:

INQUIRY STRIPS MASK FROM THUGS

GOVERNOR ORDERS INVESTIGATION OF SAN DIEGO
-INQUIRY REVEALS FRIGHTENED OFFICIALS
-MEN STILL ENTERING CITY.

[-by Stumpy]

San Diego FSF, Jail re Death of Hoey, Cmg Ntn p13, May 4, 912

San Diego, Cal., April 22, 1912

To the “Worker”-The most notable event of the past week has been the taking of testimony in the Free Speech fight by commissioner, Mr. Harris Weinstock, appointed by Governor Johnson to come to San Diego to get the facts in regard to the complete abrogation of all laws by the police and vigilantes, and incidentally this investigation has been the means of showing as fine an example of unqualified heroism as the world has ever seen.

The governor has appointed the commissioner in response to requests from scores of people here and elsewhere who knew of the lawlessness that was being carried on here, and he had issued invitations to all who wished to come forth and testify regarding the methods of the police and the justification for the vigilantes.

It would seem that here was a chance for the lovers of “law and order” to come forth and prove what martyrs the people of San Diego had been, but with the exception of two police officials and two others, one of them a vigilante, there was no one in all the town who had the nerve to come forth and justify their actions.

The first of the “citizens” to come forth had been well loaded with whisky, and he wanted to know if the commissioner was going to take the word of a lot of “anarchists and ragamuffins who were there to make trouble.” He then wanted the commissioner to go somewhere to get the statements of “a thousand citizens who were willing to testify, but the room where the investigation was being held was no fit place for them to come.” His scheme failed, as the commissioner told him plainly that no star chamber proceedings would be held.

Detective Shepherd was also on the job, but was unable to hold it down for more than a few minutes. When he was asked one or two questions about taking men out to be slugged by the vigilantes his prompter at a side door said “Telephone message for Shepherd,” and that was the end of his talk.

But it was not the end of the record. Thomas Kilcullen and one of the other I. W. W. men at once took the stand and testified that Shepherd was telling a point blank lie in the very essence of his testimony. He had had the nerve to state that no men were beaten up and that no one was turned over to the vigilantes. But men were there to prove him to be an unqualified liar, and the proof went into the record next after Shepherd’s attempt at a whitewash.

The true heroes were seven men who had been driven from the town and clubbed, some of them to insensibility, and told that if they ever returned to San Diego they would be killed. Some of them had been driven out two or three times, some had been clubbed on the streets of rotten San Diego, all had been threatened with death if they ever returned, yet they were defying the most vicious gun men of the west to give their story of cruelty to the governor that there might be the evidence for him to give us a measure of justice and fair dealing in our fight.

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