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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
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.”
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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.
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[Emphasis added.]
