Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday September 27, 1921 Mother Jones Speaks at United Mine Workers Convention, Part I
Indianapolis, Convention of the United Mine Workers of America Sixth Day, September 26, 1921, Mother Jones Speaks, Part I of IV:
Indiana Daily Times September 27, 1921
Vice-President Murray: I understand that Mother Jones has just arrived in the convention and I am going to request Brother David Fowler to escort her to the platform. It isn’t necessary that I should introduce Mother Jones to you at this time; it isn’t necessary that I should eulogize the work she has performed for the coal diggers of America, and I will simply present to the convention at this time our good friend, Mother Jones.
ADDRESS OF MOTHER JONES
Mr. Chairman and Delegates: I have been watching you from a distance, and you have been wasting a whole lot of time and money. I want you to stop it.
All along the ages, away back in the dusty past, the miners started their revolt. It didn’t come in this century, it came along in the cradle of the race when they were ground by superstition and wrong. Out of that they have moved onward and upward all the ages against all the courts, against all the guns, in every nation they have moved onward and upward to where they are today, and their effort has always been to get better homes for their children and for those who were to follow them.
I have just come up from West Virginia. I left Williamson last Friday and came into Charleston. I was doing a little business around there looking after things. We have never gotten down to the core of the trouble that exists there today. Newspapers have flashed it, magazines have contained articles, but they were by people who did not understand the background of the great struggle.
In 1900 I was sent into West Virginia; I went there and worked for a while, taking a survey of the situation. At that time men were working fourteen hours a day and they did not get their coal weighed. They weighed a ton of coal with an aching back, dug it, loaded it and didn’t know how much was in it. However, we have moved onward and today they get their checkweighman, they get paid in cash instead of in company money as they used to; but that wasn’t brought around in an easy manner, it wasn’t brought around arguing on the floor.
I walked nine miles one night with John H. Walker in the New River field after we had organized an army of slaves who were afraid to call their souls their own. We didn’t dare sleep in a miner’s house; if we did the family would be thrown out in the morning and would have no place to go. We walked nine miles before we got shelter. When we began to organize we had to pay the men’s dues, they had no money.
At one time some of the organizers came down from Charleston, went up to New Hope and held a meeting. They had about fourteen people at the meeting. The next morning the conductor on the train told me the organizers went up on a train to Charleston. I told Walker to bill a meeting at New Hope for the next night and I would come up myself. He said we could not bill meetings unless the national told us to. I said: “I am the national now and I tell you to bill that meeting.” He did.
When we got to the meeting there was a handful of miners there and the general manager, clerks and all the pencil pushers they could get. I don’t know but there were a few organizers for Jesus there, too. We talked but said nothing about organizing. Later that night a knock came on the door where I was staying and a bunch of the boys were outside. They asked if I would organize them. I said I would. They told me they hadn’t any money. Walker said the national was not in favor of organizing, they wanted us only to agitate. I said: “John, I am running the business here, not the national; they are up in Indianapolis and I am in New Hope. I am going to organize those fellows and if the national finds any fault with you, put it on me—I can fight the national as well as I can the company if they are not doing right.”
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday September 18, 1901 Mother Jones, Interviewed in Indianapolis, Advises Ruling Class
From the Appeal to Reason of September 14, 1901:
An Interview With Mother Jones.
“Mother” Jones, as she is affectionately called by her boys, for whom she labors in season and out of season, was interviewed by an Indianapolis reporter at the time of her visit to that city, in which she said:
The issues of the day are capitalism and Socialism. We have our rights and I will I fight for them until the bitter end. We are now in a great industrial battle with the two armies of labor and capital arrayed against each other. We want to bring harmony out of chaos. A great industrial war is on. There is no question about it. We will have a number of strikes and other uprisings, but the workers are educating themselves. While they are producing they are reasoning. They will resort to the ballot and not to the bullet. Out of this industrial chaos they will bring industrial harmony. They will not be begging their masters to give them a day’s work or a loaf of bread, They will simply take that which is theirs by rights. They produce it, and in producing it, they should own it. We are after the machinery of production, distribution and exchange.
The era of Socialism is dawning. From the records I find that in 1850 the wealth of the American nation was $8,000,000,000. The share of the working people was 62½%, and the people who exploit had but 37½%. In 1880 the producer’s share went down to 24%, while the wealth of the nation had increased to $48,000,000,000, and the share of the non-producers had increased to 76%. In 1901 the nation’s wealth is estimated at $100,000,000,000, and the exploiters have 90% of that amount, and the producers only 10%. After $22,000,000 were raked in on the first of July as dividends, the workers had not even 10%.
Here is the point I am getting at: The capitalist class can do but little more exploiting in America. The people are disinherited, but they do not seem to realize it.
Inside of the next ten years the capitalists will have reached into eastern nations for new fields, and the middle class capitalists will have disappeared from society. The proletariat of nations will have molded its parts together and will come on the field as the conscious revolutionary party for the first time in the history of the world and will demand the surrender of the keys of nature’s storehouse. If the ruling class takes notice of the past it will surrender gracefully.
I look for the possible solution of the industrial problem in the dawn of the era of Socialism. Then will the masses of oppressed men and women of the nations of the earth rally to its bright banner and hail the advance of the Co-operative Commonwealth when all laborers will be capitalists and every capitalist will be a laborer, and industrial harmony will at last have come to a patient, long-suffering people.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 15, 1921 “Marching Through West Virginia” by Heber Blankenhorn
From The Nation of September 14, 1921:
Marching Through West Virginia
By HEBER BLANKENHORN
I
IF—as the war correspondents used to begin—you will place your left hand on the map of West Virginia, with the edge of the palm along the Kanawha River at Charleston, the down-pointing thumb will lie along the road southwest into Logan and Mingo counties, and the outstretched fingers will represent the valleys whence the miners collected for the march along the thumb-line. That region has filled the country’s newspapers with communiques, dealing with contending “armies,” “lines” held along Spruce Fork Ridge, intrenchments, machine-gun nests, bombing planes, so many dead for the day, so many wounded.
Marmet is ten miles from the State capital at the mouth of Lens Creek Valley. On the afternoon of August 22 a cordon of 100 armed men is stretched across the dirt road, the mine railroad, and the creek, barring out officers of the law, reporters, all inquirers. Inside lies the “trouble.” The miners have been mobilizing for four days. A snooping airplane has just been driven off with hundreds of shots. Accident and a chance acquaintance let me in.
The men, a glance shows, are mountaineers, in blue overalls or parts of khaki uniform, carrying rifles as casually as picks or sticks. They are typical. The whole village seems to be out, except the children, women, and old men. They show the usual mining-town mixture of cordiality and suspicion to strangers. But the mining-camp air of loneliness and lethargy is gone. Lens Creek Valley is electric and bustling. They mention the towns they come from, dozens of names, in the New River region, in Fayette County, in counties far to the north. All are union men, some railroaders. After a mile we reach camp. Hundreds are moving out of it—toward Logan. Over half are youths, a quarter are Negroes, another quarter seem to be heads of families, sober looking, sober speaking. Camp is being broken to a point four miles further on. Trucks of provisions, meat, groceries, canned goods move up past us.
“This time we’re sure going through to Mingo,” the boys say.
Them Baldwin-Feltses [company detectives] has got to go. They gotta stop shooting miners down there. Keeney turned us back the last time, him and that last Governor. Maybe Keeney was right that time. This new Governor got elected on a promise to take these Baldwin-Feltses out. If nobody else can budge them thugs, we’re the boys that can. This time we go through with it.
“What started you?”
This thing’s been brewing a long while. Then two of our people gets shot down on the courthouse steps—you heard of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers? The Governor gives them a safe conduct; they leave their guns behind and get killed in front of their wives. It was a trap.
“But that was several weeks ago.”
Well, it takes a while for word to get ’round. Then they let his murderer, that Baldwin-Felts, Lively, out on bond-free-with a hundred miners in jail in Mingo on no charges at all—just martial law. Well, we heard from up the river that everybody was coming here. We knew what for. When we found lots had no guns we sent back to get them.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday September 7, 1901 Mother Jones Paints a Picture of American Freedom in West Virginia
From the International Socialist Review of September 1901:
A Picture of American Freedom in West Virginia ———-
[By Mother Jones]
SOME months ago a little group of miners from the State of Illinois decided to face the storm and go to the assistance of their fellow-workmen in the old slave state of West Virginia. They hoped that they might somehow lend a hand to break at least one link in the horrible corporation chains with which the miners of that state are bound. Wherever the condition of these poor slaves of the caves is worst there is where I always seek to be, and so I accompanied the boys to West Virginia.
They billed a meeting for me at Mt. Carbon, where the Tianawha Coal and Coke Company have their works. The moment I alighted from the train the corporation dogs set up a howl. They wired for the “squire” to come at once. He soon arrived with a constable and said : “Tell that woman she cannot speak here to night; if she tries it I will jail her.” If you come from Illinois you are a foreigner in West Virginia and are entitled to no protection or rights under the law—that is if you are interested in the welfare of your oppressed fellow beings. If you come in the interest of a band of English parasites you are a genuine American citizen and the whole state is at your disposal. So the squire notified me that if I attempted to speak there would be trouble. I replied that I was not hunting for trouble, but that if it came in that way I would not run away from it. I told him that the soil of Virginia had been stained with the blood of the men who marched with Washington and Lafayette to found a government where the right of free speech should always exist.
“I am going to speak here to-night,” I continued. “When I violate the law, and not until then will you have any right to interfere.” At this point he and the constable started out for the county seat with the remark that he would find out what the law was on that point. For all I have been able to hear they are still hunting for the law, for I have never heard from them since. The company having called off their dogs of war I held my meeting to a large crowd of miners.
But after all the company came out ahead. They notified the hotel not to take any of us in or give us anything to eat. There upon a miner and his wife gave me shelter for the night. The next morning they were notified to leave their miserable little shack which belonged to the company.He was at once discharged and with his wife and babe went back to Illinois, where, as a result of a long and bitter struggle the miners have succeeded in regaining a little liberty.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 27, 1921 Madison, West Virginia – Advance Forces of Miners’ Army Reaches Danville
From The Washington Times of Aug 26, 1921:
Page 1:
By International News Service.
MADISON, W. Va., Aug. 26.-The advance forces in the union miners’ “army” of 5,000 men, which is marching toward the Mingo county strike zone, arrived at Danville, a little hamlet along the Coal river, two miles northeast of this place, at noon today.
The men had been marching since 3 o’clock this morning, at which time they broke camp at Racine, sixteen miles northeast of here. The marchers were tired but maintained orderly lines. They hope to reach the Boone-Logan county border by tonight.
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By International News Service.
CHILLICOTHE, Ohio, Aug. 26.-Two hundred Federal soldiers from the Columbus barracks arrived at Camp Sherman today to join the 19th United States Infantry here, which is prepared to move at a moment’s notice, into Mingo county, West Virginia.
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By International News Service.
MADISON, W. Va., Aug. 26..-C. F. Keeney, of Charleston, president of district No. 17, United Mine Workers of America, left here this morning to head off the invasion of Logan county by 5,000 armed union miners.
Guns and Planes Ready.
Just before leaving Kenney said he had been advised that the sheriff of Logan county had machine guns planted covering all roads and that airplanes were loaded with bombs. Any attempt to march through Logan county would mean a massacre of the union miners’ force. Keeney made haste to reach the men before bloodshed resulted.
The marchers left Racine today for Madison and will not reach here until late this afternoon or tonight. The miners’ army is 12 miles from here now.
Deny Pitched Battle.
Published reports that Sheriff Don Chafin of Logan county and 300 Deputies had engaged in battle late Thursday with the miners’ army were flatly denied by both Kenney and local authorities. A small rumor was magnified into a great fact last night, it was stated. There was no battle or trouble of any kind.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 26, 1921 Marmet, West Virginia – Telegram Read by Mother Jones Declared “Bogus”
From The Wheeling Intelligencer of August 25, 1921:
Charleston, W. Va., Aug 24.-Reports received at the offices of Governor E. F. Morgan that the men, estimated by county officials to number more than 5,000, most of them armed, assembled at Marmet from the coal fields of eastern Kanawha county, had taken a vote today to break camp and return to their homes, were denied tonight by C. Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney, president and secretary-treasurer respectively of District 17, United Mine Workers of America.
It was the first statement that has come from the offices of the miners’ union here, since the men began to assemble last Saturday. It was in answer to a statement coming from the governor’s office to the effect that Keeney and Mooney had a “tilt” with “Mother” Jonesover the purported speech to the men this morning advising them to return to their homes during the course of whichshe was said to have read a telegram from President Harding urging the men to break up their camp.
Both Keeney and Mooney declared the telegram purporting to have come from the president was “bogus.” They said they called George B. Christian, secretary to President Harding by long distance telephone this afternoon who told them, they say, that “no such telegram was sent by the chief executive.”
Alleged Harding Message.
[Keeney and Mooney said:]
“Mother” Jones went to the camp of the miners on Lens Creek, Tuesday night and told the men she would bring them a message from President Harding on Wednesday.
This morning the men sent a committee of two to Charleston to request us to go to Marmet and verify the telegram. We returned with the committee, arriving in time to hear “Mother” Jones address some 500 miners assembled at the lower end of the camp, advising them to go home. She read a telegram which she said was signed by President Harding, in which the president asked the miners to stand by the constitution and return to their homes and work and promising them he would use his power to drive the Baldwin-Felts guards from the state, never to return.
After she had finished reading the telegram, we asked “Mother” Jones to show it to us. She refused to comply and some strong words were exchanged.
Keeney and Mooney said they then returned to Charleston and called President Harding’s secretary, who, they say, denied that any telegram had been sent.
“Mother” Jones Leaves.
“Mother” Jones could not be located here tonight. At the hotel at which she stopped while in the city, it was said she checked out today and left on Chesapeake & Ohio train No. 2 for the east.
Keeney and Mooney said they investigated the reports that the men assembled at Marmet had taken a vote to return home and “found them unfounded and untrue.”
Small groups of armed men straggled into the camp today, according to information received by Sheriff Henry A. Walker, and he estimated the number now assembled to be approximately 6,000. Reports earlier in the day that the men would be joined by others from the coal fields of Indiana and Illinois could not be verified. Trains coming in from outside the state have not carried more than the usual number of passengers today, railroad men said tonight.
Two large automobile trucks belonging to C. H. James & Son of this city were chartered by five men from Marmet today, and provisions were solicited from Charleston stores and restaurants. Purchases were also made for the men in camp in Charleston stores, 15,000 loaves of bread having been bought from a grocery company. The trucks were manned by five residents of Marmet led by C. Silvas and [?] Medley both miners.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 25, 1921 Marmet, West Virginia – Mother Jones Headed for Miners’ Camp at Marmet
From The West Virginian of August 24, 1921:
MOTHER JONES GOES TO MARMET
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Charleston Citizens Still Hope
There Will Be No Trouble
CHARLESTON, August 24-Mother Jones, well know as a leader among miners, left here this morning for Marmet where about 3,000 miners have been in camp as a protest against the state of martial law in the Mingo county coal field.
She was to have addressed the men, who had moved their camp five miles from the original site, which was described as a more comfortable location.
While recognizing the gravity of the situation occasioned by the presence of so large a body of men within striking distance of the capital public officials and leading citizens here expressed the opinion that under proper leadership the incident would be closed without serious result.
It was recognized, however, that the situation still contained elements of danger particularly if the original program was carried out and the men carried out their march through Boone and Logan counties to Mingo.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 18, 1921 Williamson, West Virginia – Mother Jones Visits Mingo County Jail
From the Hinton Daily News and Leader of August 17, 1921:
MOTHER JONES VISITS MINGO COUNTY JAILS ———-
Williamson, W. V., Aug.,-16.-“Mother” Jones, labor organizer, arrived in Williamson tonight after, it is said, permission was granted by Governor Morgan to visit the Mingo coal fields, where there has been an industrial controversy since July 1, 1920. Upon her arrival she obtained permission from Sheriff A. C Pinson to visit the county jail, where nearly 100 prisoner are confined, some of them being idle miners. This is the third time “Mother” Jones has visited the Williamson district since the controversy began.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 17, 1901 Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part IV
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.) By Dorothy Adams.
[Part IV of IV.]
On our journey up to Berry, where Mother Jones addressed a mass meeting just at the end of the railroad trestle on this side of Sewell, we saw a man crawl from under the rods of a freight train that had slowed up for water. He was barefooted and his clothes were in tatters. He sat down beside the little spring that bubble up behind the water tank and Mother Jones divided our luncheon with him. He was a miner hunting for work, 43 years old, with a family back in Alabama, glad to sell himself for the miserable pittance of a West Virginia coal digger. He had traveled all the way from Alabama, sleeping on the rods of freight cars. He was going up Quinnimont on the scent of a job. The whistle blew, he drank another cup of cool water, swallowed the last bite of sandwich and all in the twinkling of an eye swung under the moving train.
We encounter most difficulty when it becomes necessary for Mother Jones to cross the river. Most of the ferries are the property of the companies who control the adjacent mines. Where Mother Jones identity is discovered the ferrymen refuse to carry her. I took a snap shot of an altercation which she had with an operator when she was about to cross to the tipple of the Sunday Creek Coal company of Ohio.
The local ferry had refused to carry her, and she was just about to step into the rowboat of an obliging colored man when the operator of one of the companies rushed up. “I tell you I own half this river, and I dare you to cross,” he shouted.
“Huh, you own half the river, do you?” retorted Mother Jones. “Well, it’s a pretty long river for a man like you to own the half of. However, I believe God Almighty owns the other half, and maybe He has a block or two of stock in your half, so I think I’ll cross, come along, uncle,” to the awe-stricken colored man.
Needless to say Mother Jones crossed the river and talked to the little company of black smeared diggers gathered behind the tipple.
The dignity of this woman is awe-inspiring. When the constable and squire met us at North Caperton the other night she treated them with the indulgence with which a grandmother looks upon the practical jokes of her grandsons. She was not at all nonplussed, but calmly sat on a pile of railroad ties awaiting her time, and after a quarter of an hour’s parley between the squire and the constable (Mother Jones never parleys with a petty law officer) they decided to ride across the mountain to Fayetteville, the county seat, and look up the law.
They have not returned thus far, and Mother Jones held her meeting that night and numerous others since.
Sitting on the river bank near Hawks Nest, Mother Jones computed that every miner in the West Virginia coal fields must dig twenty tons at the very lowest estimate to pay the various company assessments before he has anything for food and clothing and powder. He receives a wage that will average anywhere from $1.00 to $1.80 per day.
Out of this comes house rent of not less than $5 a month, water, $1 per month; squibs, 25 cents per month, two gallons of oil per month at 50 cents per gallon, which can be bought anywhere on open market for 25 cents per gallon; powder, of which he uses between three and four kegs per month in order to mine enough coal to pay him $1.00 per day, at $2.25 per keg….[there continues documentation of expenses for blacksmith, for company doctor, for hospital, whether or not doctor or hospital care are needed].
All he has left he is at liberty to spend for food and clothing at the “pluck me,” the miner’s vernacular for the company store. It is pretty well named. The prices charged for everything are exacerbated in the extreme [examples given of prices for flour and salt at the pluck-me versus at stores in “free” towns-towns not under company control-where the miners are forbidden to shop].
Hellraisers Journal – Friday August 16, 1901 Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part III
From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:
(Kansas City Star.) By Dorothy Adams.
[Part III of IV.]
But back again to the miners’ shack at St. Clair. The coal digger’s children are restless. They sleep, six of them, in the same tiny, moonlit room where Mother Jones lies and I write. They roll their heat pricked bodies first on one side, then on the other. Little naked legs are thrown out over the counterpane, in the adjoining and smaller room the younger children and their father are trying to sleep, while the mother hushes the fretful baby.
This room, too, is flooded with light. Not moonlight, however, but the fierce glare of the coke ovens.
But there is no rest to the West Virginia coal miner or his helpless children in this valley of dreadful night. I have been in the crowded tenements of New York on nights of record-breaking heat, but even there I have never seen the misery that is here to-night. From Quinnimont in the east to Raymond in the west the New river valley unwinds 137 miles of burning labyrinth.
From its torture none can escape; the long processions of rumbling freight trains, the shrieking of the shift engine whistle, the heat and glare and belchings of the coke ovens.
The valley is a narrow, precipitous gorge, every foot of level surface being occupied by the railroad tracks. In many of the camps that Mother Jones and I traveled through this week these tracks lay but three feet from the doors of the miners’ dwellings. All along the valley the houses on the inner side of the railroad abut against the cliffs, and on the outer side perch upon piles driven into the steep, sloping banks running down to the river. On the inner side of the tracks and between them and the row of houses are the coke ovens.
The shack usually consists of three rooms-two bedrooms and a kitchen The company that employs the coal digger receives from $5 to $8 per month rental for these three rooms, which does not include the additional $1 for water, which they must carry themselves from the company well.
The water supply is the most pitiful of all the tragedies to be found here. The family with whom we are spending the night use the river water, as many others are forced to do who cannot pay the requisite $1 per month.
It is at all seasons of the year thick and muddy as chocolate, and is bad to bathe in, to say nothing of drinking. Mother Jones hired a passing colored woman to walk up to the company well, about a quarter of a mile up the tracks, and bring us a bucket of clear water, for we were very thirsty after our long tramp in the hot sun.
A bucket of clear, pure water, not as cold as can be drawn rom any New York city hydrant, but clear as crystal. The children rushed to it like bees to a clover blossom. They fought for the dinted old dipper. They scrambled for cups and tins, and a neighboring baby came toddling in with an empty the tin can.
It is to better just such conditions as these that Mother Jones has come down into this country. She holds meetings at the coal tipples in the evening at 6 o’clock. Then the men slide down the rails on the incline that leads to the mouth of the mine in the mountain above. She urges them to join the union and preserve their liberties. She tells them of the good times that have come to the miners of Illinois since the awful object lessons at Pana and Virden. How they work eight hours there, instead of ten, as they do here. How there is no dockage there. How they have done away with the company shack, and the company store, and the company blacksmith and church and doctor. How the miners there buy their powder for $1.75 per keg instead of $2.25; how the coal companies are obliged to pay them their wages in cash, without any dockage, and how they enjoy the boon of spending their earnings where they please.
At night she holds meetings, usually aided by some one of the four men organizers who are in that country to help her. Every means possible is used by the coal companies to intimidate those in favor of organization. Immediate discharge is the penalty should an employe be discovered to have joined the United Mine Workers. Of the 28,000 miners in the state only about 3,000 are union men. The companies are very independent, because every incoming freight brings only too many idle men searching for work, who are glad to step into the job left vacant by the union recruit and to move into the shack from which his family was evicted.
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