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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 15, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part II

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part II of IV.]

A week ago last Sunday I met this wonderful woman for the first time. It was in her own room at the Washburn hotel, at Charleston, whence I was to set out with her the next day on her mission up the Kanawha and New River valleys.

I saw a neat, trim, comfortable looking woman of 60 years, just tall enough and stout enough to be motherly in appearance. She wore a black silk gown, her platform dress, never donned, as I afterward discovered except on rare occasions. Mother Jones must have been a handsome young girl. Her skin, even yet, is soft and white, and there are few wrinkles in her broad, thoughtful brow. Her eyes are deep set, clear, shining blue gray, shrewd, alert, tender. While she talks they flash by turns indignation, scorn, surprise, amusement, merriment.

She was engaged in the very prosaic task of putting a new velvet binding upon her walking skirt, but she now dropped her work, laid off her glasses, settled herself comfortably back in her rocking chair, and asked if I had heard any news on my trip down regarding the steel strike.

[She said:]

It means so much to us all. Everything depends upon the success or the failure of the striking steel workers. This great strike is the beginning of the end of the campaign begun at Homestead just nine years ago, and which numbers Lattimer and Hazleton in Pennsylvania and Pana and Virden in Illinois among its blood-stained battlefields. Whatever may be the outcome of this, the greatest strike we have yet instituted, its immediate effects will be but temporary. Won or lost, it means a long step forward in industrial evolution. If the union forces lose their fight it will only precipitate the crisis.

It will take but a spark from the revolutionary torch to start a conflagration that will spread from one end of the country to the other. Ten years ago I found the miners and the mill workers timid and wavering and easily subdued. Now I find them bold and firm and uncompromising. They are becoming educated in economics. While they have been using their muscles for their masters they have been training their brains to think and reason for their own advancement.

The people are patient, infinitely patient. Oppressed people have always been patient until patience ceased to be a virtue. They will sweat at the furnace, they will crawl on their bleeding knees through the dark coal caverns, they will even see their young children broken under the wheel of commercial greed. All this they have borne for a long time, with only occasional mutterings of discontent. It is always the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The wage slave must be ground down just a little more, his yoke made only a little heavier.

When the cataclysm comes the people of this country cannot expect anything different from what has befallen nations that have allowed the classes to exploit the blood and brawn of the masses. Human nature is not different to-day from the human nature of 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago. In the bosom of the hard oppressed toiler in the mine and the mill and at the furnace there is slumbering a long suppressed vindictiveness. This spirit I find in the workers everywhere.

Mother Jones’ voice, clear and ringing when she addresses a crowd, is soft and low in conversation. It is the voice of the gentle nuns of he Canadian convents where she was educated and whose schools she taught prior to her marriage. While yet a very young women there came the great tragedy of her life. Her husband and four little children were swept away by yellow fever in less than one month’s time.

For more than thirty years Mother Jones has been a student of economics and participator in the leading industrial movements of the nation. She is numbered among the agitators of the famous “Sand Lots Movement, ” in San Francisco many years ago.

She was one of the orators who were wont to address the mobs that gathered about the mint in that city, howling for Chinese exclusion. She has taken and influential part in every great strike within the last decade. Her title was bestowed upon her by the 500,000 American Railway union men during the great railroad strike at Chicago in 1897.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part II” →

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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 14, 1901
Mother Jones Organizes Miners in West Virginia; Dorothy Adams Reports, Part I

From the Denver Rocky Mountain News of August 11, 1901:

(Kansas City Star.)
By Dorothy Adams.

[Part I of IV.]

OF IMMEASURABLE importance as a factor in the unit of organized labor is the mission that Mother Jones has been delegated to bear to the 28,000 toilers in the coal mines of West Virginia. To her the United Mine Workers of all America now look for a solution of the problem that has long baffled and harassed not only themselves but all interdependent bodies of organized labor. That problem is the unionization of the West Virginia forces and their alliance with the federations of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

For Mother Jones the state of West Virginia is a forbidden land. She enters its borders as an outlaw and in defiance of the federal judiciary. Under the ban of the perpetual injunction issued by Judge Jackson in 1897, forbidding and restraining organizers of the United Mine Workers from entering the confines of the state forever, this gentle apostle of industrial emancipation is liable to arrest and imprisonment any moment that vested interests deem it expedient to enforce that dangerous and obnoxious law.

It is my privilege to accompany Mother Jones into this forbidden land and to journey with her on foot through the enemy’s country. Constables and squires meet us at every turn and serve all manner of papers and warrants and restraining injunctions on Mother Jones, which she, with fine contempt, chucks into her black silk hand-bag, and then goes ahead and does as she pleases. Only day before yesterday, as we walked into North Caperton at dusk, the constable and squire challenged Mother Jones and forbade her the right of addressing a meeting of miners on the opposite side of the river that night.

Only this morning the miner at Mount Carbon who sheltered us last night was discharged and his family evicted from the wretched company shack they called home. The West Virginia coal miner speaks to Mother Jones at the risk of losing his job, and his family harbors her under certain penalty of eviction should the fact reach the ears of the mine superintendent.

Wherever we go there is no room for us in the company inn, and thus we are only too often obliged to partake of the hospitality of a friendly coal digger and thus it is that Mother Jones lies fast asleep to-night upon the hard, bare, moon-washed floor of a hovel at St. Clair. Our host’s family cannot afford the luxury of a lamp. I am writing in the moonlight that streams through the sashless windows and the low, open doorway and whitens the snow of Mother Jones’ hair. Her head is pillowed on her hand-bag.

Mother Jones is dead tired. Up the high mountain side, down the dark ravine, through the fastnesses of the West Virginia wilderness, along the hot, dusty railroad track in the valley, by rock and by stream for many along, hot mile, she and I have trudged this day.

But before I go into an account of our journey through this awful valley, allow me to say a word about the good old woman whom more than 500,000 sweat-dripping toilers call and reverence by the name of “mother.” Let me tell you something about the personality of this heroine of a hundred strikes.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “In The Forbidden Land with Mother Jones” -Dorothy Adams Reports from West Virginia, Part I” →