——————–
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.]
