Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones: “…the babes of Ludlow, I stand here bringing their tears and wasted hopes to you…”

21st September 20243rd October 2024 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones Babes of Ludlow, Speech at Trinidad CO UMW District 15 Special Convention, ES1 p154 (176 of 360) —————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 21, 1914
Trinidad, Colorado – Mother Jones Speaks at Special Convention of District 15

Mother Jones at Ludlow with Frank Hayes, full, possibly Sept 23, 1913 — **Mother Jones at Ludlow with Frank Hayes, possibly September 23, 1913**

Mother Jones was greeted with wild cheering and applause in Trinidad, Colorado, when she arose to speak this past Tuesday at the special convention of District 15, United Mine Workers of America. Delegates were gathered there to consider President Wilson’s proposal for ending the year long strike.

Mother remembered the children and the mothers who were massacred at Ludlow on April 20th:

I stand facing the far east, sounding the voices of the babes of Ludlow, I stand here bringing their tears, their wasted hopes to you, the heartaches of the mothers, the screams and the agonies of those who gave up their lives there; but they did not die in vain. They stirred the nation from end to end and you never again will see such a condition of slavery in Colorado.

The convention resulted in a vote in favor of acceptance of the plan put forward by President Wilson.

From the Proceedings of the Miners’ Special Convention, September 15, 1914
-Excerpts from the Speech of Mother Jones:

Now, boys, many things have happened in the last year. One year ago today, I talked to you about industrial freedom. We are living in a great nation. Industrial despotism will have to die and you, my boys, must use your brains, you must study and think. The sword will have to disappear and the pen will have to take its place. We are the bulwark of the nation.

Thank God that we have another great man, another Lincoln, in Washington today in our President. (Applause.) He does not rush into things but weighs everything carefully in the scale.

If there are any representatives of the Colorado Fuel & Iron company here, I want to tell you to keep out. You cannot vote in this Convention, for none but bona fide working men will have a vote here. If you are here, I will find you, I can spot you immediately, for I can smell you four miles away. (Applause.)

* * *

At the time of the strike in West Virginia, I cancelled engagements in San Francisco and went to West Virginia. I went to Charleston and took the Cabin Creek train and went up there. A little boy came to me and he said, “Mother, have you come to stay with us?” “Yes, I have come to stay with you,” and the tears trickled down his cheeks as he told me how they had beaten his mother and his baby brother and driven his father away and he said: “If I live to be a man I will kill twenty of them.”

They were not United States bayonets. They were corporation bayonets, and corporation bayonets are in the hands of sewer rats and the others are in the hands of men. While in West Virginia, I was a guest of the State, I was arrested and placed in the bull pen. But they didn’t keep me quiet there for I was raising hell more than if I had been out. Now these boys didn’t get what they wanted in that settlement in West Virginia. They came to me and asked my advice and I said: “Take what you can get out of the pirates.” The newspaper men asked: “What do you think of the settlement?” and I told them it was alright, it wasn’t what we wanted, but what we could get. The mine owners of West Virginia have begun to realize what that settlement means to them. You were never in the condition here that they were in West Virginia. I was not followed here by the Baldwin-Felts thugs in the dead of night or horseback as I was in West Virginia. In a battle we had there seven of my brothers were murdered in cold blood and twenty-one were wounded.

* * *

The President of the United States, when he found you could not settle your difficulties, sent the federal troops here to defend you, and now if you don’t accept this proposition what more can he do. He has to withdraw the troops. The constitution gives him so long to keep them here and I don’t know but what he has already overstepped that authority now.

Another thing, you have allowed here in this strike is to let everybody to get a hand in it. Now this fight is ours, we have got the United States with us and we are fighting the greatest moneyed power in the world. John D. Rockefeller controls the whole of New York City and New York with its millions of population has to submit to him. He owns the mines, the industries and the railroads clear through the nation, but one man arises against that power and says to the miners of Colorado, I will be with you if you are fair. He faces the greatest moneyed power in the world and says these miners shall at least have a showing.

* * *

I stand facing the far east, sounding the voices of the babes of Ludlow, I stand here bringing their tears, their wasted hopes to you, the heartaches of the mothers, the screams and the agonies of those who gave up their lives there; but they did not die in vain. They stirred the nation from end to end and you never again will see such a condition of slavery in Colorado.

* * *

Now, boys, you know I have no interests outside of the welfare of the children yet to come. I have carried your case to Congress, to the President, and I feel that we ought to pay that tribute of respect to the head of the nation in accepting this proposition. It is not all we want but Christ did not get all he wanted. So, boys, take my advice, I beg of you in the name of the women and children of Ludlow to pay that tribute of respect to the President of the nation, saying that we appreciate the move he has made and I believe you will get more.

Now, don’t say Mother Jones is playing politics. I never played politics in my life. I have been a Socialist for twenty-nine years and I would hammer a Socialist if he is a crazy lunatic just the same as any one else. I am not living for nothing I hold no office only that of disturbing. Before I leave the world, I have a contract with God Almighty to stay here eighty-two years more, there will be no bayonets and no guns, we will all be great citizens, and the bayonets of the future will be the pen, which is mightier than the sword. The next thing the public officers will do at Washington will be to take over the mines. We want the mines and we want the oil fields and we are going to have them. I stand here today as one pleading with you, I ask you to accept the President’s proposition. Let the nation know that the United Mine Workers are not what they are represented to be by General Chase and his staff of pirates. I want the people to know that you miners are men and law-abiding citizens.

[Emphasis added]

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Hellraisers Journal: Appeal to Reason Correspondent, John Kenneth Turner, Begins Series on “Government by Gunmen”

14th May 202415th May 2024 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Powers of Privilege ed, Ab Chp III —————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday May 14, 1914
Mother Jones Praises John Kenneth Turner’s Series, “Government by Gunmen”

From the Appeal to Reason of May 9, 1914:

John Kenneth Turner Opens Fire
On Government by Gunmen

Here follows the introductory article of the “Government by Gunmen” series. In investigating these facts John Kenneth Turner risked his life, as it required his association with gunmen, detectives and the riff-raff of capitalist society. Several times he was warned by friends to drop his investigations. A reformed gunman has written the Appeal urging us to suppress this series if we valued Turner’s life. But the author of “Barbarous Mexico” and the investigator of West Virginia and other recent labor wars, laughs at this threat. He believes that the publicity given to this series will not only protect him but all who are today in danger of being “eliminated” by the murderous detective agencies. Here then is the beginning of the “Government by Gunmen” series. And every week for nearly half a year we shall bring before the public bar the strongest indictment of Capitalism’s Invisible Army that was ever attempted in this country. The Appeal feels that our first and most important duty is to abolish Government by Gunmen. It must be done-it will be done.

By JOHN KENNETH TURNER
Staff Correspondent Appeal to Reason.

In the county jail at Marysville, Cal., a short time ago I talked with two young workingmen who were on trial for murder. A jury of twelve men-not working men-has since declared them guilty and a judge has sentenced them to imprisonment at hard labor for the rest of their natural lives.

Yet these two workingmen had not killed anybody. Nor had they planned or attempted to kill anybody.

One, Richard Ford, is ruined for life-torn from his wife and two little children forever-solely because he became the spokesman for 2,300 hop-pickers who went on strike against intolerable conditions.

The career of the other, Herman Suhr, is blasted-he too, is unfortunate enough to possess a wife and two children-solely because he signed a number of telegrams asking that organizers be sent to the hop-fields to enroll the 2,300 pickers in a labor union.

The arrest, the trial and the conviction of Ford and Suhr was a deliberate frame-up of a ring of capitalists, in which a private detective agency took a necessary and criminal part…..

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Masses: “The Kanawha Striker” by Paint Creek Miner and Drawing of Strikers by Charles A. Winter

2nd April 20245th April 2024 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Ralph Chaplin, WV Miners Longing for the Spring, Leaves, Paint Creek Miner, ISR p736, Apr 1913 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 2, 1914
“The Kanawha Striker” by Paint Creek Miner & Drawing by Charles Winter

From The Masses of April 1914:

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Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Defies Chase, Returns to Trinidad, Arrested and Held as Military Prisoner at Local Hospital

13th January 202414th January 2024 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Chase No Own State, RMN p3, Jan 12, 1914 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 13, 1914
Trinidad, Colorado – Mother Jones Seized by State Militia, Held at San Rafael Hospital

From the Trinidad Chronicle News of January 12, 1914:

“Mother” Mary Jones, nationally known as a strike leader, is a military prisoner at the San Rafael hospital where she is being held incommunicado. The woman, who was deported from the strike zone Sunday, January 4, by the military authorities and warned not to return to the district under pain of immediate arrest, accepted the defi and returned this morning. She slipped quietly out of Denver at midnight on a C. & S. train.

That she expected arrest is indicated by her action in alighting at the D. & R. G. crossing this morning instead of waiting until the train reached the station. She walked to the Toltec hotel alone and took a room but did not register at once. The fact of her presence became known to the military authorities about eleven o’clock and a few moments later a military detail in command of Lieut. H. O. Nichols entered her room, placed her in an automobile and whirled her away to the hospital at full speed, with a swarm of cavalry men galloping behind the machine.

Apparently the only object of the aged strike leader had in returning to Trinidad was to see if the threat to arrest her would be carried out. It was. “Mother” Jones was apparently not surprised at the action but was loud in her denunciation of the “military despots who stab and spit upon constitutional rights.” She declares she has viloated no law and that she is willing to face any sort of a civil inquiry. “Why take me to a hospital?” she shouted at Lieut. Nichols , when arrested. “I am not sick! Why not take me to jail?” The prisoner made it clear that she was even more willing to be placed in a cell “for the sake of the cause.”

[…..]

[Paragraph break and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones in Boston and Baltimore with J. W. Brown of West Virginia, Speaks on Colorado Coal Strike

21st November 202323rd November 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Stick Together, MI Mnrs Bltn p1, Aug 14, 1913 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday November 21, 1913
Mother Jones Travels to Boston and Baltimore Accompanied by J. W. Brown

From The Boston Globe of November 17, 1913:

From the Baltimore Sun of November 20, 1913:

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Hellraisers Journal: From Miners Magazine: “Mother Jones of the Revolution-She Will Die Fighting” by Kate Richards O’Hare

21st September 202322nd September 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote re Mother Jones per Kate Richards OHare, Mnrs Mag p7, Sept 18, 1913 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday September 21, 1913
“Mother Jones of the Revolution” by Kate Richards O’Hare

From the Miners Magazine of September 18, 1913:

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Hellraisers Journal: Socialist and Labor Star: “Hard Up”-Poem by Roxie Trent of Christian, Logan County, West Virginia

14th September 202316th September 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday September 14, 1913
“Hard Up”-Poem by Roxie Trent of Christian, Logan County, West Virginia

From the Huntington Socialist and Labor Star of September 12, 1913:

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Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks on Labor Day to Miners at Thurber, Texas; Travels by Train to Trinidad, Colorado

4th September 20234th September 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Stick Together, MI Mnrs Bltn p1, Aug 14, 1913 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 4, 1913
Mother Jones Speaks to Miners at Thurber, Texas; Travels to Trinidad

From the Fort Worth Record of August 31, 1913:

From the Trinidad Chronicle-News of September 3, 1913:

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Hellraisers Journal: Shawnee County Socialist: “Cleve Woodrum, Humble Martyr to Cause of Labor” by Cabin Creek Striker

25th August 202326th August 2023 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Pray for dead, ed, Ab Chp 6, 1925 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 25, 1913
Cleve Woodrum, Martyred Union Miner by Cabin Creek Striker

From the Shawnee County Socialist of August 23, 1913:

CLEVE WOODRUM AN HUMBLE MARTYR
TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR.
———-

The Washington Herald
July 26, 1913

There are some who would wish us to believe that the West Virginia outrages have ceased since the Senate Committee and the Socialist Party Committee have made their report, but they still go on.

Cleve Woodrum was picking berries for his sick wife, but had with him his rifle, when two hired murderers of the mine owners attacked him. Woodrum killed both of them, and was himself wounded. The other hired assassins, finding the two did not return from their murder, hunted and found one of the guards mortally wounded and the other dead. The wounded guard, Don Slater, they sent to the Hospital where he died, but, [finding] Woodrum, these [gunthugs] tortured the wounded man and then mutilated his body and left it in the bush where it was afterward found by his friends.

This was a cowardly assassination and then a brutal savagery of which only [gunthugs] are capable, and yet no paper but a few labor papers will mention it.

Read this letter from a Cabin Creek striker and remember that the mine owners, whose money hires these [gunthugs] are mostly pious church members, and they pay some of this blood money to the preachers to preach as they the mine owners demand.

This may be Christianity, but it has nothing to do with the gentle and loving Jesus.

Our Comrade, Cleve Woodrum.
Eskdale, West Virginia.

Cleve Woodrum, the martyr to the cause of human liberty, born October 12, 1884, killed July 24, 1913, entered the coal mines at the early age of 11, denied an education by the same class that hired the gunman to kill him. The departed comrade leaves a father, mother and eight brothers and sisters, an invalid wife with six little children, the eldest being eight years old and Mrs. Woodrum soon to become a mother. Cleve met his death while just out of hearing from home and was picking berries for his sick wife who had just returned from the hospital after undergoing surgical treatment. A plot between the coal operators and the military thugs to put Slater out of the way as Slater knew too much about the dirty work, murders and sluggings the coal operators had ordered and which had been carried out to the letter and the operators taking the advantage of the jealousy existing between the old line of Baldwins and the military Baldwins and Slater was ambushed by his own crowd.

Comrade Woodrum immortalized this great fight for the cause of justice and the freedom of his class from wage slavery, as much so as the John Brown martyrdom immortalized the scaffold for his opposition to chattel slavery.

I knew the deceased when he was a little trapper boy in the mines years ago. Standing in water cold as ice up to his knees while the young bones were trying to develop and powder smoke so thick you could hardly see. Long weary hours of toil, and food that was kept in a dinner pail closed in tight for several hours which was not nutritious or fit to eat. Even at that Cleve was manly, honest, upright, square, hard working man.

He had been in the Socialist movement about two years when he saw the light, his honest heart just responded to the working class’s philosophy of reason that the worker should receive the full product of his labor just like the rose to a spring shower.

This was his creed, this was his religion. He professed the religion of humanity, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and to attain that end he had the highest of motives first taught by a union carpenter and Social Revolutionist by the name of Jesus, put to death by the ruling class for his radical teachings and would not recant one iota.

The union miners of this field should place suitable shaft over his tomb and ae well provide for his widow and little helpless children. Why not? The capitalist class pension their uniformed hired murderers for shooting down their own class and calling them heroes. So it is to the Socialist and union miners to provide for these widows and keep the grave green of working class heroes, as the coal barons forgot Slater as soon as the last breath went out.

A CABIN CREEK STRIKER.

This is the class war. Comrade Woodrum’s tortured and mutilated body is the dumb witness to the class war, and should rouse us slaves to class consciousness.

We should resolve over the mutilated body of this humble and faithful comrade to unite, organize and resolve that this class war shall end in the coming Co-Operative Commonwealth.

[Newsclip and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: International Socialist Review: W. H. Thompson Replies to Debs Regarding Report on West Virginia

12th August 202313th August 2023 Janet RayeEugene Victor Debs

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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 12, 1913
Comrade Thompson Responds to Debs Regarding Socialists’ Report on West Virginia

From the International Socialist Review of August 1913:

A Reply to Debs

[-by W. H. Thompson
Editor of Huntington Socialist and Labor Star]

Editor of the Call:

In your issue of June 28 appears an article by Comrade Eugene V. Debs, headed “Debs Denounces Vilifiers of West Virginia Committee Report.” As one of the parties referred to as “vilifiers,” I would like to answer a few of the points made in the article.

The Socialist and Labor Star bitterly condemned the committee’s report; it did not publish it, but it did give an explanation for suppressing it, in the following words: “We have never, and will never, devote any of our space to whitewashing a cheap political tool of the capitalist class, not even when the whitewash is mixed by a committee representing our own party.”

From Comrade Debs’ own words I will endeavor to prove that our condemnation of the report was justified. Our charges against the report were that it was a “weak mass of misstatements and a sickening eulogy of Dictator Hatfield.” The truth of the last clause of the charge is plainly apparent to everyone who has read the report. The truth of the first clause is well known to all who have taken the trouble to inform themselves regarding the trouble in this state.

Comrade Debs says that when the committee arrived in West Virginia more than sixty of our comrades were in jail and two of our papers were suppressed. All true. Now pay particular attention to dates. The committee arrived in West Virginia on May 17. Hatfield was inaugurated governor on March 4, something over two months previous. These comrades had been held in-or put in-jail at Hatfield’s orders, and the papers had been suppressed at his command. Mother Jones, Editor Boswell, National Committeeman Brown, and forty-six other Socialists were placed on trial before a military drumhead court-martial on March 7. On March 9, the Circuit Court of Kanawha County issued a writ forbidding the trial of these prisoners by the militia. The sheriff went into the military zone to serve this writ, only to be met by the Provost Marshal, who, acting under orders from Hatfield, forcibly prevented the serving of the papers, and the drumhead trial proceeded in defiance of the civil courts.

The report of our committee says: “It was under the administration of Glasscock, and not Hatfield, that Mother Jones, C. H. Boswell and John Brown were court-martialed and convicted.”

On April 25, the Charleston Labor Argus was confiscated, suppressed, and those suspected of being connected with it were thrown into jail. On May 9 the Socialist and Labor Star was confiscated, its plant destroyed and five of its owners jailed by order of Governor Hatfield.

Our committee’s report referring to these outrages says: “In this connection it, is but fair to say that the governor and his friends disavow knowledge of these outrages!”

According to Comrade Debs’ article, it did not take him long to discover “that a certain element was hostile to the United Mine Workers.” Apparently, however, he failed to discover that there were numerous elements hostile to Socialism. There was an element hostile to the United Mine Workers’ officials who had just leagued themselves with Hatfield and agreed upon a “settlement” of the strike, which was odious to the strikers and which they have since totally repudiated. Comrade Debs uses this “element” that was hostile to the United Mine Workers as a shield to hide behind when we attack him for whitewashing Hatfield. Then he pours out this vial of wrath upon us:

The whole trouble is that some Chicago I. W. W .-ites, in spirit, at least, are seeking to disrupt and drive out the United Mine Workers to make room for the I. W. W . and its program of sabotage.

Speaking for myself, I will say that I have never seen a real live I. W. W.-ite. If there is or has ever been such an animal in West Virginia I am blissfully unaware of the fact. However, I have heard considerable of this new species from the capitalistic press and I note that the capitalists are very hostile toward it. I consider that a good recommendation for a labor organization and will certainly not speak slightingly of it or condemn it as long as the parasites fear it, but as for the I. W. W. being responsible for the attack on the Mine Workers’ officials, who deliberately attempted to betray the Kanawha strikers, I think Comrade Debs’ fear was father to the thought.

Then Debs dramatically points to Mother Jones and John Brown as evidence that the Mine Workers’ officials are straightforward and honest, or these two class-conscious comrades would not work for them. And I come right back with the assertion that both Mother Jones and Brown have worked, not for these officials whom he so vigorously defends, but for the rank and file of the workers.

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Tag: Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike of 1912-1913