Tag: Rockefeller Government

Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Invades Canada, Supports Striking Coal Miners of Ladysmith and Nanaimo, Vancouver Island

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

Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 12, 1914
Mother Jones Invades Canada to Support Miners of Ladysmith and Nanaimo

From The Winnipeg Tribune of  June 5, 1914
-Called to Aid Nanaimo Strikers, Mother Jones Insists, “I’ll go in spite of you!”

Mother Jones Barred from Canada, Wpg Tb p1, June 5, 1914

The coal miners of Nanaimo, British Columbia put out a call to Mother Jones to come and assist them with their strike. They are members of the United Mine Workers of America who have been on strike since August of last year. They have suffered all the usual consequence of the striking coal miner: military despotism and mass arrests. In March, many of those arrested were sentenced, some to six months, and some to four years in prison.

Mother Jones was labeled a “disturbing element” by the chief of the provincial police of British Columbia and was prevented, from boarding a steamer for Victoria by Canadian immigration officers and told that she was barred from Canada.

Labor Secretary William B. Wilson, former official of the U. M. W. of A., was contacted by Frank Farrington, western representative of the mine worker’s union, and Wilson sent a message requesting that Mother Jones “be accorded every right she is entitled to as an American citizen.

“Mother Jones made this statement regarding her status as a “disturbing element” threatening the peace of the citizens of Canada:

I am past 80 years and have never been charged with a crime, and so I cannot understand why I am prevented from entering a friendly nation. I never quarrel and I believe in law and order, and I do not blame the man who stopped me, for he had his order from higher up. He is merely carrying out a policy that means “You shall not educate my slaves,” but it is a mistaken view and is bound to fall finally. I had been invited to go to British Columbia and did not know that I was committing any wrong in accepting the invitation of the mine workers there.

Efforts continued on behalf of Mother Jones to enable her to go to the aid of her boys in Nanaimo.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Invades Canada, Supports Striking Coal Miners of Ladysmith and Nanaimo, Vancouver Island” →

Hellraisers Journal: It is not an act of civilized warfare to turn machine guns upon women and children.-Testimony of Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Pearl Jolly, Ludlow Next Time, Women Will Fight, Tacoma Tx p3, May 25, 1914—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 7, 1914
New York City – Judge Lindsey Testifies Before Commission on Industrial Relations

LoC, Lindsey and Ludlow Women 1, WDC May 21, 1914
Mrs. Lindsey, Judge Lindsey, Mary Petrucci, Mary Thomas, Pearl Jolly,
Mrs. Lee Champion, Olga and Rachael Thomas
On Thursday May 28th, Judge Lindsey of Colorado appeared before the Commission on Industrial Relations. The previous week, Judge Lindsey had escorted miners’ wives, survivors of the Ludlow Massacre, to the White House for an interview with President Wilson.

In his testimony before the Commission, the Judge spoke about the plight of women and children when their husbands and fathers die on the job. He describe how the “industrial government” of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company dictates to every branch of the state and county governments in Colorado, and, that that “industrial government” is dictated to from the federal “industrial government” in New York City.

Of the Ludlow Massacre, Judge Lindsey stated:

It is not an act of civilized warfare, if you please, to turn machine  guns and rifles upon a tent colony in which it is known by those who are responsible  and those who do the deed that there are defenseless women and children.

Judge Lindsey testified during the afternoon session of May 28th. Present were Chairman Walsh, and Commissioners Ballard, O’Connell, Lennon, Garretson, and Harriman.  We present the first part of the testimony below, and will publish the rest of the testimony tomorrow.

TESTIMONY OF JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY.

Mr. Thompson. Now, just for the purpose of making our record, l will ask you a few preliminary questions. Your name?
Judge Lindsey. My name is Ben B. Lindsey.
Mr. Thompson. Your address?
Judge Lindsey. Denver, Colo.
Mr. Thompson. And your profession or-
Judge Lindsey. l am a lawyer, a judge on the bench, and have been for 15 years or thereabouts, in the city of Denver.
Mr. Thompson. Now, you may go on with your story.
Judge Lindsey. l will try, Mr. Chairman, to make my story as connected as possible; but unless l should be misunderstood, I first wish to make a statement as to the statement made by the gentleman who has preceded me [Major Boughton], which l think is a good illustration of much of the misunderstanding which grows out of an unfortunate situation like that which you are asked to hear some evidence about. He read from a newspaper saying that a Mr. Lord, representing the miners, had stated that there were 2.000 men, miners, and if necessary there would be 50,000 more ready to resist the militia. The gentleman did not state what Mr. Lord said, neither did the newspapers that he read from state what Mr. Lord said. Mr. Lord said, for l was present when he said, that if the tactics pursued by certain men in the militia that brought about the murders, as he expressed it and claimed, of women and children were repeated in Colorado that there were in that case 2,000 men who had red blood enough in their veins to resist that sort of encroachment under whatever name it might be called, and that there were 50,000 men in this country who were willing to join.

Now, that is an entirely different statement from that which the gentleman read and the statement which he would have this commission to believe is true. I merely mention it as a good illustration of how Mr. Lawson could have been misquoted and misrepresented by the paper from which he [the witness BoughtonJ read.

l have talked personally with Mr. Lawson within the last fortnight or so,  just before I left Denver. I have talked with Mr. Lawson in the presence of men of the most radical type, who proposed or suggested things that I have heard Mr. Lawson fight against and talk against, and the statements made to me by Mr. Lawson are quite contradictory of the statement the gentleman read from the newspaper purporting to be made by Mr. Lawson. Since I left Denver and since I have been in this city I  have found myself misquoted on several different occasions and things put into my mouth that l never said, things put into my mouth that I could not have said; and I wish to state to this commission, because of this fact of which I am a witness, having heard Mr. Lord, that it go very slow in accepting statements made in the newspapers.

I  have a statement in the Pueblo Chieftain of May 3 that I could offer to this commission, two or three columns, in which it is stated that a certain prominent citizen, of Colorado said that the thing to be done with men like myself was that they should be killed—k-i-l-l-e-d-. I am not going to claim that those men who are making inflammatory statements of that kind are trying to stir up a sentiment among certain individuals that will bring about my own murder, yet that will be found in the Pueblo Chieftain of May 3, which is supposed to be the official organ, in so far as they have any official organ, of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. Now, so much for that. Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: It is not an act of civilized warfare to turn machine guns upon women and children.-Testimony of Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey of Colorado” →

Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks: “Was it fair of Rockefeller to burn up my babes so he could enslave those men?”

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

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 23, 1914
Mother Jones Speaks on Behalf of the Brooklyn Colorado Relief Committee

From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of May 19, 1914:

MOTHER JONES MOVES
BIG TEMPLE CROWD
———-
Bids Defiance to Rockefeller as She Pleads
for “Her Boys” of the Mines.
———-

DENOUNCES GOV. AMMONS.
———-
Brooklyn Colorado Relief Committee
Protests Against Outrages.
———-

Trinidad CO Mother Jones Surrounded by Bayonets, Sc Lbr Str p1, Feb 13, 1914

From The Socialist and Labor Star, February 13, 1914

Mother Jones, the angel of the miners, who has given almost every day of her 82 years to the fight for improved industrial conditions for the workers in all forms of trade and in all parts of the country, last night [May 18th] appealed to an audience of several hundred at the Masonic Temple to aid the striking miners in Colorado and based her appeal on a graphic and forcefully told tale of conditions in the mining district as she herself had seen them and taken part in.

Clad in a plain black dress, with a touch of color only, down the front, at her waist and around the end of the sleeves, Mother Jones by her earnestness moved the large audience to applause when she bade defiance to John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil owners and the “invisible government” which she held responsible for the sufferings of “her boys” and the cruel sacrifice of “her babes” in the Ludlow tent colony disaster; held them tense and with breath caught, while she pictured the horrible deaths from smoke and fire of the women and children in that catastrophe; and moved them to laughter by her caustic epigrams about the “uniformed rats” and their superiors who she declares “oppress her boys.”

“If I were that fellow’s mother I’d disown him,” she declared of Governor Ammons (Democrat of Colorado) after telling how he and the members of the Senate had only smiled after hearing the tale of a miner who because he had refused to leave the postoffice in the mining camp without his mail, had been taken out by the militia and made to dig his own grave until, weakened by their taunts and cruelty, he fell unconscious into it.

[She declared, while the audience cheered:]

The Revolution was not fought because of taxation without representation. It was fought because of military despotism on the part of King George III. And when King George only sneered at the warning of Benjamin Franklin that unless the despotism stopped there would be a revolution, the answer our forefathers gave was Bunker Hill and Yorktown. Let John D. Rockefeller take care lest we have another Bunker Hill and Yorktown. He says he won’t recognize the union. King George said he would never recognize the union but he had to. And Mr. Rockefeller will have to, too.

Says Pen and Brain, Not War,
Must Settle Industrial Troubles.

Colorado, she said, was the key to the present industrial war in this country and she made an earnest appeal for its right and proper solution.

It must not be settled by the sword but by the pen and brain and I stand here today appealing for your assistance in the fight. We want to bury the bayonet. We are appealing to the mothers of the race, for no nation is ever greater than its mothers; and no man is more humane than his mother. If there were not among the women so much talk of temperance and foreign missionaries, if we did missionary work at home and let other nations do theirs, these conditions of which I speak would have been changed long since. The women of Colorado have had the ballot twenty-one years and yet see the horrible happenings that they have permitted in their State. It is because they have busied themselves too much with social settlements and other such things that are given to the industrial class to satisfy them and not with the real things in life about them.

Theodore Roosevelt, she said, refused to see a group of miners’ children she had once brought down to Oyster Bay so he could see for himself their maimed hands and the other effects work in the mines had on them.

Roosevelt, like Ammons, refused to see these children; Roosevelt, whom you think, is next to God Almighty, refused to see them because they were mine workers and not mine owners’ children.

[Speaking of the Ludlow catastrophe, she asked:]

Was it fair, was it fair of Rockefeller to burn up my babes so he could enslave those men? Can’t we find some other way of settling the question? Has this nation reached that stage in its history when babes have to pay the penalty-when on the altar of greed, we place the helpless infant and roast it to death for more coin?

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones Speaks: “Was it fair of Rockefeller to burn up my babes so he could enslave those men?”” →

Hellraisers Journal: Duluth Labor World: Hastings, Colorado-“Mother Jones Says Rockefeller Oppresses the Coal Miners”

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Mother Jones, CFI Owns Colorado, re 1903 Strikes UMW WFM, Ab Chp 13, 1925—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 7, 1904
Hastings, Colorado – Mother Jones Exposes Rockefeller’s “Sunday School Methods”

From the Duluth Labor World of February 6, 1904:

MOTHER JONES
Says Rockefeller Oppresses the Coal Miners.

Mother Jones Gives 500 Dollars to CO Strikers, LW p4, Feb 6, 1904

Hastings, Colo., Feb. 5.-[Mother Jones, the miners’ friend, who is now going up and down among the striking miners in Colorado, says:]

Rockefeller’s mining company cleared $39,000 [*] last year, and every dollar of it was wrung form the miners.

At some of these mining camps a miner is not even allowed to bring a pound of butter from the outside. He is compelled to buy everything at the company’s store. Every man who comes to the mines to work must be searched, and when he goes to visit a friend outside the camp an armed guard goes with him.

What would a Chicago workingman think if he had to pay 90 cents for a quart of syrup that cost at wholesale $1.25 a gallon? What would he think if his employer taxed him a dollar a month for a doctor whether he needed one or not? What would he think if he was obliged to pay his employer 50 cents a month for a preacher?

“Yet such are Mr. Rockefeller’s Sunday school methods of conducting his mining business in Colorado,” says Mother Jones.

[Emphasis added. Newsclip added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Duluth Labor World: Hastings, Colorado-“Mother Jones Says Rockefeller Oppresses the Coal Miners”” →