From the Jewish Daily Forward of January 10, 1910:
The “Triangle” company…With blood this name will be written in the history of the American workers’ movement, and with feeling will this history recall the names of the strikers of this shop-of the crusaders.
City Hall, New York City,
-December 28, 1910
Testimony before the New York State Senate and Assembly Joint Investigating Committee on Corrupt Practices and Insurance Companies Other Than Life Insurance:
Judge M. Linn Bruce, Counsel
Chief Edward F Croker, NYC Fire Department
Bruce: How high can you successfully combat a fire now? Croker: Not over eighty-five feet. Bruce: That would be how many stories of an ordinary building? Croker: About seven. Bruce: Is this a serious danger? Croker: I think if you want to go into the so-called workshops which are along Fifth Avenue and west of Broadway and east of Sixth Avenue, twelve, fourteen or fifteen story buildings they call workshops, you will find it very interesting to see the number of people in one of these buildings with absolutely not one fire protection, with out any means of escape in case of fire.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 14, 1921 Mexico City – Mother Jones Speaks at Pan-American Labor Congress
From the Washington Evening Star of January 13, 1921:
LABOR CONGRESS HEARS TALK
BY ‘MOTHER’ JONES ———- Thirty More Questions Likely to Be
Brought Up in Mexico City.
By the Associated Press.
MEXICO CITY, January 13.-Delegates to the Congress of the Pan-American Federation of Labor, in session here, listened today to an address by “Mother” Jones, the radical labor leader, who arrived here last week from the United States. She has been a regular attendant at sessions of the congress, although not a delegate, and yesterday was granted special permission to appear this morning before the federation.
The resolutions committee was busily engaged yesterday receiving motions to be brought before the congress, and when the committee adjourned, John P. Frey, its chairman, announced that a score of resolutions dealing with pan-American activity had been received and that the recommendations contained in the report of the executive committee would provide thirty more questions to be brought before the congress for final disposition.
The congress proper enjoyed a virtual holiday yesterday, the day’s session lasting only thirty minutes.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 13, 1921 Mexico City – Mother Jones Greeted by Shower of Flowers
Translated from Mexico City’s El Universal of January 10, 1921:
Mother Jones Arrives in Mexico City
Upon arriving at Buena Vista station in Mexico City [on the morning of January 9th], Mother Jones was met by 2,000 workers among whom were a large feminine contingent from the factories: El Recuerdo, El Buen Tono, Tabacelera, Cigarrera, La Estrella, Departmentos Fabules, and from the Trade Union of Waitresses, etc., all of whom carried, as did the male element, the banners of their respective groups…..
Mother Jones was the object of singular interest. With ninety years on her shoulders, she is one of the most indefatigable fighters for working-class organization in the United States.
Amidst a veritable shower of flowers, Mother Jones was brought in an auto from the platform of the station to the Glorieta Cuauhtémoc, where another contingent of trade union workers were awaiting her. They applauded her and threw fragrant sprays of roses. In the Glorieta, a demonstration was organized to honor Mother Jones, and was followed by a parade to the Hotel St. Francis where several Mexican workers spoke, and the guest of honor answered. She did so in virile and intrepid language, saying , in short, that when she first visited Mexico [in 1911], she never believed the workers’ movement in this country would have reached its present numbers and effectiveness; that she had been struggling in the field of ideas and action for years and years, a a struggle which would end only with her death; that she had dedicated her existence to seeking the economic, moral, and cultural development of the working class. She ended with a tribute to the Mexican workers affirming that only on the day when a single language and a single nation would exist on earth, would human happiness have been achieved.
Mother Jones is an elderly lady whose appearance is as modest as it its admirable, a woman with a very friendly behavior.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 11, 1921 Mexico City – Mother Jones Attends Pan-American Labor Conference
From The Pittsburg Press of January 9, 1921:
“MOTHER” JONES WILL BE OBREGON’S GUEST. —–
Charleston, W. Va., Jan. 8.-Treasuring an invitation to be the guest of President Alvaro Obregon, of Mexico, during her stay in Mexico City, “Mother” Jones left here accompanied by Fred Mooney, secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers of this district, to attend the Pan-American labor conference. She has been in West Virginia working among the miners for some time.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 2, 1910 Chicago, Illinois – Eugene Debs Speaks on Working Class Politics
From the International Socialist Review of November 1910:
THE campaign of the Socialist party of Cook county, Illinois, was formally opened on September 18th, Eugene V. Debs being the principal speaker. A vast concourse of people were assembled at Riverview Park where the meeting took place. Below will be found some extracts from the speech of Debs, in which he emphasized the necessity of industrial unity as the only means of effective political action. Said Debs:
We live in the capitalist system, so-called because it is dominated by the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class.
So long as the workers are divided, economically and politically, they will remain in subjection, exploited of what they produce, and treated with contempt by the parasites who live out of their labor.
The economic unity of the workers must first be effected before there can be any progress toward emancipation. The interests of the millions of wage workers are identical, regardless of nationality, creed, or sex, and if they will only open their eyes to this simple, self-evident fact, the greatest obstacle will have been overcome and the day of victory will draw near.
The primary need of the workers is industrial unity and by this I mean their organization in the industries in which they are employed as a whole instead of being separated into more or less impotent unions according to their crafts.Industrial unionism is the only effective means of economic organization and the quicker the workers realize this and unite within one compact body for the good of all, the sooner will they cease to be the victims of ward-heeling labor politicians and accomplish something of actual benefit to themselves and those dependent upon them. In Chicago where the labor grafters, posing as union leaders, have so long been permitted to thrive in their iniquity, there is especially urgent need of industrial unionism, and when this is fairly under way it will express itself politically in a class conscious vote of and for the working class.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday September 9, 1900 Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1900, Part I Found Visiting Jailed Strikers of Georges Creek Coal District
From The Philadelphia Inquirer of August 5, 1900:
STRIKE LEADER GOES TO PRISON
FOR SIX MONTHS
——-
Woman Sympathizer Creates a Sensation
in a Maryland Jail
Special to The Inquirer.
CUMBERLAND, Md., Aug. 4.-William Warner, the strike leader, was sentenced this afternoon to six months in the House of Correction, having been convicted of unlawful assembly during trouble which arose at an anti-strike meeting. Seventeen miners were also sentenced. They were visited at the jail this afternoon by Mother Jones, the woman labor organizer, who created a sensation by proposing three cheers in the jail for the strikers and three hisses “for the blacklegs.” She led the cheering, as well as the hissing. Warner, who is from Pittsburg, took an appeal.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday July 5, 1920
Gompers Demands Investigation of Government by Gunthug in West Virginia
From the United Mine Workers Journal of July 1, 1920:
Asks Investigation of Killing at Matewan
When Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, heard of the killing of ten men in a battle between coal company gunmen and coal miners at Matewan, W. Va., he sent a letter to Senator Kenyon, chairman of the Senate committee on labor and education, asking him to have his committee make an investigation of the case. His letter was as follows:
The men were shot and killed by an armed band of men sent into the state by the order of and in the pay of private interests. The men who were killed were interested only in seeing that the statutes and the constitution of the state and of the United States were respected, according to the newspaper reports of the outbreak. I am of the opinion that the invasion of West Virginia by an armed band of men in the pay of absentee owners of West Virginia mining property constitutes a suspension of the constitutional guarantees.
It will be remembered that a public official, testifying in the investigation of 1912-13 before the committee of which you are now chairman, swore that the constitution of the United States did not apply in West Virginia. It was brought out that miners had been kidnapped and given long sentences by drumhead court martial. This official was not rebuked by West Virginia for his testimony as to its lawlessness. On the contrary, he was appointed by the governor of the state to be the impartial investigator of crime against the miners, their wives and their children, in the mining camp of Guyan Valley, and this within the year.
For a generation the only law in the mining camps of West Virginia, save in those few instances where the power of organized labor and outraged public opinion has forced a return to constitutional methods, has been the law of the thug and the gunman disguised as deputy sheriffs and usurping the police power of the land. The blackjack and the pistol, the high-powered rifle and the machine gun have been substituted for statute law, judges and juries.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 26, 1910
New York, New York – How the Shirt Waist Girls’ Strike Began
From the Duluth Labor World of January 22, 1910:
—–
By ROBERTUS LOVE.
[Part II of II.]
How General Strike Began.
The general strike was not declared until Nov. 22, when at a great mass meeting in the hall of Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln made his first speech in the east, President Gompers of the American Federation of Labor delivered an address on the shirt waist workers’ situation. A Jewish girl [Clara Lemlich], representing many thousands of her nationality who work in the waist shops, advanced to the front of the platform and delivered in Yiddish an appeal to those of her race to strike immediately. More than 2,000 right hands went up in response. The sentiment for an immediate and wholesale strike spread to the Italian and American shirt waist makers, and the “walk out” of seven-eighths of those employed in that industry was the result.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 20, 1920
Bogalusa, Louisiana – Union Men Massacred by Loyalty Leaguers
From The Liberator of January 1920:
Bogalusa
By Mary White Ovington
The New York Times November 23, 1919
ON Saturday morning, November 22, in the town of Bogalusa, in the state of Louisiana, three men marched down the street. One was black; the other two, armed, walking on either side, were white. A negro criminal, one says at once, guarded by two officers of the law. No, there was no look of criminal or of policeman on anyone of the three faces. Those men, marching abreast, one black, the others white, were brothers, comrades-in-arms in the interminable battle of the worker for the product of his toil. The black man had dared to organize in a district where organization meant at the least exile, at the most, a death by lynching. On either side of him two white union men, carpenters by trade, risked by their espousal of the black man’s cause, not only their lives, but, if they were permitted to live, their reputations. They knew every vile taunt the cheap type of southerner, whom Dixie has made familiar to the world, would cast upon them. Yet together the three men marched down the broad highway of the Southern lumber town.
Unionism is far from popular in Bogalusa. The town is controlled by the Great Southern Lumber Company which this autumn ordered 2500 union men to destroy their union cards. Those refusing were thrown out of work. The Lumber Company has at its command the Loyalty League, a state organization formed during the war, not of soldiers but of men at home, part of whose business it was to see that every able-bodied man (Negro understood) should work at any task, at any wage, and for any hours that the employer might desire. They had back of them the State “work or fight law,” and might put to work men temporarily unemployed, save that the provision of the act did not apply to “persons temporarily unemployed by reasons of differences with their employers such as strikes or lockouts.”
Under this legislation it was small wonder that unionism was forbidden by the Lumber Company; or that, though the war was ended, the Loyalty League continued its work. Returning soldiers joined it, and the night before the three men marched down the city street five hundred armed Leaguers held up a train half-a-mile from the railroad station and searched it for undesirables. Failing to get anyone on the train, they turned back into town and proceeded to chase undesirables there. A number of union negroes were beaten up, but their chief quarry, Saul Dechus [Dacus], president of the local timberman’s union, they could not find. They wanted the “nigger” to be handed to them to be lynched, and failing to get him, they went discontented to their homes.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 13, 1910
Rose Strunsky on New York City’s Shirtwaist Uprising, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of January 1910:
The Strike of the Singers of the Shirt
—–
By Rose Strunsky.
—–
[Part II of II.]
The next day [November 24th, following the November 23rd mass meeting at Cooper Union], when the girls in the shops were informed of the general strike, they rose without a question, left their work and went out. Six hundred shops joined the union in a few days. The spontaneous and enthusiastic response to the call came as a great surprise to every one. None had guessed of this latent fire-neither the leaders, nor the Woman’s Trade Union League, nor the girls themselves. None knew that it was there. In forty-eight hours it reached forty thousand girls. Their demands were for the recognition of the union, a twenty per cent, increase in their wages and shorter hours—a fifty-two hour working week.
Before the strike was several hours old twenty shops settled and five hundred girls won. The next day forty-one shops settled and seven thousand girls returned to work and each day brings bosses who are willing to settle on union terms.
Morning, afternoon and evening every hall on the East Side and the large halls in the city that could be gotten, were filled with strikers and sympathizers, to discuss ways and means and to encourage each other in the struggle.
The war was on, and the chivalrous instincts in the old veterans of the class struggle came out. Besides the Socialists and the Women’s Trade Union League, the United Hebrew Workers [United Hebrew Trades] sent out committees to help these new militants; the American Federation of Labor offered Mr. Mitchell to give his aid and advice, and Solomon Shindler [Schindler], the Gompers of the East Side, has directed their forces from the very beginning.
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