Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 12, 1904 “Comrade John W. Bennett is braving the cold blast of North Dakota’s winter…”
From the Appeal to Reason of January 9, 1904:
In view of the above, a short account of Comrade Bennett’s trip thru Nelson County, N.D. may be interesting….
The afternoon of [December] 8th, Comrade Bennett and I started with a horse and buggy for McVille, where Bennett was billed to speak that night.
When we left my home, a storm, at times approaching a blizzard stage, was raging and grew in severity until, after we had traveled about twelve miles, it became so blinding we were compelled to seek shelter at a convenient farm house. After an interval of about forty minutes, the storm having abated somewhat, we thanked our involuntary host for the shelter and the offer of more so freely extended, and once more plunged forward, arriving at the home of Comrade R. H. Carr about one hour later where a hearty welcome awaited us. After supper, seated by a cheerful hard coal fire with the storm raging outside, what a temptation to say: “There will be no one at the meeting place tonight, let us remain at home.” But the thought that a few might have braved the elements in order to hear the truth compelled us, Comrades Mr. and Mrs. Carr, Bennett and myself, to drive two and one-half miles to the place of meeting and we were amply rewarded by the close and even eager attention with which the fifteen persons there assembled listened to the speaker. While no local was organized that night, I confidently predict that one will be formed there in the near future. …
In closing this short detailed account of a very small portion of the work of our loyal and earnest Comrade Bennett, I desire to say: if the reading of the above inspires one comrade to renewed effort in behalf of the cause we all love, I will feel amply repaid for writing it.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday March 2, 1913 Kanawha County, West Virginia – Mother Jones Arrested, Charged with Murder
From the International Socialist Review of March 1913:
Mother Jones Under Arrest -by L. H. Marcy
Mother Jones Arrested and Jailed in a Box Car
Last June, when “Mother Jones” traveled across the states from Butte, Mont., to aid the West Virginia miners in their fight, a reporter on the Charleston Gazette interviewed her. The following is quoted from this paper June 11th.
Mother Jones…from the stump and through the press has shown a desire only to do something for the betterment of the great American laboring class. She is 80 years old. On the day of her arrival here she addressed a miners’ mass meeting for an hour and a half-and unassisted she climbed a steep hill to the speakers’ stand and made a stronger effort and a more telling address in every way than that of any of the others whose names appeared on the list of speakers, and most of whom were only half her years.
Some people never get old, and Mother Jones is one who, no matter how long she be spared to her stormy career, will be gathered to her ancestors in the bosom of youth.
The reporter had heard a lot about the woman he was about to interview-and seen her pictured everywhere-had heard of her making fiery speeches in places where her life was in danger, and he expected to encounter a cyclone.
The reporter, however, was wrong.
What he really found was a kindly-faced woman of apparently 50 years-the only evidence of her four score years being an abundance of snow-white hair. She gave the reporter a kindly greeting-a greeting that reminded him at once of the name that had attached itself to the woman he had come to see-the name was that of “mother”-and the reporter knew whence the name had come.
“Mother” was right.
A few brief questions, and as many brief answers and the interview was over-for “Mother” Jones does not seek to be featured in the daily press.
[She said:]
I am simply a social revolutionist. I believe in collective ownership of the means of wealth. At this time the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The man who owns the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker, who produces the wealth from the means in the hands of the capitalist, takes what he can get. Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner than we think, evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live, and the worker will have gained his own. This change will come as the result of education.
My life work has been to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer-and to stir up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightfully theirs. When force is used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the things which are his, he has the right to meet force with force. He has the right to strike for what is his due, and he has no right to be satisfied with less. The people want to do right, but they have been hoodwinked for ages. They are now awakening, and the day of their enfranchisement is near at hand.
That, in substance, is what Mother Jones had to say about her mission on earth. She bowed the reporter from the room. He had seen “Mother Jones.”
For eight months “Mother Jones” has been working, speaking and fighting with the West Virginia miners. In spite of her eighty years she has suffered with the miners, their wives and children, sharing every hardship, the cold of winter in the mountains, the coarse food and the insults and brutality of the “guards” and militiamen.
Many were the speeches she made and every one a battle cry for class solidarity. The most weary and disheartened group gathered courage and inspiration when she addressed her “Boys.”
But it became evident to the mill bosses that the beautiful, white-haired woman was a militant figure that it would be well to eliminate. So, on February 13th, “Mother Jones” was arrested on a charge of murder. It is claimed that she advised the strikers to arm themselves. Many times the mine “guards” crept up upon strikers in their mountain retreat, and coldly murdered them. Several “guards” were discovered and shot by the miners in self defense. An attempt will be made to hold “Mother Jones” responsible. Evidently the true Progressive believes in murder only where the gun is in the hands of a servant of the owning class and directed against working men.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 22, 1903 Rochester, New York – Eugene Debs Speaks on Socialism and the Labor Movement
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York) of February 9, 1903:
SOME PHASES OF LABOR MOVEMENT ———-
ADDRESS OF EUGENE V. DEBS AT FITZHUGH HALL. ———-
THE WORKINGMAN’S HOPE ———- Socialistic Programme Set Forth as the Need of the People-The Tool of Production -Reflections on Trusts-Panic Prophesied. ———-
Eugene V. Debs, of Denver, Col., the prominent labor leader and Socialist, spoke at Fitzhugh Hall yesterday afternoon, under the auspices of the Labor Lyceum. His subject was “Some Phases of the Labor Movement; or, Socialism and Civilization.” Mr. Debs was given an enthusiastic reception, and for two hours he had the close attention of the audience. The seats on the floor of the hall were filled and but few were empty in the gallery.
Phillip Jackson presided at the meeting and made a few remarks, after which he introduced Mr. Debs. In his eloquent address, Mr. Debs said, in part:
The labor question broadly stated is the question of all humanity and upon its just solution depend the peace of society and the survival of civilization. The central and controlling fact of civilization is the evolution of industry.
A little over a century and a quarter ago, the American colonists were compelled to declare their political independence. The people were then engaged largely in agricultural pursuits, what they manufactured was produced in simple and primitive ways and they used with their hands the tools with which they did their work. The problem of making a living was a comparatively easy one. Each man could with the product of his own labor satisfy his own wants.
Long ago the too simple tool of those days was touched by the magic want of invention, until its mechanism has now become marvelously complex. In the great modern industrial evolution, the workingman has suffered, and because of his ignorance has allowed the tool of production to pass from his grasp. The cunning that was in the hand of labor has passed into the machine. As competition has become keen, handicraft has been succeeded more and more by the machine work, until skilled labor has become common labor; the struggle for existence became so hard that woman was forced into the labor market and become a factor in industrial conditions.
As the evolution of machinery has continually progressed, it has been found that many of these could be operated by the deft touch of children, until now 3 million of these have been forced into the labor market in competition with men and women.This has resulted from the system that makes profit the all-important consideration and life of little importance. There must be cheap labor in spite of its effects on the lives of human beings.
The state of Alabama once had a law against child labor. The time is coming, however, when competition will force manufacturers to operate their factories where the raw materials are produced. This has already been done by the New England manufacturers. They went to the lawmakers of Alabama and said: “We must have cheap labor if we are to compete in the markets of the world, and in order to do this, we must employ the children in our mills. You have a law against the employment of children in this state. We should like it to come here, but, if this is enforced, it will compel us to go elsewhere.” What was the result? Today there is no law against the employment of children in Alabama.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 7, 1903 Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic
From the InternationalSocialistReview of February 1903:
Socialism Versus Fads.
[-by Father Thomas Hagerty] ———-
[Part II of II]
I remember, a little over a year ago, with what amazement I listened to a lecturer on Socialism who, with evident relish, quoted this sentence from Dr. Paul Carus: “The essential feature of existence, of that which presents itself to the senses, is not the material, but the formal; not that which makes it concrete and particular, but that which constitutes its nature and applies generally; not that which happens to be here, so that it is this, but that which makes it to be thus; not its Thisness but its Suchness.”* The discourse itself was vaguely soothing, like James Jeffrey Roche’s Concord love-song:
“Ah, the Ifness sadd’ning, The Whichness madd’ning, And the But ungladd’ning That lie behind!
When the signless token Of love is broken In the speech unspoken Of mind to mind!”
But imagine the flood of pure white light which such a discourse poured into the brains of the non-Socialists of that audience! At the worst, however, it was Socialism only in the Pickwickian sense and did not roughly antagonize any one’s private beliefs. The lecturer was deeply interested in things occult and could not resist the opportunity, which an audience gathered to hear of Socialism gave him, to expound his favorite doctrines concerning the Nirvana.
On the other hand one frequently meets with the man who prefaces his explanation of Socialism by insisting, like Büchner in matters of science, that the mind must first be emptied of all ideas of God and the supernatural before it is in a proper condition to receive the philosophy of Karl Marx.He wanders far afield to attack this church or that dogma and leaves his hearer under the impression that Socialism is essentially atheistic. He blames all the misery and ignorance in the world upon religion and seems never to have learned that a materialist conception of history puts beyond doubt the fact that the social organism is, in a very large measure, conditioned by its interaction with industrial environment, and that a comparative study of religions shows the influence of economic factors in much of their development. Such a man does positive harm to the cause of Socialism; and he is just as unreasonable and as unscientific as the preacher who insists on basing the science of economics upon his own particular creed.
There is, furthermore, the utterly inconsistent fad of “Christian Socialism,” whose upholders put forth the dogma of the Fatherhood of God as the ground-work of economic science and then proceed to build upon it a superstructure as much out of plumb as the leaning tower of Pisa. They contend that Labor and Capital must recognize their mutual rights,—that, in other words, the lamb must lie down in the lion’s belly and rely upon its coat of wool to protect itself from the searching acid of the gastric juices thereof. They would have men led into the highways of industrial righteousness by the allurement of Gospel texts, unmindful of the fact that nineteen centuries of such blandishment have failed to soften the granite heart of the ruling classes. The New Testament was never designed to serve as a treatise on Socialism any more than it was intended to teach the first principles of Biology. With profound reverence for its beautiful pages, I find it vastly inferior to Huxley and Martin’s “Practical Biology” and Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital,” for the same reason that I find Homer’s “Iliad” inferior to Remsen’s “Chemistry,” for when I want to study either of these sciences I can discover no knowledge of the protoplasm in St. Matthew and no guides to quantative analysis in Homer. This fact, however, does not hinder me from giving full value to the letters of St. Paul nor from appreciating the rhythm and swing of the lines that carry that ancient swashbuckler Achilles.
But when the crazy charge of infidelity is urged against us and a bishop forces a Father McGrady to resign because of his advocacy of Socialism, we may rightly say with Thoreau: “Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches.” Surely, it is a flagrant infidelity which denies all Truth which does not bear the approval of a bishop’s imprimatur. It is a subtle atheism which admits the existence of God and then in His Name refuses economic salvation to millions of His creatures; which prays to Heaven and builds churches for worship and then tacitly sanctions the Capitalism which burns the marrow out of orphans’ bones.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday February 6, 1903 Father Thomas Hagerty on Socialism, Scientific and Idealistic
From the InternationalSocialistReview of February 1903:
Socialism Versus Fads.
[-by Father Thomas Hagerty] ———-
[Part I of II]
A LACK of what Whewell so aptly calls “the habit of geometrical thought” is noticeable in much of the confusion which upsets men’s judgment of Socialism.Many persons, earnest in their work for the co-operative common wealth, have only one measure for all problems. From their iron prejudices they forge a Procustean bed upon which they stretch every event too small to fit it and foreshorten every long-limbed fact which has the misfortune to stick over its rigid limits. Thus, as Locke has observed, “some men have so used their heads to mathematical figures, that in giving a preference to the methods of that science, they introduce lines and diagrams into their study of divinity or political inquiries, as if nothing could be known with out them; and others accustomed to retired speculations run natural philosophy into metaphysical notions and the abstract generalities of logic; and how often may one meet with religion and morality treated of in the terms of the laboratory, and thought to be improved by the methods and notions of chemistry?” *
Evidences of the effect of this method abound in every age. Thales of Miletus, the founder of Greek philosophy, based his teachings of Nature on the theory that out of water all things are made. Water is the primal matter and the earth itself floats upon water. The great Philo of Alexandria taught, after the manner of Plato, that the stars are persons endowed with reason and akin to the Divinity. The early churchmen took the Bible as the sole measure of scientific truth and, in consequence, fell into the most childish errors. Many of them denied the sphericity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes. The learned St. Augustine declared that no men live on the other side of the earth because “Scripture speaks of no such descendants of Adam.”
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 18, 1903 “Bishop Spalding and Socialism” by Editor Algie M. Simons
From the International Socialist Review of January 1903:
Bishop Spalding and Socialism.* [by A. M. Simons] —————
[Part II of II]
Again, in [Bishop Spalding’s] recognition of the class character of our present law, he comes very close to Socialism. Speaking of punishment for crime, he says:
The delinquents who are incarcerated are chiefly the poor, who had they money to pay the fines would escape punishment. The heaviest punishment is inflicted on the most helpless, and frequently on the least guilty; and thus the morally weak, the victims of unfortunate environments, are degraded, hardened, and made habitual offenders.
I do not wish to push the matter too far and to ascribe too great a comprehension of or favorable attitude towards Socialism on the part of Bishop Spalding. But on page 58 we see some thing that reads very like a description of the rise of proletarian class consciousness. He says:
The laborers, who in proportion as their minds have been awakened, have become conscious of the hardships and limitations to which they are subject, feel this more keenly than any other class, and hence they have formed in numerable organizations to protect their rights and promote their interests.
Finally, we would seldom find a harsher indictment against the capitalist system than is to be found on pages 173 and 174:
The political and social conditions which involve the physical deterioration and the mental and moral degradation of multitudes are barbarous, and unless they are improved must lead to the ruin of the State. From this point of view, which is the only true point of view, our present economic and commercial systems are subversive of civilization. They sacrifice men to money; wisdom and virtue to cheap production and the amassing of capital. They foster greed in the stronger and hate in the weaker. They drive the nations to competitive struggles which are as cruel as war, and in the final results more disastrous; for their tendency is to make the rich vulgar and heartless, and the poor reckless and vicious. As stratagems and lies are considered lawful in war, so in the warfare of commercial competition opinion leans to the view that whatever may be done with impunity is right. The adulteration of food and drink, the watering of stocks, the bribing of legislators, the crushing of weaker concerns, the enforced idleness of thousands, who are thereby driven to despair and starvation, are not looked upon as lying within the domain of morals, any more than the shooting of a man in battle is considered a question of morality. The degradation and ruin of innumerable individuals are implications of the law of competition, just as in the struggle for existence there is a world-crushing and destruction of the weak by the strong.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday December 18, 1902 Mother Jones News Round-Up for November 1902, Part I Found Speaking in New York City and Standing with Striking Miners of West Virginia
From TheComrade of November 1902:
Mother Jones at Cooper Union, New York City, October 18, 1902 by Ryan Walker
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Frank Sieverman and Mother Jones
From The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of November 1, 1902:
MOTHER JONES’S LECTURE. ———- Discussed Social and Political Topics at the Criterion Theater. ———-
“Mother” Jones lectured before a good sized audience last evening in the Criterion Theater on social and political topics. The audience was evidently in sympathy wiih her views, for she was frequently interrupted with applause and her introduction was the signal for an ovation that must have been flattering to the venerable organizer.
“Mother” Jones is a well preserved woman of perhaps 60 years, with bright blue eyes and clear complexion, and she speaks with great force and earnestness.
Dr. Charles Furman presided at the meeting and introduced “Mother” Jones. Some enthusiastic socialist leaped up on his seat and called for three cheers for the speaker and they were given with a will.
“Mother” Jones began her address by saying the movement of the present day was along lines of progression laid down by the sages years ago, and everywhere along the line of battle the cry was forward. “To move forward is the object of socialism, and to help you in this movement is why I am here to-night.”
In referring to the recent coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania “Mother” Jones said John Mitchell was one of God’s own noblemen and she flayed the operators in no uncertain tone. Referring to her arrest and incarceration in West Virginia, “Mother” Jones said she had been blamed by a great many people because she shook hands with the judge who sentenced her to jail. “Why shouldn’t I do so?” she cried. “The judge was not to blame. He was a victim of environment and had to perform his sworn duty to carry out the laws as he found them.” Continuing, the speaker said neither of the old parties could be trusted because both were capitalistic.
In many respects her address was disappointing. She presented no new arguments and her discourse did not differ mainly from the usual pronouncements of socialists-that is, condemnation of capital. J. P. Morgan came in for a good share of the speaker’s attention and many of her witty sallies in reference to him evoked hearty applause.
From the Appeal to Reason of November 1, 1902:
All newspaper reports to the contrary notwithstanding, the miners’ strike in West Virginia is by no means over, and a hard fight is being made in a number of districts where the operators refuse to make any concessions. “Mother” Jones writes from Montgomery, W. Va, that the utmost suffering prevails there, in consequence of the harsh measures taken by the “Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.” She says: “We have fifteen hundred families of coal miners thrown out of their homes by the capitalist cannibals, and now camping on the highway. We should not talk so much about evictions in Ireland. Free America eclipses Ireland.”
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From Mother Jones. Montgomery, West Va., Oct 5, 1902.
Dear Wayland: Here I am in the midst of industrial warfare with all its horrors. The wind blows cold this morning, but these cruel coal barons do not feel the winter blast; their babes, nay even their poodles dogs, are warm and have a comfortable breakfast, while these slaves of the caves, who in the past have moved the commerce of the world, are out on the highways without clothes or shelter. Nearly 3,000 families have been thrown out of the corporation shacks to face the cold blasts of winter weather.Children look into your face and their looks ask, is this what we are here for?
Is this the doctrine Jesus taught? Is this what he agonized for that frightful night in the Garden of Gethsemane 2.000 years ago? When you look at this picture of suffering, and then look into the homes of the Barons, with their joy and pleasures that these helpless people have given, then I ask Bishop Potter how he can howl “all for Jesus” on Sunday and on Monday morning drink wine at $35.00 a bottle, and sing all for Baer and Morgan.
In Pennsylvania its “shoot to kill,” in Virginia, it’s injunction them to death: Everywhere you go, you step on an injunction. Step on the Monstrous injunction. There yells a corporation lap dog, if you step on the R. R. T. the R. R. Detective yells, “Get off here, on injunction company property.” If you go into the river some one yells out “I own half that River.” Well, said I, for God’s sake give me a chance to make a deal with Peter, perhaps he might lend a rope down and swing me in the air. They will have an injunction on that soon. If you go on the public highways, to say “all for Jesus,” with a crowd of strikers, it is an unlawful assemblage-no one can do that but Potter and Morgan-you must be a sky pilot, an looking for Morgan.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 26, 1912 Girard, Kansas – Wayland’s Last Paragraph, “…no unkind words…”
From the Appeal to Reason of November 23, 1912:
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To a Good Soldier
[-by Kate Richards O’Hare]
We shed no tears of grief; grief is for the naked lives of those who have made the world no better.
We have no idle, vain, regrets; for who are we to judge, or say that he has shirked his task or left some work undone? No eyes can count the seed that he has sown, the thoughts that he has planted in a million souls now covered deep beneath the mold of ignorance which will not spring into life until the snows have heaped upon his gave and the sun of springtime comes to reawaken the sleeping world.
Sleep on our comrade; rest your weary mind and soul; sleep sweet and deep, and if in other realms the boon is granted that we may again take up our work, you will be with us and give us of your strength, your patience and your loyalty to your fellow men. We bring no ostentatious tributes of our love; we spend not gold for flowers for your tomb, but with hearts that rejoice at your deliverance offer a comrade’s tribute to lie above your breast-the red flag of human brotherhood.
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Frank Sieverman and Mother Jones
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