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Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 30, 1914
Sterling, Colorado – Mrs. Lee Refuses to Help Free Mother Jones
From The Cincinnati Post of January 28, 1914:
(Will woman suffrage make good in Colorado?
That is the question all the United States is asking today. That question was put up to Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee, Chairman of the Democratic State committee in Colorado. The Governor and his militia Generals, who placed 82-year-old Mother Jones in solitary confinement in a military prison, are members of her party. The following is from the Denver correspondent of the Post, who went to Sterling to see Mrs. Lee.-Editor’s Note.)
STERLING, COLO., Jan. 28.-(Spl.)-Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee, head of the Democratic State central committee, doesn’t know officially that Mother Jones has been illegally imprisoned or that the Colorado state troops rode down and beat women and children paraders with swords in Trinidad.
So she won’t protest
“I want to do what is right for the party and the women,” said Mrs. Lee, who has been recuperating from a nervous attack on a farm near here.
“I don’t know that there is anything wrong in the coal strike fields. I want time.”
“Do you believe any citizen-man or woman-should be deprived of his constitutional right of personal liberty and free speech without due process of law?” she was asked.
Mrs. Lee evaded the question five times and finally said, “No.”
Mrs. Lee will not ask the State [Democratic Party] committee to do anything about the coal strike that will embarrass Governor Ammons.
[Emphasis added.
Note: Mrs. Gertrude A. Lee is married to Colonel George M. Lee who is next in authority to General Chase in the state militia now occupying southern Colorado and enforcing its military despotism upon the striking miners, their wives and their children.
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