Tag: The Survey

Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “Westmoreland Strike Called Off” by Paul Kellogg; Long Struggle Ends in Defeat

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Quote fr Westmoreland Strike by James Cole, ab Aug1910—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 29, 1911
Paul Kellogg on the Defeat of the Westmoreland Miners’ Strike

From The Survey of July 29, 1911:

WESTMORELAND STRIKE CALLED OFF 

PAUL U. KELLOGG 

Westmoreland County Coal Strike, Camp of Evicted, ISR p101, Aug 1910

After sixteen months, during which their strike was kept up in the heat of summer and the cold of hillside camps in winter, the men have given in in the Irwin-Greensburg field of western Pennsylvania. The main causes underlying this remarkable struggle, which President Hutchinson of the Westmoreland Company called civil war, were described in The SURVEY for December 3, 1910. Since then articles have appeared in Grit, Collier’s, the Philadelphia North American, and elsewhere, and this spring a hearing was held before the rules committee of the House at the instigation of Congressman Wilson.

The hearing did not lead to a federal investigation as the labor men had hoped, and this may have had some influence on the action of the international executive board of the United Mine Workers of America at Indianapolis on June 27. The board voted that there were no longer funds to continue sending $20,000 each week to Greensburg. According to a correspondent, two factors decided this action: the slack coal market has cut down mine work all over the country, and the members have been slow in sending in the tax which supports the striking miners and their families; in the second place, “a million dollars has already been expended here, with no immediate hope of settlement, and by losing this strike they will not endanger the miners’ chances in other strike zones, in Colorado especially, where another expensive strike is on .”

Following the action of the international board, a meeting of leaders was held in Greensburg and the strike was declared off on July 5.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “Westmoreland Strike Called Off” by Paul Kellogg; Long Struggle Ends in Defeat” →

Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: “The Conflict on the Tug” by Winthrop D. Lane, Miners’ Battle for Union Rights

Janet RayeBattle of Blair Mountain of 1921
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Quote Mother Jones, Doomed, Wmsn WV, June 20, 1920, Speeches Steel, p213—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday June 21, 1921
Miners’ of Mingo County, West Virginia, Fight for Right to Organize

From The Survey of June 18, 1921:

The Conflict on the Tug

[-by Winthrop D. Lane]

Review, Civil War in WV by WD Lane, KS City Str MO p4, June 18, 1921
Kansas City Star of June 18, 1921

THE gunfire that has been awakening echoes in West Virginia Hills as well as in the United States Senate chamber, where a resolution calling for a Senate investigation of the industrial trouble in that state has been under discussion, is neither a new nor an unexpected feature of the conflict over unionism in the coal fields there. No doubt some of the pictures recently drawn of the reign of feudism in that country have been too vividly colored; private families are not now engaged in the planned extermination of each other as they once were. But if the feud is no longer an active and malignant eruption in the life of the region, the tradition of feudism remains. The men who shot their personal enemies from ambush or in the open did not die without issue; their descendants still tramp the West Virginia and Kentucky hills in large numbers, sit at clerk’s desks in stores and village banks and even occupy the sheriff’s and county clerk’s offices.

The fact is that in the mines and mining communities of those regions there are today men who saw their fathers or grandfathers take their guns down from the wall, go a hundred yards from the house and lie in wait for prospective victims. Life is not held as dearly in such a civilization as in some others. The traditional method of settling disputes is too much by the gun; and when two men cannot agree, the courts are likely to find that the arbitrament of  the law has been superseded by the arbitrament of the levelled pistol barrel. 

Introduce into such a community, now, an acute modern industrial conflict. Let capital enter and bring forth coal from the hills. Let the whole country become an industrial area. Let the trade union enter and try to persuade the workers to organize. Let the owners and managers of coal mines say: “You shall not organize. We will not let you.” The methods that have been used to settle other disputes will be resorted to in settling this. The nature of the trouble is different, but the way of meeting it is the same. There are in the mines of West Virginia many men who know nothing of this tradition, who were brought up in other environments. But there are also, both in the mines and among the general population, many to whom the tradition is a keen memory. They are familiar with the use of firearms; most of them possess guns. They regard a fight between capital and labor as no different, in the tactics evoked, from any family or domestic quarrel.

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Hellraisers Journal: From the Spokane Industrial Worker: “Child Labor” -a Poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Mother Jones Quote, Child Labor Man of Six Snuff Sniffer—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday April 28, 1911
“Child Labor” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of April 27, 1911:

POEM Child Labor, by CP Gilman, IW p2, Apr 26, 1911

“Little Spinner” by Lewis Hine, North Carolina , December 1908:

Child Labor ed, L Hine, Spinner, Whitnel Cotton Mill, NC, Dec 1908

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: Citizen’s Mass Meeting Stands for Factory Fire Prevention after Triangle Disaster

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Rose Schneiderman Quote, Life So Cheap, NY Met Opera Hse, Apr 2, Survey p84, Apr 8, 1911—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday April 9, 1911
Mass Meeting at Metropolitan Opera House Stands for Fire Prevention

From The Survey of April 8, 1911:

The Survey Social Charitable Civic, Apr 8, 1911

THE COMMON WELFARE

PREVENTION OF FACTORY FIRES

Prevention was the keynote of the whole week in discussion of the Triangle factory fire in New York and in other industrial cities which have begun to take stock of their risks. There were many meetings, chief of which was the citizens’ mass meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House, reported on succeeding pages, which resulted in the appointment of a committee of five made up of Eugene A. Philbin, chairman; Mary A. Dreier, Edward T. Devine, William Jay Schieffelin, Lillian D. Wald, and Peter Brady. The New York American has organized a committee on prevention of which Ernest Flagg, an eminent architect, is chairman and the other members are Fire Chief Croker, P. Tecumseh Sherman, formerly state commissioner of labor, and William Archer, a builder.

A conference under call of R. Fulton Cutting, president of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, appointed a committee consisting of Mr. Cutting, Franklin B. Kirkbride, Leopold Plaut, Homer Folks and John A. Kingsbury which, in conjunction with the mass meeting committee, is organizing a permanent body on fire prevention.

On Wednesday (after this issue had gone to press) public burial was given the eight unclaimed bodies and the workers of the city planned an enormous silent parade in their honor.

One of the events of the week was the opening of the Triangle Waist Company in another building. A violation of the law was immediately filed against it for installing a row of sewing machines in front of the exit to the fire-escapes. The proprietor asked the Ladies ‘ Shirtwaist Union to organize his shop, but no action was taken.

Real Triangle by Sloan re Fire, Survey p81, Apr 8, 1911 Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Survey: Citizen’s Mass Meeting Stands for Factory Fire Prevention after Triangle Disaster” →

Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for March 1920, Part III: Jim Seymour on Mass Meeting for Labor Defense in San Francisco

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote Mother Jones Raising Hell, NYT p1, Oct 6, 1916———-

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 9, 1920
-Mother Jones News for March 1920, Part III
Jim Seymour Describes Labor Defense Meeting in San Francisco

From The Butte Daily Bulletin of March 29, 1920:

Mother Jones Raises Hell in San Francisco, BDB p4, Mar 29, 1920—–

Bulletin’s “Minister Without Portfolio”
Attends Interesting Gathering of
“Vicious Syndicalists.”
—–

BY JIM SEYMOUR.

(Special to the Bulletin.)

Mother Jones, Crpd Lg, Chg Tb p120, Oct 26, 1919

Frisco (known bourgeoiseally as San Francisco), March 20 (By Mail).-Last night [Friday, March 19th] California hall was filled to “S. R. O.” by specimens of the various breeds of workers and a very few others. William Cleary, attorney for a number of vicious criminal syndicalists, and some woman called “Mother Jones,” were billed to speak under the auspices of the Labor Defense league. Cleary jimmed the meeting by exercising his prerogative as a member of the bar and coming late. The trial was kept waiting for him until several of the chairs got too hot for the comfort of the sitters, whereupon Robert Whitaker, ex-sky pilot [preacher] and chairman of the meeting, who seems too good-natured to be named anything more dignified than Bob, delivered a serm-an opening address in which he mentioned the names of Anita Whitney, Kate O’Hare and one Eugene Debs. The applause percentages follow: Whitney, 96; Debs, 72; O’Hare, 49. Collection for defense of criminal syndicalists, for which the Lord be praised, $148.03.

The Rev. Bob then addressed us a few remarks that convinced us that the white-haired old woman on the stage was really Mother Jones and that nobody was trying to palm off a ringer on us. I don’t know just what it was, but Whitaker said something that Mother Jones didn’t quite agree with; and I don’t know just what Mother Jones’ reply was, but she gave him a good-natured bawling out that seemed to amuse the audience but failed to disturb the equanimity of the man who had just collected $148 for the cause. And so long as it didn’t harm him, or us, or the boys in jail, we will remark that it served him jolly well right-he should have known better than to pull that absurd burgeoise stunt of introducing a speaker that is better known than Jesus Christ. [Note: Mother Jones as a devote Catholic would certainly dispute that description of her fame.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for March 1920, Part III: Jim Seymour on Mass Meeting for Labor Defense in San Francisco” →

Hellraisers Journal: From The Progressive Woman: Clara Lemlich and Fannie Zinsher, “Two Little Heroines”

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Quote Clara Lemlich, Cooper Un Nov 22 re Uprising, NY Call p2, Nov 23, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 3, 1910
New York, New York – Clara Lemlich and Fannie Zinsher, Heroines

From The Progressive Woman of May 1910:

TWO LITTLE HEROINES

Clara Lemlich, Fannie Zinsher, Survey p553, p551, Jan 22, 1910
From The Survey of January 22, 1910
—–

I have listened to all the speakers and I have no patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers for the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.—Clara Lemlich at the famous Cooper Union meeting.

The spontaneous strike of 20,000 shirt waist makers in New York City was the greatest event in the history of woman’s work. The majority of the strikers were mere girls, few of them over twenty years of age. They had no “great” leaders, but among them were individualities strong enough and great enough to hold a place in the history of our country’s industrial development. Two of these were Fannie Zinsher and Clara Lemlich. The following from The Survey [“The Spirit of the Strikers” by Mary Brown Sumner] is a sketch of the lives of these two brave little girls:

I have two pictures of Fanny Zinsher in my mind, one as she came from Russia at fourteen, fleeing from persecution to free America, with round cheeks, smiling, irresponsible lips and clear eyes full of interest and delight in living; the other after five years of American freedom, with sad sweet eyes whose sight was strained by the flashing of the needle and by study late at night, mouth drooping with a weight of sadness and responsibility and an expression of patience and endurance far beyond her twenty years.

She came a little high school girl from Kishineff to San Francisco. She did not know what work for wages was, but she and her brother four years older had to turn to and support a mother and a little brother. Three hundred power-machines in one long room of the garment factory welcomed this little human machine-in-the-making. The roar and flash of the needles terrified her. She tried to work, but her nerves went more and more to pieces, her frightened eyes failed to follow her fingers as they guided her work and the second day she slit a finger open and was laid up for three weeks. When she returned she could adapt herself no better to the nervous strain. At piece work she could earn little over one dollar a week, until a kind forewoman removed her to a smaller room where in time she rose to five dollars.

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Hellraisers Journal: Explosion at CF&I’s Primero Mine Kills 79 Miners in Colorado; Company Continues to Withhold News

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Mother Jones Quote, Life Cheaper Than Props, Trinidad CO, Sept 16, 1913, Hse Com p2630
Mother Quotes CF&I Mine Manager
———-

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 5, 1910
Trinidad, Colorado – Primero Mine Disaster Leaves 300-400 Children Fatherless

From The Fort Collins Express of February 3, 1910:

Primero MnDs, HdLn 79 Dead Explosion, Fort Collins Exp p1, Feb 3, 1910—–

THE REPORT OF THE EXPLOSION REACHED HERE AT SIX O’CLOCK TONIGHT BY A MESSENGER AND TELEPHONE THE WIRES WERE PURPOSELY CUT OR WERE BROKEN BY SOME UNKNOWN CAUSE BETWEEN HERE AND THE SCENE OF THE DISASTER, FOR JUST AFTER THE EXPLOSION THE WIRES PUT OUT OF COMMISSION AND ONLY MEAGER NEWS HAS BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE MINE.

At 11:30 tonight a messenger reported from a point about half way between here and Primero that fifteen bodies bad been recovered and that 135 more were in the mine with no hope of being rescued alive.

The cause of the explosion is unknown. A rescue party that left this city is expected back about 2 o’clock in the morning with complete reports of the disaster.

The criticism being directed against the company owning the mine is very severe as there is an apparent attempt to prevent the details from being made public. A large number of men who worked in the mine live in Trinidad, going back and forth on miners’ trains each morning and evening. Great excitement prevails in this city among the wives and children of the entombed men.

———-

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Hellraisers Journal: “The Strike of the Singers of the Shirt” by Rose Strunsky for International Socialist Review, Part I

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Quote Clara Lemlich, Cooper Un Nov 22 re Uprising, NY Call p2, Nov 23, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 11, 1910
Rose Strunsky on New York City’s Shirtwaist Uprising, Part I

From the International Socialist Review of January 1910:

The Strike of the Singers of the Shirt
—–

By Rose Strunsky.
—–

[Part I of II.]

NYC Uprising, 40,000 Shirtwaist Strikers March, ISR p620, Jan 1910

Letter T, ISR p620, Jan 1910

HE Song of the Shirt in chorus! The fact is momentous. The lyric becomes an epic. The plaint becomes a war-song. It becomes a man song.

It is historic. The singer has come out of the garret. She has dropped her needle and bends over her machine in the crowded tenement of a shopkeeper or in the loft of a manufacturer. There are rows upon rows of machines next to her, and she sings the Song of the Shirt in chorus. It is the death of the woman. It is the birth of the sexless laborer.

As woman she was in the field of labor as man’s scab. She underbid him. She was an accident in the field the stones to be picked up for loading the sling of the capitalist.

That this most finely developed industrial country should be the first to turn woman into the laborer was historically logical and to be foreseen, and now this great dramatic and vital birth has happened—happened by the new Singers of the Shirt; by the general strike of the forty thousand shirt-waist makers of New York, which began on November 23rd.

This new-born laborer, this woman per se of yesterday, has taken the slug-horn to her lips and called out her armies upon that battlefield where she had been but a tool these hundred years of industrial transition, and, stern-eyed and intense, has made her first charge against the enemy. The act is impressive and significant and has the beauty which comes with a noble growth and the sadness which accompanies beauty and growth. The outbreak was strong and unexpected though for years the foundations of it were laid by quiet propaganda as well as economic necessity.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Strike of the Singers of the Shirt” by Rose Strunsky for International Socialist Review, Part I” →

Hellraisers Journal: “The Cherry Mine Murders” -Men and Boys Burned and Suffocated in Criminal Fire Trap, Part II

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Mother Jones Quote, Life Cheaper Than Props, Trinidad CO, Sept 16, 1913, Hse Com p2630———-

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 8, 1910
Cherry, Illinois – Scene of Mass Murder of Men and Boys, Part II

From the International Socialist Review of January 1910:

The Cherry Mine Murders.
—–

Why Four Hundred Workers Were Burned and Suffocated
in a Criminal Fire Trap.
—–

By J. O. Bentall.
—–

[Part II of II.]

Cherry MnDs Murders by JO Bentall, Despair, ISR p582, Jan 1920

Little Albert Buckle, 15 years old November 28, who escaped on the last car up, and his mother and sister stood at the ropes all day watching for “Rich,” who was 16 years the 21st of last June, and who had worked in the mine ever since his father was killed three years ago, but poor Richard was not brought up that day. On Monday I went to see the broken-hearted mother but I could not comfort her.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Cherry Mine Murders” -Men and Boys Burned and Suffocated in Criminal Fire Trap, Part II” →

Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for November 1919, Part I: Found in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D. C.

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Quote Mother Jones, Raise Hell in Jail, Gary IN Oct 23, NYT p2, Oct 24, 1919———-

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday December 28, 1919
Mother Jones News for November 1919, Part I
Found in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Washington, D. C.

From The Survey of November 8, 1919
-taken from “Closed Towns” by S. Adele Shaw:

GSS, Mother Jones, WZF, Organizers, Survey p64, Nov 8, 1919

———-

[One] evening I went to a meeting of strikers [held in Braddock, Pennsylvania]. All was quiet as I made my way toward the river. Down a poorly lighted street, so dark I could scarcely see the curb, I found the men standing, filling the vacant lot before the door of the hall which was packed, and on the sidewalks and street, but not blocking either. There was neither noise nor excitement. “Mother Jones goin’ to speak.” “Come on, lady.” And the men held up their arms to open a passage for me. The hall was jammed. Sweat stood on every forehead.

The first speaker was J. G. Brown of the Pittsburgh strike committee. I had heard him the summer before in the mill towns telling the men what the eight-hour day would mean for them and their families, urging them to take out their papers and become citizens, and never failing to impress upon them the necessity of obeying the laws of the town, state and the country. Then came the deep clear voice of a woman, filling every corner of the hall. I stood on tiptoe and saw the grey hair of Mother Jones, the woman agitator of the mining districts of Colorado and West Virginia, who with the rough speech and ready invective of the old-time labor spell binder, has exerted a powerful influence over the striking steel workers. At her first words there was complete silence. Though practically all were foreigners, not a man in the hall appeared to miss a word.

[Mother Jones said:]

We’re going to have a hell of a fight here, boys. We are to find out whether Pennsylvania belongs to Gary or to Uncle Sam. If it belongs to Gary we are going to take it away from him. We can scare and starve and lick the whole gang when we get ready…The eyes of the world are on us today. They want to see if America can make the fight…Our boys went over there. You were told to clean up the Kaiser. Well, you did it. And now we’re going to clean up the damned Kaisers at home…They sit up and smoke seventy-five cent cigars and have a lackey bring them champagne. They have stomachs two miles long and two miles wide and we fill them…Remember when all was dark in Europe and Columbus said, “I see a new land,” they laughed. But the Queen of Spain sold her jewels and Columbus went to it…He died in poverty, but he gave us this nation and you and I aren’t going to let Gary take it from us…If he wants fourteen hours he can go in and work it himself…We don’t want guns. We want to destroy guns. We want honest men to keep the peace. We want music and play grounds and the things to make life worth while…Now, you fellows go on out. I want to talk to the other boys.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for November 1919, Part I: Found in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D. C.” →