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Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 16, 1903
Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1903, Part III
-Speaks at Meeting of Indianapolis Central Labor Union
From The Los Angeles Record of January 27, 1903:
“MOTHER JONES” TO THE MINERS
Mother Jones, the woman champion of the United Mine Workers, stirred their convention in Indianapolis by a speech denouncing the use of the pistol in labor disputes. She said:
You old gray beards are going to see a new epoch. You have been crying that we are in a country without liberty, but you have not gone out and fought to get it. That you are going to do and you won’t use pistol to get it either. We will shoot such men as Judge Jackson off the bench, and it won’t be with a gun.
Good for “Mother Jones.”
She is talking Americanism straight from the shoulder. No one can charge this white-haired old woman with incendiarism when she sticks to the ballot box.
The pistol is a relic of barbarism-a barbarism from which the Anglo-Saxon has not yet emerged.
Capital is shrewd. Sometimes it employes “private detectives,” not so much to guard property, as to provoke violence. The strikers oppose pistol to pistol. They lose public sympathy and the strike.
“Mother Jones” knows this and the miners are coming to know it, as is attested by their applause at the utterance.
Two so-called gospels have distinguished the last decade or so, each diametrically opposed to the other:
Nietache’s gospel is the gospel of brute force.
Tolstoi’s gospel is comprehended in “Resist not evil.”So long as men and women are as they are either of these doctrines run to its legitimate extreme is absurd.
We must resist evil, not by brute force, but by education, agitation and finally, and forcefully, at the ballot box.
That is civilization.
That is the evolution of society.
[Photograph added.]
From The Indianapolis Journal of January 27, 1903:
CENTRAL LABOR UNION
———-RESOLUTION FAVORING SUNDAY
BASEBALL ADOPTED.
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Women Object to Being Excluded
from the Banquet to Miners
To-Morrow Night.
———-The Central Labor Union at a meeting held last night, adopted a resolution favoring the passage of the bill now before the Legislature legalizing Sunday baseball. The resolution was introduced by John L. Feltman, who spoke briefly in explanation of it.
President George A. Custer was absent last night and the chair was occupied by Vice President Edgar A. Perkins.
[…..]
The report of the committee, which arranged the miners’ banquet to be given Thursday night, by William F. Ewald precipitated a storm. The report described the programme of entertainment and furnished the names of the men who will serve on the committees to entertain the miners and operators. It concluded with the statement that the banquet was to be for the men delegates only, and the women delegates to the body, as well as the women in the Label League, would be entertained subsequently in a little affair to be planned for them. Delegates immediately objected to this and declared that women ought to be admitted and they could see no reason for their exclusion. After a long discussion of the merits and demerits of the last banquet and the possibility of a recurrence of several unpleasant features, “Mother” Jones, who was a guest of the evening, made a talk which smoothed over the obstacles to peace, and the report of the committee was concurred in. The women were still unsatisfied, however, and several of them voiced their disapproval by saying that they thought it was a shame that they could not go to the banquet.
“Mother” Jones was given a chance to speak during the meeting, and quickly drifted into socialism……
