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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 18, 1900
Mother Jones News Round-Up for November 1900, Part II
Found in Freeland, Pennsylvania, Fighting for Silk Mill Strikers

From the Hazleton Plain Speaker of November 13, 1900:

The Silk Mill Strike.

The [Freeland] Grand Opera House was packed last evening with men, women and children who came to hear “Mother” Jones discuss the silk mill strike. The lack of system, cohesive organization, and sympathy, that characterized this strike in its incipient stage was amply atoned for by last night’s meeting, for “Mother” Jones appeared at her best and her pathetic appeal for justice for the little army of frail and youthful girls that sat upon the stage, touched a responsive chord in the large audience.

The boys and girls, many of whom appeared very young, were arranged on the stage with good effect, and the speaker lost no time in getting down to the core of her subject. She exhibited a little boy before the floodlights whom she claimed worked in the Freeland silk mill for one cent per hour. She next brought forward a pale-faced frail little girl who received $1.10 per week and pointed out in forcible language the decay of the Republic and the degeneration of the race if the mothers of the men of the future were permitted to be thus enslaved. The speaker gave a brief history of the abolition of child labor in England, and denounced the silk mills as vile hell holes where cursing and foul language was the order of the day. She denounced the men who employ babes in violation of the law and make money by their labor as “commercial cannibals” who would find it difficult to justify their stewardship when called to answer before the Supreme Judge.

She compared the conduct of a mother living at Upper Lehigh who flogged her little girl back to work in the silk mill with the conduct of the negro mother who in the days of chattel slavery clung to her offspring with a maternal affection that the tortures of the masters lash could not sever. The speaker became dramatic as she exhibited the frail little girls that the local authorities could not control without the aid of deputy sheriffs and her sarcasm in denouncing the men who brought them here was withering and eloquent. She “roasted” a local merchant who it is alleged said that the girls should be arrested and appealed to the manhood of her audience to abolish profanity in the mill and appoint a committee to confer with the management and intercede for better conditions for the girls. She told her audience that she would personally appeal to the state factory inspector to enforce the law and closed with an earnest appeal to the men to save their money and keep away from the saloons, “You will need it all” she said “for we are on the eve of the greatest panic in the history of the world.”

“Within the next two years” she said “a financial crash will take place that will paralyze industry from ocean to ocean, and the working men should carefully husband their earnings as they will then need it.” She prophesied a social revolution with the close of the century, that will upset existing conditions and free the human race from the curse of competitive slavery.

[Photograph added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for November 1900, Part II: Found in Freeland, PA, Fighting for Striking Silk Mill Workers” →