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[Illustration: Mother Jones’ Latest Photograph]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES

EDITED BY MARY FIELD PARTON

INTRODUCTION BY CLARENCE DARROW

 CHICAGO
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
 1925

 Copyright, 1925, by
 CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
 Printed in the United States of America

 Press of
 John F. Higgins,
 376 W. Monroe St.,

INTRODUCTION

Mother Jones is one of the most forceful and picturesque figures of the
American labor movement. She is a born crusader. In an earlier period
of the world she would have joined with Peter the Hermit in leading
the crusaders against the Saracens. At a later period, she would have
joined John Brown in his mad, heroic effort to liberate the slaves.
Like Brown, she has a singleness of purpose, a personal fearlessness
and a contempt for established wrongs. Like him, the purpose was the
moving force, and the means of accomplishing the end did not matter.

In her early life, she found in the labor movement an outlet for her
inherent sympathy and love and daring. She never had the time or the
education to study the philosophy of the various movements that from
time to time have inspired the devoted idealist to lead what seemed to
be a forlorn hope to change the institutions of men.

Mother Jones is essentially an individualist. Her own emotions and
ideas are so strong that she is sometimes in conflict with others,
fighting for the same cause. This too is an old story; the real leaders
of any cause are necessarily individualists and are often impatient
of others who likewise must go in their own way. All movements
attract men and women of various minds. The early abolitionists could
not agree as to methods. In their crusade were found the men who
believed in constitutional methods, such as Giddings and Lincoln; the
men who believed in force, of which John Brown was the chief; the
non-resistant, like William Lloyd Garrison; the lone individualist who
hit wherever he found a head to hit, like Wendell Phillips. Mother
Jones is the Wendell Phillips of the labor movement. Without his
education and scholarship, she has the power of moving masses of men by
her strong, living speech and action. She has likewise his disregard
for personal safety. After the capture of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry,
many real abolitionists were paralyzed with fear and fled from the
field, but Wendell Phillips hurled his phillipics from the housetops
and defied his enemies to do their worst.

In all her career, Mother Jones never quailed or ran away. Her deep
convictions and fearless soul always drew her to seek the spot where
the fight was hottest and the danger greatest.

I never personally knew anything of her misunderstandings with John
Mitchell, but it seems only fair for me to say that I was associated
with him for many months in the arbitration growing out of the coal
strike. We were friends for many years and he always had my full
respect and trust. I cannot help feeling that both were true and
that the disagreements were only such as inevitably grow out of close
association of different types of mind in a great conflict.

Mother Jones was always doubtful of the good of organized institutions.
These require compromises and she could not compromise. To her there
was but one side. Right and wrong were forever distinct. The type is
common to all great movements. It is essentially the difference between
the man of action and the philosopher. Both are useful. No one can
decide the relative merits of the two.

This little book is a story of a woman of action fired by a fine zeal.
She defied calumny. She was not awed by guns or jails. She kept on her
way regardless of friends and foes. She had but one love to which she
was always true and that was her cause. People of this type are bound
to have conflicts within and without the ranks.

Mother Jones was especially devoted to the miners. The mountainous
country, the deep mines, the black pit, the cheap homes, the danger,
the everlasting conflict for wages and for life, appealed to her
imagination and chivalry. Much of the cause of trades unionism in
England and America has been associated with the mines. The stories
of the work of women and children in the mines of Great Britain are
well known to all trades unionists. The progress of trades unionism
in England was largely the progress of the miners’ cause. The fight
in America has been almost a replica of the contest in Great Britain.
Through suffering, danger and loyalty the condition of the miners
has gradually improved. Some of the fiercest combats in America have
been fought by the miners. These fights brought thousands of men and
their families close to starvation. They brought contests with police,
militia, courts and soldiers. They involved prison sentences, massacres
and hardships without end. Wherever the fight was the fiercest and
danger the greatest, Mother Jones was present to aid and cheer. In both
the day and the night, in the poor villages and at the lonely cabin
on the mountain side, Mother Jones always appeared in time of need.
She had a strong sense of drama. She staged every detail of a contest.
Her actors were real men and women and children, and she often reached
the hearts of employers where all others failed. She was never awed by
jails. Over and over she was sentenced by courts; she never ran away.
She stayed in prison until her enemies opened the doors. Her personal
non-resistance was far more powerful than any appeal to force.

This little book gives her own story of an active, dramatic life. It is
a part of the history of the labor movement of the United States.

CLARENCE DARROW.

Chicago, June 6th, 1925.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

     I. Early Years                                   11

    II. The Haymarket Tragedy                         17

   III. A Strike in Virginia                          24

    IV. Wayland’s Appeal to Reason                    28

     V. Victory at Arnot, Pennsylvania                30

    VI. War in West Virginia                          40

   VII. A Human Judge                                 49

  VIII. Roosevelt Sent for John Mitchell              56

    IX. Murder in West Virginia                       63

     X. The March of the Mill Children                71

    XI. “Those Mules Won’t Scab Today”                84

   XII. How the Women Mopped Up Coaldale              89

  XIII. The Cripple Creek Strike                      94

   XIV. Child Labor, North and South                 114

    XV. Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone                 132

   XVI. The Mexican Revolution                       136

  XVII. How the Women Sang Themselves Out of Jail    145

 XVIII. Victory in West Virginia                     148

   XIX. Guards and Gunmen                            169

    XX. Governor Hunt, Human and Just                172

   XXI. In Rockefeller’s Prisons                     178

  XXII. “You Don’t Need a Vote to Raise Hell”        195

 XXIII. A West Virginia Prison Camp                  205

  XXIV. The Steel Strike of 1919                     209

   XXV. Struggle and Lose: Struggle and Win          227

  XXVI. Medieval West Virginia                       232

 XXVII. Progress in Spite of Leaders                 236

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 Mother Jones’ Latest Photograph             _Frontispiece_

                                                Facing Page
 Mother Jones Heading Protest Procession of Strikers
   at Denver                                            102

 Mother Jones with the Miners’ Children                 128

 Mother Jones Doesn’t Need a Vote to Raise Hell         202

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

I was born in the city of Cork, Ireland, in 1830. My people were poor.
For generations they had fought for Ireland’s freedom. Many of my folks
have died in that struggle. My father, Richard Harris, came to America
in 1835, and as soon as he had become an American citizen he sent for
his family. His work as a laborer with railway construction crews took
him to Toronto, Canada. Here I was brought up but always as the child
of an American citizen. Of that citizenship I have ever been proud.

After finishing the common schools, I attended the Normal school
with the intention of becoming a teacher. Dress-making too, I
learned proficiently. My first position was teaching in a convent in
Monroe, Michigan. Later, I came to Chicago and opened a dress-making
establishment. I preferred sewing to bossing little children.

However, I went back to teaching again, this time in Memphis,
Tennessee. Here I was married in 1861. My husband was an iron moulder
and a staunch member of the Iron Moulders’ Union.

In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept Memphis. Its victims were mainly
among the poor and the workers. The rich and the well-to-do fled the
city. Schools and churches were closed. People were not permitted to
enter the house of a yellow fever victim without permits. The poor
could not afford nurses. Across the street from me, ten persons lay
dead from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night
quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping
and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children sickened
and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial.
My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of
grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken
as was mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the
wheels of the death cart.

After the union had buried my husband, I got a permit to nurse the
sufferers. This I did until the plague was stamped out.

I returned to Chicago and went again into the dressmaking business
with a partner. We were located on Washington Street near the lake. We
worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to
observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. Often while sewing
for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake
Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the
poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen
lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical
comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers
seemed neither to notice nor to care.

Summers, too, from the windows of the rich, I used to watch the mothers
come from the west side slums, lugging babies and little children,
hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air from the lake. At night, when
the tenements were stifling hot, men, women and little children slept
in the parks. But the rich, having donated to the charity ice fund,
had, by the time it was hot in the city, gone to seaside and mountains.

In October, 1871, the great Chicago fire burned up our establishment
and everything that we had. The fire made thousands homeless. We stayed
all night and the next day without food on the lake front, often going
into the lake to keep cool. Old St. Mary’s church at Wabash Avenue and
Peck Court was thrown open to the refugees and there I camped until I
could find a place to go.

Near by in an old, tumbled down, fire scorched building the Knights of
Labor held meetings. The Knights of Labor was the labor organization
of those days. I used to spend my evenings at their meetings, listening
to splendid speakers. Sundays we went out into the woods and held
meetings.

Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor. Those were the
days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers,
no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of the
martyrs and the saints.

I became acquainted with the labor movement. I learned that in 1865,
after the close of the Civil War, a group of men met in Louisville,
Kentucky. They came from the North and from the South; they were the
“blues” and the “greys” who a year or two before had been fighting
each other over the question of chattel slavery. They decided that the
time had come to formulate a program to fight another brutal form of
slavery--industrial slavery. Out of this decision had come the Knights
of Labor.

From the time of the Chicago fire I became more and more engrossed in
the labor struggle and I decided to take an active part in the efforts
of the working people to better the conditions under which they worked
and lived. I became a member of the Knights of Labor.

One of the first strikes that I remember occurred in the Seventies.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees went on strike and they sent
for me to come help them. I went. The mayor of Pittsburgh swore in as
deputy sheriffs a lawless, reckless bunch of fellows who had drifted
into that city during the panic of 1873. They pillaged and burned
and rioted and looted. Their acts were charged up to the striking
workingmen. The governor sent the militia.

The Railroads had succeeded in getting a law passed that in case of a
strike, the train-crew should bring in the locomotive to the roundhouse
before striking. This law the strikers faithfully obeyed. Scores of
locomotives were housed in Pittsburgh.

One night a riot occurred. Hundreds of box cars standing on the tracks
were soaked with oil and set on fire and sent down the tracks to the
roundhouse. The roundhouse caught fire. Over one hundred locomotives,
belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were destroyed. It was a
wild night. The flames lighted the sky and turned to fiery flames the
steel bayonettes of the soldiers.

The strikers were charged with the crimes of arson and rioting,
although it was common knowledge that it was not they who instigated
the fire; that it was started by hoodlums backed by the business men
of Pittsburgh who for a long time had felt that the Railroad Company
discriminated against their city in the matter of rates.

I knew the strikers personally. I knew that it was they who had tried
to enforce orderly law. I knew they disciplined their members when they
did violence. I knew, as everybody knew, who really perpetrated the
crime of burning the railroad’s property. Then and there I learned in
the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others’
sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.

These early years saw the beginning of America’s industrial life. Hand
and hand with the growth of factories and the expansion of railroads,
with the accumulation of capital and the rise of banks, came anti-labor
legislation. Came strikes. Came violence. Came the belief in the hearts
and minds of the workers that legislatures but carry out the will of
the industrialists.

CHAPTER II

THE HAYMARKET TRAGEDY

From 1880 on, I became wholly engrossed in the labor movement. In all
the great industrial centers the working class was in rebellion. The
enormous immigration from Europe crowded the slums, forced down wages
and threatened to destroy the standard of living fought for by American
working men. Throughout the country there was business depression and
much unemployment. In the cities there was hunger and rags and despair.

Foreign agitators who had suffered under European despots preached
various schemes of economic salvation to the workers. The workers
asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The
agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.

Particularly the city of Chicago was the scene of strike after strike,
followed by boycotts and riots. The years preceding 1886 had witnessed
strikes of the lake seamen, of dock laborers and street railway
workers. These strikes had been brutally suppressed by policemen’s
clubs and by hired gunmen. The grievance on the part of the workers was
given no heed. John Bonfield, inspector of police, was particularly
cruel in the suppression of meetings where men peacefully assembled
to discuss matters of wages and of hours. Employers were defiant and
open in the expression of their fears and hatreds. The Chicago Tribune,
the organ of the employers, suggested ironically that the farmers of
Illinois treat the tramps that poured out of the great industrial
centers as they did other pests, by putting strychnine in the food.

The workers started an agitation for an eight-hour day. The trades
unions and the Knights of Labor endorsed the movement but because many
of the leaders of the agitation were foreigners, the movement itself
was regarded as “foreign” and as “un-American.” Then the anarchists of
Chicago, a very small group, espoused the cause of the eight-hour day.
From then on the people of Chicago seemed incapable of discussing a
purely economic question without getting excited about anarchism.

The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A person
who believed in an eight-hour working day was, they said, an enemy to
his country, a traitor, an anarchist. The foundations of government
were being gnawed away by the anarchist rats. Feeling was bitter.
The city was divided into two angry camps. The working people on one
side--hungry, cold, jobless, fighting gunmen and police clubs with
bare hands. On the other side the employers, knowing neither hunger nor
cold, supported by the newspapers, by the police, by all the power of
the great state itself.

The anarchists took advantage of the widespread discontent to preach
their doctrines. Orators used to address huge crowds on the windy,
barren shore of Lake Michigan. Although I never endorsed the philosophy
of anarchism, I often attended the meetings on the lake shore,
listening to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the
workers.

Meanwhile the employers were meeting. They met in the mansion of George
M. Pullman on Prairie Avenue or in the residence of Wirt Dexter, an
able corporation lawyer. They discussed means of killing the eight-hour
movement which was to be ushered in by a general strike. They discussed
methods of dispersing the meetings of the anarchists.

A bitterly cold winter set in. Long unemployment resulted in terrible
suffering. Bread lines increased. Soup kitchens could not handle the
applicants. Thousands knew actual misery.

On Christmas day, hundreds of poverty stricken people in rags and
tatters, in thin clothes, in wretched shoes paraded on fashionable
Prairie Avenue before the mansions of the rich, before their employers,
carrying the black flag. I thought the parade an insane move on the
part of the anarchists, as it only served to make feeling more bitter.
As a matter of fact, it had no educational value whatever and only
served to increase the employers’ fear, to make the police more savage,
and the public less sympathetic to the real distress of the workers.

The first of May, which was to usher in the eight-hour day uprising,
came. The newspapers had done everything to alarm the people. All over
the city there were strikes and walkouts. Employers quaked in their
boots. They saw revolution. The workers in the McCormick Harvester
Works gathered outside the factory. Those inside who did not join the
strikers were called scabs. Bricks were thrown. Windows were broken.
The scabs were threatened. Someone turned in a riot call.

The police without warning charged down upon the workers, shooting into
their midst, clubbing right and left. Many were trampled under horses’
feet. Numbers were shot dead. Skulls were broken. Young men and young
girls were clubbed to death.

The Pinkerton agency formed armed bands of ex-convicts and hoodlums
and hired them to capitalists at eight dollars a day, to picket the
factories and incite trouble.

On the evening of May 4th, the anarchists held a meeting in the shabby,
dirty district known to later history as Haymarket Square. All about
were railway tracks, dingy saloons and the dirty tenements of the poor.
A half a block away was the Desplaines Street Police Station presided
over by John Bonfield, a man without tact or discretion or sympathy, a
most brutal believer in suppression as the method to settle industrial
unrest.

Carter Harrison, the mayor of Chicago, attended the meeting of the
anarchists and moved in and about the crowds in the square. After
leaving, he went to the Chief of Police and instructed him to send no
mounted police to the meeting, as it was being peacefully conducted and
the presence of mounted police would only add fuel to fires already
burning red in the workers’ hearts. But orders perhaps came from other
quarters, for disregarding the report of the mayor, the chief of police
sent mounted policemen in large numbers to the meeting.

One of the anarchist speakers was addressing the crowd. A bomb was
dropped from a window overlooking the square. A number of the police
were killed in the explosion that followed.

The city went insane and the newspapers did everything to keep it like
a madhouse. The workers’ cry for justice was drowned in the shriek for
revenge. Bombs were “found” every five minutes. Men went armed and gun
stores kept open nights. Hundreds were arrested. Only those who had
agitated for an eight-hour day, however, were brought to trial and a
few months later hanged. But the man, Schnaubelt, who actually threw
the bomb was never brought into the case, nor was his part in the
terrible drama ever officially made clear.

The leaders in the eight hour day movement were hanged Friday, November
the 11th. That day Chicago’s rich had chills and fever. Ropes stretched
in all directions from the jail. Police men were stationed along the
ropes armed with riot rifles. Special patrols watched all approaches
to the jail. The roofs about the grim stone building were black with
police. The newspapers fed the public imagination with stories of
uprisings and jail deliveries.

But there were no uprisings, no jail deliveries, except that of Louis
Lingg, the only real preacher of violence among all the condemned men.
He outwitted the gallows by biting a percussion cap and blowing off his
head.

The Sunday following the executions, the funerals were held. Thousands
of workers marched behind the black hearses, not because they were
anarchists but they felt that these men, whatever their theories, were
martyrs to the workers’ struggle. The procession wound through miles
and miles of streets densely packed with silent people.

In the cemetery of Waldheim, the dead were buried. But with them was
not buried their cause. The struggle for the eight hour day, for more
human conditions and relations between man and man lived on, and still
lives on.

Seven years later, Governor Altgeld, after reading all the evidence in
the case, pardoned the three anarchists who had escaped the gallows
and were serving life sentences in jail. He said the verdict was
unjustifiable, as had William Dean Howells and William Morris at the
time of its execution. Governor Altgeld committed political suicide by
his brave action but he is remembered by all those who love truth and
those who have the courage to confess it.

A STRIKE IN VIRGINIA

It was about 1891 when I was down in Virginia. There was a strike in
the Dietz mines and the boys had sent for me. When I got off the train
at Norton a fellow walked up to me and asked me if I were Mother Jones.

“Yes, I am Mother Jones.”

He looked terribly frightened. “The superintendent told me that if you
came down here he would blow out your brains. He said he didn’t want to
see you ’round these parts.”

“You tell the superintendent that I am not coming to see him anyway. I
am coming to see the miners.”

As we stood talking a poor fellow, all skin and bones, joined us.

“Do you see those cars over there, Mother, on the siding?” He pointed
to cars filled with coal.

“Well, we made a contract with the coal company to fill those cars for
so much, and after we had made the contract, they put lower bottoms
in the cars, so that they would hold another ton or so. I have worked
for this company all my life and all I have now is this old worn-out
frame.”

We couldn’t get a hall to hold a meeting. Every one was afraid to rent
to us. Finally the colored people consented to give us their church for
our meeting. Just as we were about to start the colored chairman came
to me and said: “Mother, the coal company gave us this ground that the
church is on. They have sent word that they will take it from us if we
let you speak here.”

I would not let those poor souls lose their ground so I adjourned the
meeting to the four corners of the public roads. When the meeting was
over and the people had dispersed, I asked my co-worker, Dud Hado, a
fellow from Iowa, if he would go with me up to the post office. He was
a kindly soul but easily frightened.

As we were going along the road, I said, “Have you got a pistol on you?”

“Yes,” said he, “I’m not going to let any one blow your brains out.”

“My boy,” said I, “it is against the law in this county to carry
concealed weapons. I want you to take that pistol out and expose a
couple of inches of it.”

As he did so about eight or ten gunmen jumped out from behind an old
barn beside the road, jumped on him and said, “Now we’ve got you, you
dirty organizer.” They bullied us along the road to the town and we
were taken to an office where they had a notary public and we were
tried. All those blood-thirsty murderers were there and the general
manager came in.

“Mother Jones, I am astonished,” said he.

“What is your astonishment about?” said I.

“That you should go into the house of God with anyone who carries a
gun.”

“Oh that wasn’t God’s house,” said I. “That is the coal company’s
house. Don’t you know that God Almighty never comes around to a place
like this!”

He laughed and of course, the dogs laughed, for he was the general
manager.

They dismissed any charges against me and they fined poor Dud
twenty-five dollars and costs. They seemed surprised when I said I
would pay it. I had the money in my petticoat.

I went over to a miner’s shack and asked his wife for a cup of tea.
Often in these company-owned towns the inn-keepers were afraid to let
me have food. The poor soul was so happy to have me there that she
excused herself to “dress for company.” She came out of the bedroom
with a white apron on over her cheap cotton wrapper.

One of the men who was present at Dud’s trial followed me up to the
miner’s house. At first the miner’s wife would not admit him but he
said he wanted to speak privately to Mother Jones. So she let him in.

“Mother,” he said, “I am glad you paid that bill so quickly. They
thought you’d appeal the case. Then they were going to lock you both up
and burn you in the coke ovens at night and then say that you had both
been turned loose in the morning and they didn’t know where you had
gone.”

Whether they really would have carried out their plans I do not know.
But I do know that there are no limits to which powers of privilege
will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

CHAPTER IV

WAYLAND’S APPEAL TO REASON

In 1893, J. A. Wayland with a number of others decided to demonstrate
to the workers the advantage of co-operation over competition. A group
of people bought land in Tennessee and founded the Ruskin Colony. They
invited me to join them.

“No,” said I, “your colony will not succeed. You have to have religion
to make a colony successful, and labor is not yet a religion with
labor.”

I visited the colony a year later. I could see in that short time
disrupting elements in the colony. I was glad I had not joined the
colony but had stayed out in the thick of the fight. Labor has a lot of
fighting to do before it can demonstrate. Two years later Wayland left
for Kansas City. He was despondent.

A group of us got together; Wayland, myself, and three men, known as
the “Three P’s”--Putnam, a freight agent for the Burlington Railway;
Palmer, a clerk in the Post Office; Page, an advertising agent for
a department store. We decided that the workers needed education.
That they must have a paper devoted to their interests and stating
their point of view. We urged Wayland to start such a paper. Palmer
suggested the name, “Appeal to Reason.”

“But we have no subscribers,” said Wayland.

“I’ll get them,” said I. “Get out your first edition and I’ll see that
it has subscribers enough to pay for it.”

He got out a limited first edition and with it as a sample I went to
the Federal Barracks at Omaha and secured a subscription from almost
every lad there. Soldiers are the sons of working people and need to
know it. I went down to the City Hall and got a lot of subscriptions.
In a short time I had gathered several hundred subscriptions and the
paper was launched. It did a wonderful service under Wayland. Later
Fred G. Warren came to Girard where the paper was published, as
editorial writer. If any place in America could be called my home, his
home was mine. Whenever, after a long, dangerous fight, I was weary and
felt the need of rest, I went to the home of Fred Warren.

Like all other things, “The Appeal to Reason” had its youth of vigor,
its later days of profound wisdom, and then it passed away. Disrupting
influences, quarrels, divergent points of view, theories, finally
caused it to go out of business.

CHAPTER V

VICTORY AT ARNOT

Before 1899 the coal fields of Pennsylvania were not organized.
Immigrants poured into the country and they worked cheap. There was
always a surplus of immigrant labor, solicited in Europe by the
coal companies, so as to keep wages down to barest living. Hours of
work down under ground were cruelly long. Fourteen hours a day was
not uncommon, thirteen, twelve. The life or limb of the miner was
unprotected by any laws. Families lived in company owned shacks that
were not fit for their pigs. Children died by the hundreds due to the
ignorance and poverty of their parents.

Often I have helped lay out for burial the babies of the miners, and
the mothers could scarce conceal their relief at the little ones’
deaths. Another was already on its way, destined, if a boy, for the
breakers; if a girl, for the silk mills where the other brothers and
sisters already worked.

The United Mine Workers decided to organize these fields and work
for human conditions for human beings. Organizers were put to work.
Whenever the spirit of the men in the mines grew strong enough a strike
was called.

In Arnot, Pennsylvania, a strike had been going on four or five months.
The men were becoming discouraged. The coal company sent the doctors,
the school teachers, the preachers and their wives to the homes of the
miners to get them to sign a document that they would go back to work.

The president of the district, Mr. Wilson, and an organizer, Tom
Haggerty, got despondent. The signatures were overwhelmingly in favor
of returning on Monday.

Haggerty suggested that they send for me. Saturday morning they
telephoned to Barnesboro, where I was organizing, for me to come at
once or they would lose the strike.

“Oh Mother,” Haggerty said, “Come over quick and help us! The boys are
that despondent! They are going back Monday.”

I told him that I was holding a meeting that night but that I would
leave early Sunday morning.

I started at daybreak. At Roaring Branch, the nearest train connection
with Arnot, the secretary of the Arnot Union, a young boy, William
Bouncer, met me with a horse and buggy. We drove sixteen miles over
rough mountain roads. It was biting cold. We got into Arnot Sunday
noon and I was placed in the coal company’s hotel, the only hotel in
town. I made some objections but Bouncer said, “Mother, we have engaged
this room for you and if it is not occupied, they will never rent us
another.”

Sunday afternoon I held a meeting. It was not as large a gathering as
those we had later but I stirred up the poor wretches that did come.

“You’ve got to take the pledge,” I said. “Rise and pledge to stick to
your brothers and the union till the strike’s won!”

The men shuffled their feet but the women rose, their babies in their
arms, and pledged themselves to see that no one went to work in the
morning.

“The meeting stands adjourned till ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” I
said. “Everyone come and see that the slaves that think to go back to
their masters come along with you.”

I returned to my room at the hotel. I wasn’t called down to supper but
after the general manager of the mines and all of the other guests had
gone to church, the housekeeper stole up to my room and asked me to
come down and get a cup of tea.

At eleven o’clock that night the housekeeper again knocked at my
door and told me that I had to give up my room; that she was told it
belonged to a teacher. “It’s a shame, mother,” she whispered, as she
helped me into my coat.

I found little Bouncer sitting on guard down in the lobby. He took me
up the mountain to a miner’s house. A cold wind almost blew the bonnet
from my head. At the miner’s shack I knocked.

A man’s voice shouted, “Who is there?”

“Mother Jones,” said I.

A light came in the tiny window. The door opened.

“And did they put you out, Mother?”

“They did that.”

“I told Mary they might do that,” said the miner. He held the oil lamp
with the thumb and his little finger and I could see that the others
were off. His face was young but his body was bent over.

He insisted on my sleeping in the only bed, with his wife. He slept
with his head on his arms on the kitchen table. Early in the morning
his wife rose to keep the children quiet, so that I might sleep a
little later as I was very tired.

At eight o’clock she came into my room, crying.

“Mother, are you awake?”

“Yes, I am awake.”

“Well, you must get up. The sheriff is here to put us out for keeping
you. This house belongs to the Company.”

The family gathered up all their earthly belongings, which weren’t
much, took down all the holy pictures, and put them in a wagon, and
they with all their neighbors went to the meeting. The sight of that
wagon with the sticks of furniture and the holy pictures and the
children, with the father and mother and myself walking along through
the streets turned the tide. It made the men so angry that they decided
not to go back that morning to the mines. Instead they came to the
meeting where they determined not to give up the strike until they had
won the victory.

Then the company tried to bring in scabs. I told the men to stay home
with the children for a change and let the women attend to the scabs.
I organized an army of women housekeepers. On a given day they were
to bring their mops and brooms and “the army” would charge the scabs
up at the mines. The general manager, the sheriff and the corporation
hirelings heard of our plans and were on hand. The day came and the
women came with the mops and brooms and pails of water.

I decided not to go up to the Drip Mouth myself, for I knew they would
arrest me and that might rout the army. I selected as leader an Irish
woman who had a most picturesque appearance. She had slept late and her
husband had told her to hurry up and get into the army. She had grabbed
a red petticoat and slipped it over a thick cotton night gown. She wore
a black stocking and a white one. She had tied a little red fringed
shawl over her wild red hair. Her face was red and her eyes were mad.
I looked at her and felt that she could raise a rumpus.

I said, “You lead the army up to the Drip Mouth. Take that tin dishpan
you have with you and your hammer, and when the scabs and the mules
come up, begin to hammer and howl. Then all of you hammer and howl and
be ready to chase the scabs with your mops and brooms. Don’t be afraid
of anyone.”

Up the mountain side, yelling and hollering, she led the women, and
when the mules came up with the scabs and the coal, she began beating
on the dishpan and hollering and all the army joined in with her. The
sheriff tapped her on the shoulder.

“My dear lady,” said he, “remember the mules. Don’t frighten them.”

She took the old tin pan and she hit him with it and she hollered, “To
hell with you and the mules!”

He fell over and dropped into the creek. Then the mules began to rebel
against scabbing. They bucked and kicked the scab drivers and started
off for the barn. The scabs started running down hill, followed by the
army of women with their mops and pails and brooms.

A poll parrot in a near by shack screamed at the superintendent, “Got
hell, did you? Got hell?”

There was a great big doctor in the crowd, a company lap dog. He had
a little satchel in his hand and he said to me, impudent like, “Mrs.
Jones, I have a warrant for you.”

“All right,” said I. “Keep it in your pill bag until I come for it. I
am going to hold a meeting now.”

From that day on the women kept continual watch of the mines to see
that the company did not bring in scabs. Every day women with brooms
or mops in one hand and babies in the other arm wrapped in little
blankets, went to the mines and watched that no one went in. And all
night long they kept watch. They were heroic women. In the long years
to come the nation will pay them high tribute for they were fighting
for the advancement of a great country.

I held meetings throughout the surrounding country. The company was
spending money among the farmers, urging them not to do anything for
the miners. I went out with an old wagon and a union mule that had gone
on strike, and a miner’s little boy for a driver. I held meetings among
the farmers and won them to the side of the strikers.

Sometimes it was twelve or one o’clock in the morning when I would
get home, the little boy asleep on my arm and I driving the mule.
Sometimes it was several degrees below zero. The winds whistled down
the mountains and drove the snow and sleet in our faces. My hands and
feet were often numb. We were all living on dry bread and black coffee.
I slept in a room that never had a fire in it, and I often woke up in
the morning to find snow covering the outside covers of the bed.

There was a place near Arnot called Sweedy Town, and the company’s
agents went there to get the Swedes to break the strike. I was holding
a meeting among the farmers when I heard of the company’s efforts. I
got the young farmers to get on their horses and go over to Sweedy Town
and see that no Swede left town. They took clotheslines for lassos and
any Swede seen moving in the direction of Arnot was brought back quick
enough.

After months of terrible hardships the strike was about won. The mines
were not working. The spirit of the men was splendid. President Wilson
had come home from the western part of the state. I was staying at his
home. The family had gone to bed. We sat up late talking over matters
when there came a knock at the door. A very cautious knock.

“Come in,” said Mr. Wilson.

Three men entered. They looked at me uneasily and Mr. Wilson asked me
to step in an adjoining room. They talked the strike over and called
President Wilson’s attention to the fact that there were mortgages on
his little home, held by the bank which was owned by the coal company,
and they said, “We will take the mortgage off your home and give you
$25,000 in cash if you will just leave and let the strike die out.”

I shall never forget his reply:

“Gentlemen, if you come to visit my family, the hospitality of the
whole house is yours. But if you come to bribe me with dollars to
betray my manhood and my brothers who trust me, I want you to leave
this door and never come here again.”

The strike lasted a few weeks longer. Meantime President Wilson, when
strikers were evicted, cleaned out his barn and took care of the
evicted miners until homes could be provided. One by one he killed his
chickens and his hogs. Everything that he had he shared. He ate dry
bread and drank chicory. He knew every hardship that the rank and file
of the organization knew. We do not have such leaders now.

The last of February the company put up a notice that all demands were
conceded.

“Did you get the use of the hall for us to hold meetings?” said the
women.

“No, we didn’t ask for that.”

“Then the strike is on again,” said they.

They got the hall, and when the President, Mr. Wilson, returned from
the convention in Cincinnati he shed tears of joy and gratitude.

I was going to leave for the central fields, and before I left, the
union held a victory meeting in Bloosburg. The women came for miles in
a raging snow storm for that meeting, little children trailing on their
skirts, and babies under their shawls. Many of the miners had walked
miles. It was one night of real joy and a great celebration. I bade
them all good bye. A little boy called out, “Don’t leave us, Mother.
Don’t leave us!” The dear little children kissed my hands. We spent the
whole night in Bloosburg rejoicing. The men opened a few of the freight
cars out on a siding and helped themselves to boxes of beer. Old and
young talked and sang all night long and to the credit of the company
no one was interfered with.

Those were the days before the extensive use of gun men, of military,
of jails, of police clubs. There had been no bloodshed. There had been
no riots. And the victory was due to the army of women with their mops
and brooms.

A year afterward they celebrated the anniversary of the victory. They
presented me with a gold watch but I declined to accept it, for I felt
it was the price of the bread of the little children. I have not been
in Arnot since but in my travels over the country I often meet the men
and boys who carried through the strike so heroically.

CHAPTER VI

WAR IN WEST VIRGINIA

One night I went with an organizer named Scott to a mining town in the
Fairmont district where the miners had asked me to hold a meeting. When
we got off the car I asked Scott where I was to speak and he pointed to
a frame building. We walked in. There were lighted candles on an altar.
I looked around in the dim light. We were in a church and the benches
were filled with miners.

Outside the railing of the altar was a table. At one end sat the priest
with the money of the union in his hands. The president of the local
union sat at the other end of the table. I marched down the aisle.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Holding a meeting,” said the president.

“What for?”

“For the union, Mother. We rented the church for our meetings.”

I reached over and took the money from the priest. Then I turned to the
miners.

“Boys,” I said, “this is a praying institution. You should not
commercialize it. Get up, every one of you and go out in the open
fields.”

They got up and went out and sat around in a field while I spoke to
them. The sheriff was there and he did not allow any traffic to go
along the road while I was speaking. In front of us was a school house.
I pointed to it and I said, “Your ancestors fought for you to have
a share in that institution over there. It’s yours. See the school
board, and every Friday night hold your meetings there. Have your wives
clean it up Saturday morning for the children to enter Monday. Your
organization is not a praying institution. It’s a fighting institution.
It’s an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the
dead and fight like hell for the living!”

                                ----

Tom Haggerty was in charge of the Fairmont field. One Sunday morning,
the striking miners of Clarksburg started on a march to Monongha to
get out the miners in the camps along the line. We camped in the open
fields and held meetings on the road sides and in barns, preaching the
gospel of unionism.

The Consolidated Coal Company that owns the little town of New England
forbade the distribution of the notices of our meeting and arrested any
one found with a notice. But we got the news around. Several of our
men went into the camp. They went in twos. One pretended he was deaf
and the other kept hollering in his ear as they walked around, “Mother
Jones is going to have a meeting Sunday afternoon outside the town on
the sawdust pile.” Then the deaf fellow would ask him what he said and
he would holler to him again. So the word got around the entire camp
and we had a big crowd.

When the meeting adjourned, three miners and myself set out for
Fairmont City. The miners, Jo Battley, Charlie Blakelet and Barney
Rice walked but they got a little boy with a horse and buggy to drive
me over. I was to wait for the boys just outside the town, across the
bridge, just where the interurban car comes along.

The little lad and I drove along. It was dark when we came in sight
of the bridge which I had to cross. A dark building stood beside the
bridge. It was the Coal Company’s store. It was guarded by gunmen.
There was no light on the bridge and there was none in the store.

A gunman stopped us. I could not see his face.

“Who are you?” said he.

“Mother Jones,” said I, “and a miner’s lad.”

“So that’s you, Mother Jones,” said he rattling his gun.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said, “and be sure you take care of the store
tonight. Tomorrow I’ll have to be hunting a new job for you.”

I got out of the buggy where the road joins the Interurban tracks, just
across the bridge. I sent the lad home.

“When you pass my boys on the road tell them to hurry up. Tell them I’m
waiting just across the bridge.”

There wasn’t a house in sight. The only people near were the gunmen
whose dark figures I could now and then see moving on the bridge. It
grew very dark. I sat on the ground, waiting. I took out my watch,
lighted a match and saw that it was about time for the interurban.

Suddenly the sound of “Murder! Murder! Police! Help!” rang out through
the darkness. Then the sound of running and Barney Rice came screaming
across the bridge toward me. Blakelet followed, running so fast his
heels hit the back of his head. “Murder! Murder!” he was yelling.

I rushed toward them. “Where’s Jo?” I asked.

“They’re killing Jo--on the bridge--the gunmen.”

At that moment the Interurban car came in sight. It would stop at the
bridge. I thought of a scheme.

I ran onto the bridge, shouting, “Jo! Jo! The boys are coming. They’re
coming! The whole bunch’s coming. The car’s most here!”

Those bloodhounds for the coal company thought an army of miners was in
the Interurban car. They ran for cover, barricading themselves in the
company’s store. They left Jo on the bridge, his head broken and the
blood pouring from him. I tore my petticoat into strips, bandaged his
head, helped the boys to get him on to the Interurban car, and hurried
the car into Fairmont City.

We took him to the hotel and sent for a doctor who sewed up the great,
open cuts in his head. I sat up all night and nursed the poor fellow.
He was out of his head and thought I was his mother.

The next night Tom Haggerty and I addressed the union meeting, telling
them just what had happened. The men wanted to go clean up the gunmen
but I told them that would only make more trouble. The meeting
adjourned in a body to go see Jo. They went up to his room, six or
eight of them at a time, until they had all seen him.

We tried to get a warrant out for the arrest of the gunmen but we
couldn’t because the coal company controlled the judges and the courts.

Jo was not the only man who was beaten up by the gunmen. There were
many and the brutalities of these bloodhounds would fill volumes.

In Clarksburg, men were threatened with death if they even billed
meetings for me. But the railway men billed a meeting in the dead of
night and I went in there alone. The meeting was in the court house.
The place was packed. The mayor and all the city officials were there.

“Mr. Mayor,” I said, “will you kindly be chairman for a fellow American
citizen?”

He shook his head. No one would accept my offer.

“Then,” said I, “as chairman of the evening, I introduce myself, the
speaker of the evening, Mother Jones.”

The Fairmont field was finally organized to a man. The scabs and the
gunmen were driven out. Subsequently, through inefficient organizers,
through the treachery of the unions’ own officials, the unions lost
strength. The miners of the Fairmont field were finally betrayed by the
very men who were employed to protect their interests. Charlie Battley
tried to retrieve the losses but officers had become corrupt and men so
discouraged that he could do nothing.

It makes me sad indeed to think that the sacrifices men and women made
to get out from under the iron heel of the gunmen were so often in
vain! That the victories gained are so often destroyed by the treachery
of the workers’ own officials, men who themselves knew the bitterness
and cost of the struggle.

I am old now and I never expect to see the boys in the Fairmont
field again, but I like to think that I have had a share in changing
conditions for them and for their children.

The United Mine Workers had tried to organize Kelly Creek on the
Kanawah River but without results. Mr. Burke and Tom Lewis, members
of the board of the United Mine Workers, decided to go look the field
over for themselves. They took the train one night for Kelly Creek. The
train came to a high trestle over a steep canyon. Under some pretext
all the passengers except the two union officials were transferred to
another coach, the coach uncoupled and pulled across the trestle. The
officials were left on the trestle in the stalled car. They had to
crawl on their hands and knees along the tracks. Pitch blackness was
below them. The trestle was a one-way track. Just as they got to the
end of the trestle, a train thundered by.

When I heard of the coal company’s efforts to kill the union officers,
I decided I myself must go to Kelly Creek and rouse those slaves. I
took a nineteen-year-old boy, Ben Davis, with me. We walked on the east
bank of the Kanawah River on which Kelly Creek is situated. Before
daylight one morning, at a point opposite Kelly Creek, we forded the
river.

It was just dawn when I knocked at the door of a store run by a man by
the name of Marshall. I told him what I had come for. He was friendly.
He took me in a little back room where he gave me breakfast. He said
if anyone saw him giving food to Mother Jones he would lose his store
privilege. He told me how to get my bills announcing my meeting into
the mines by noon. But all the time he was frightened and kept looking
out the little window.

Late that night a group of miners gathered about a mile from town
between the boulders. We could not see one another’s faces in the
darkness. By the light of an old lantern I gave them the pledge.

The next day, forty men were discharged, blacklisted. There had been
spies among the men the night before. The following night we organized
another group and they were all discharged. This started the fight. Mr.
Marshall, the grocery man, got courageous. He rented me his store and
I began holding meetings there. The general manager for the mines came
over from Columbus and he held a meeting, too.

“Shame,” he said, “to be led away by an old woman!”

“Hurrah for Mother Jones!” shouted the miners.

The following Sunday I held a meeting in the woods. The general
manager, Mr. Jack Rowen, came down from Columbus on his special car. I
organized a parade of the men that Sunday. We had every miner with us.
We stood in front of the company’s hotel and yelled for the general
manager to come out. He did not appear. Two of the company’s lap dogs
were on the porch. One of them said, “I’d like to hang that old woman
to a tree.”

“Yes,” said the other, “and I’d like to pull the rope.”

On we marched to our meeting place under the trees. Over a thousand
people came and the two lap dogs came sniveling along too. I stood up
to speak and I put my back to a big tree and pointing to the curs, I
said, “You said that you would like to hang this old woman to a tree!
Well, here’s the old woman and here’s the tree. Bring along your rope
and hang her!”

And so the union was organized in Kelly Creek. I do not know whether
the men have held the gains they wrested from the company. Taking men
into the union is just the kindergarten of their education and every
force is against their further education. Men who live up those lonely
creeks have only the mine owners’ Y. M. C. A.s, the mine owners’
preachers and teachers, the mine owners’ doctors and newspapers to look
to for their ideas. So they don’t get many.

CHAPTER VII

A HUMAN JUDGE

In June of 1902 I was holding a meeting of the bituminous miners of
Clarksburg, West Virginia. I was talking on the strike question, for
what else among miners should one be talking of? Nine organizers sat
under a tree near by. A United States marshal notified them to tell me
that I was under arrest. One of them came up to the platform.

“Mother,” said he, “you’re under arrest. They’ve got an injunction
against your speaking.”

I looked over at the United States marshal and I said, “I will be
right with you. Wait till I run down.” I went on speaking till I
had finished. Then I said, “Goodbye, boys; I’m under arrest. I may
have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up this
fight! Don’t surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at
Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he
plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the
money powers.”

That night several of the organizers and myself were taken to
Parkersburg, a distance of eighty-four miles. Five deputy marshals
went with the men, and a nephew of the United States marshal, a nice
lad, took charge of me. On the train I got the lad very sympathetic to
the cause of the miners. When we got off the train, the boys and the
five marshals started off in one direction and we in the other.

“My boy,” I said to my guard, “look, we are going in the wrong
direction.”

“No, mother,” he said.

“Then they are going in the wrong direction, lad.”

“No, mother. You are going to a hotel. They are going to jail.”

“Lad,” said I, stopping where we were, “am I under arrest?”

“You are, mother.”

“Then I am going to jail with my boys.” I turned square around. “Did
you ever hear of Mother Jones going to a hotel while her boys were in
jail?”

I quickly followed the boys and went to jail with them. But the jailer
and his wife would not put me in a regular cell. “Mother,” they said,
“you’re our guest.” And they treated me as a member of the family,
getting out the best of everything and “plumping me” as they called
feeding me. I got a real good rest while I was with them.

We were taken to the Federal court for trial. We had violated something
they called an injunction. Whatever the bosses did not want the miners
to do they got out an injunction against doing it. The company put a
woman on the stand. She testified that I had told the miners to go into
the mines and throw out the scabs. She was a poor skinny woman with
scared eyes and she wore her best dress, as if she were in church. I
looked at the miserable slave of the coal company and I felt sorry for
her: sorry that there was a creature so low who would perjure herself
for a handful of coppers.

I was put on the stand and the judge asked me if I gave that advice to
the miners, told them to use violence.

“You know, sir,” said I, “that it would be suicidal for me to make such
a statement in public. I am more careful than that. You’ve been on the
bench forty years, have you not, judge?”

“Yes, I have that,” said he.

“And in forty years you learn to discern between a lie and the truth,
judge?”

The prosecuting attorney jumped to his feet and shaking his finger
at me, he said “Your honor, there is the most dangerous woman in the
country today. She called your honor a scab. But I will recommend mercy
of the court if she will consent to leave the state and never return.”

“I didn’t come into the court asking mercy,” I said, “but I came here
looking for justice. And I will not leave this state so long as there
is a single little child that asks me to stay and fight his battle for
bread.”

The judge said, “Did you call me a scab?”

“I certainly did, judge.”

He said, “How came you to call me a scab?”

“When you had me arrested I was only talking about the constitution,
speaking to a lot of men about life and liberty and a chance for
happiness; to men who had been robbed for years by their masters,
who had been made industrial slaves. I was thinking of the immortal
Lincoln. And it occurred to me that I had read in the papers that
when Lincoln made the appointment of Federal judge to this bench, he
did not designate senior or junior. You and your father bore the same
initials. Your father was away when the appointment came. You took the
appointment. Wasn’t that scabbing on your father, judge?”

“I never heard that before,” said he.

A chap came tiptoeing up to me and whispered, “Madam, don’t say ‘judge’
or ‘sir’ to the court. Say ‘Your Honor.’”

“Who is the court?” I whispered back.

“His honor, on the bench,” he said, looking shocked.

“Are you referring to the old chap behind the justice counter? Well, I
can’t call him ‘your honor’ until I know how honorable he is. You know
I took an oath to tell the truth when I took the witness stand.”

When the court session closed I was told that the judge wished to see
me in his chambers. When I entered the room, the judge reached out his
hand and took hold of mine, and he said, “I wish to give you proof that
I am not a scab; that I didn’t scab on my father.”

He handed me documents which proved that the reports were wrong and had
been circulated by his enemies.

“Judge,” I said, “I apologize. And I am glad to be tried by so human
a judge who resents being called a scab. And who would not want to be
one. You probably understand how we working people feel about it.”

He did not sentence me, just let me go, but he gave the men who were
arrested with me sixty and ninety days in jail.

I was going to leave Parkersburg the next night for Clarksburg. Mr.
Murphy, a citizen of Parkersburg, came to express his regrets that I
was going away. He said he was glad the judge did not sentence me. I
said to him, “If the injunction was violated I was the only one who
violated it. The boys did not speak at all. I regret that they had to
go to jail for me and that I should go free. But I am not trying to
break into jails. It really does not matter much; they are young and
strong and have a long time to carry on. I am old and have much yet to
do. Only Barney Rice has a bad heart and a frail, nervous wife. When
she hears of his imprisonment, she may have a collapse and perhaps
leave her little children without a mother’s care.”

Mr. Murphy said to me, “Mother Jones, I believe that if you went up and
explained Rice’s condition to the judge he would pardon him.”

I went to the judge’s house. He invited me to dinner.

“No, Judge,” I said, “I just came to see you about Barney Rice.”

“What about him?”

“He has heart disease and a nervous wife.”

“Heart disease, has he?”

“Yes, he has it bad and he might die in your jail. I know you don’t
want that.”

“No,” replied the judge, “I do not.”

He called the jailer and asked him to bring Rice to the phone. The
judge said, “How is your heart, Barney?”

“Me heart’s all right, all right,” said Barney. “It’s that damn ould
judge that put me in jail for sixty days that’s got something wrong wid
his heart. I was just trailing around with Mother Jones.”

“Nothing wrong with your heart, eh?”

“No, there ain’t a damn thing wrong wid me heart! Who are you anyhow
that’s talking?”

“Never mind, I want to know what is the matter with your heart?”

“Hell, me heart’s all right, I’m telling you.”

The judge turned to me and said, “Do you hear his language?”

I told him I did not hear and he repeated to me Barney’s answers. “He
swears every other word,” said the judge.

“Judge,” said I, “that is the way we ignorant working people pray.”

“Do you pray that way?”

“Yes, judge, when I want an answer quick.”

“But Barney says there is nothing the matter with his heart.”

“Judge, that fellow doesn’t know the difference between his heart and
his liver. I have been out to meetings with him and walking home down
the roads or on the railroad tracks, he has had to sit down to get his
breath.”

The judge called the jail doctor and told him to go and examine
Barney’s heart in the morning. Meantime I asked my friend, Mr. Murphy,
to see the jail doctor. Well, the next day Barney was let out of jail.

CHAPTER VIII

ROOSEVELT SENT FOR JOHN MITCHELL

The strike of the anthracite miners which started in the spring with
$90,000 in the treasury, ended in the fall with over a million dollars
in the possession of the United Mine Workers. The strike had been
peaceful. The miners had the support of the public. The tie up of the
collieries had been complete. Factories and railroads were without coal.

Toward fall New York began to suffer. In October, Mr. Roosevelt
summoned “Divine Right Baer”, President of the Coal Producers’ Union,
and other officials of the coal interests, to Washington. He called
also the officials of the miners’ union. They sat at the cabinet table,
the coal officials on one side, the miners’ officials at the other and
the president at the head of the table in between the two groups.

They discussed the matter and the mine owners would not consent to
any kind of settlement. Mr. Baer said that before he would consent to
arbitration with the union he would call out the militia and shoot the
miners back into the mines.

The meeting adjourned without results. Mr. Roosevelt sent for John
Mitchell. He patted him on the shoulder, told him that he was the true
patriot and loyal citizen and not the mine owners. After the conference
there was a deadlock.

Mr. Mitchell reported the conference to the miners. They said, “All
right. We have money enough to see this thing through. We will fight to
a finish. Until the coal operators recognize our union and deal with
our demands.”

Wall Street sent for Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan to come home from Europe.
He came. The situation was serious for the mine operators. The public
was indignant at their stubbornness.

A Mr. ---- wrote to Montgomery where I was organizing and asked me
to come to New York, saying he wished to discuss the strike with me.
I went to headquarters at Wilkesbarre and asked Mr. Mitchell what I
should do.

He said, “Go, Mother, but whatever you do, do not consent to any
outside group arbitrating this strike. The union won this strike. The
operators know that they are beaten and that they must deal with the
United Mine Workers.”

“No,” I said, “I will consent to no other group undertaking the
settlement. I will report to you.”

I met Mr. ---- and we went over the situation. He then went down to Mr.
Morgan’s office and I waited for him in his office until he returned.
“Mr. Morgan is most distressed,” he said on his return. “He says the
miners have us!”

On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Baer and his group met on Mr. Morgan’s yacht
out in the bay of New York. Mr. Root came down from Washington to
represent Roosevelt. Not a newspaperman was permitted out on that
yacht. There were no telegrams, no telephones, no messages. How to lose
the strike without apparently losing it was what they discussed. But
give the victory to the union they would not!

Mr. Root proposed the way out. The President should appoint “an
impartial board of inquiry.” This method of settling the strike would
avoid capitulation to the union, put the operators in the position of
yielding to public opinion, make the miners lose public support if they
refused to submit their cause to the board.

The next morning, Monday, my friend, Mr. ----, met Mr. Morgan at 209
Madison Avenue. He returned from that appointment, crying “The strike
is settled.”

I went back to Wilkesbarre and found that Mr. Mitchell had already been
to Washington and had consented to the arbitration of the strike by a
board appointed by the president.

“It would never do to refuse the president,” he said, when I tried to
dissuade him from taking part in the conferences.

“You have a good excuse to give the president,” I replied. “Tell him
that when you came home from the last conference in the cabinet room,
Mr. Baer said he would shoot the miners back before he would deal with
their union. Tell him that the miners said, ‘All right. We will fight
to a finish for the recognition of The United Mine Workers’.”

“It would not do to tell the president that,” he replied.

That night, Mr. Mitchell, accompanied by Mr. Wellman, Roosevelt’s
publicity man, went to Washington. He had an audience with the
president the next morning. Before he left the White House, the
newspapers, magazines and pulpits were shouting his praises, calling
him the greatest labor leader in all America. Mr. Mitchell was not
dishonest but he had a weak point, and that was his love of flattery;
and the interests used this weak point in furtherance of their designs.

When he returned to Wilkesbarre, priests, ministers and politicians
fell on their knees before him. Bands met him at the station. The men
took the horses from his carriage and drew it themselves. Parades with
banners marched in his honor beside the carriage. His black hair was
pushed back from his forehead. His face was pale. His dark eyes shone
with excitement. There were deep lines in his face from the long strain
he had been under.

Flattery and homage did its work with John Mitchell. The strike was
won. Absolutely no anthracite coal was being dug. The operators could
have been made to deal with the unions if Mr. Mitchell had stood firm.
A moral victory would have been won for the principle of unionism. This
to my mind was more important than the material gains which the miners
received through the later decision of the president’s board.

Mr. Mitchell died a rich man, distrusted by the working people whom he
once served.

From out that strike came the Irish Hessian law--the establishment
of a police constabulary. The bill was framed under the pretext that
it would protect the farmer. Workingmen went down to Harrisburg and
lobbied for it. They hated the coal and iron police of the mine owners
and thought anything preferable to them. They forgot that the coal and
iron police could join the constabulary and they forgot the history of
Ireland, whence the law came: Ireland, soaked with the blood of men and
of women, shed by the brutal constabulary.

“No honorable man will join,” said a labor leader to me when I spoke of
my fears.

“Then that leaves the workers up against the bad men, the gunmen and
thugs that do join,” I answered.

And that’s just where they have been left.

I attended the hearings of the board of inquiry, appointed by President
Roosevelt. Never shall I forget the words of John Mitchell as he
appeared before the commission:

“For more than twenty years the anthracite miners have groaned under
most intolerable and inhuman conditions. In a brotherhood of labor they
seek to remedy their wrongs.”

Never shall I forget the words of President Baer, speaking for the
operators:

“The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected not by
the labor agitator but by the Christian men and women to whom God in
His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of
this country.”

Never shall I forget the words of labor’s great pleader, Clarence
Darrow:

“These agents of the Almighty have seen men killed daily; have seen
men crippled, blinded and maimed and turned out to alms-houses and
on the roadsides with no compensation. They have seen the anthracite
region dotted with silk mills because the wages of the miner makes it
necessary for him to send his little girls to work twelve hours a day,
a night, in the factory ... at a child’s wage. President Baer sheds
tears because boys are taken into the union but he has no tears because
they are taken into the breakers.”

Never, never shall I forget his closing words, words which I shall hear
when my own life draws to its close:

“This contest is one of the important contests that have marked the
progress of human liberty since the world began. Every advantage that
the human race has won has been at fearful cost. Some men must die that
others may live. It has come to these poor miners to bear this cross,
not for themselves alone but that the human race may be lifted up to a
higher and broader plane.”

The commission found in favor of the miners in every one of their
demands. The operators gracefully bowed to their findings. Labor walked
into the House of Victory through the back door.

CHAPTER IX

MURDER IN WEST VIRGINIA

At the close of the anthracite strike in October, 1902, I went into the
unorganized sections of West Virginia with John H. Walker of Illinois.
Up and down along both sides of the New River we held meetings and
organized--Smithersfield, Long Acre, Canilton, Boomer.

The work was not easy or safe and I was lucky to have so fearless a
co-worker. Men who joined the union were blacklisted throughout the
entire section. Their families were thrown out on the highways. Men
were shot. They were beaten. Numbers disappeared and no trace of them
found. Store keepers were ordered not to sell to union men or their
families. Meetings had to be held in the woods at night, in abandoned
mines, in barns.

We held a meeting in Mount Hope. After the meeting adjourned, Walker
and I went back to our hotel. We talked till late. There came a tap on
the door.

“Come in,” I said.

A miner came into the room. He was lean and tall and coughed a lot.

“Mother,” he said, “there are twelve of us here and we want to
organize.”

I turned to Walker. “Mother,” he said, “the National Board told us to
educate and agitate but not to organize; that was to come later.”

“I’m going to organize these men tonight,” said I.

“I’m reckoning I’m not going to be mining coal so long in this world
and I thought I’d like to die organized,” said the spokesman for the
group.

I brought the other miners in my room and Mr. Walker gave them the
obligation.

“Now, boys, you are twelve in number. That was the number Christ had.
I hope that among your twelve there will be no Judas, no one who will
betray his fellow. The work you do is for your children and for the
future. You preach the gospel of better food, better homes, a decent
compensation for the wealth you produce. It is these things that make a
great nation.”

The spokesman kept up his terrible coughing. He had miner’s
consumption. As they had no money to pay for their charter I told them
that I would attend to that.

Three weeks afterward I had a letter from one of the group. He told me
that their spokesman was dead but they had organized eight hundred men
and they sent me the money for the charter.

In Caperton Mountain camp I met Duncan Kennedy, who is now commissioner
for the mine owners. He and his noble wife gave us shelter and fed
us when it was too late for us to go down the mountain and cross the
river to an inn. Often after meetings in this mountain district, we sat
through the night on the river bank. Frequently we would hear bullets
whizz past us as we sat huddled between boulders, our black clothes
making us invisible in the blackness of the night.

Seven organizers were sent into Laurel Creek. All came back, shot at,
beaten up, run out of town.

One organizer was chased out of town with a gun.

“What did you do?” I said.

“I ran.”

“Which way?” said I.

“Mother,” he said, “you mustn’t go up there. They’ve got gunmen
patrolling the roads.”

“That means the miners up there are prisoners,” said I, “and need me.”

A week later, one Saturday night I went with eight or ten trapper boys
to Thayer, a camp about six miles from Laurel Creek. Very early Sunday
morning we walked to Laurel Creek. I climbed the mountain so that I
could look down on the camp with its huddle of dirty shacks. I sat down
on a rock above the camp and told the trapper boys to go down to the
town and tell the boys to come up the mountain side. That Mother Jones
was going to speak at two o’clock and tell the superintendent that
Mother Jones extends a cordial invitation to him to come.

Then I sent two boys across a little gully to a log cabin to get a cup
of tea for me. The miner came out and beckoned to me to come over. I
went and as I entered the door, my eyes rested on a straw mattress on
which rested a beautiful young girl. She looked at me with the most
gentle eyes I ever saw in a human being. The wind came in through the
cracks of the floor and would raise the bed clothes a little.

I said to the father, “What is wrong with your girl?”

“Consumption,” said he. “I couldn’t earn enough in the mines and she
went to work in a boarding house. They worked her so hard she took
sick--consumption.”

Around a fireplace sat a group of dirty children, ragged and
neglected-looking. He gave us tea and bread.

A great crowd came up the mountain side that afternoon. The
superintendent sent one of his lackeys, a colored fellow. When the
miners told me who he was and that he was sent there as a spy, I said
to him, “See here, young man, don’t you know that the immortal Lincoln,
a white man, gave you freedom from slavery. Why do you now betray your
white brothers who are fighting for industrial freedom?”

“Mother,” said he, “I can’t make myself scarce but my hearing and my
eyesight ain’t extra today.”

That afternoon, up there on the mountain side, we organized a strong
union.

The next day the man who gave me food--his name was Mike
Harrington--went to the mines to go to work, but he was told to go
to the office and get his pay. No man could work in the mines, the
superintendent said, who entertained agitators in his home.

Mike said to him, “I didn’t entertain her. She paid me for the tea and
bread.”

“It makes no difference,” said he, “you had Mother Jones in your house
and that is sufficient.”

He went home and when he opened the door, his sick daughter said,
“Father, you have lost your job.” She started to sob. That brought on a
coughing fit from which she fell back on the pillow exhausted--dead.

That afternoon he was ordered to leave his house as it was owned by the
company. They buried the girl and moved to an old barn.

Mike was later made an organizer for the United Mine Workers and he
made one of the most faithful workers I have ever known.

In February of 1903, I went to Stanford Mountain where the men were
on strike. The court had issued an injunction forbidding the miners
from going near the mines. A group of miners walked along the public
road nowhere near the mines. The next morning they held a meeting in
their own hall which they themselves had built. A United States deputy
marshal came into the meeting with warrants for thirty members for
violating the injunction.

The men said, “We did not break any law. We did not go near the mines
and you know it. We were on the public road.”

“Well,” said the deputy, “we are going to arrest you anyway.”

They defied him to arrest them, insisting they had not violated the
law. They gave him twenty-five minutes to leave town. They sent for his
brother, who was the company doctor, and told him to take him out.

That night I went to hold a meeting with them. They told me what had
happened.

I said, “Boys, it would have been better if you had surrendered,
especially as you had the truth on your side and you had not been near
the mines.”

After the meeting I went to a nearby camp--Montgomery--where there was
a little hotel and the railway station. Before leaving, the boys, who
came to the edge of the town with me said, “You will be coming back
soon, Mother?”

I had no idea how soon it would be.

The next morning I went to the station to get an early train. The
agent said to me, “Did you hear what trouble they had up in Stanford
Mountain last night?”

“I think you are mistaken,” I answered, “for I just came down from
there myself last night.”

“Well,” he said, “they have had some trouble there, all the same.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“Yes; I was taking the railway messages and couldn’t get all the
details. Some shooting.”

I said, “Take back my ticket. I must go up to those boys.”

I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed
to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were
huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came
nearer the miners’ homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between
the stilts that propped up a miner’s shack the clay red with blood. I
pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His
brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with
bullets.

In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his
mother sobbed over the father’s corpse. When the little fellow saw me,
he said, “Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him.”

The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in
their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of
the coal company.

The coroner went. The men were buried on the mountain side. And nothing
was ever done to punish the men who had taken their lives.

CHAPTER X

THE MARCH OF THE MILL CHILDREN

In the spring of 1903 I went to Kensington, Pennsylvania, where
seventy-five thousand textile workers were on strike. Of this number at
least ten thousand were little children. The workers were striking for
more pay and shorter hours. Every day little children came into Union
Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing,
some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped little
things, round shouldered and skinny. Many of them were not over ten
years of age, although the state law prohibited their working before
they were twelve years of age.

The law was poorly enforced and the mothers of these children often
swore falsely as to their children’s age. In a single block in
Kensington, fourteen women, mothers of twenty-two children all under
twelve, explained it was a question of starvation or perjury. That the
fathers had been killed or maimed at the mines.

I asked the newspaper men why they didn’t publish the facts about child
labor in Pennsylvania. They said they couldn’t because the mill owners
had stock in the papers.

“Well, I’ve got stock in these little children,” said I, “and I’ll
arrange a little publicity.”

We assembled a number of boys and girls one morning in Independence
Park and from there we arranged to parade with banners to the court
house where we would hold a meeting.

A great crowd gathered in the public square in front of the city hall.
I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and
maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them
to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia’s mansions were
built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of
these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for
others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to
these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the
future citizens of the nation.

The officials of the city hall were standing in the open windows. I
held the little ones of the mills high up above the heads of the crowd
and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were
light to lift.

I called upon the millionaire manufacturers to cease their moral
murders, and I cried to the officials in the open windows opposite,
“Some day the workers will take possession of your city hall, and when
we do, no child will be sacrificed on the altar of profit.”

The officials quickly closed the windows, just as they had closed their
eyes and hearts.

The reporters quoted my statement that Philadelphia mansions were built
on the broken bones and quivering hearts of children. The Philadelphia
papers and the New York papers got into a squabble with each other over
the question. The universities discussed it. Preachers began talking.
That was what I wanted. Public attention on the subject of child labor.

The matter quieted down for a while and I concluded the people needed
stirring up again. The Liberty Bell that a century ago rang out for
freedom against tyranny was touring the country and crowds were coming
to see it everywhere. That gave me an idea. These little children were
striking for some of the freedom that childhood ought to have, and I
decided that the children and I would go on a tour.

I asked some of the parents if they would let me have their little boys
and girls for a week or ten days, promising to bring them back safe and
sound. They consented. A man named Sweeny was marshal for our “army.” A
few men and women went with me to help with the children. They were on
strike and I thought they might as well have a little recreation.

The children carried knapsacks on their backs in which was a knife and
fork, a tin cup and plate. We took along a wash boiler in which to cook
the food on the road. One little fellow had a drum and another had a
fife. That was our band. We carried banners that said, “We want more
schools and less hospitals.” “We want time to play.” “Prosperity is
here. Where is ours?”

We started from Philadelphia where we held a great mass meeting. I
decided to go with the children to see President Roosevelt to ask him
to have Congress pass a law prohibiting the exploitation of childhood.
I thought that President Roosevelt might see these mill children and
compare them with his own little ones who were spending the summer on
the seashore at Oyster Bay. I thought, too, out of politeness, we might
call on Morgan in Wall Street who owned the mines where many of these
children’s fathers worked.

The children were very happy, having plenty to eat, taking baths in the
brooks and rivers every day. I thought when the strike is over and they
go back to the mills, they will never have another holiday like this.
All along the line of march the farmers drove out to meet us with wagon
loads of fruit and vegetables. Their wives brought the children clothes
and money. The interurban trainmen would stop their trains and give us
free rides.

Marshal Sweeny and I would go ahead to the towns and arrange sleeping
quarters for the children, and secure meeting halls. As we marched on,
it grew terribly hot. There was no rain and the roads were heavy with
dust. From time to time we had to send some of the children back to
their homes. They were too weak to stand the march.

We were on the outskirts of New Trenton, New Jersey, cooking our lunch
in the wash boiler, when the conductor on the interurban car stopped
and told us the police were coming down to notify us that we could not
enter the town. There were mills in the town and the mill owners didn’t
like our coming.

I said, “All right, the police will be just in time for lunch.”

Sure enough, the police came and we invited them to dine with us. They
looked at the little gathering of children with their tin plates and
cups around the wash boiler. They just smiled and spoke kindly to the
children, and said nothing at all about not going into the city.

We went in, held our meeting, and it was the wives of the police who
took the little children and cared for them that night, sending them
back in the morning with a nice lunch rolled up in paper napkins.

Everywhere we had meetings, showing up with living children, the
horrors of child labor.

At one town the mayor said we could not hold a meeting because he did
not have sufficient police protection. “These little children have
never known any sort of protection, your honor,” I said, “and they are
used to going without it.” He let us have our meeting.

One night in Princeton, New Jersey, we slept in the big cool barn on
Grover Cleveland’s great estate. The heat became intense. There was
much suffering in our ranks, for our little ones were not robust. The
proprietor of the leading hotel sent for me. “Mother,” he said, “order
what you want and all you want for your army, and there’s nothing to
pay.”

I called on the mayor of Princeton and asked for permission to speak
opposite the campus of the University. I said I wanted to speak on
higher education. The mayor gave me permission. A great crowd gathered,
professors and students and the people; and I told them that the rich
robbed these little children of any education of the lowest order that
they might send their sons and daughters to places of higher education.
That they used the hands and feet of little children that they might
buy automobiles for their wives and police dogs for their daughters
to talk French to. I said the mill owners take babies almost from the
cradle. And I showed those professors children in our army who could
scarcely read or write because they were working ten hours a day in the
silk mills of Pennsylvania.

“Here’s a text book on economics,” I said, pointing to a little chap,
James Ashworth, who was ten years old and who was stooped over like an
old man from carrying bundles of yarn that weighed seventy-five pounds.
“He gets three dollars a week and his sister who is fourteen gets
six dollars. They work in a carpet factory ten hours a day while the
children of the rich are getting their higher education.”

That night we camped on the banks of Stony Brook where years and
years before the ragged Revolutionary Army camped, Washington’s brave
soldiers that made their fight for freedom.

From Jersey City we marched to Hoboken. I sent a committee over to the
New York Chief of Police, Ebstein, asking for permission to march up
Fourth Avenue to Madison Square where I wanted to hold a meeting. The
chief refused and forbade our entrance to the city.

I went over myself to New York and saw Mayor Seth Low. The mayor
was most courteous but he said he would have to support the police
commissioner. I asked him what the reason was for refusing us entrance
to the city and he said that we were not citizens of New York.

“Oh, I think we will clear that up, Mr. Mayor,” I said. “Permit me to
call your attention to an incident which took place in this nation just
a year ago. A piece of rotten royalty came over here from Germany,
called Prince Henry. The Congress of the United States voted $45,000
to fill that fellow’s stomach for three weeks and to entertain him.
His brother was getting $4,000,000 dividends out of the blood of the
workers in this country. Was he a citizen of this land?”

“And it was reported, Mr. Mayor, that you and all the officials of New
York and the University Club entertained that chap.” And I repeated,
“Was he a citizen of New York?”

“No, Mother,” said the mayor, “he was not.”

“And a Chinaman called Lee Woo was also entertained by the officials of
New York. Was he a citizen of New York?”

“No, Mother, he was not.”

“Did they ever create any wealth for our nation?”

“No, Mother, they did not,” said he.

“Well, Mr. Mayor, these are the little citizens of the nation and they
also produce its wealth. Aren’t we entitled to enter your city?”

“Just wait,” says he, and he called the commissioner of police over to
his office.

Well, finally they decided to let the army come in. We marched up
Fourth Avenue to Madison Square and police officers, captains,
sergeants, roundsmen and reserves from three precincts accompanied us.
But the police would not let us hold a meeting in Madison Square. They
insisted that the meeting be held in Twentieth Street.

I pointed out to the captain that the single taxers were allowed to
hold meetings in the square. “Yes,” he said, “but they won’t have
twenty people and you might have twenty thousand.”

We marched to Twentieth Street. I told an immense crowd of the horrors
of child labor in the mills around the anthracite region and I showed
them some of the children. I showed them Eddie Dunphy, a little fellow
of twelve, whose job it was to sit all day on a high stool, handing in
the right thread to another worker. Eleven hours a day he sat on the
high stool with dangerous machinery all about him. All day long, winter
and summer, spring and fall, for three dollars a week.

And then I showed them Gussie Rangnew, a little girl from whom all the
childhood had gone. Her face was like an old woman’s. Gussie packed
stockings in a factory, eleven hours a day for a few cents a day.

We raised a lot of money for the strikers and hundreds of friends
offered their homes to the little ones while we were in the city.

The next day we went to Coney Island at the invitation of Mr. Bostick
who owned the wild animal show. The children had a wonderful day such
as they never had in all their lives. After the exhibition of the
trained animals, Mr. Bostick let me speak to the audience. There was a
back drop to the tiny stage of the Roman Colosseum with the audience
painted in and two Roman emperors down in front with their thumbs
down. Right in front of the emperors were the empty iron cages of the
animals. I put my little children in the cages and they clung to the
iron bars while I talked.

I told the crowd that the scene was typical of the aristocracy of
employers with their thumbs down to the little ones of the mills and
factories, and people sitting dumbly by.

“We want President Roosevelt to hear the wail of the children who
never have a chance to go to school but work eleven and twelve hours a
day in the textile mills of Pennsylvania; who weave the carpets that
he and you walk upon; and the lace curtains in your windows, and the
clothes of the people. Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery
and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on
the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the
manufacturers. Fifty years ago the black babies were sold C. O. D.
Today the white baby is sold on the installment plan.

“In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they
have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little
children from whom all song is gone?

“I shall ask the president in the name of the aching hearts of these
little ones that he emancipate them from slavery. I will tell the
president that the prosperity he boasts of is the prosperity of the
rich wrung from the poor and the helpless.

“The trouble is that no one in Washington cares. I saw our legislators
in one hour pass three bills for the relief of the railways but when
labor cries for aid for the children they will not listen.

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said
he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad
he would be a United States Senator.

“We are told that every American boy has the chance of being president.
I tell you that these little boys in the iron cages would sell their
chance any day for good square meals and a chance to play. These little
toilers whom I have taken from the mills--deformed, dwarfed in body and
soul, with nothing but toil before them--have never heard that they
have a chance, the chance of every American male citizen, to become the
president.

“You see those monkeys in those cages over there.” I pointed to a side
cage. “The professors are trying to teach them to talk. The monkeys are
too wise for they fear that the manufacturers would buy them for slaves
in their factories.”

I saw a stylishly dressed young man down in the front of the audience.
Several times he grinned. I stopped speaking and pointing to him I
said, “Stop your smiling, young man! Leave this place! Go home and
beg the mother who bore you in pain, as the mothers of these little
children bore them, go home and beg her to give you brains and a heart.”

He rose and slunk out, followed by the eyes of the children in the
cage. The people sat stone still and out in the rear a lion roared.

The next day we left Coney Island for Manhattan Beach to visit Senator
Platt, who had made an appointment to see me at nine o’clock in the
morning. The children got stuck in the sand banks and I had a time
cleaning the sand off the littlest ones. So we started to walk on the
railroad track. I was told it was private property and we had to get
off. Finally a saloon keeper showed us a short cut into the sacred
grounds of the hotel and suddenly the army appeared in the lobby. The
little fellows played “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here” on their fifes
and drums, and Senator Platt when he saw the little army ran away
through the back door to New York.

I asked the manager if he would give the children breakfast and charge
it up to the Senator as we had an invitation to breakfast that morning
with him. He gave us a private room and he gave those children such a
breakfast as they had never had in all their lives. I had breakfast
too, and a reporter from one of the Hearst papers and I charged it all
up to Senator Platt.

We marched down to Oyster Bay but the president refused to see us and
he would not answer my letters. But our march had done its work. We
had drawn the attention of the nation to the crime of child labor. And
while the strike of the textile workers in Kensington was lost and
the children driven back to work, not long afterward the Pennsylvania
legislature passed a child labor law that sent thousands of children
home from the mills, and kept thousands of others from entering the
factory until they were fourteen years of age.

CHAPTER XI

THOSE MULES WON’T SCAB TODAY

Lattimer was an eye-sore to the miners. It seemed as if no one could
break into it. Twenty-six organizers and union men had been killed in
that coal camp in previous strikes. Some of them had been shot in the
back. The blood of union men watered the highways. No one dared go in.

I said nothing about it but made up my mind that I was going there some
night. After the raid of the women in Coaldale in the Panther Creek,
the general manager of Lattimer said that if I came in there I would go
out a corpse. I made no reply but I set my plans and I did not consult
an undertaker.

From three different camps in the Panther Creek I had a leader bring a
group of strikers to a junction of the road that leads into Lattimer.
There I met them with my army of women again.

As I was leaving the hotel the clerk said, “Mother, the reporters told
me to ring their bell if I saw you go out.”

“Well, don’t see me go out. Watch the front door carefully and I will
go out the back door.”

We marched through the night, reaching Lattimer just before dawn. The
strikers hid themselves in the mines. The women took up their position
on the door steps of the miners’ shacks. When a miner stepped out of
his house to go to work, the women started mopping the step, shouting,
“No work today!”

Everybody came running out into the dirt streets. “God, it is the old
mother and her army,” they were all saying.

The Lattimer miners and the mule drivers were afraid to quit work. They
had been made cowards. They took the mules, lighted the lamps in their
caps and started down the mines, not knowing that I had three thousand
miners down below ground waiting for them and the mules.

“Those mules won’t scab today,” I said to the general manager who was
cursing everybody. “They know it is going to be a holiday.”

“Take those mules down!” shouted the general manager.

Mules and drivers and miners disappeared down into the earth. I kept
the women singing patriotic songs so as to drown the noise of the men
down in the mines.

Directly the mules came up to the surface without a driver, and we
women cheered for the mules who were the first to become good union
citizens. They were followed by the miners who began running home.
Those that didn’t go up were sent up. Those that insisted on working
and thus defeating their brothers were grabbed by the women and carried
to their wives.

An old Irish woman had two sons who were scabs. The women threw one
of them over the fence to his mother. He lay there still. His mother
thought he was dead and she ran into the house for a bottle of holy
water and shook it over Mike.

“Oh for God’s sake, come back to life,” she hollered. “Come back and
join the union.”

He opened his eyes and saw our women standing around him.

“Shure, I’ll go to hell before I’ll scab again,” says he.

The general manager called the sheriff who asked me to take the women
away. I said, “Sheriff, no one is going to get hurt, no property is
going to be destroyed but there are to be no more killings of innocent
men here.”

I told him if he wanted peace he should put up a notice that the mines
were closed until the strike was settled.

The day was filled with excitement. The deputies kept inside the
office; the general manager also. Our men stayed up at the mines to
attend to the scabs and the women did the rest. As a matter of fact the
majority of the men, those with any spirit left in them after years of
cowardice, wanted to strike but had not dared. But when a hand was
held out to them, they took hold and marched along with their brothers.

The bosses telephoned to John Mitchell that he should take me and
my army of women out of Lattimer. That was the first knowledge that
Mitchell had of my being there.

When the manager saw there was no hope and that the battle was won by
the miners, he came out and put up a notice that the mines were closed
until the strike was settled.

I left Lattimer with my army of women and went up to Hazelton.
President Mitchell and his organizers were there. Mr. Mitchell said,
“Weren’t you afraid to go in there?”

“No,” I said, “I am not afraid to face any thing if facing it may bring
relief to the class that I belong to.”

The victory of Lattimer gave new life to the whole anthracite district.
It gave courage to the organization. Those brave women I shall never
forget who caused those stone walls to fall by marching around with tin
pans and cat calls.

Soon afterward, a convention was called and the strike was settled. The
organizers got up a document asking every miner to subscribe so much to
purchase a $10,000 house for John Mitchell. The document happened to
come into my hands at the convention which was called to call off the
victorious strike. I arose and I said:

“If John Mitchell can’t buy a house to suit him for his wife and for
his family out of his salary, then I would suggest that he get a job
that will give him a salary to buy a $10,000 house. Most of you do not
own a shingle on the roof that covers you. Every decent man buys a
house for his own wife first before he buys a house for another man’s
wife.”

I was holding the petition as I spoke and I tore it up and threw the
bits on the floor. “’Tis you men and your women who won the strike,”
I said, “with your sacrifice and your patience and your forbearance
through all these past weary months. ’Tis the sacrifice of your
brothers in other trades who sent the strike benefits week in and week
out that enabled you to make the fight to the end.”

From then on Mitchell was not friendly to me. He took my attitude as
one of personal enmity. And he saw that he could not control me. He had
tasted power and this finally destroyed him. I believe that no man who
holds a leader’s position should ever accept favors from either side.
He is then committed to show favors. A leader must stand alone.

CHAPTER XII

HOW THE WOMEN MOPPED UP COALDALE

In Lonaconia, Maryland, there was a strike. I was there. In Hazelton,
Pennsylvania, a convention was called to discuss the anthracite strike.
I was there when they issued the strike call. One hundred and fifty
thousand men responded. The men of Scranton and Shamokin and Coaldale
and Panther Creek and Valley Battle. And I was there.

In Shamokin I met Miles Daugherty, an organizer. When he quit work and
drew his pay, he gave one-half of his pay envelope to his wife and the
other half he kept to rent halls and pay for lights for the union.
Organizers did not draw much salary in those days and they did heroic,
unselfish work.

Not far from Shamokin, in a little mountain town, the priest was
holding a meeting when I went in. He was speaking in the church. I
spoke in an open field. The priest told the men to go back and obey
their masters and their reward would be in Heaven. He denounced the
strikers as children of darkness. The miners left the church in a body
and marched over to my meeting.

“Boys,” I said, “this strike is called in order that you and your wives
and your little ones may get a bit of Heaven before you die.”

We organized the entire camp.

The fight went on. In Coaldale, in the Hazelton district, the miners
were not permitted to assemble in any hall. It was necessary to win the
strike in that district that the Coaldale miners be organized.

I went to a nearby mining town that was thoroughly organized and asked
the women if they would help me get the Coaldale men out. This was
in McAdoo. I told them to leave their men at home to take care of
the family. I asked them to put on their kitchen clothes and bring
mops and brooms with them and a couple of tin pans. We marched over
the mountains fifteen miles, beating on the tin pans as if they were
cymbals. At three o’clock in the morning we met the Crack Thirteen
of the militia, patrolling the roads to Coaldale. The colonel of the
regiment said “Halt! Move back!”

I said, “Colonel, the working men of America will not halt nor will
they ever go back. The working man is going forward!”

“I’ll charge bayonets,” said he.

“On whom?”

“On your people.”

“We are not enemies,” said I. “We are just a band of working women
whose brothers and husbands are in a battle for bread. We want our
brothers in Coaldale to join us in our fight. We are here on the
mountain road for our children’s sake, for the nation’s sake. We are
not going to hurt anyone and surely you would not hurt us.”

They kept us there till daybreak and when they saw the army of women in
kitchen aprons, with dishpans and mops, they laughed and let us pass.
An army of strong mining women makes a wonderfully spectacular picture.

Well, when the miners in the Coaldale camp started to go to work
they were met by the McAdoo women who were beating on their pans and
shouting, “Join the union! Join the union!”

They joined, every last man of them, and we got so enthusiastic that we
organized the street car men who promised to haul no scabs for the coal
companies. As there were no other groups to organize we marched over
the mountains home, beating on our pans and singing patriotic songs.

Meanwhile President Mitchell and all his organizers were sleeping in
the Valley Hotel over in Hazelton. They knew nothing of our march onto
Coaldale until the newspaper men telephoned to him that “Mother Jones
was raising hell up in the mountains with a bunch of wild women!”

He, of course, got nervous. He might have gotten more nervous if he
had known how we made the mine bosses go home and how we told their
wives to clean them up and make decent American citizens out of them.
How we went around to the kitchen of the hotel where the militia were
quartered and ate the breakfast that was on the table for the soldiers.

When I got back to Hazelton, Mitchell looked at me with surprise. I
was worn out. Coaldale had been a strenuous night and morning and its
thirty mile tramp. I assured Mitchell that no one had been hurt and no
property injured. The military had acted like human beings. They took
the matter as a joke. They enjoyed the morning’s fun. I told him how
scared the sheriff had been. He had been talking to me without knowing
who I was.

“Oh Lord,” he said, “that Mother Jones is sure a dangerous woman.”

“Why don’t you arrest her?” I asked him.

“Oh Lord, I couldn’t. I’d have that mob of women with their mops and
brooms after me and the jail ain’t big enough to hold them all. They’d
mop the life out of a fellow!”

Mr. Mitchell said, “My God, Mother, did you get home safe? What did you
do?”

“I got five thousand men out and organized them. We had time left over
so we organized the street car men and they will not haul any scabs
into camp.”

“Did you get hurt, Mother?”

“No, we did the hurting.”

“Didn’t the superintendents’ bosses get after you?”

“No, we got after them. Their wives and our women were yelling around
like cats. It was a great fight.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE CRIPPLE CREEK STRIKE

(1903)

The state of Colorado belonged not to a republic but to the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company, the Victor Company and their dependencies. The
governor was their agent. The militia under Bell did their bidding.
Whenever the masters of the state told the governor to bark, he yelped
for them like a mad hound. Whenever they told the military to bite,
they bit.

The people of Colorado had voted overwhelmingly for an eight-hour day.
The legislature passed an eight-hour law but the courts had declared
it unconstitutional. Then when the measure was submitted directly to
the people, they voted for it with 40,000 votes majority. But the next
legislature, which was controlled by the mining interests, failed to
pass the bill.

The miners saw that they could not get their demands through peaceful
legislation. That they must fight. That they must strike. All the metal
miners struck first. The strike extended into New Mexico and Utah. It
became an ugly war. The metal miners were anxious to have the coal
miners join them in their struggle.

The executive board of the United Mine Workers was in session in
Indianapolis and to this board the governor of Colorado had sent a
delegation to convince them that there ought not to be a strike in the
coal fields. Among the delegates, was a labor commissioner.

I was going on my way to West Virginia from Mount Olive, Illinois,
where the miners were commemorating their dead. I stopped off at
headquarters in Indianapolis. The executive board asked me to go to
Colorado, look into conditions there, see what the sentiments of the
miners were, and make a report to the office.

I went immediately to Colorado, first to the office of The Western
Federation of Miners where I heard the story of the industrial
conflict. I then got myself an old calico dress, a sunbonnet, some pins
and needles, elastic and tape and such sundries, and went down to the
southern coal fields of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

As a peddler, I went through the various coal camps, eating in the
homes of the miners, staying all night with their families. I found the
conditions under which they lived deplorable. They were in practical
slavery to the company, who owned their houses, owned all the land, so
that if a miner did own a house he must vacate whenever it pleased
the land owners. They were paid in scrip instead of money so that they
could not go away if dissatisfied. They must buy at company stores and
at company prices. The coal they mined was weighed by an agent of the
company and the miners could not have a check weighman to see that full
credit was given them. The schools, the churches, the roads belonged to
the Company. I felt, after listening to their stories, after witnessing
their long patience that the time was ripe for revolt against such
brutal conditions.

I went to Trinidad and to the office of the Western Federation of
Miners. I talked with the secretary, Gillmore, a loyal, hard-working
man, and with the President, Howell, a good, honest soul. We sat up and
talked the matter over far into the night. I showed them the conditions
I had found down in the mining camps were heart-rending, and I felt it
was our business to remedy those conditions and bring some future, some
sunlight at least into the lives of the children. They deputized me to
go at once to headquarters in Indianapolis.

I took the train the next morning. When I arrived at the office in
Indianapolis, I found the president, John Mitchell, the vice-president,
T. L. Lewis, the secretary, W. B. Wilson of Arnot, Pennsylvania, and a
board member, called “old man Ream,” from Iowa. These officers told me
to return at once to Colorado and they would call a strike of the coal
miners.

The strike was called November 9th, 1903. The demand was for an eight
hour day, a check weighman representing the miners, payment in money
instead of scrip. The whole state of Colorado was in revolt. No coal
was dug. November is a cold month in Colorado and the citizens began to
feel the pressure of the strike.

Late one evening in the latter part of November I came into the hotel.
I had been working all day and into the night among the miners and
their families, helping to distribute food and clothes, encouraging,
holding meetings. As I was about to retire, the hotel clerk called me
down to answer a long distance telephone call from Louisville. The
voice said, “Oh for God’s sake, Mother, come to us, come to us!”

I asked what the trouble was and the reply was more a cry than an
answer, “Oh don’t wait to ask. Don’t miss the train.”

I got Mr. Howell, the president, on the telephone and asked him what
was the trouble in Louisville.

“They are having a convention there,” he said.

“A convention, is it, and what for?”

“To call off the strike in the northern coal fields because the
operators have yielded to the demands.” He did not look at me as he
spoke. I could see he was heart sick.

“But they cannot go back until the operators settle with the southern
miners,” I said. “They will not desert their brothers until the strike
is won! Are you going to let them do it?”

“Oh Mother,” he almost cried, “I can’t help it. It is the National
Headquarters who have ordered them back!”

“That’s treachery,” I said, “quick, get ready and come with me.”

We telephoned down to the station to have the conductor hold the train
for Louisville a few minutes. This he did. We got into Louisville
the next morning. I had not slept. The board member, Ream, and Grant
Hamilton, representing the Federation of Labor, came to the hotel where
I was stopping and asked where Mr. Howell, the president was.

“He has just stepped out,” I said. “He will be back.”

“Well, meantime, I want to notify you,” Ream said, “that you must
not block the settlement of the northern miners because the National
President, John Mitchell, wants it, and he pays you.”

“Are you through?” said I.

He nodded.

“Then I am going to tell you that if God Almighty wants this strike
called off for his benefit and not for the miners, I am going to raise
my voice against it. And as to President John paying me ... he never
paid me a penny in his life. It is the hard earned nickels and dimes
of the miners that pay me, and it is their interests that I am going to
serve.”

I went to the convention and heard the matter of the northern miners
returning to the mines discussed. I watched two shrewd diplomats deal
with unsophisticated men; Struby, the president of the northern coal
fields, and Blood, one of the keenest, trickiest lawyers in the West.
And behind them, John Mitchell, toasted and wined and dined, flattered
and cajoled by the Denver Citizens’ Alliance, and the Civic Federation
was pulling the strings.

In the afternoon the miners called on me to address the convention.

“Brothers,” I said, “You English speaking miners of the northern
fields promised your southern brothers, seventy per cent of whom do
not speak English, that you would support them to the end. Now you are
asked to betray them, to make a separate settlement. You have a common
enemy and it is your duty to fight to a finish. The enemy seeks to
conquer by dividing your ranks, by making distinctions between North
and South, between American and foreign. You are all miners, fighting
a common cause, a common master. The iron heel feels the same to all
flesh. Hunger and suffering and the cause of your children bind more
closely than a common tongue. I am accused of helping the Western
Federation of Miners, as if that were a crime, by one of the National
board members. I plead guilty. I know no East or West, North nor South
when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is
my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every
workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in
Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”

The delegates rose en masse to cheer. The vote was taken. The majority
decided to stand by the southern miners, refusing to obey the national
President.

The Denver Post reported my speech and a copy was sent to Mr. Mitchell
in Indianapolis. He took the paper in to his secretary and said,
pointing to the report, “See what Mother Jones has done to me!”

Three times Mitchell tried to make the northern miners return to the
mines but each time he was unsuccessful. “Mitchell has got to get
Mother Jones out of the field,” an organizer said. “He can never lick
the Federation as long as she is in there.”

I was informed that Mitchell went to the governor and asked him to put
me out of the state.

Finally the ultimatum was given to the northern miners. All support for
the strike was withdrawn. The northern miners accepted the operators’
terms and returned to work. Their act created practical peonage in the
south and the strike was eventually lost, although the struggle in the
south went on for a year.

Much of the fighting took place around Cripple Creek. The miners were
evicted from their company-owned houses. They went out on the bleak
mountain sides, lived in tents through a terrible winter with the
temperature below zero, with eighteen inches of snow on the ground.
They tied their feet in gunny sacks and lived lean and lank and hungry
as timber wolves. They received sixty-three cents a week strike
benefit while John Mitchell went traveling through Europe, staying at
fashionable hotels, studying the labor movement. When he returned the
miners had been lashed back into the mines by hunger but John Mitchell
was given a banquet in the Park Avenue Hotel and presented with a watch
with diamonds.

From the day I opposed John Mitchell’s authority, the guns were turned
on me. Slander and persecution followed me like black shadows. But the
fight went on.

One night when I came in from the field where I had been holding
meetings, I was just dropping to sleep when a knock--a loud knock--came
on my door. I always slept in my clothes for I never knew what might
happen. I went to the door, opened it, and faced a military chap.

“The Colonel wants you up at headquarters.”

I went with him immediately. Three or four others were brought in: War
John and Joe Pajammy, organizers. We were all taken down to the Santa
Fe station. While standing there, waiting for the train that was to
deport us, some of the miners ran down to bid me good-bye. “Mother,
good-bye,” they said, stretching out their hands to take mine.

The colonel struck their hands and yelled at them. “Get away from
there. You can’t shake hands with that woman!”

The militia took us to La Junta. They handed me a letter from the
governor, notifying me that under no circumstances could I return to
the State of Colorado. I sat all night in the station. In the morning
the Denver train came along. I had no food, no money. I asked the
conductor to take me to Denver. He said he would.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t want you to lose your job.”

I showed him the letter from the governor. He read it.

“Mother,” he said, “do you want to go to Denver?”

“I do,” said I.

“Then to Hell with the job;” said he, “it’s to Denver you go.”

In Denver I got a room and rested a while. I sat down and wrote a
letter to the governor, the obedient little boy of the coal companies.

[Illustration: Mother Jones Heading Protest Procession of Strikers at
Denver]

“Mr. Governor, you notified your dogs of war to put me out of the
state. They complied with your instructions. I hold in my hand a
letter that was handed to me by one of them, which says ‘under no
circumstances return to this state.’ I wish to notify you, governor,
that you don’t own the state. When it was admitted to the sisterhood of
states, my fathers gave me a share of stock in it; and that is all they
gave to you. The civil courts are open. If I break a law of state or
nation it is the duty of the civil courts to deal with me. That is why
my forefathers established those courts to keep dictators and tyrants
such as you from interfering with civilians. I am right here in the
capital, after being out nine or ten hours, four or five blocks from
your office. I want to ask you, governor, what in Hell are you going to
do about it?”

I called a messenger and sent it up to the governor’s office. He read
it and a reporter who was present in the office at the time told me his
face grew red.

“What shall I do?” he said to the reporter. He was used to acting under
orders.

“Leave her alone,” counselled the reporter. “There is no more patriotic
citizen in America.”

From Denver I went down the Western Slope, holding meetings, cheering
and encouraging those toiling and disinherited miners who were
fighting against such monstrous odds.

I went to Helper, Utah, and got a room with a very nice Italian family.
I was to hold a meeting Sunday afternoon. From every quarter the men
came, trudging miles over the mountains. The shop men were notified
not to come but they came anyhow. Just as the meeting was about to
open, the mayor of the little town came to me and said that I could not
hold a meeting; that I was on company ground. I asked him how far his
jurisdiction extended. He said as far as the Company’s jurisdiction. He
was a Company mayor.

So I turned to the audience and asked them to follow me. The audience
to a man followed me to a little tent colony at Half Way that the
miners had established when they had been evicted from their homes.

When the meeting closed I returned to Helper. The next day, although
there was no smallpox in town, a frame shack was built to isolate
smallpox sufferers in. I was notified that I had been exposed to
smallpox and must be incarcerated in the shack. But somehow that night
the shack burned down.

I went to stay in Half Way because the Italian family were afraid to
keep me longer. Another Italian family gave me a bare room in their
shack. There was only a big stone to fasten the door. No sooner was I
located than the militia notified me that I was in quarantine because
I had been exposed to smallpox. But I used to go out and talk to the
miners and they used to come to me.

One Saturday night I got tipped off by the postoffice master that the
militia were going to raid the little tent colony in the early morning.
I called the miners to me and asked them if they had guns. Sure, they
had guns. They were western men, men of the mountains. I told them to
go bury them between the boulders; deputies were coming to take them
away from them. I did not tell them that there was to be a raid for I
did not want any bloodshed. Better to submit to arrest.

Between 4:30 and 5 o’clock in the morning I heard the tramp of feet on
the road. I looked out of my smallpox window and saw about forty-five
deputies. They descended upon the sleeping tent colony, dragged the
miners out of their beds. They did not allow them to put on their
clothing. The miners begged to be allowed to put on their clothes, for
at that early hour the mountain range is the coldest. Shaking with
cold, followed by the shrieks and wails of their wives and children,
beaten along the road by guns, they were driven like cattle to Helper.
In the evening they were packed in a box car and run down to Price, the
county seat and put in jail.

Not one law had these miners broken. The pitiful screams of the women
and children would have penetrated Heaven. Their tears melted the
heart of the Mother of Sorrows. Their crime was that they had struck
against the power of gold.

The women huddled beneath the window of the house where I was
incarcerated for smallpox.

“Oh Mother, what shall we do?” they wailed. “What’s to become of our
little children!”

“See my little Johnny,” said one woman, holding up a tiny, red
baby--new born.

“That’s a nice baby,” I said.

“He sick. Pretty soon he die. Company take house. Company take my man.
Pretty soon company take my baby.”

Two days after this raid was made, the stone that held my door was
suddenly pushed in. A fellow jumped into the room, stuck a gun under my
jaw and told me to tell him where he could get $3,000 of the miners’
money or he would blow out my brains.

“Don’t waste your powder,” I said. “You write the miners up in
Indianapolis. Write Mitchell. He’s got money now.”

“I don’t want any of your damn talk,” he replied, then asked:

“Hasn’t the president got money?”

“You got him in jail.”

“Haven’t you got any money?”

“Sure!” I put my hand in my pocket, took out fifty cents and turned the
pocket inside out.

“Is that all you got?”

“Sure, and I’m not going to give it to you, for I want it to get a jag
on to boil the Helen Gould smallpox out of my system so I will not
inoculate the whole nation when I get out of here.”

“How are you going to get out of here if you haven’t money when they
turn you loose?”

“The railway men will take me anywhere.”

There were two other deputies outside. They kept hollering for him to
come out. “She ain’t got any money,” they kept insisting. Finally he
was convinced that I had nothing.

This man, I afterward found out, had been a bank robber, but had been
sworn in as deputy to crush the miners’ union. He was later killed
while robbing the post office in Prince. Yet he was the sort of man who
was hired by the moneyed interests to crush the hopes and aspirations
of the fathers and mothers and even the children of the workers.

I was held twenty-six days and nights in that bare room, isolated for
smallpox. Finally with no redress I was turned loose and went to Salt
Lake. During all those days and nights I did not undress because of
imminent danger.

All civil law had broken down in the Cripple Creek strike. The militia
under Colonel Verdeckberg said, “We are under orders only from God and
Governor Peabody.” Judge Advocate McClelland when accused of violating
the constitution said, “To hell with the constitution!” There was a
complete breakdown of all civil law. Habeas corpus proceedings were
suspended. Free speech and assembly were forbidden. People spoke
in whispers as in the days of the inquisition. Soldiers committed
outrages. Strikers were arrested for vagrancy and worked in chain gangs
on the street under brutal soldiers. Men, women and tiny children were
packed in the Bullpen at Cripple Creek. Miners were shot dead as they
slept. They were ridden from the country, their families knowing not
where they had gone, or whether they lived.

When the strike started in Cripple Creek, the civil law was operating,
but the governor, a banker, and in complete sympathy with the
Rockefeller interests, sent the militia. They threw the officers out of
office. Sheriff Robinson had a rope thrown at his feet and told that if
he did not resign, the rope would be about his neck.

Three men were brought into Judge Seeds’ court--miners. There was
no charge lodged against them. He ordered them released but the
soldiers who with drawn bayonets had attended the hearing, immediately
rearrested them and took them back to jail.

Four hundred men were taken from their homes. Seventy-six of these were
placed on a train, escorted to Kansas, dumped out on a prairie and
told never to come back, except to meet death.

In the heat of June, in Victor, 1600 men were arrested and put in the
Armory Hall. Bullpens were established and anyone be he miner, or
a woman or a child that incurred the displeasure of the great coal
interests, or the militia, were thrown into these horrible stockades.

Shop keepers were forbidden to sell to miners. Priests and ministers
were intimidated, fearing to give them consolation. The miners opened
their own stores to feed the women and children. The soldiers and
hoodlums broke into the stores, looted them, broke open the safes,
destroyed the scales, ripped open the sacks of flour and sugar, dumped
them on the floor and poured kerosene oil over everything. The beef and
meat was poisoned by the militia. Goods were stolen. The miners were
without redress, for the militia was immune.

And why were these things done? Because a group of men had demanded an
eight hour day, a check weighman and the abolition of the scrip system
that kept them in serfdom to the mighty coal barons. That was all. Just
that miners had refused to labor under these conditions. Just because
miners wanted a better chance for their children, more of the sunlight,
more freedom. And for this they suffered one whole year and for this
they died.

Perhaps no one in the labor movement has seen more brutality
perpetrated upon the workers than I have seen. I have seen them killed
in industry, worn out and made old before their time, jailed and shot
if they protested. Story after story I could tell of persecution and of
bravery unequalled on any battle field.

There was Mrs. M. F. Langdon of Cripple Creek. “The Victor Record,” a
newspaper giving the miners’ side of the strike, had been arbitrarily
suppressed by the militia, as were all journals that did not espouse
the cause of the coal operators. Her husband had been arrested because
he was the editor of The Record.

The military were surprised when the morning after the suppression of
the paper and the jailing of the editor and his helpers, the paper came
out as usual. Throughout the night Mrs. Langdon, working with a tiny
candle, had set the type and run the sheets out on a hand press.

On November 19, 1903, two organizers, Demolli and Price, were going to
Scofield when a short distance from town, a mob composed of members
of the “citizens’ alliance” boarded the train armed with high-powered
rifles, and ordered the train crew to take the organizers back.

In December, Lucianno Desentos and Joseph Vilano were killed outright
by deputy sheriffs at Secundo. Soon after their killing, the home
of William G. Isaac, an organizer, was blown up. He was in Glenwood
Springs when it occurred. Part of the house was wrecked by the
explosion, the part in which his two little children usually slept. The
night of the explosion, however, they slept in the back room with their
mother. The family was saved from being burned to death in the fire
that followed the explosion by crawling through a broken window. Isaac
was arrested and charged with attempting the murder of his wife and
children.

And so I could go on and on. Men beaten and left for dead in the road.
The home of Sherman Parker searched without warrants, his wife in her
nightclothes made to hold the light for the soldiers. And no arms found.

On Sunday in February of 1914, Joe Panonia and myself went to a camp
out in Berwyn to hold a meeting, and William Farley and James Mooney,
national organizers, went to Bohnn. Both settlements lay in the same
direction, Berwyn being a little further on. As we drove through Bohnn
after our meeting, three women ran out from a shack, waving their long,
bony arms at us and shrieking and whirling around like witches. They
jumped right in front of our automobile in the narrow road.

“Come in! Come in! Something bad!” They put their hands to their heads
and rocked sidewise. They were foreigners and knew little English.

“Joe,” I said, “we’d better drive on. They may have been drinking. It
may be some sort of hoax to get us into the house.”

“No! No!” shrieked the women. “No drink! Something bad!” They climbed
on the running board and began pulling us.

“Come on, Mother,” said Joe. “Let’s go in. I think there has been
trouble.”

We followed the three lanky women into the shack. On a wretched bed
covered with dirty rag-ends of blankets and old quilts lay Mooney,
bleeding profusely and unconscious. Farley sat beside him, badly beaten.

Joe raced into Trinidad and got a doctor but although Mooney survived
he was never quite right in the head afterward. Farley, however,
recovered from his terrible beating.

He said that as they were returning from Bohnn, seven gunmen jumped out