CHAPTER VIIA 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 wentwith 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 theminers 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 isa 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 hisimprisonment, 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.

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 thetrue 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 minersback 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 ifMr. 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 thatthe 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.

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 usshelter 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 attwo 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 ofminers 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, “Didyou 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.

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 wantmore 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 childrenback 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 sleptin 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 isfourteen 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 ofthe 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 havetwenty 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 emperorswere 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 theselittle 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 notanswer 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.

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 thatdidn’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 notdared. 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 calledto 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.

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 wantour 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 wemade 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.”

(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 anxiousto 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 vacatewhenever 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 meto 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 apenny 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 helpingthe 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 southand the strike was eventually lost, although the struggle in the south went on for a year.

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