KERN’S FIGHT AGAINST FEUDALISM IN WEST VIRGINIA
Scarcely had Senator Kern assumed the leadership of the senate until he
was engaged in the most notable and bitter battle of his career against
the feudalism of the coal barons of West Virginia. His resolution for a
senatorial investigation into the conditions in the Paint Creek district
where anarchy was apparently in full flower, with the constitutional
guaranties of citizens brushed aside, and men being tried for their
lives by drumhead courtmartials while the civil courts were open, was
the signal for the marshaling of an army of opposition embracing
railroads, coal operators, bankers, all the powerful moneyed interests.
Never before in history, in a distinct fight between the working classes
on the one side and the great interests on the other, had the masses won
in the senate. Never before had a senator just assuming leadership so
audaciously challenged defeat. And he won.
But to appreciate the significance of his triumph it is necessary to
record something of the ineffable inhumanity of the industrial feudalism
which had been established through the employment of armies of gun-men,
the subsidization of the press, the prostitution of the courts, the
cringing sycophancy of politicians, and the organization of bi-partisan
political machines to meet the demands of greed.
It must be a startling story--a story of greed fattening upon the hunger
of children, of the trampling of inalienable rights, of the kicking to
death of unborn babes by brutes untouched by the law, of the murder of
women, and the shooting of unarmed men in the night--a story of tyranny
and brutality as infamous and cruel as was ever born of the dynasty of
the Romanoffs.
And this story, which shocked the most conservative members of the
senate, and shamed a republic, must be told primarily because the
American people have been told too little of it. And it must be told in
the story of Kern as an illumination of his political character and as
an explanation of the bitter hostility with which his course was viewed
by such a large portion of “our best people” in his own state.
The story, of the “Kern Resolution” is the story of Kern. But behind the
resolution itself is a story that must be told if we are to understand
the full significance of it.
I
Coal has been the crown and the crime of West Virginia. The second state
in the union in its deposits of coal, the industrial, social and
political life of the commonwealth revolves about the mine. Until a few
years ago there was no organization among the miners. They were
industrial slaves. The living conditions under which they worked were
horrible beyond description. They had no rights that the coal barons
were bound to respect, and none that the civil authorities apparently
cared to enforce. In the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek sections in the
county of the state capital these conditions existed for years. They
were robbed of the full fruit of their labors by a system which denied
them the privilege of having a representative in the weighing of the
coal they produced. Compelled to live in the cottages of the companies,
they were charged unreasonable rentals for impossible huts. Forced to
purchase their food from the company stores, they were made to pay on an
average of thirty per cent more for the food necessities of life than
were being charged at independent stores.
From their meager pay the companies deducted every month $6 for rent, $1
for coal, $1 for a physician, 20 cents as a hospital fund, 50 cents for
the blacksmith, 80 cents per gallon for miners’ oil, and for various
other things approximating an average of $11.05 each month. By the time
the miner with a family had paid all this and for the bare necessities
of life he was usually in debt to the company. Thus a form of
peonage--peonage in reality if not in the legal sense--was established.
These men were slaves.
It was the game of the companies to keep them slaves. They thought it
paid better than to have free men. And to this end these companies
perfected a remarkable organization to prevent the unionization of the
miners. This organization was known as “mine guards,” and the miners
were compelled to pay the bills. These guards were furnished by the
Baldwin-Felts agency and were composed largely of the scourings of the
slums of cities. These gun-men had no legal status but the miners were
forced to recognize their authority--and their authority was a gun.
The pretext for the use of these armed thugs was the protection of the
mines, the purpose was to prevent the organizers of the United Mine
Workers from entering the field, to prohibit newspaper men from visiting
the camps and exposing the infamy, to forbid the miners from exercising
their constitutional right to meet in peaceful assembly for the
discussion of their wrongs. The purpose was to Siberianize West
Virginia. And the purpose was met.
They were there to terrorize over the miners, to panhandle newspaper men
and beat up the organizers of the United Mine Workers--and they did
their work with a zest.
These guards met the trains regularly and every organizer of the United
Mine Workers understood that if he left the train he did so at the peril
of his life. This condition existed for years within a few miles of the
state capital, within little more than two hundred miles of the capital
of the republic and was known to exist. The riff-raff of the scums of
the cities, reeking with rotten whisky and armed with guns, held high
carnival, panhandling organizers, terrorizing miners, insulting women
and children, and they did it with impunity.
And the reason was that popular government had broken down and had been
displaced by the feudalism of the coal barons and their allies. To
control the labor market, to dictate the laws, to interpret the laws,
the mine owners entered politics and became the bosses. Such, in a
general way, was the condition in the mine sections of West Virginia
when the supreme fight came in 1912.
II
An hour’s ride from Charlestown, in the Kanawa mountain, are two ragged
gulches eight miles apart and divided by a sharp ridge. One is the Cabin
Creek mining settlement, and the other the Paint Creek settlement. A
decade or more before the trouble of 1912 the miners along Cabin Creek
had, after much travail, been organized, but an ill-advised strike had
wrought their ruin and resulted in the restoration of the old non-union
conditions aggravated now by the hate born of the victory over them.
This settlement had come to be known as “Russia.” The mine owners had
here established an ideal feudalism. They owned everything in sight but
the country road, which was the bed of a creek. Thus it was practically
impossible to visit Cabin Creek without trespassing on company ground
and being roughly handled by the whisky-crazed gun-men called “guards.”
A miner or his family could only call at the shack of a neighbor by
suffrance, since he could not reach the neighbor’s house without
trespassing on company property. Here the gun-men were supreme. The men
were slaves in all but name. They submitted to being robbed of the fruit
of their labor, to extortion in the matter of rental and in the purchase
of food in the company stores, and organizers of the miners understood
that he who ventured into Cabin Creek would probably be carried out upon
a stretcher.
The miners of Paint Creek had been organized, but in the spring of 1912
the coal barons determined to extend the feudalism of Cabin Creek across
the ridge. The opportunity came when the time for the signing of a new
contract was reached. In the conference between the miners and the
operators at Charlestown the miners submitted many demands, all of a
kind conceded in other mining states such as Indiana and Illinois, but
after more than a week the operators refused to sign. In the interest of
industrial peace the miners thereupon agreed to continue under the old
contract with the old prices and conditions, provided the operators
would agree to the full recognition of the union. This, too, was
refused, and a strike was ordered. Within ten days the miners were asked
to meet with representatives of the coal companies in an effort to
adjust the difference, and this, agreed to by the miners, resulted in a
further compromise and the signing of a contract by the operators and
the miners. The operators almost immediately broke faith, the strike was
renewed and the fight was on. The issue was clear from the
beginning--whether or not the conditions in Cabin Creek domineered over
by drunken gun-men, should be established in Paint Creek.
The representatives of feudalism acted quickly. Almost immediately Paint
Creek was invaded by the gun-men, headed by the infamous and murderous
Ernest Gaujot, the “King Guard,” a man with a criminal record, with
machine guns, plenty of ammunition and searchlights. Thugs, gun-men and
thieves were hastily scoured from the scums of the cities, supplied with
whisky and guns and turned loose upon the miners and their families. The
program was to terrorize the miners into surrender. In the darkness of
the night the gun-men fired the Gatling guns for practice. They
swaggered in their drunken insolence into the homes of the unarmed
miners, leeringly speculated aloud on what a good target the master of
the house would make, turned everything upside down, kicked and cuffed
the children, ordered drink and food, and let loose the flood gates of
profanity and vulgarity in the presence of the women and babes. Nothing
so nearly resembling anarchy has ever been seen on American soil. These
drunken brutes invaded the home of a miner by the name of Frank Russe,
and finding no one at home but the wife, who was about to become a
mother, they slapped her face and drove her from the house. But the
crime of that time that cries to heaven and curses the civilization that
permitted the criminal to live, was committed at the home of Tony
Sevilla, who was in Ohio at the time in search of work. The unspeakable
Gaujot and his gang searched the house, and after they had gone a
neighboring woman, knowing that Mrs. Sevilla was in a delicate
condition, hurried over to find her on her knees, an expression of agony
upon her face, making the sign of the cross. Pointing to her side, where
one of the gun-men protectors of feudalism had kicked her, she moaned in
broken English: “I don’t hear my baby calling me now.”
They had murdered the unborn babe and mother and were permitted to go on
with their murderous work. No one was arrested for that! No one was
molested for that! That was two hundred miles from the capital of the
republic, in the county of the capital of an American state, and in the
twentieth century of Christian civilization.
And the barons were satisfied. They wanted quick action. The guards were
instructed to throw the miners out of their homes without mercy. Women
about to become mothers, the sick, the babes, were driven shelterless
into the fields. The miners established a tented camp at Holly Grove at
the mouth of the creek and another at Mossey, near its headwaters. At
Mucklow, near by, the guards--Gaujot’s men--were established. And when
the miners, driven to desperation by the prodding of the guards, twice
attacked the Mucklow camp, the papers of Charlestown contained lurid
accounts of the brutal and bloodthirsty attacks of the anarchistic
miners upon the representatives of law and order personified by Gaujot.
There was much sympathy for the operators. It looked as though the
miners were whipped--that America would be driven out of Paint Creek and
Russia established.
III
On July 6 an old woman alighted from the train in Charlestown. She had
now reached her eighty-third year and during the greater part of her
life she had been the heart and center of the great industrial battles
of the country. The country had come to know her as “the angel of the
miners,” and her boys, as she called the miners, as “Mother” Jones. For
years she had gone where men had not dared to venture. She had faced
guns, thwarted conspiracies, partaken of bull-pen fare, but, as this
gray-haired old woman with a grandmotherly face, she was planning for
the greatest battle of her life. She knew the West Virginia coal fields
and the conditions. She had been there before. And she realized that the
representatives of feudalism were preparing to exterminate unionism and
establish gun-men rule in Paint Creek as across the ridge. She was a
strategist. She had no faith in defensive warfare. She proposed to force
the fighting, to sustain unionism in Paint Creek and carry it across the
ridge.
Having decided upon this counter movement she quietly arranged for an
initial demonstration that would awaken the public to what was going on.
One day the city of Charlestown was startled to see an old woman leading
three thousand miners through the streets to the state house, and
bearing banners to the effect that the gun-men had to go. The men were
sober and orderly--she had seen to that. Governor Glasscock saw her. She
served notice upon him. Calling attention to the inscription in front of
the state house, “Mountaineers are Always Free,” she told the governor,
that the boast would be made to stand the test of reality. And she gave
the governor twenty-four hours to get rid of the gun-men. And if the
state failed to rid the mining region of these guards she told him
boldly that the miners would. The gun-men did not go in twenty-four
hours. It was now evident that the state, organized for the protection
of society, would not intervene and rid the commonwealth of these
ruffian mercenaries. The miners determined that they would no longer be
terrorized, beaten, robbed, their wives and daughters should no longer
be insulted and cuffed about, their constitutional rights no longer
disregarded. And while they had no thought in the beginning of civil war
they now proceeded to arm themselves--to do for themselves what the
state had refused to do for them. In less than three weeks after
“Mother” Jones had served notice on the governor, the miners, infuriated
at the prodding of the gun-men, entrenched at Mucklow, moved upon the
stronghold of the enemy with such fury that the pitched battle resulting
left the guards in danger of annihilation. The state now became alarmed.
This was serious. And the governor hurried the state militia to the
scene in special trains. The militia now proceeded to disarm both sides.
During the first week in August, “Mother” Jones, taking her life in her
hands, invaded Cabin Creek, and in the early afternoon called a meeting
of the miners at Eskdale.
And that afternoon she organized them into the union and swore them to
the oath of the United Mine Workers. The men were instantly discharged
and told to “go to ‘Mother’ Jones for work.” A week later another
meeting was held at Eskdale and when eighty Baldwins attempted to
prevent the meeting they were put to flight by five hundred armed
miners. This was followed by evictions, and West Virginia was in a state
of civil war.
To the gun-men and the coal barons “Mother” Jones became a pet
abomination. The brutal treatment accorded her by the guards has seldom
been equaled in the case of a woman. Meanwhile martial law had been
declared.
Realizing the necessity of informing and arousing the country on the
conditions, “Mother” Jones left for a speaking tour which included the
city of Washington. It was unnecessary. The operators had planned
something much better for that purpose.
IV
The miners’ tented camp at Holly Grove had become an eyesore to the
representatives of feudalism. They determined to wipe it out and thus
terrorize the strikers into submission. Their plan was diabolical,
medieval in its brutality. An armored train was equipped at Huntington,
W. Va., for the purpose. On the night of February 7, 1913, the special
crew went aboard.
The miners were peacefully in their tents or houses that night, many
asleep, when between ten and eleven o’clock the armored train moved
slowly at a speed of about seven miles an hour through Holly Grove
pouring a fusillade of bullets upon the unsuspecting and unprepared
inhabitants. Cesco Estep, who was sitting with his family by the fire
when the shooting began, called upon his family to take refuge in the
cellar and led the way. He fell dead a few feet from the cellar door.
His wife, who was about to become a mother, fled for her life. One woman
was shot in the feet. About fifteen shots passed through the Estep
house, which sheltered women and children that night. The woman was shot
in her own home. Bullets passed through many houses and tents, setting
fire to a store, and the marvel was that many were not murdered. The
miners, as quickly as they could recover from their surprise, in a few
instances returned the fire, and this was the occasion for much
indignation in the capital, where it was understood that the miners had
brutally attacked an armored train. The train passed on and was
dismounted in the C. & O. shops in Richmond. This incident was something
novel in the history of industrial warfare in America.
V
The following evening “Mother” Jones went to Hansford to see what
arrangements had been made for the burial of the murdered man and what
could be done for the widow and orphans. The miners there, expecting a
visit from the train later, had taken precautions to prepare. There was
some excitement. Later that evening “Mother” Jones went to Charlestown.
Meanwhile troops had been sent into the mining section, martial law had
been declared, and miners were being arrested in numbers. Hearing of the
intense excitement at a mining camp known as Bloomer, where the majority
of the miners were Italians, “Mother” Jones called a meeting there with
the view to preventing them from taking extreme measures. The excitement
was so intense that she adjourned the meeting until the next morning at
Long Acre, a few miles distant. Having impressed them with the thought
that lawlessness would be a play into the hands of the enemy, she had
them select a committee to call upon the governor with a request for the
release of their fellow workers. She paid their fares to Charlestown.
When she reached Charlestown she was taken into custody by local
officers, taken to a justice of the peace court where a warrant was
sworn out against her, conveyed across the river to a C. & O. train,
carried twenty-two miles into the martial law zone, and turned over to
the military authorities. There this venerable woman was placed in a
room in the house of a poor miner where the only furniture in the room
was a small lounge, on which she slept, a small table and two rocking
chairs, with no wash bowl. For eight weeks, day and night, two or three
militiamen marched around the house keeping guard. No one was permitted
to see her. Newspaper men were especially taboo.
And she was to be tried before a drumhead courtmartial, with all the
civil courts open, on a charge of murder! Others were included in the
charge. The miners who had fled from Holly Grove to Hansford after the
attack, had set out to capture a machine gun near Mucklow, and in the
pitched battle the bookkeeper of a coal company was killed. There was no
concern over the murder of Estep. The killing of the bookkeeper was
followed by the arrest of more than a hundred miners--and “Mother”
Jones.
VI
We now enter upon the most startling feature of the feudalism of West
Virginia in the coal districts. It was soon made evident to the
thoughtful that the system was in position to enforce darkness. With
pitched battles, armored trains, murdered women, there was little or
nothing about it in the press of the country. But when the story that a
woman of the celebrity of “Mother” Jones, loved by millions among the
toilers, was to be tried for her life before a drumhead courtmartial was
told in less than a dozen lines, the system made a fatal blunder. That
little light illumined the darkness. Senator Kern, reading these few
lines in the _Washington Post_, expressed his amazement to those in his
office that so little information was furnished. Far out in San
Francisco, Fremont Older, the fighting editor of _The Bulletin_, who had
been one of the leaders in the movement that destroyed the Schmitz
boodle brigade and sent Abe Reuf to the penitentiary, talked it over
with his clever wife and decided that she should go at once to West
Virginia and ascertain by personal observation the occasion for the
silence. The story of Mrs. Older was soon told in _Collier’s Weekly_--a
brief, gripping, startling story of an unthinkable situation for
America.
The darkness gave such light that magazines took steps to secure
articles concerning an unparalleled condition. Harold E. West’s
startling story of “Civil War in West Virginia” appeared in _The Survey_
in early April. An even more amazing story from M. Michelson, under the
satiric title, “Sweet Land of Liberty,” appeared in the May number of
_Everybody’s Magazine_. _Collier’s Weekly_ gave its readers Mrs. Older’s
story about the middle of April. The country began to wonder--and to
wait.
Meanwhile the most dangerous and startling evil in the situation--the
power of the governor to trample upon the constitutional rights of the
people of his state, to ignore the civil courts when they were in
session, and try men and women for their lives by a military
tribunal--was vigorously contested in the Supreme Court of Appeals in
the now famous habeas corpus cases of Mays and Nance and a little later
in the cases of Jones, Boswell, Batley and Paulson. The constitution of
West Virginia was explicit and emphatic on the point, but the court
decided that the constitutional rights of citizens could be brushed
aside. A more remarkable decision has probably never been handed down by
any American tribunal. How remarkable the world was permitted to
understand through the vigorous and indignant dissenting opinion of
Judge Ira E. Robinson.
And yet for three months this military tribunal sat at Pratt on Paint
Creek sending men to the penitentiary and jail and fixing penalties in
many cases in excess of those fixed by the statute with the approval of
the then Governor Glasscock.
It was long after her release that “Mother” Jones found that she had
been sentenced to the penitentiary for five years and that several of
the men had been sentenced to twenty years. She went back to her prison.
VII
Senator Kern introduced his famous Paint Creek resolution in the senate,
on the request of representatives of the United Mine Workers, on April
12, 1913. He did not at that time have the slightest idea of the
tremendous importance of his act. The disclosures made to him were so
unusual as to convince him that light could do no harm, and his
confidence in the judgment of William B. Wilson, then secretary of labor
in the cabinet of the president, who had introduced a similar resolution
in the House, and of Senator Borah, who had presented such a resolution
in the Senate in the preceding session, was such that he did not
hesitate in acceding to the request. But he was not to be left long in
the dark as to the significance attached to his resolution by many of
the most powerful financial elements in the country. The original
resolutions directed that an investigation should be instituted to
ascertain whether or not a system of peonage was maintained in the coal
fields of West Virginia; whether or not access to the post-offices in
these coal fields was ever denied miners, and if so, by whom; whether or
not the immigration laws of the country were being violated; in the
event that any such conditions existed, what could be done to remedy
them, whether the commissioner of labor or any other government official
could be of service in adjusting the strike, and whether or not parties
were being convicted and punished in violation of the laws of the United
States. This resolution was offered on April 12. The following six weeks
were to astonish the senator in the disclosures of the resources and
ramifications of the representatives of feudalism in West Virginia.
Taking its natural course the resolution went first to the committee of
the senate on contingent expenses, and here the system first became
active. One of the operators of West Virginia, a former member of the
senate, wired former colleagues protesting any investigation. It was
sixteen days before the committee submitted back a favorable report with
certain amendments, and while there was nothing on the surface during
these sixteen days to indicate that a bitter battle was being fought, it
was impressed upon Senator Kern in many ways. It was not until May 9, or
twenty-seven days after the resolution was presented, that the
resolution really got before the senate in shape for discussion.
Meanwhile the author of the resolution was learning things concerning
conditions in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek region. Letters and
telegrams by the hundreds poured in upon him from people in all walks of
life familiar with those conditions, miners, merchants, lawyers, school
teachers, telegraph operators, former legislators, and the striking
feature of these letters was the request that their names be protected
from publicity. The merchant frankly feared a boycott, the lawyer social
ostracism, the teacher a discharge from his position, the operator the
blacklist of the railroad, the former officials political destruction,
but all united in one common story--a story of such unthinkable
lawlessness and cruelty as to be almost past belief. Newspaper men who
had attempted to enter the field to ascertain the real conditions and
had been met at the train by the armed guards and sent on about their
business, added their story. Mrs. Fremont Older, who had been both a
witness and for a time a victim of the system, went to Washington and
told him her story--a story calculated to outrage any man of the legal
profession who entertained the slightest regard for the courts or the
constitution. Representatives of the United Mine Workers armed him with
plenty of ammunition from their arsenal. But even before the miners’
side of the story had been impressed upon him Senator Kern was convinced
of the imperative necessity for the investigation by the nature and
persistence of the opposition. Men with no apparent interests in the
coal fields not citizens of West Virginia began to wire and phone their
importunities to drop the proposed investigation. Many railroad
officials seemed morbidly concerned. The highest financial circles of
New York City brought every possible influence to bear. Being a man of
more than ordinary perspicacity the grave concern of these men opened to
the senator a broad vista. The climax of this campaign to influence him
to drop the fight came when an old and valued friend in New York City
connected with one of the greatest financial groups of that city called
him on the phone in an effort to dissuade him.
“I will see you in hell first,” was the reply as Kern slammed up the
receiver.
As usual with men of this type their vaulting ambition overleaped
itself. Meanwhile Governor Haywood of West Virginia, elected to succeed
Glasscock on the pledge to eliminate the armed thugs called guards, gave
an interview to the press which was sent throughout the country
attacking Kern in the most bitter language.
Thus at a time when the public, kept in the dark as to the horrible
conditions in West Virginia through the deliberate suppression of the
most sensational news, Kern was being pilloried throughout the country
as a demagogic sensationalist, in league with lawlessness, and not above
stooping to ordinary falsehoods. The conservative element, prone to
suspect all strikers, and exonerate all against whom strikes are aimed,
was being prejudiced against him. The masses of the people were not
aroused because they did not have the facts. The most powerful
influences were in league against him. And the whisper went about the
corridors of the capital that the resolution was a deadly blow at the
rights of the states, and was only the beginning of more dangerous
encroachments upon state sovereignty. Mr. Kern had only entered upon
his work as senate leader and his personal, and especially his political
enemies, knowing little and caring less about the merits of the
resolution, and convinced that it could never pass the senate, were
already gloating over his humiliation, and preparing to herald it as an
early repudiation of his leadership by his party.
Never before in the history of the United States senate in a straight
contest between the lowly or the workers and the great financial
interests had the workers won--and the politicians were judging the
future by the past.
But on the very day that Haywood issued his scurrilous statement an
historic telegram was placed in the hands of Kern which did much to turn
the tide. This telegram has its own story.
VIII
One day in early May, Mother Jones, enjoying life in “the pleasant
boarding house in a private family on the banks of the Kanawha river,”
was startled by some one throwing into the open window of the room where
“she was detained but in no sense confined” beyond the fact that armed
sentinels saw to it that she did not leave the room, a copy of _The
Cincinnati Post_. Opening the paper she found under glaring headlines
the story of the battle in the senate of which she had been in utter
ignorance. This article told of the bitter fight being made against the
Kern resolution, of the long distance call to Kern from New York City,
and of the senator’s indignant response, “I’ll see you in hell first.”
And she realized that if the battle in the senate was lost the cause of
the miners in West Virginia would be set back for a generation. She did
not know Kern--had never met him. The thought came to her that she
should write him of the real conditions. Then she read _The Post_
article again in which the comment was made that the New York financiers
“did not write, did not telegraph--they took the quickest way to reach
him.” A letter--it might never reach him, and everything might be lost
in the meanwhile. She decided to send a telegram. And she wrote:
HANSFORD, WEST VIRGINIA, MAY 4.
Senator Kern, care Senate Chamber, Washington,
D. C.:
From out of the military bastile, where I have been forced to pass
my eighty-first milestone of life, I plead with you for the honor
of this nation. I send you groans and tears of men, women and
children as I have heard them in this state, and beg you to force
that investigation. Children yet unborn will rise and bless you.
MOTHER JONES.
Reading it critically she concluded that the words “military bastile”
might smack of pose and she substituted “military prison walls.”
The next problem was how to get the telegram to Washington. The poor
people at whose home she was “detained” were friendly to her and her
cause, although this was not known to the authorities. Early during her
incarceration she had thought it possible that she might be in need of
communication with the outside world and with the aid of the head of the
house a part of the flooring had been cut, and an empty bottle was
suspended by a wire into the cellar. It was the understanding that at
the sound of a bell with which she had been furnished the man should go
to the cellar, where he would find a communication in the bottle. Into
this bottle she stuffed the telegram with a note of instructions to
deliver it to an operator who was friendly some distance away with the
message from her to “get it to Washington if it is the last thing you do
in life.” Some time later the messenger returned with the message from
the operator--“Tell Mother Jones that telegram will be in Washington
before you get back.” And it was.
That telegram was instantly given to the press and flashed over the
country. It created consternation in Charlestown. It threw open the
prison doors to the venerable woman. One of the military men at Pratt
was instructed from the state house by phone to conduct Mother Jones to
the capital by the first train. Reaching Charlestown she was taken
before the governor and treated with exceptional courtesy.
She was permitted to spend the night in the hotel in Charlestown where
she was accustomed to stopping. Immediately afterward at a miners’
convention in the city she was instructed by John P. White, president of
the United Mine Workers, to go to Washington and give all possible aid
to Kern in his fight.
And thus she went, without having been formally set at liberty and
without knowing what the sentence of the military tribunal had been.
Reaching Washington she went into conference immediately with Kern, and
the following day found her, loaded down with letters to senators from
Secretary of Labor Wilson, trudging the interminable marble corridors of
the senate office building, informing senators individually and at
length of the conditions in West Virginia. At times her eighty-odd years
bore heavily upon her and worn and weary she would return to Kern’s
office, sink exhausted into a chair for a rest of a few minutes--then on
her way again.
The most impressive and effective lobbyist that ever trod the stones of
the capital was this old woman.
IX
Senator Kern in opening the debate on the “Kern resolution” on May 9th
asked that “this investigation proceed that the full light may be let in
on this foul spot and that all the facts bearing on these questions may
be brought out to the end that wrongs, if they exist, may be righted,
and that any men who are unjustly accused may be vindicated.”
Five days went by before the resolution was again considered by the
senate. In the meanwhile the country was awakening to the significance
of the fight and Kern was able to present scores of letters, telegrams,
petitions from miners of West Virginia and elsewhere, and a striking
telegram from the victims of militarism then held in the jail at
Clarksburg, West Virginia, “stripped of constitutional rights, denied a
jury trial, forced to face a drumhead court martial, deprived of their
citizenship, reduced to subjects and thrown into jail.” This resulted in
the renewal of the discussion and Senator Kern said:
“I had a telegram the other day from a leader of Socialism
denunciatory of these conditions. When I showed it to a senator
here he deprecated the idea that there was such relationship
between me and that man that he would feel free to telegraph me.
Men are being imprisoned in West Virginia to-day because they are
Socialists; newspapers are being suppressed because they teach the
doctrines of Socialism; men are discharged from mines, according to
the testimony taken before the military commission, because they
vote the Socialist ticket and because they belong to a labor union;
and while the doctrine of judicial recall gains favor with the
people whose rights are stricken down by unjust decisions, so do
the forces of Socialism multiply in such breeding grounds as those
in parts of West Virginia, with special privilege on one hand
eating out the substance of the people, and with judges setting
aside constitutional safeguards to the end that the people may be
oppressed and denied rights for which their fathers fought and
died.
“Socialism has grown in this country until more than a million men
cast their votes for the Socialist ticket at the last election. The
fire of Socialism is fed by such fuel as this West Virginia
decision, and the lawless action there of men charged with the
execution of the laws. Socialism grows and will grow in exact
proportion as wrongdoing is countenanced and upheld, not only by
the strong legislative forces of the country, but especially when
they are backed up by the judicial arm of the government.
“Senators, these million men who voted the Socialist ticket last
November are the men who ought to be full of that kind of
patriotism in time of war that would impel them to go out and walk
on the uttermost ridge of battle, to peril their lives in defense
of their country and their country’s flag because they love their
country, because they venerate the laws of the land.
“This great body of a million or more men whose loyalty you
question, and the millions more who make up the organized labor
forces of the land, and who are not yet Socialists, will love their
country and its flag if you will permit them, and not drive them
away by making them constantly realize that they can not expect
fair treatment either in the administration of the law by executive
officers or in the construction and enforcement of law by the
courts.
“If the time comes--we all pray it may be averted--when the
integrity of this nation is assailed, either from within or from
without--if the time comes when the American Republic is brought
face to face with the marching armies of the nations beyond the
sea, we will need those million of men, for they are men that toil
with their hands. They have strong arms. They are the same type of
men as that splendid Army of the Republic fifty years ago who won
for themselves imperishable renown by their sacrifices in behalf of
the Union and the flag.
“Do you make good citizens of men by denying them their rights? Do
you command the respect and the patriotism of the toilers of this
land by turning them away when they come into this great tribunal
and simply ask that the light be turned on, to the end that the
people may know as to whether or not God reigns and the
Constitution still lives, and whether they and their kind are to be
despoiled of their heritage of liberty?
“For a man to be a loyal, good citizen of this country he must love
his country. Can you ask him to love his country and be true to her
traditions and institutions when in his heart of hearts he knows
that in this land and beneath its flag there is a law for him which
is not enforced against others, and that he can no longer appeal to
the courts for the enforcement of his constitutional rights?”
Strong support was given the resolution by Hollis of New Hampshire,
Borah, Kenyon, Martine, but it was left to Root to brush aside the
technicalities and precedents and insist that the vital thing involved
was the preservation of American institutions. The fight against the
resolution finally resolved itself into the proposition proposed and
championed by Bacon to strike out the clause providing for an
investigation into whether or not “citizens of the United States have
been arrested, tried and convicted contrary to or in violation of the
constitution and the laws of the United States.” It should be said in
justice to Bacon that he was as forcible as any in his condemnation of
the oppression of the miners, and favored the investigation with the
elimination of the fourth clause. His amendment, however, was defeated
by a vote of 59 to 10, and the resolution, as finally shaped by the
committee on Education and Labor was agreed to without a record vote.
This differed from the original resolution in that it broadened the
scope of the investigation to include an inquiry into agreements and
combinations contrary to the laws of the country.
Thus for the first time in the history of the senate in a fight
involving a contest between capital and labor the workers won. The
leadership of Kern was not “repudiated” as newspapers antagonistic to
him, counting their chickens before they were hatched, had framed their
headlines to read. The next best thing was done--as little was said
about his triumph as possible.
X
And the result of the investigation was a vindication--and a triumph for
the miners. The sub-committee of the committee on Education and Labor,
to which was assigned the task of investigating, was highly satisfactory
to the author of the resolution. It was proof positive against a white
wash. Kern was particularly pleased with the presence on the committee
of Borah, Kenyon and Martine, all of whom were temperamentally
sympathetic toward the oppressed, and interested in social justice, and
the first two were in addition able lawyers and men with vision. The
committee sat in Charlestown in July and with a recess necessitated by
important business in the senate, concluded its work in Washington in
September and early October. The reports were all the more impressive
because of their fairness and the conservatism of expression. Peonage in
the legal sense was not disclosed. That men who were indebted to the
companies were in a state of virtual peonage there is no doubt. No proof
was found that any “attempt to prevent the delivery of mail to patrons
of the postoffice” had been made, other than the fact that the
postoffice, in the company stores, were frequented by the armed guards.
No evidence was adduced showing a violation of the national immigration
laws though the fact was disclosed that men were induced through
“misinformation and misrepresentations” to accept employment in the coal
fields and that “hardships in this respect were disclosed.” But the all
important charge that the constitution had been set aside, martial law
established, men arrested without warrant of the civil authorities,
tried by drumhead court martials, and given sentences in excess of any
provided in the statutes was made good. This phase of the investigation
was in charge of Senator Borah, who treated the evidence in a
conservative judicial manner. In his supplementary report Senator
Martine took occasion to say: “I charge that the hiring of armed bodies
of men by private mine owners and others corporations and the use of
steel armored trains, machine guns and bloodhounds on defenseless women
and children is but a little way removed from barbarism.” Senator Kenyon
in discussing the cause of the trouble and the suggestion of Bishop
Donahue that “human greed on both sides” was responsible said: “It is a
little difficult to realize how there can be so much human greed on the
side of a man who is supporting a family and working day by day in the
mines at ordinary living wages, but there is greed on the part of the
owners of the property.” And the committee report, commenting on the
situation at the time of its preparation, said:
“The differences between the miners and operators, which were
considered irreconcilable, have been amicably adjusted. Peace now
reigns in this section where heretofore existed strife, contention,
and armed conflict. The relations between the operators and the
miners have become friendly and conciliatory. Business has been
resumed and the mines are being operated. Martial law has been
abolished and civil law and authority fully established. The
committee is satisfied that the investigations have greatly aided
in the accomplishment of these beneficial and much-desired
results.”
And the miners knew, what was of more vital importance to them, that
none of their men would serve twenty years in the penitentiary at the
behest of a military despotism, and Mother Jones declared that “Senator
Kern threw open the prison doors for me.”
The militant courage of Kern held high the torch that illuminated the
darkness of the darkest spot, industrially on American soil, and it will
never be so dark again. His action made him powerful foes, even in his
own state. But it won him something that he cherished--the undying
gratitude of the workers who go down into the earth for the fuel that
warms mankind.