“YOU DON’T NEED A VOTE TO RAISE HELL”
After the operators had refused to accept the President’s terms for
peace, the strike went on with its continued bitterness, suffering,
patience. Strikers were killed. Gunmen were killed. John R. Lawson,
an official of the Union, active in behalf of the rank and file,
was arrested and charged with murder. It was an easy matter in the
operator-owned state to secure a conviction. I took a train and went to
Iowa to see President White.
“President Wilson said that this strike must be eventually settled by
public opinion,” said I. “It’s about time we aroused a little. We’ve
got to give this crime of convicting an innocent man of murder a little
publicity.”
“You’re right, Mother,” said he. “What do you think we ought to do?”
“I want to hold a series of meetings over the country and get the facts
before the American people.”
Our first meeting was in Kansas City. I told the great audience that
packed the hall that when their coal glowed red in their fires, it was
the blood of the workers, of men who went down into black holes to dig
it, of women who suffered and endured, of little children who knew
but a brief childhood. “You are being warmed and made comfortable with
human blood!” I said.
In Chicago, Frank P. Walsh, Chairman of the Industrial Commission,
addressed the meeting. Garrick Theater was crowded. He told them of the
desperate efforts of the operators to break the spirit of the miners by
jailing their leaders.
We held meetings in Columbus and Cleveland and finally held a mass
meeting in Washington. By this time the public opinion that President
Wilson referred to was expressing itself so that the long-eared
politicians heard.
Through the efforts of men like Ed Nockels, labor leader of Chicago,
and others, John Lawson was released on bonds. Ed Nockels is one of
the great men who give their life and talents to the cause of the
workers. Not all labor’s leaders are honest. There are men as cruel and
brutal as the capitalists in their ranks. There is jealousy. There is
ambition. The weak envy the strong.
There was Bolton, secretary of the miners in Trinidad, a cold-blooded
man, a jealous, ambitious soul. When Lawson was arrested he said, “He
is just where I want him!”
I was at headquarters in Trinidad one morning when two poor wretches
came in and asked him for some coal. Their children were freezing,
they said.
Bolton loved power. He loved the power of giving or refusing. This time
he refused. A fellow named Ulick, an organizer, was present. I said to
him, “Go with these men and see what their condition is. Buy them coal
and food if they need it,” and I gave him money.
One of the men had walked over the hills with his shoes in tatters. The
other had no overcoat and the weather was below zero. Ulick returned
and told me the condition of these miners and their families was
terrible.
I am not blind to the short comings of our own people, I am not unaware
that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge
does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is
exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns
and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human,
more civilized for their children, and for their children’s children.
In this matter of arousing public opinion, I traveled as far as
Seattle. The Central Trades Union of Seattle arranged a monster mass
meeting for me. I told those fine western people the story of the
struggle in their sister state. I raised a lot of hell about it and a
lot of money, too, and a yell of public opinion that reached across the
Rockies.
The miners of British Columbia were on strike. They sent for me to
come and address them. I went with J. G. Brown. As I was about to go on
the boat, the Canadian Immigration officers asked me where I was going.
“To Victoria,” I told them.
“No you’re not,” said an officer, “you’re going to the strike zone.”
“I might travel a bit,” said I.
“You can’t go,” said he, like he was Cornwallis.
“Why?”
“I don’t have to give reasons,” said he as proudly as if the American
Revolution had never been fought.
“You’ll have to state your reasons to my uncle,” said I, “and I’ll be
crossing before morning.”
“Who is your uncle?”
“Uncle Sam’s my uncle,” said I. “He cleaned Hell out of you once and
he’ll do it again. You let down those bars. I’m going to Canada.”
“You’ll not put a boot in Canada,” said he.
“You’ll find out before night who’s boss on this side the water,” said
I.
I returned to Labor Headquarters with Brown and we telegraphed the
Emigration Department, the Labor Department and the Secretary of
State at Washington. They got in touch with the Canadian Government
at Ottawa. That very afternoon I got a telegram from the Emigration
Department that I might go anywhere I wanted in Canada.
The next morning when I went to get on the boat, the Canadian official
with whom I had spoken the day before ran and hid. He had found out who
my uncle was!
I addressed meetings in Victoria. Then I went up to the strike zone.
A regiment of Canadian Kilties met the train, squeaking on their
bagpipes. Down the street came a delegation of miners but they did
not wear crocheted petticoats. They wore the badge of the working
class--the overalls. I held a tremendous meeting that night and the
poor boys who had come up from the subterranean holes of the earth to
fight for a few hours of sunlight, took courage. I brought them the
sympathy of the Colorado strikers, a sympathy and understanding that
reaches across borders and frontiers.
Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is
dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who
risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who
crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their
caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose
very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.
I know the life of the miner. I have sat with him on culm piles as he
ate his lunch from his bucket with grimy hands. I have talked with his
wife as she bent over the washtub. I was talking with a miner’s wife
one day when we heard a distant thud. She ran to the door of the shack.
Men were running and screaming. Other doors flung open. Women rushed
out, drying their hands on their aprons.
An explosion!
Whose husband was killed? Whose children were fatherless?
“My God, how many mules have been killed!” was the first exclamation of
the superintendent.
Dead men were brought to the surface and laid on the ground. But more
men came to take their places. But mules--new mules--had to be bought.
They cost the company money. But human life is cheap, far cheaper than
are mules.
One hundred and nineteen men were brought out and laid on the ground.
The lights in their lamps were out. The light in their eyes was gone.
But their death brought about the two-shaft system whereby a man had a
chance to escape in case one of the exits filled with gas or burned.
Life comes to the miners out of their deaths, and death out of their
lives.
In January of 1915, I was invited to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s office
with several other labor officers. I was glad to go for I wanted to
tell him what his hirelings were doing in Colorado. The publicity
that had been given the terrible conditions under which his wealth
was made had forced him to take some action. The union he would not
recognize--never. That was his religion. But he had put forth a plan
whereby the workers might elect one representative at each mine to meet
with the officials in Denver and present any grievance that might arise.
So with Frank J. Hayes, Vice President of the United Mine Workers,
James Lord, and Edward Doyle we went to the Rockefeller offices. He
listened to our recital of conditions in Colorado and said nothing.
I told him that his plan for settling industrial disputes would not
work. That it was a sham and fraud. That behind the representative of
the miner was no organization so that the workers were powerless to
enforce any just demand; that their demands were granted and grievances
redressed still at the will of the company. That the Rockefeller plan
did not give the miners a treasury, so that should they have to strike
for justice, they could be starved out in a week. That it gave the
workers no voice in the management of the job to which they gave their
very life.
John Rockefeller is a nice young man but we went away from the office
where resides the silent government of thousands upon thousands of
people, we went away feeling that he could not possibly understand the
aspirations of the working class. He was as alien as is one species
from another; as alien as is stone from wheat.
I came to New York to raise funds for the miners’ families. Although
they had gone back beaten to work, their condition was pitiful. The
women and children were in rags and they were hungry. I spoke to a
great mass meeting in Cooper Union. I told the people after they had
cheered me for ten minutes, that cheering was easy. That the side lines
where it was safe, always cheered.
“The miners lost,” I told them, “because they had only the
constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always
win.”
I told them how Lieutenant Howert of Walsenberg had offered me his arm
when he escorted me to jail. “Madam,” said he, “will you take my arm?”
“I am not a Madam,” said I. “I am Mother Jones. The Government can’t
take my life and you can’t take my arm, but you can take my suitcase.”
I told the audience how I had sent a letter to John Rockefeller,
Junior, telling him of conditions in the mines. I had heard he was a
good young man and read the Bible, and I thought I’d take a chance.
The letter came back with “Refused” written across the envelope.
“Well,” I said, “how could I expect him to listen to an old woman when
he would not listen to the President of the United States through his
representative, Senator Foster.”
[Illustration: Mother Jones Doesn’t Need a Vote to Raise Hell]
Five hundred women got up a dinner and asked me to speak. Most of the
women were crazy about women suffrage. They thought that Kingdom-come
would follow the enfranchisement of women.
“You must stand for free speech in the streets,” I told them.
“How can we,” piped a woman, “when we haven’t a vote?”
“I have never had a vote,” said I, “and I have raised hell all over
this country! You don’t need a vote to raise hell! You need convictions
and a voice!”
Some one meowed, “You’re an anti!”
“I am not an anti to anything which will bring freedom to my class,”
said I. “But I am going to be honest with you sincere women who are
working for votes for women. The women of Colorado have had the vote
for two generations and the working men and women are in slavery. The
state is in slavery, vassal to the Colorado Iron and Fuel Company and
its subsidiary interests. A man who was present at a meeting of mine
owners told me that when the trouble started in the mines, one operator
proposed that women be disfranchised because here and there some woman
had raised her voice in behalf of the miners. Another operator jumped
to his feet and shouted, ‘For God’s sake! What are you talking about!
If it had not been for the women’s vote the miners would have beaten us
long ago!’”
Some of the women gasped with horror. One or two left the room. I told
the women I did not believe in women’s rights nor in men’s rights
but in human rights. “No matter what your fight,” I said, “don’t be
ladylike! God Almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves
made the ladies. I have just fought through sixteen months of bitter
warfare in Colorado. I have been up against armed mercenaries but this
old woman, without a vote, and with nothing but a hatpin has scared
them.
“Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines.
Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized
their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and
charity.”