CHAPTER XVII
HOW THE WOMEN SANG THEMSELVES OUT OF JAIL
The miners in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, went on strike for more wages. Their pay was pitifully low. In answer to the cry for bread, the Irish -- that is the Pennsylvania -- constabulary were sent into the district.
One day a group of angry women were standing in front of the mine, hooting at the scabs that were taking the bread from their children's mouths. The sheriff came and arrested all the women "for disturbing the peace." Of course, he should have arrested the scabs, for they were the ones who really disturbed it.
I told them to take their babies and tiny children along with them when their case came up in court. They did this and while the judge was sentencing them to pay thirty dollars or serve thirty days in jail, the babies set up a terrible wail so that you could hardly hear the old judge. He scowled and asked the women if they had some one to leave the children with.
I whispered to the women to tell the judge that miners' wives didn't keep nurse girls; that God gave the children to their mothers and He held them responsible for their care.
Two mounted police were called to take the women to the jail, some ten miles away. They were put on an interurban car with two police men to keep them from running away. The car stopped and took on some scabs. As soon the car started the women began cleaning up the scabs. The two policemen were too nervous to do anything. The scabs, who were pretty much scratched up, begged the motorman stop and let them off but the motorman said it was against the law to stop except at the station. That gave the women a little more time to trim the fellows. When they got to the station, those scabs looked as if they had been sleeping in the tiger cat's cage at the zoo.
When they got to Greensburg, the women sang as the car went through the town. A great crowd followed the car, singing with them. As the women, carrying their babies, got off the car before the jail the crowd cheered and cheered them. The police officers handed the prisoners over to the sheriff and both of them looked relieved.
The sheriff said to me, "Mother, I wou1d rather you brought me a hundred men than those women. Women are fierce!"
"I didn't bring them to you, sheriff," said I, " 'twas the mining company's judge sent them to you for a present."
The sheriff took them upstairs, put them all in a room and let me stay with them for a long while. I told the women:
"You sing the whole night long. You can spell one another if you get tired and hoarse. Sleep all day and sing all night and don't stop for anyone. Say you're singing to the babies. I will bring the little ones milk and fruit. Just you all sing and sing."
The sheriff's wife was an irritable little cat She used to go up and try to stop them because she couldn't sleep. Then the sheriff sent for me and asked me to stop them.
"I can't stop them," said I. "They are singing to their little ones. You telephone to the judge to order them loose."
Complaints came in by the dozens: from hotels and lodging houses and private homes.
"Those women howl like cats," said a hotel keeper to me.
"That's no way to speak of women who are singing patriotic songs and lullabies to their little ones," said I.
Finally after five days in which everyone in town had been kept awake, the judge ordered their release. He was a narrow-minded, irritable, savage-looking old animal and hated to do it but no one could muzzle those women!
CHAPTER XVIII
VICTORY IN WEST VIRGINIA
One morning when I was west, working for the Southern Pacific machinists, I read in the paper that the Paint Creek Coal Company, would not settle with their men and had driven them out into the mountains. I knew that Paint Creek country. I had helped the miners organize that district in 1904 and now the battle had to be fought all over again.
I cancelled all my speaking dates in California, tied up all my possessions in a black shawl-I like traveling light-and went immediately to West Virginia. I arrived in Charleston in the morning, went to a hotel, washed up and got my breakfast early in order to catch the one local train a day that goes into Paint Creek.
The train wound in and out among the mountains, dotted here and there with the desolate little cabins of miners. From the brakemen and the conductor of the train I picked up the story of the strike. It had started on the other side of the Kanawha hills in a frightful district called "Russia," -- Cabin Creek. Here the miners had been peons for years, kept in slavery by the guns of the coal company, and by the system of paying in scrip so that a miner never had any money should he wish to leave the district. He was cheated of his wages when his coal was weighed, cheated in the company store where he was forced to purchase his food, charged an exorbitant rent for his kennel in which he lived and bred, docked for school tax and burial tax and physician and for "protection," which meant the gunmen who shot him back into the mines if he rebelled or so much as murmured against his outrageous exploitation. No one was allowed in the Cabin Creek district without explaining his reason for being there to the gunmen who patrolled the roads, all of which belonged to the coal company. The miners finally struck -- it was a strike of desperation.
The strike of Cabin Creek spread to Paint Creek, where the operators decided to throw their fate in with the operators of Cabin Creek Immediately all civil and constitutional rights were suspended. The miners were told to quit their houses, and told at the point of a gun. They established a tent colony in Holly Grove and Mossey. But they were not safe here from the assaults of the gunmen, recruited in the big cities from the bums and criminals
To protect their women and children, who were being shot with poisoned bullets, whose houses were entered and rough-housed, the miners armed themselves as did the early sett lers against the attacks of wild Indians.
"Mother, it will be sure death for you to go into the Creeks," the brakeman told me. "Not an organizer dares go in there now. They have machine guns on the highway, and those gunmen don't care whom they kill."
The train stopped at Paint Creek Junction and I got off. There were a lot of gunmen, armed to the teeth, lolling about. Everything was still and no one would know of the bloody war that was raging in those silent hills, except for the sight of those guns and the strange, terrified look on everyone's face.
I stood for a moment looking up at the ever-lasting hills when suddenly a little boy ran screaming up to me, crying, "Oh Mother Jones! Mother Jones! Did you come to stay with us!" He was crying and rubbing his eyes with his dirty little fist.
"Yes, my lad, I've come to stay," said I.
A guard was listening.
"You have!" says he.
"I have!" says I.
The little fellow threw his arms around my knees and held me tight.
"Oh Mother, Mother," said he, "they drove my papa away and we don't know where he is, and they threw my mama and all the kids out of the house and they beat my mama and they beat me."
He started to cry again and I led him away up the creek. All the way he sobbed out his sorrows, sorrows no little child should ever know; told of brutalities no child should ever witness.
"See, Mother, I'm all sore where the gunmen hit me," and he pulled down his cotton shirt and showed me his shoulders which were black and blue.
"The gunmen did that?"
"Yes, and my mama's worse'n that!" Suddenly he began screaming," The gunmen! The gunmen! Mother, when I'm a man I'm going to kill twenty gunmen for hurting my mama! I'm going to kill them dead -- all dead !"
I went up to the miners' camp in Holly Grove where all through the winter, through snow and ice and blizzard, men and women and little children had shuddered in canvas tents that America might be a better country to live in. I listened to their stories. I talked to Mrs. Sevilla whose unborn child had been kicked dead by gunmen while her husband was out looking for work. I talked with widows, whose husbands had been shot by the gunmen; with children whose frightened faces talked more effectively than their baby tongues. I learned how the scabs had been recruited in the cities, locked in boxcars, and delivered to the mines like so much pork.
"I think the strike is lost, Mother," said an old miner whose son had been killed.
"Lost! Not until your souls are lost!" said I.
I traveled up and down the Creek, holding meetings, rousing the tired spirits of the miners. I got three thousand armed miners to march over the hills secretly to Charleston, where we read a declaration of war to Governor Glasscock who, scared as a rabbit, met us on the steps of the state house. We gave him just twenty-four hours to get rid of the gunmen, promising him that hell would break loose if he didn't. He did. He sent the state militia in, who at least were responsible to society and not to the operators alone.
One night in July, a young man, Frank Keeney, came to me. "Mother," he said, "I have been up to Charleston trying to get some one to go up to Cabin Creek, and I can't get anyone to go. The national officers say they don 't want to get killed. Boswell told me you were over here in the Paint Creek and that perhaps you might come over into the Cabin Creek district."
"I'll come up ," said I. "I've been thinking of invading that place for some time."
I knew all about Cabin Creek -- old Russia. Labor organizer after organizer had been beaten into insensibility, thrown into the creek, tossed into some desolate ravine. The creek ran with the blood of brave men, of workers who had tried to escape their bondage.
"Where can we hold our meetings!" I asked. "I don't know, Mother. The company owns every bit of dust for twenty square miles about. And the guards arrest you for trespassing.
"Is there an incorporated village anywhere near!"
"Eksdale," said he, "is free."
"Bill a meeting for me there Tuesday night. Get the railway men to circulate the bills."
Monday night, a fellow by the name of Ben Morris, a national board member came to me and said, "Mother, I understand you are going up to Cabin Creek tomorrow. Do you think that is wise?"
"It's not wise," said I, "but necessary."
"Well, if you go, I'll go," said he.
"No, I think it is better for me to go alone. You represent the National office. I don't. I'm not responsible to anyone. If anything happens and you are there, the operators might sue the Union for damages. I go as a private citizen. All they can do to me is to put me in jail. I'm used to that."
He left me and went directly to the governor and told him to send a company of the militia up to Cabin Creek as I was going up there. Then he got the sheriff to give him a body guard and he sneaked up behind me. At any rate I did not see him or the militia on the train nor did I see them when I got off.
In Eksdale a sympathetic merchant let me stay in his house until the meeting began.
When I got off the train, two or three miners met me.
"Mother," they said, "did you know there is a detective along with you. He's behind you now . . . the fellow with the red necktie.
I looked around. I went up to him.
"Isn't your name Corcoran?" said I.
"Why, yes," said he, surprised.
"Aren't you the Corcoran who followed me up New River in the strike of 1902? You were working for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the coal company then."
"Why, yes," said he, "but you know people change!"
"Not sewer rats," said I. "A sewer rat never changes!"
That night we held a meeting. When I got up to speak I saw the militia that the national organizer had had the governor send. The board member was there. He had made arrangements with the local chairman to introduce him. He began speaking to the men about being good and patient and trusting to the justice of their cause.
I rose. "Stop that silly trash," said I. I motioned him to a chair, The men hollered, "sit down! sit down!"
He sat. Then I spoke.
"You men have come over the mountains," said I, "twelve, sixteen miles. Your clothes are thin. Your shoes are out at the toes. Your wives and little ones are cold and hungry! You have been robbed and enslaved for years! And n ow Billy Sunday comes to you and tells you to be good and patient and trust to justice! What silly trash to tell to men whose goodness and patience has cried out to a deaf world."
I could see the tears in the eyes of those poor fellows. They looked up into my face as much as to say, "My God, Mother, have you brought us a ray of hope?"
Some one screamed, "Organize us, Mother!"
Then they all began shouting . . "Organize us! Organize us!"
"March over to that dark church on the corner and I will give you the obligation," said I.
The men started marching. In the dark the spies could not identify them.
"You can't organize those men," said the board member, "because you haven't the ritual."
"The ritual, hell," said I. "I'll make one up!"
"They have to pay fifteen dollars for a charter," said he.
"I will get them their charter," said I." Why these poor wretches haven't fifteen cents for a sandwich. All you care about is your salary regardless of the destiny of these men."
On the steps of the darkened church, I organized those men. They raised their hand and took the obligation to the Union.
"Go home from this meeting," said I. "Say nothing about being a union man. Put on your overalls in the morning, take your dinner buckets and go to work in the mines, and get the other men out"
They went to work. Every man who had attended the meeting was discharged. That caused the strike, a long, bitter, cruel strike. Bullpens came. Flags came. The militia came. More hungry, more cold, more starving, more ragged than Washington's army that fought against tyranny were the miners of the Kanawha Mountains. And just as grim. Just as heroic. Men died in those hills that others might be free.
One day a group of men came down to Elksdale from Red Warrior Camp to ask me to come up there and speak to them. Thirty-six men came down in their shirt sleeves. They brought a mule and a buggy for me to drive in with a little miner's lad for a driver. I was to drive in the creek bed as that was the only public road and I could be arrested for trespass if I took any other. The men took the shorter and easier way along the C. and O. tracks which paralleled the creek a little way above it.
Suddenly as we were bumping along I heard a wild scream. I looked up at the tracks along which the miners were walking. I saw the men running, screaming as they went. I heard the whistle of bullets. I jumped out of the buggy and started to run up to the track. One of the boys screamed, "God! God! Mother, don't come. They'll kill …"
"Stand still," I called. "Stand where you are. I'm coming!"
When I climbed up onto the tracks I saw the boys huddled together, and around a little bend of the tracks, a machine gun and a group of gunmen.
"Oh Mother, don't come," they cried. "'let them kill us; not you!"
"I'm coming and no one is going to get killed," said I.
I walked up to the gunmen and put my hand over the muzzle of the gun. Then I just looked at those gunmen, very quiet, and said nothing. I nodded my head for the miners to pass.
"Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat !" yelled a fellow called Mayfield, crouching like a tiger to spring at me.
I kept my hand on the muzzle of the gun. "Sir," said I, "my class goes into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is my gun! My class melts the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel. They dig the coal that feeds furnaces. My class is not fighting you, not you. They are fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men who rob them and deprive their children of childhood. It is the hard-earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from. They aren't fighting you."
Several of the gunmen dropped their eyes but one fellow, this Mayfield, said, "I don't care a damn! I'm going to kill every one of them and you, too!"
I looked him full in the face. "Young man, said I, "I want to tell you that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you touch one of my white hairs, that creek will run with blood, and yours will be the first to crimson it. I do not want to hear the screams of these men nor to see the tears, nor feel the heartache of wives and little children. These boys have no guns! Let them pass!"
"So our blood is going to crimson the creek is it!" snarled this Mayfield.
I pointed to the high hills. "Up there in the mountain I have five hundred miners. They are marching armed to the meeting I am going to address. If you start the shooting, they will finish the game."
Mayfield's lips quivered like a tiger's deprived of its flesh.
"Advance!" he said to the miners. They came forward. I kept my hand on the gun. The miners were searched. There were no guns On them. They were allowed to pass.
I went down the side of the hill to my buggy.
The mule was chewing grass and the little lad was making a willow whistle. I drove on. That night I held my meeting.
But there weren't any five hundred armed men in the mountains. Just a few jack rabbits, perhaps, but I had scared that gang of cold blooded, hired murderers and Red Warrior camp was organized.
The miners asked me to come up to Wineberg, a camp in the Creek district. Every road belonged to the coal company. Only the bed of the creek was a public road. At that time of the year-early spring-the water in the creek was high.
I started for Wineberg accompanied by a newspaperman, named West, of the Baltimore Sun. We walked along the railroad track.
Again I met the gunmen with their revolvers and machine guns. Mayfield was there, too.
"You can't walk here!" he growled "Private property!"
"You don't mean to say you are going to make that old lady walk that creek in that ice cold water, do you?" said the reporter.
"It's too damn good for her! She won't walk it!" he laughed.
"Won't I?" said I. I took off my shoes, rolled u p my skirt and walked the creek.
At Wineberg the miners, standing in the creek and on its edges, met me. With our feet in water we held a meeting. Holding their shoes in their hands, their trousers rolled up, the men took the obligation to the union.
I was very tired. A miner stepped up to me and asked me to come to his cabin and have a dish of tea.
"Your house is on private property," yelled a gunman. "She cannot go."
"I pay rent," he protested.
"Private property, just the same. I'll arrest her for trespassing if she steps out of the creek."
The struggle went on with increasing bitterness. The militia disarmed both gunmen and miners but they were of course, on the side of the grand dukes of the region. They forbade all meetings. They suspended every civil right. They became despotic. They arrested scores of miners, tried them in military court, without jury, sentenced them to ten, fifteen years in the Moundsville prison.
I decided to call the attention of the national government to conditions in West Virginia. I borrowed one hundred dollars and went out and billed meetings in Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, and from these cities I came to Washington, D. C. I had already written to Congressman W. B. Wilson, to get up a protest meeting.
The meeting was held in the armory and it was packed: senators, congressmen, secretaries, citizens. It is usual to have star orators at such meetings, who use parlor phrases. Congress man Wilson told the audience that he hoped they would not get out of patience with me, for I might use some language which Washington was not accustomed to hear.
I told the audience what things were happening in West Virginia, proceedings that were un-American. I told them about the suspension of civil liberty by the military. Of the wholesale arrests and military sentences.
"This is the seat of a great republican form of government. If such crimes against the citizens of the state of West Virginia go unrebuked by the government, I suggest that we take down the flag that stands for constitutional government, and run up a banner, saying, 'This is the flag of the money oligarchy of America!'
The next day by twelve 0 'clock all the military prisoners but two were called down to the prison office and signed their own release.
From Washington I went to West Virginia to carry on my work. The day before I arrived, an operator named Quinn Morton, the sheriff of Kanawha County, Bonner Hill, deputies and guards drove an armored train with gatling guns through Holly Grove, the tent colony of the miners, while they were sleeping. Into the quiet tents of the workers the guns were fired, killing and wounding the sleepers. A man by the name of Epstaw rose and picked up a couple of children and told them to run for their lives. His feet were shot off. Women were wounded. Children screamed with terror. No one was arrested.
Three days later, a mine guard, Fred Bobbett, was killed in an altercation. Fifty strike and their organizers were immediately arrested, and without warrant.
I went to Boomer where the organization is composed of foreigners, and I went to Long Acre, getting each local union to elect a delegate who should appeal to the governor to put a stop to the military despotism.
I met all these delegates in a church and told them how they were to address a governor. We took the train for Charleston. I thought it better for the delegates to interview the governor without me, so after cautioning them to keep cool, I went over to the hotel where they were to meet me after their interview.
As I was going along the street, a big elephant, called Dan Cunningham, grabbed me by the arm and said, "I want you!" He took me to the Roughner Hotel, and sent for a warrant for my arrest. Later I was put on the C. and 0. train and taken down to Pratt and handed over to the military. They were not looking for me so they had no bullpen ready. So a Dr. Hans ford and his wife took care of me and some organizers who were arrested with me. The next day I was put in solitary in a room, guarded by soldiers who paced day and night in front of my door. I could see no one. I will give the military of West Virginia credit for one thing: they are far less brutal and cold blooded than the military of Colorado.
After many weeks we were taken before the judge advocate. The court had sent two lawyers to my bullpen to defend me but I had refused to let them defend me in that military court. I refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court, to recognize the suspension of the civil courts. My arrest and trial were unconstitutional. I told the judge advocate that this was my position. I refused to enter a plea.
I was tried for murder. Along with the others I was sentenced to serve twenty years in the state penitentiary. I was not sent to prison immediately but held for five weeks in the military camp. I did not know what they were going to do with me. My guards were nice young men, respectful and courteous with the exception of a fellow called Lafferty, and another sewer rat whose name I have not taxed my mind with.
Then from California came aid. The great, lion-hearted editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, Fremont Older, sent his wife across the continent to Washington. She had a talk with Senator Kearns. From Washington she came to see me. She got all the facts in regard to the situation from the beginning of the strike to my unconstitutional arrest and imprisonment. She wrote the story for Collier's Magazine,
She reported conditions to Senator Kearns, immediately demanded a thorough congressional inquiry.
Some one dropped a Cincinnati Post through my prison window. It contained a story of Wall Street's efforts to hush up the inquiry. If Wall Street gets away with this," I thought ''and the strike is broken, it means industrial bondage for long years to come in the West Virginia mines."
I decided to send a telegram, via my underground railway, to Senator Kearns. There was a hole in the floor of my prison-cabin. A rug covered the hole. I lifted the rug and rang two beer bottles against one another. A soldier who was my friend came crawling under the house to see "what was up." He had slipped me things before, and I had given him what little I had to give -- an apple, a magazine. So I gave him the telegram and told him to take it three miles up the road to another office. He said he would. "It's fine stuff, Mother," he said.
That night when he was off duty he trudge three miles up the road with the telegram. H sent it.
The next day in Washington, the matter of congressional inquiry in the West Virginia mines came up for discussion in the Senate.
Senator Goff from Clarksburg, who had stock in the coal mines of West Virginia, got up on the floor and said that West Virginia was a place of peace until the agitators came in. "And the grandmother of agitators in this country," he went on, "is that old Mother Jones! I learn from the governor that she is not in prison at all but is only detained in a very pleasant boarding house!"
Senator Kearns rose. "I have a telegram from this old women of eighty-four in this very pleasant boarding house," said he. "I will read it."
To the astonishment of the senators and the press he then read my telegram. They had supposed the old woman's voice was in prison with her body.
"From out the military prison walls of Pratt, West Virginia, where I have walked over my eighty-fourth milestone in history, I send you the groans and tears and heartaches of men, women and children as I have heard them in this state. From out these prison walls, I plead with you for the honor of the nation, to push that investigation, and the children yet unborn will rise and call you blessed."
Then the senate took action. A senatorial commission was appointed to investigate conditions.
One hour after this decision, Captain Sherwood of the militia, a real man in every sense of the word aside from the uniform, said to me, "Mother, the governor telephoned me to bring you to Charleston at once, You have only twenty-five minutes before the train comes."
"What does the governor want?" said I.
"He didn't say."
When I got to the governor's office, I had to wait some time because the governor and the mine owners were locked behind doors holding a secret conference as to how they should meet the senatorial investigation.
Governor Hatfield bad succeeded Governor Glasscock, and he told me, when he finally admitted me, that he bad been trying to settle tie strike ever since he bad been elected.
"I could have settled it in twenty-four hours," said I.
He shook his head mournfully.
"I would make the operators listen to the grievances of their workers. I would take the $650,000 spent for the militia during this strike and spend it on schools and playgrounds and libraries that West Virginia might have a more highly developed citizenry, physically and intellectually. You would then have fewer little children in the mines and factories; fewer later in jails and penitentiaries; fewer men and women submitting to conditions that are brutalizing and unAmerican."
The next day he attended the convention of the miners that was in session in Charleston. I saw him there and I said to him, "Governor, I am going out of town tomorrow."
"Where are you going?"
"I'm going to consult a brain specialist. My brain got out of balance while I was in the bull-pen."
"Didn’t you know I was a doctor?" said he.
"Your pills won't do me any good " I said. Shortly after the miner's convention, Governor Hatfield set aside all the military sentences, freeing all of the prisoners but eight. The operators recognized the union and many abuses were corrected.
The working men had much to thank Senator Kearns for. He was a great man, standing for justice and the square deal. Yet, to the shame of the workers of Indiana, when he came up for re-election they elected a man named Watson, a deadly foe of progress. I felt his defeat keenly, felt the ingratitude of the workers. It was through his influence that prison doors had opened, that unspeakable conditions were brought to light. I have felt that the disappointment of his defeat brought on his illness and ended the brave, heroic life of one of labor's few friends.
One day when I was in Washington, a man came to see me who said General Elliott had sent him to me. General Elliott was the military man who had charge of the prisoners sentenced to the penitentiary in the court martial during the strike. Never would I forget that scene on the station platform of Pratt when the men were being taken to Moundsville; the wives screaming frantically; the little children not allowed to kiss or caress their fathers. Neither the screams nor the sobs touched the stone heart of General Elliott.
And now General Elliott had sent a friend to me to ask me to give him a letter endorsing him for Congress.
"And did General Elliott send you?"
"Yes."
"Then tell the general that nothing would give me more pleasure than to give you a letter, but it would be a letter to go to hell and not to Congress!"
CHAPTER XIX
GUARDS AND GUNMEN
In the fall of 1912 I went to Eksdale, West Virginia. A strike had been going on in that section of the coal country for some time. A weary lull had come in the strike and I decided to do something to rouse the strikers and the public.
I called six trusty American men to me, told them to go up along the creeks on either side of which mining camps are located, and to notify all the miners that I wanted them in Charleston at one o'clock Tuesday afternoon; they must not bring any clubs or guns with them.
Tuesday afternoon, at a prearranged place, I met the boys in Charieston. The camps had turned out in full. I told the lads to follow me, and they did, through the streets of Charleston with a banner that said, "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." "Nero" was the governor who fiddled with the moneyed interests while the state was going to ruin. Another banner was addressed to a certain gunman whom the workers particularly hated because of his excessive brutality. It said, "If G--------- is not out of town by six o'clock he will be hanging to a telegraph pole!"
The reason that he did not hang was because he was out of town before six.
We gathered on the state house grounds. I went into the governor's office and requested him politely to come out, as there were a lot Virginia's first families giving a lawn party outside, and they wanted him to talk to them. I could see that he wanted to come out but he was timid.
"Mother," he said, "I can't come with you but I am not as bad as you may think."
"Come," I said, pulling him by his coattail. Hie shook his head. He looked like a scared child and I felt sorry for him; a man without the courage of his emotions; a good, weak man who could not measure up to a position that took great strength of mind, a character of granite.
From a platform on the statehouse steps I read a document that we had drawn up, requesting the governor to do away with the murderous Baldwin Felts guards and gunmen. We asked him to reestablish America and American traditions in West Virginia. I called a committee to take the document into the statehouse and place it reverently on the governor's table. I then spoke to the crowd and in conclusion said, "Go home now. Keep away from the saloons. Save your money. You're going to need it."
"What will we need it for, Mother?" some one shouted.
"For guns," said I. "Go home and read the immortal Washington's words to the colonists. He told those who were struggling for liberty against those who would not heed or hear "to buy guns."
They left the meeting peacefully and bought every gun in the hardware stores of Charleston. They took down the old hammerlocks from their cabin walls. Like the Minute Men of New England, they marched up the creeks to their homes with the grimness of the soldiers of the revolution.
The next morning alarms were ringing. The United States senate called attention to the civil war that was taking place but 350 miles from the capital. The sleepy eye of the national government looked upon West Virginia. A senatorial investigation was immediately ordered to inquire into the blight that was eating out the heart of the coal industry. Once again the public was given a chance to hear the stifled cry of the miners in their eternal struggle.
CHAPTER XX
GOVERNOR HUNT
I went into Arizona in 1913 for the Western Federation of Miners. The miners throughout the copper region were on strike. Great fortunes were being made in the war and the miners demanded their share of it. Ed Grough, a very able organizer, was with me in the field.
The strike of the miners in Arizona was one of the most remarkable strikes in the history of the American labor movement. Its peaceful character, its successful outcome, were due to that most remarkable character, Governor Hunt.
The answer of the copper kings, who for thirty years had held the copper country as despots hold their thrones, their answer to the miners' demands was to close the mines completely. The operators then left town. They built a tent colony for the faithful scabs who cared for their masters more than for their class.
Then the governor acted, acted in favor of peace. He authorized the sheriff of the copper region to deputize forty striking miners to watch the mine owners' property, to see that no violence was done to any man. He said that bullpens if built would be for gunmen as well as for any striker who advised violence. He refused to let scabs be brought in under the protection of state troops and hired thugs, as was done in Colorado.
One night during the strike I was addressing a large audience composed of citizens as well as miners.
"I am glad," said I, "to see so many union men and women tonight. In fact I know that every man and woman here is a loyal member of the union. I refer to the United States, the union of all the states. I ask then, if in union there is strength for our nation, would there not be for labor! What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union. What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow."
The strike lasted four months, in which time there was complete lack of disorder. Though the striking miners had to go miles up the hills for their firewood, they did not touch a stick of the lumber that lay in piles about the mines, and was the property of the mine owners.
Although the bosses had gone away, leaving their houses practically open, taking nothing, when they returned they found things just as they were left.
A fire broke out in one of the mills due to defective wiring. The strikers formed a bucket brigade and put out the fire. Two were injured The copper-controlled newspapers accused the miners of setting the mill on fire and in the course of their story omitted the fact that strikers saved it. As no violence could be attributed to the strikers, the financial interests went out to "get" Governor Hunt. In spite of their vigorous campaign of lies and fraud, Governor Hunt was chosen in the primaries and in the subsequent election.
But the election was challenged. He was counted out and a present of the governorship handed to the tool of the copper interests, Campbell.
Meanwhile the miners won their strike. They received large increases in wages and a standing grievance committee was recognized which was to act as intermediary between the operators and the miners.
This strike demonstrated the fact that where the great vested interests do not control the state government, the voice of labor makes itself heard. But it is hard for labor to speak above the roar of guns.
I came to know Governor Hunt, a most human and just man. One day I saw the governor stop his machine and ask a poor man with his bundle of blankets over his back, where he was going. The man was a "blanket-stiff," a wandering worker. His clothes were dusty. His shoes in slithers. He told the governor where he was going.
"Jump in," said the governor, opening the door of his machine.
The man shook his head, looking at his dusty clothes and shoes.
The governor understood. "Oh, jump in," he laughed. "I don't mind outside dirt. It's the dirt in people's hearts that counts!"
Governor Hunt never forgot that although he was governor, he was just like other folks.
With Governor Campbell in office, the bosses took heart. The miners in settling their strike with the copper kings had agreed to give up their charter in the Western Federation of Labor in return for a standing grievance committee. Thus they sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. They were without the backing of a powerful national organization. Grievances were disregarded and the men were without the machinery for forcing their consideration. Many of the promises made by the bosses were not executed.
The cost of living during the war went rocket high. Copper stock made men rich over night. But the miner, paying high prices for his food, for his living, was unpatriotic if he called attention to his grievances. He became an "emissary of the Kaiser" if he whispered his injuries. While boys died at the front and the copper miners groaned at the rear, tile copper kings grew richer than the kings against whom the nation fought.
Finally the burning injustice in the hearts of the copper miners leaped into flame. On June 27, 1917, a strike was called in the Copper Queen, one of the richest mines in the world.
"The I. W. W.!" yelled the copper kings whose pockets were bulging. They themselves had driven out the A. F. of L., the conservative organization.
Mining stopped. Stocks suffered a drop. Wall Street yelled "German money!" No one would listen to the story of the theft of the miners' time without pay under the pressure of war; of his claim that he could not live on his wages-no one.
Guns, revolvers, machine guns came to Bisbee as they did to the front in France. Shoot them back into the mines, said the bosses.
Then on July 12th, 1,086 strikers and their sympathizers were herded at the point of guns into cattle cars in which cattle had recently been and which had not yet been cleaned out; they were herded into these box cars, especially made ready, and taken into the desert. Here they were left without food or water -- men, women, children. Heads of families were there. Men who had bought Liberty Bonds that the reign of democracy might be ushered in. Lawyers who had taken a striker's case in court. Store keepers who sold groceries to strikers' wives out on the desert, without food or water left to die.
"I. W. W. " shrieked the press on the front page. On the back page it gave the rise in copper stocks.
Wrapped in the folds of the flag, these kidnapers of the workers were immune. Besides, they were Bisbee’s prominent citizens.
The President sent a commission. Copper was needed for the war. Faithful workers were needed. The commission investigated conditions, investigated the frightful deportations of American citizens. It made a report wholly in favor of labor and the contentions of the workers. It called the deportations from Bisbee outrageous.
But the papers of Arizona would not print the commission’s report although accepted by President Wilson.
The workers had become educated. Elections came. Again Governor Hunt was elected. The legislature had passed the infamous slave bill, "The Work or Fight Law." By this law a man who struck was automatically sent into the front line trenches. One of the first things Governor. Hunt did was to veto this bill which he characterized as a "very obnoxious form of tyranny."
Out of labor's struggle in Arizona came better conditions for the workers, who must everywhere, at all times, under advantage and disadvantage work out their own salvation.
CHAPTER XXI
IN ROCKEFELLER'S PRISONS
I was in Washington, D. C., at the time of the great coal strike against the Rockefeller holdings in southern Colorado. Ten years previous a strike against long endured exploitation and tyranny had been brutally suppressed with guns and by starvation. But the bitterness and despair of the workers smouldered and smouldered long after the fires of open rebellion had been extinguished. Finally after a decade of endurance the live coals in the hearts of miners leaped into a roaring fire of revolt.
One day I read in the newspaper that Governor Ammons of Colorado said that Mother; Jones was not to be allowed to go into the southern field where the strike was raging.
That night I took a train and went directly to Denver. I got a room in the hotel where I usually stayed. I then went up to Union head-quarters of the miners, after which I went to the station and bought my ticket and sleeper to Trinidad in the southern field.
When I returned to the hotel, a man who had registered when I did, came up to me and said, "Are you going to Trinidad, Mother Jones!"
"Of course," said I,
"Mother, I want to tell you that the governor has detectives at the hotel and railway station watching you."
"Detectives don't bother me," I told him.
"There are two detectives in the lobby, one up in the gallery, and two or three at the station watching the gates to see who boards the trains south."
I thanked him for his information. That night I went an hour or so before the coaches were brought into the station way down into the railway yards where the coaches stood ready to be coupled to the train. I went to the section house. There was an old section hand there.
He held up his lantern to see me. "Oh, Mother Jones," he said, "and is it you that's walking the ties?"
"It's myself," said I, "but I'm not walking. I have a sleeper ticket for the south and I want to know if the trains are made up yet. I want to go aboard."
"Sit here," he said, "I'll go see. I don't know." I knew he understood without any explaining why I was there.
"I wish you would tell the porter to come back with you," said I.
He went out his light bobbing at his side. Pretty Soon he returned with the porter.
"What you want, Mother?" says he.
"I want to know if the berths are made up yet?" "Do you want to get on now, Mother?" "Yes."
"Then yours is made up." I showed him my tickets and he led me across the tracks.
"Mother," he said, "I know you now but later I might find it convenienter not to have the acquaintance."
"I understand," said I. "Now here's two dollars to give to the conductor. Tell him to let Mother Jones off before we get to the Santa Fe crossing. That will be early in the morning."
"I sure will," said he.
I got on board the sleeper in the yards and was asleep when the coaches pulled into the Denver station for passengers south. I was still asleep when the train pulled out of the depot.
Early in the morning the porter awakened me. "Mother," he said, the conductor is going to stop the train for you. Be ready to hop."
When the train slowed down before we got to the crossing, the conductor came to help me off.
"Are you doing business, Mother!" said he. "I am indeed," said I. "And did you stop the train just for me!"
"I certainly did!"
He waved to me as the train pulled away. "Goodbye, Mother." It was very early and I walked into the little town of Trinidad and got breakfast. Down at
the station a company of military were watching to see if I came into town. But no Mother Jones got off at the depot, and the company marched back to headquarters, which was just across the street from the hotel where I was staying.
I was in Trinidad three hours before they knew I was there. They telephoned the governor. They telephoned General Chase in charge of the militia. "Mother Jones is in Trinidad!" they said.
"Impossible!" said the governor. "Impossible!" said the general.
"Nevertheless, she is here!"
"We have had her well watched, the hotels and the depots," they said.
"Nevertheless, she is here!"
My arrest was ordered.
A delegation of miners came to me. "Boys," I said, "they are going to arrest me but don't make any trouble. Just let them do it."
"Mother," said they, "we aren't going to let them arrest you!"
"Yes, you will. Let them carry on their game."
While we were sitting there talking, I heard footsteps tramping up the stairs.
"Here they come," said I and we sat quietly waiting.
The door opened. It was a company of militia.
"Did you come after me, boys!" said I. They looked embarrassed.
"Pack your valise and come," said the captain.
They marched me down stairs and put me in an automobile that was waiting at the door.
The miners had followed. One of them had tears rolling down his cheeks.
"Mother," he cried, "I wish I could go for you!"
We drove to the prison first, passing cavalry and infantry and gunmen, sent by the state to subdue the miners. Orders were given to drive me to the Sisters' Hospital, a portion of which had been turned into a military prison. They put me in a small room with white plastered walls, with a cot, a chair and a table, and for nine weeks I stayed in that one room, seeing no human beings but the silent military. One stood on either side of the cell door, two stood across the hall, one at the entrance to the hall, two at the elevator entrance on my floor, two on the ground floor elevator entrance.
Outside my window a guard walked up and down, up and down day and night, day and night, his bayonet flashing in the sun.
"Lads," said I to the two silent chaps at the door, "the great Standard Oil is certainly afraid of an old woman!"
They grinned.
My meals were sent to me by the sisters.
They were not, of course, luxurious. In all those nine weeks I saw no one, received not a letter, a paper, a postal card. I saw only landscape and the bayonet flashing in the sun.
Finally, Mr. Hawkins, the attorney for the miners, was allowed to visit me. Then on Sunday, Colonel Davis came to me and said the governor wanted to see me in Denver.
The colonel and a subordinate came for me that night at nine 0 'clock. As we went down the hall, I noticed there was not a soldier in sight. There was none in the elevator. There was none in the entrance way. Everything was strangely silent. No one was about. A closed automobile waited us. We three got in.
"Drive the back way " said the colonel to the chauffeur.
We drove through dark, lonely streets. The curtains of the machine were down. It was black outside and inside. It was the one time in my life that I th6ught my end had come; that I was to say farewell to the earth, but I made up my mind that I would put up a good fight before passing out of life!
When we reached the Santa Fe crossing I was put aboard the train. I felt great relief, for the strike had only begun and I had much to do. I went to bed and slept till we arrived in Denver. Here I was met by a monster, called General Chase, whose veins run with ice water. He started to take me to Brown Palace Hotel. I asked him if he would permit me to go to a less aristocratic hotel, to the one I usually stopped at. He consented, telling me he would escort me to the governor at nine o'clock.
I was taken before the governor that morning. The governor said to me, "I am going to turn you free but you must not go back to the strike zone."
"Governor," I said, "I am going back."
"I think you ought to take my advice," be said, "and do what I think you ought to do."
"Governor," said I," if Washington took instructions from such as you, we would be under King George's descendants yet! If Lincoln took instructions from you, Grant would never have gone to Gettysburg. I think I had better not take your orders."
I stayed on a week in Denver. Then I got a ticket and sleeper for Trinidad. Across tbe aisle from me was Reno, Rockefeller's detective. Very early in the morning, soldiers awakened me.
"Get up," they said, "and get off at the next stop"
I got up, of course, and with the soldiers I got off at Walsenburg, fifty miles from Trinidad. The engineer and the fireman left their train when they saw the soldiers putting me off.
"What are you going to do with that old woman?" they said. "We won't run the train till we know!"
The soldiers did not reply.
"Boys," I said, "go back on your engine. Some day it will be all right."
Tears came trickling down their cheeks, and when they wiped them away, there were long, black streaks on their faces.
I was put in the cellar under the courthouse. It was a cold, terrible place, without heat, damp and dark. I slept in my clothes by day, and at night I fought great sewer rats with a beer bottle. "If I were out of this dungeon," thought I, "I would be fighting the human sewer rats anyway!"
For twenty-six days I was held a military prisoner in that black hole. I would not give in. I would not leave the state. At any time, if I would do so, I could have my freedom. General Chase and his bandits thought that by keeping me in that cold cellar, I would catch the flue or pneumonia, and that would settle for them what to do with "old Mother Jones."
Colonel Berdiker, in charge of me, said, "Mother, I have never been placed in a position as painful as this. Won't you go to Denver and leave the strike field?"
"No, Colonel, I will not," said I.
The hours dragged underground. Day was perpetual twilight and night was deep night. I watched people's feet from my cellar window; miners' feet in old shoes; soldiers' feet, well shod in government leather; the shoes of women with the heels run down; the dilapidated shoes of children; barefooted boys. The children would scrooch down and wave to me but the soldiers shooed them off.
One morning when my hard bread and sloppy coffee were brought to me, Colonel Berdiker said to me, "Mother, don't eat that stuff!" After that he sent my breakfast to me -- good,. plain food. He was a man with a heart, who perhaps imagined his own mother imprisoned in a cellar with the sewer rats' union.
The colonel came to me one day and told me that my lawyers had obtained a habeas corpus for me and that I was to be released; that the military would give me a ticket to any place I desired.
"Colonel," said I, "I can accept nothing from men whose business it is to shoot down my class whenever they strike for decent wages. I prefer to walk."
"All right, Mother," said he, "Goodbye!"
The operators were bringing in Mexicans to work as scabs in the mines. In this operation they were protected by the military all the way from the Mexican borders. They were brought in to the strike territory without knowing the conditions, promised enormous wages and easy work. They were packed in cattle cars, in charge of company gunmen, and if when arriving, they attempted to leave, they were shot Hundreds of these poor fellows had been lured into the mines with promises of free land. When they got off the trains, they were driven like cattle into the mines by gunmen.
This was the method that broke the strike ten years previously. And now it was the scabs of a decade before who were striking -- the docile, contract labor of Europe.
I was sent down to El Paso to give the facts of the Colorado strike to the Mexicans who were herded together for the mines in that city. I held meetings, I addressed Mexican gatherings, I got the story over the border. I did everything in my power to prevent strike breakers going into the Rockefeller mines.
In January, 1914,. I returned to Colorado.
When I got off the train at Trinidad, the militia met me and ordered me back on the train. Nevertheless, I got off. They marched me to the telegrapher's office, then they changed their minds, and took me to the hotel where they had their headquarters. I told them I wanted to get my breakfast. They escorted me to the dining room.
"Who is paying for my breakfast?" said I.
"The state," said they.
"Then as the guest of the state of Colorado I'll order a good breakfast." And I did-all the way from bacon to pie.
The train for Denver pulled in. The military put me aboard it. When we reached Walsenburg; a delegation of miners met the train, singing a miner's song. They sang at the top their lungs till the silent, old mountains see to prick up their ears. They swarmed into the train.
"God bless you, Mother!"
"God bless you, my boys!"
"Mother, is your coat warm enough? It's; freezing cold in the hills!"
"I'm all right, my lad." The chap had no overcoat -- a cheap cotton suit, and a bit of woolen rag around his neck.
Outside in the station stood the militia. One of them was a fiend. He went about swinging his gun, hitting the miners, and trying to prod them into a fight, hurling vile oaths at them. But the boys kept cool and I could hear them singing above the 'shriek of the whistle as the train pulled out of the depot and wound away through the hills.
From January on until the final brutal out-rage, --the burning of the tent colony in Ludlow -- my ears wearied with the stories of brutality and suffering. My eyes ached with the misery I witnessed. My brain sickened with the knowledge of man's inhumanity to man.
It was, "Oh, Mother, my daughter has been assaulted by the soldiers-such a little girl!"
"Oh, Mother, did you hear how the soldiers entered Mrs. Hall's house, how they terrified the little children, wrecked the home, and did worse-terrible things-and just because Mr. Hall, the undertaker, had buried two miners whom the militia had killed!" "And, Oh Mother, did you hear how they are arresting miners for vagrancy, for loafing, and making them work in company ditches without pay, making them haul coal and clear snow up to the mines for nothing!" "Mother, Mother, listen! A Polish fellow arrived as a strike breaker. He didn't know there was a strike. He was a big, strapping fellow. They gave him a star and a gun and told him to shoot strikers!"
"Oh, Mother, they've brought in a shipment of guns and machine guns-what's to happen to us!"
A frantic mother clutched me. "Mother Jones," she screamed, "Mother Jones, my little boy's all swollen up with the kicking and beating he got from a soldier because he said, 'Howdy, John D. feller!' 'Twas just a kid teasing, and now he's lying like dead !"
"Mother, 'tis an outrage for an adjutant general of the state to shake his fist and holler in the face of a grey-haired widow for singing a union song in her own kitchen while she washes the dishes!"
"It is all an outrage," said I. 'Tis an outrage indeed that Rockefller should own the coal that God put in the earth for all the people. 'Tis an outrage that gunmen and soldiers are here protecting mines against workmen who ask bit more than a crust, a bit more than bondage! 'Tis an ocean of outrage !"
"Mother, did you hear of poor, old Colner? e was going to the postoffice and was arrested by the milita. They marched him down hill, making him carry a shovel and a pick his back. They told him he was to die and must dig his own grave. He stumbled and fell on the road. They kicked him and he staggered up. He begged to be allowed to go home kiss his wife and children goodbye.
"We'll do the kissing," laughed the soldiers At the place they picked out for his grave, they measured him, and then they ordered to dig-two feet deeper, they told him. Old Colner began digging while the soldiers stood around laughing and cursing and playing craps for his tin watch. Then Colner fell fainting into the grave. The soldiers left him there till he recovered by himself. There he was alone and he staggered back to camp, Mother, and he isn't quite right in the head!"
I sat through long nights with sobbing widows, watching the candles about the corpse of the husband burn down to their sockets.
"Get out and fight," I told those women. "Fight like hell till you go to Heaven t" That was the only way I knew to comfort them.
I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike. I kept the men away from the saloons, whose licenses as well as those of the brothels, were held by the Rockefeller interests.
The miners armed, armed as it is permitted every American citizen to do in defense of his home, his family; as he is permitted to do against invasion. The smoke of armed battle rose from the arroyos and ravines of the Rocky Mountains.
No one listened. No one cared. The tickers in the offices of 26 Broadway sounded louder than the sobs of women and children. Men in the steam heated luxury of Broadway offices could not feel the stinging cold of Colorado hill-sides where families lived in tents.
Then came Ludlow and the nation heard. Little children roasted alive make a front page story. Dying by inches of starvation and exposure does not.
On the 19th of April, 1914, machine guns, used on the strikers in the Paint Creek strike, were placed in position above the tent colony of Ludlow. Major Pat Hamrock and Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt were in charge of the militia, the majority of whom were, company gun-men sworn in as soldiers.
Early in the morning soldiers approached the colony with a demand from headquarters that Louis Tikas, leader of the Greeks, surrender two Italians. Tikas demanded a warrant for their arrest. They had none. Tikas refused to surrender them. The soldiers returned to quarters. A signal bomb was fired. Then another. Immediately the machine guns began spraying the flimsy tent colony, the only home the wretched families of the miners had, riddling it with bullets. Like iron rain, bullets' upon men, women and children.
The women and children fled to the hills. Others tarried. The men defended their home with their guns. All day long the firing continued. Men fell dead, their faces to the ground. Women dropped. The little Snyder boy was shot through the head, trying to save his kitten. A child carrying water to his dying mother was killed.
By five o'clock in the afternoon, the miners had no more food, nor water, nor ammunition. They had to retreat with their wives and little ones into the hills. Louis Tikas was riddled with shots while he tried to lead women and children to safety. They perished with him.
Night came. A raw wind blew down the canyons where men, women and children shivered and wept. Then a blaze lighted the sky. The soldiers, drunk with blood and with the liquor they had looted from the saloon, set fire to the tents of Ludlow with oil-soaked torches. The tents, all the poor furnishings, the clothes and bedding of the miners' families burned. Coils of barbed wire were stuffed into the well, the miners' only water supply.
After it was over, the wretched people crept back to bury their dead. In a dugout under a burned tent, the charred bodies of eleven little children and two women were found-unrecognizable. Everything lay in ruins. The wires of bed springs writhed on the ground as if they, too, had tried to flee the horror. Oil and fire and guns had robbed men and women and children of their homes and slaughtered tiny babies and defenseless women. Done by order of Lieutenant Linderfelt, a savage, brutal executor of the will of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The strikers issued a general call to arms: Every able bodied man must shoulder a gun to protect himself and his family from assassins, from arson and plunder. From jungle days to our own so-named civilization, this is a man's inherent right. To a man they armed, through-out the whole strike district. Ludlow went on burning in their hearts.
Everybody got busy. A delegation from Ludlow went to see President Wilson. Among them was Mrs. Petrucci whose three tiny babies were crisped to death in the black hole of Ludlow. She had something to say to her President.
Immediately he sent the United States cavalry to quell the gunmen. He studied the situation, and drew up proposals for a three-year truce, binding miner and operator. The operators scornfully refused.
A mass meeting was called in Denver. Lindsay spoke. He demanded that the operators be made to respect the laws of Colorado. That something be done immediately. The Denver Real Estate Exchange appointed a committee to spit on Judge Lindsey for his espousal of the cause of the miners.
Rockefeller got busy. Writers were hired to write pamphlets which were sent broadcast to every editor in the country, bulletins. In these leaflets, it was shown how perfectly happy was the life of the miner until the agitators came; how joyous he was with the company's saloon,. the company's pigstys for homes, the cornpany's teachers and preachers and coroners. How the miners hated the state law of an eight-hour working day, begging to be allowed to work ten, twelve. How they hated the state law that they should have their own check weigh-man to see that they were not cheated at the tipple.
And all the while the mothers of the children who died in Ludlow were mourning their dead.