I am as ready to die with you now
as I have been ready to fight
with you in the past.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday February 26, 1907
From the Appeal to Reason: Mother Jones on Idaho Injustice
While Eugene V. Debs continues his campaign to save Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone on the front page of this week’s edition of the Appeal to Reason, a stirring article from Mother Jones appears on page three:
THE DAWNING OF A NEW ERA
(BY MOTHER JONES.)
—–
IN the history of the country-I go farther, in the history of the world-there is nothing more criminal and heartless than the kidnaping of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone and walling them in alive without the shadow of a charge against them. Two governors, in league with the money power, are guilty of this crime. We who know these men know them to be innocent and we also know that they are worthy to receive our loyal support and that they shall have it to the end.
This diabolical deed, accomplished at night, upon honest workingmen is enough to set one’s brain in a whirl and stir one’s soul to revolt.
King Ruzvlt entered no word of protest, but indirectly approved and backed up this attack upon organized labor.
When Gooding said: “These men shall never leave Idaho alive” he said more than he intended. That is what he meant, but he has since realized that it was unfortunate for him to blurt it out.
General Miles says he can bring 250 honest citizens into court to swear that the beef trust murdered three thousand American soldiers by feeding them poisoned beef.
The mine owners, with the aid of United States deputy marshals, murdered seven miners in the dead of night on Stanford Mountain, W. Va., February 23, 1903.
These are two typical incidents which show the murderous march of King Capital. Life counts for less than nothing. But let it be noted that it is always the life of labor.
Whether it be the beef trust to grind out profit, the Standard Oil trust to contribute to education one day and raise the price of oil the next, the smelter trust to suffocate its employes in the poison fumes of its infernos, or the mine owners’ trust to have its hirelings blow up the workers to fasten crime on their organization, it is all the same, and it is always labor that furnishes the victims.
But this will not always be so. One of these days there is going to be a great awakening. I can already see the beginnings of it. Go where we will the workers are beginning to stand up and talk out loud. They are feeling the thrill of manhood; they are tired of cringing and crawling; they are just realizing what they are and what they can be; and the change from slavery to freedom, from misery to splendid manhood, is coming more swiftly than we know or the plutocrats dream.
There has been no conspiracy to kidnap the members of the beef trust for poisoning the soldiers, or the members of the Mine Owners’ association for shooting and otherwise killing their miners. Such devilish things are never hatched in the brain of honest labor. All these crimes are spawned by the abnormal brain that is itself born of exploitation and thrives upon spoils wrung from misery.
One point in the Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone case we must not lose sight of; and that is, that Gooding, the governor of the state and at the same time the tool of the money power, declared to the world that they should not leave Idaho alive.
The whole conspiracy is locked up in this confession made in an unguarded moment.
Such a thing as a fair trial never entered Gooding’s head. He had his orders from the power that rules in Idaho, as elsewhere in the capitalist system, and his one thought was to obey that order, catch our boys and kill them. That is the only thing he had in mind from the start. Such tools as Gooding, having no ability of their own, nor manhood, depend wholly upon their plutocratic masters and obey their orders implicitly to hold their jobs or to get better ones, and this applies particularly to hirelings of a political character.
When Gooding shouted that our boys should not leave Idaho alive he unintentionally issued a challenge to the working class of the United States. He did not intend this, but this has been the effect; and such an awakening has been produced that many times since the governor has found it expedient to explain that he had no intention of attacking “legitimate” unions of workingmen, but that his only purpose was to punish crime, and that Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone should have a perfectly fair trial.
This comes with poor grace from a governor who is at the same time a kidnaper; an executive of a state who at the very moment he is making these professions has one heel upon the law and the other upon the necks of his victim.
Gooding’s protestations at this hour must be taken with considerable salt. He has been forced to this position and does not occupy it naturally, and any ordinary eye can see through the transparency very clearly.
Now let the working men and women of the United States say to Gooding and those behind him: You have issued the challenge, you have started this fight, you have attacked our comrades, and now we shall rally to the rescue of our fellow-workers and fight it out to a finish on any line you choose.
We have the right on our side, they have the power, but one honest-hearted workingman, whose cause is just and whose conscience is clear, has more moral power, more real strength that counts, than a thousand hirelings in the cause of crime.
If workingmen are now true, as seems evident upon every hand, then the last bull-pen has been built and the last soldiers have insulted and outraged the wives and children of their imprisoned fathers, husbands and brothers.
I personally know Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. They are the last men to be guilty of assassination. No one who knows them believes in his heart that they have had anything to do with the crime for which they are now in jail. They are as innocent as any of us, and the mine owners know this as well as anybody.
But these men were a menace to the capitalist anarchists that ruled with blood and iron in Colorado and this is why the charge of murder must be fastened upon them and an end put to them forever.
The real murderer is McPartland [McParland]. He put up the job, with Guggenheim and his crowd to back him up, supply the funds, the special train and the hundred other factors in the conspiracy.
Let us protest from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes to the gulf. Let the workers every where arise and swear that this crime shall not be committed.
To our imprisoned comrades in Idaho I have this to say: I am as ready to die with you now as I have been to fight with you in the past.
———-
[Emphasis and photograph of Mother Jones added.]
SOURCE
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Feb 23, 1907
(Also source for image of “ready to die” quote.)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67586817/
IMAGE
Mother Jones, Mar 11, 1905, AtR
http://www.newspapers.com/image/66992169/
See also:
Tag: Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone Case
https://weneverforget.org/tag/haywood-moyer-pettibone-case/
Feb 23, 1903 Mother Jones and the Massacre of the Raleigh County Miners
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/17/1256099/-Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Feb-23-1903-Mother-Jones-and-the-Massacre-of-the-Raleigh-County-Miners