—————
Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 13, 1914
Chicago, Illinois – Former Michigan Gunthug Testifies Before House Committee
From the Chicago Day Book of March 10, 1914:
Tag: C. E. Mahoney
Hellraisers Journal: House Sub-Committee Hearings on Mine Conditions Underway in Denver, Colorado and Hancock, Michigan
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 14, 1914
House Sub-Committee Hearings Underway in Colorado and Michigan
From The Day Book of February 14, 1914
Representatives Casey, Howell and Taylor Are on the Job in Michigan:
From The Indianapolis News of February 9, 1914
U. S. Sub-Committees to Investigate Mining Conditions in Michigan and Colorado:
HOWELL SNOWBOUND;
STRIKE INQUIRY DELAYED
———-CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE IN MICHIGAN LACKS QUORUM.
———-
REPRESENTATIVES KEPT IN
———-HANCOCK, Mich., February 9.-The train bearing Representative Joseph Howell, of Utah, the member necessary to make a quorum of the congressional investigating committee, was reported storm-bound somewhere on the lower peninsula today and prospects for a meeting dwindled as the day advanced. Chairman Taylor said that it was unlikely that hearings would begin before tomorrow.
The heaviest snowfall of the winter has kept Mr. Taylor and Representative Casey of Pennsylvania indoors since their arrival on Saturday and they have had no opportunity to see any of the copper country beyond the range of vision from their hotel.
—————
OPENS HEARING IN DENVER
———-
Congressional Subcommittee Seeks Evidence
of Law Violations.DENVER, Colo., February 9.-Hearing of testimony in the federal investigation of the Colorado coal miners’ strike began in the senate chamber of the state capitol today. The subcommittee of the house committee on mines and mining which arrived from Washington yesterday, will hold hearings in Denver and at Trinidad, Pueblo, Boulder and other points, to determine whether federal statutes have been violated and to determine on recommendations for the settlement of the Colorado strike and the prevention of future labor struggles.
When today’s hearing opened E. V. Brake, deputy labor commissioner; Professor Russell D. George, state geologist, and James Dalrymple, chief coal mining inspector, gave testimony as to general coal mining conditions in Colorado.
Two distinct strikes are included in the investigation, to be made by the committee. The miners in the northern Colorado coal fields were called out in April 1910, and that strike never has been settled. Since then, many of the strikebreakers who took the places of the union men have been organized by the United Mine Workers of America, and a considerable part of them walked out with the southern men when the strike of all the coal miners in the state was called on September 23, 1913.
The investigating committee consists of Martin D. Foster (Dem.), Chairman, Illinois; James Francis Byrnes (Dem.), South Carolina; John M. Evans (Dem.), Montana; Richard Wilson Austin (Rep.), Tenn., and Howard Sutherland (Rep.), West Virginia.
[Emphasis added.]
Hellraisers Journal: President Charles Moyer and Auditor Charles Tanner of the Western Federation of Miners Return to Upper Michigan’s Copper Country
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 16, 1914
Houghton, Michigan – Cheering Crowd Meets Moyer and Tanner at Station
From the Miners Magazine of January 15, 1914:
From the Miners’ Bulletin of January 9, 1914:
Hellraisers Journal: John H. Walker and John Mitchell Enter the Strike Zone of Michigan’s Copper Country
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 27, 1913
Michigan Copper Country – John Walker and John Mitchell Speak to Strikers
From The Calumet News of August 23, 1913:
Note: John Walker reported that the military presence in Michigan’s Copper Country is brutal, and that General Abbey’s troops are acting as:
scab herders, strike-breakers, and black-leg protectors..[who] have shot people in the back, browbeaten men and women, insulted women and girls, and after filling up on beer and whisky sent them by the mine owners, swaggered up and down the streets with their big guns and sabers, a disgrace to the rottenest government on earth, let alone ours……
Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones, Joseph and Laura Cannon Speak to Striking Miners and Families in Michigan Copper Country
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 9, 1913
Michigan’s Copper Country – “Fiery” Mother Jones and the Cannons on the Scene
From the Escanaba Morning Press of August 8, 1913:
COPPERDOM IN DREAD
CRISIS IS IMPENDING
———-
Houghton, Mich., Aug 7.-The general impression in the district affected by the copper mine workers’ strike is that a crisis impending through the presence of Mother Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Cannon, three fiery orators of the Western Federation of Miners. Persons who have had an opportunity in other strikes to see these people in action say they likely to inflame the strikers and their families to such a pitch of enthusiasm as may result in a reoccurrence of the of the first week of the strike.
The leaders of the strike here, Messrs. Mahoney, Miller and Lowney, have counselled peace in all their recent speeches, have the strikers to preserve law and order and to wait with determination because they are going to win.
But the speeches made by Cannon and his wife [Laura Gregg Cannon] at the Kansankoti hall, Hancock, Tuesday night were certainly not pacific. They aroused more enthusiasm than any speakers previously heard here since the strike opened and gave a good forecast of the result of their later speeches.
The strikers are for the most part phlegmatic Huns, Croatians and Finns, members of races not given to vociferous outbursts. If the Jones and the Cannons of the strike forces can stir these people up something more exciting than has been seen in the past week may be expected.
Mother Jones and Mrs. Cannon have reputations for exciting the women of strike districts to a point of frenzy resulting in rioting. Something of this sort is feared.
An example of the dangerous potentiality in Mother Jones can be seen in the interview given out by her at Calumet Tuesday afternoon [August 5th]. She said:
I’m a socialist, Why shouldn’t I be? That is the party that stands ready to help the working man.
I can’t see the need for the militia. Take a plumber and make him a major and he swells up like a toad and seems to forget that he is a workingman. The struggle is between the employer and employee and the state ought to let them fight it out. The strikers don’t believe in damaging property or the destruction of lives and I always impress on the men that they shouldn’t do damage.
They threw me into the bull pen in West Virginia, but before then, I went with 16 representatives of the miners to see the governor. When they heard I was coming, the governor wired for the fire department and the police and the legislators crawled under their desks and cried, “Is she coming?” The firemen came running up the streets without their socks. I had the devil scared out of the whole bunch of sewer rats. An old woman like me, over 80 years old. They thought I was coming to murder them, I guess.
What do you think the charge was they arrested me on. Stealing a field gun, my dears, and the damn fools were looking for it in the hills for months.
Ah, boys this is a terrible thing to go through. I hope you don’t see the like here. I saw my brave boys, who I know would not commit a crime, taken from their homes to far-away jails while their wives and babies screamed for their husbands. I raised my hand to heaven and prayed for their safe return.
And they talk about the red flag, bless you. Why, don’t they know the red flag was the first flag hoisted at Lexington, that a farmer who didn’t have time to put his shirt on went into the ranks of the bloody Sassenachs [English persons] and waved his red shirt in the air to cheer his comrades. Don’t they know the red bar is the first on the flag, signifying that blood was shed for the union?
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for August 1911, Part I: Found Defended at Convention of Western Federation of Miners
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday October 26, 1911
Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1911, Part I
John O’Neill, Editor of Miner’s Magazine, Speaks in Defense of Mother Jones
From Proceedings of W. F. M. Convention, Butte, August 2, 1911:
[Excerpt from Address of John O’Neill
-Editor of Miners Magazine]
We [the W. F. M. executive board and the John O’Neill] have been arraigned by the Wallace committee because the editor deemed that he was justified to train the editorial guns of the Magazine on the dishonesty, immorality and drunkenness of J. Mahlon Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist party. For some time the editor has known that the office of the Socialist party at Chicago could not be classed as a place fit for the inmates of a Sunday school, and in editorials of a general character, attempted to arouse the membership of the Socialist party to the fact that “something was rotten in Denmark,” and suggested that there should be a house–cleaning. Editorials of a general character are not feared by criminals, and it is only when an editor becomes specific and points out the crime and the criminal that there is heard a howl of indignation from men and women who realize that lightning is striking close to where they live. The editor who informs the people of a city that the community is infested with criminals, does not arouse the antipathy of the criminals, but when an editor brands John Jones as a burglar, Sam Brown as a foot–pad, and Jim Smith as a porch climber, such an editor, by striking close, is making it tropical for criminals. To say that the Socialist party needed fumigation officially or to declare that the Western Federation of Miners has a number of Pinkertons in its member ship, would arouse but little excitement; but when an editor points the finger of accusation at the culprits and names the crimes of which they are guilty, their masks of righteousness are pulled on and some people exclaim, “The editor has a personal grudge.”
The editor has no personal grudge against the secretary of the Socialist party, but when the report of an investigating committee which white–washed Barnes reveals the fact that twelve empty whiskey bottles were found in the office of Barnes, when the report of that committee shows that a stenographer of the gentler sex is found at hotels until long after midnight taking dictation from male members of the national committee of the Socialist party, and that when that report discloses that Barnes did not hold in his possession one single shred of positive evidence that he had liquidated the financial obligation that existed between himself and “Mother” Jones until he was forced to pay the obligation through a threat of an action in court, and when a quintet of conspirators who voted for themselves to serve on a committee, give angelic virtues to a “booze–fighter,” a blackmailer, and “ free–lover, ” the editor of the Miners’ Magazine concluded that it was time that members of the Western Federation of Miners who are socialists and pay per capita tax, should know something of the official conduct of the leading official of the Socialist party of America.
Had the report of the investigating committee which white–washed Barnes, cast no reflection on the honor of that silvery–haired woman who has been crowned the “Queen of the Miners,” the editor of the Miners’ Magazine might have refrained from using his pen to hold up to the arclight some of the frailties that affect the Socialist party officially, but when Barnes and his white-washing committee herald through a document published in the official bulletin of the Socialist party, that “Mother” Jones is a black–mailer, then no power on earth can restrain the editor of the Miners’ Magazine from denouncing such an infamy and defending the woman who has given the best years of her life to lift laboring humanity to a higher plane of civilization. That report of the investigating committee branded “Mother” Jones as a black mailer,” and gave credentials of honor and integrity to the libel on manhood who had used his ingenuity in an attempt to bilk her out of the sum of $200.
I cannot forget that when the storm raged in Colorado, that when the members of the Western Federation of Miners in Cripple Creek and Telluride were torn from their homes, that when the wails of wives and the cries of children could be heard as they saw husbands and fathers brutally slugged by the hired thugs of the mine owners and driven at the point of the bayonet to bull–pens and freight trains, that “Mother” Jones, the woman blackmailed by Barnes and a subsidized committee, sent $500.00 to the Western Federation of Miners to help feed the women and children whose protectors were driven beyond the borders of the state by the brutal power of armed Hessians farmed out to a Mine Owners’ Association.
Will the committee of Wallace Miners’ Union and Globe Miners’ Union, tell me that the editor of the Miners’ Magazine shall remain mute and silent in the defense of a woman who has faced the injunctions of courts, been thrown into bull–pens and pest houses, and who never flinched or faltered before the rifles of State militia or federal troops in her loyalty to the cause of unionism? Shall the Wallace committee and Globe Miners’ Union tell me that I shall not wield my pen or raise my voice in resenting the aspersions cast upon the tried and true woman, who, for thirty years, has stood beneath the folds of labor’s flag to give the best that was in her to combat the machinations of corporate despotism and to lead men on labor’s battlefield closer to the goal of economic liberty? The editor is not an ingrate. Within his memory is treasured the history of the struggles and sacrifices of the dauntless woman, who even now in her 78th year, as her eyes are growing dim and her step faltering, is still fighting the cause of suffering humanity, and the editor refuses to shackle his pen or imprison his tongue and permit this woman to be maligned by a “booze fighter,” blackmailer and “free lover,” who has been Loramerized by a quintet of white–washers who voted for themselves to serve on an investigating committee .
[Photograph added.]
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts & Doings of Mother Jones for July 1911, Found at Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Miners Meet to Call Off Strike
—————
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 25, 1911
Mother Jones News Round-Up for July 1911
Found at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Where Miners Meet to Call Off Strike
From Pennsylvania’s Latrobe Bulletin of July 3, 1911:
The Calling Off of the Strike Is
Declared To Be In Sight
———-Greensburg the Scene of Special Convention.
Ten Delegates Are Present From the Local Union
Behind closed doors, with Francis Feehan presiding, with Mother Jones, Van Bitner and others prominently identified with the strike present, the convention of miners is now on in full swing in Tonkay’s hall, at Greensburg…
The Greensburg Tribune claims to have received authentic information from Indianapolis to the effect that the executive board decided that the strike should end.
Mother Jones, who is at the convention, was in attendance at the International board meeting, last week, and it is said that she made a plea for the strikers…..
[Photograph added.]
From the Pittsburgh Gazette Times of July 6, 1911:
The long and bitter labor struggle of the coal miners in the Irwin-Greensburg field for recognition of the union was brought to a close yesterday. Locals of the United Mine Workers of America met and adopted a resolution to return to work. This action was taken under instructions from the international executive board of the United Mine Workers, which held a special meeting last Monday that resulted in the decision to call a meeting of the locals and order the return to work.
It is believed the miners welcomed the instructions from their executive board. They had been idle for 16 months, during which time many hardships were endured. When notice was served that the payment of strike benefits would cease next week, the men realized that their cause was lost and the struggle hopeless…..
The abrupt ending of the long strike resulted in a divided sentiment among union miners. When it became known yesterday that the locals had concurred in the action of their international executive board, the following circular was sent out to the various locals, signed by Robert Gibbons, Abe Kephart and Andrew Puskar of the miners’ organization of District No. 5:
The miners throughout the Irwin-Greensburg fields today held local meetings at which in every case a vote was taken to call off the strike which has lasted for 16 months. This was compulsory for these poor, misguided brothers, as the International Executive Board in session at Indianapolis headquarters last week voted to discontinue paying strike benefits to them and directed Francis Feehan to call their leaders and arrange to have the strike terminated without recognition or concessions whatever.
Meeting of Leaders.
A meeting of these leaders was held in Greensburg on Monday. International Board Members A. R. Watkins of Ohio, George Dagger of Western Pennsylvania, and Thomas Haggerty of Central Pennsylvania had been delegated to represent the International Union. Mother Jones told the International Board at Indianapolis that it had been a lost cause since last summer. But it was continued until there had been the loss of 18 lives and the useless expenditure of a $1,000,000 of the miners’ money, besides large donations from many of our people and others in sympathy……
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for July 1909, Part IV: Speaks for Mexican Revolutionaries
———-
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday August 11, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for July 1909, Part IV:
-Mother Speaks on Behalf of Mexican Revolutionaries
From Los Angeles Herald of July 23, 1909:
MOYER-FLYNN FIGHT RAGING
—–WESTERN FEDERATION WAR IS CLOSE TO CLIMAX
—–
Butte Union Insurgent Leaders Insist That
Funds Due Local Body Were Diverted
to the Main Organization
—–(By Associated Press.)
DENVER, July 22.-The expected controversy over the adoption of President Moyer’s report occupied practically the entire time of today’s sessions of the convention of the Western Federation of Miners.
The introduction of the committee resolution recommending favorable action was the signal for the anti-administration forces, led by P. W. Flynn of Butte, to launch their carefully prepared contest….
A lengthy discussion ended in an attempt by the Flynn crowd to have Moyer’s supplementary report as well as his statement tabled, but this was lost, 149 to 198.
Before the vote on the adoption of the Flynn statement could be taken the hour of adjournment was reached.
“Mother” Jones Talks
“Mother” Jones addressed the convention today in behalf of the alleged Mexican revolutionists, for whom extradition is sought by the Diaz government.
Hereafter when a delegate on the floor of the convention of the Western Federation of Miners calls another delegate a liar or uses profane language it will cost him $10. A resolution to this effect was adopted this morning.
The convention again reaffirmed its policy of education and recommended an aggressive campaign along the lines of independent political action and industrial unionism. It also instructed the executive board whenever the revenues would permit to place Socialist workers in the field and distribute Socialist literature.
———-
[Photograph added.]
Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for July 1909, Part II: Found Speaking at Convention of the Western Federation of Miners
———-
Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 9, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for July 1909, Part II:
-Found Speaking in Denver at W. F. of M. Convention
From Proceedings of the Convention of Western Federation of Miners
-Held at Denver, Colorado, July 12-August 3, 1909:
Third Day, Afternoon Session of July 14, 1909:
-From Financial Report of Secretary-Treasurer Earnest Mills
We have been in receipt of $3,911.72, principally through the efforts of “Mother” Jones, for the defense of the Mexican Political Refugees, whose cases were discussed at the Sixteenth Annual Convention, and $3,809.75 has been paid to the Bisbee Mexican Defense Committee, and used directly in behalf of securing the liberty of the imprisoned men, while the balance, $101.97, has been forwarded to the Political Refugee Defense Committee at Chicago at the request of “Mother” Jones for the defense of Calixto Guerra, a political refugee, whose extradition is demanded by President Diaz of Mexico.
Fifth Day, Afternoon Session of July 16, 1909:
Mother Jones, having entered the hall at this time [following the Report of Vice-President C. E. Mahoney], was escorted to the platform, where she was introduced by the chair to the delegates, who received the venerable “mother” with ringing applause.
“Mother” Jones spoke at length, describing the struggle of the coal miners who are now on strike, and urging the delegates to elect men to their respective legislatures and congress who would look after the interests of the working class. At the conclusion of her address, “Mother” Jones was loudly applauded.
Hellraisers Journal: George Pettibone in Los Angeles, Gives Interview, Visits With Clarence Darrow at Hospital
There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday January 12, 1908
Los Angeles, California – Pettibone On Labor Spies and Frame-Ups
From the Los Angeles Herald of January 11, 1908:
PETTIBONE TELLS STORY
——NOW IN CITY AND MAY RESIDE HERE
—–
Man Accused of Complicity in Assassination
of Former Governor Steunenberg Gives
Interesting Opinions
—–
Weak from long confinement in the jail at Boise, Idaho, where he was held a prisoner on a charge of complicity in the assassination oE former Governor Steunenberg, George A. Pettibone has arrived in Los Angeles and is staying at the Touraine apartments, 447 South Hope street.
In company with his wife, Mr. Pettibone contemplates making Los Angeles his permanent home. His trial attracted attention wherever the words “labor union” are known.
He spoke heatedly of the efforts which were made to connect him with the murder of Steunenberg.
[He said:]
False testimony concocted by Pinkerton agents was responsible for the arrest of William D. Haywood, Charles H. Moyer and myself and the sole purpose of their efforts was to give them an opening wedge so that they could retain their official position as agents of the Mine Owners’ association.
