You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Friday August 16, 1907
Mother Jones News for July, Part II: Found in Arizona
From the Bisbee Daily Review of July 17, 1907:
SHERIFF WHITE ROASTED BY “MOTHER”
—–
Gets a Hot Tongue Lashing In Tucson
Before an Audience of Fifty-
Strike Notices Are Posted There.
—–(Special to Review.)
TUCSON, Ariz., July 16.-“Mother Jones” spoke here last night [July 15] in front of the Cabinet saloon on Congress street. Fifty people by actual count listened to her discourse on the subject of “Relation of Capital to Labor.”
She stated that Sheriff Jack White of Cochise County had made the remark that she should be run out of the country, and proceeded to give the big sheriff at Tombstone a vitriolic tongue lashing the equal of which has never been heard on the streets of Tucson before.
She paid her respects to the Copper Queen and Calumet & Arizona companies, and proceeded to give her own version of the strike situation there.
Strike notices were posted about Tucson today warning working men to stay away from Bisbee. They are the same notices printed shortly after the strike was inaugurated and are signed by Rawlins, Cannon, Mitanovich et al.
———-
[Photograph added.]
From The Arizona Republican of July 17, 1907:
THE JOAN OF ARC OF MINE WORKERS
—–
“Mother” Jones Arrives in Phoenix in
The Course of a Tour of the West.
—–“Mother” Jones, the Joan or Arc of the miners, arrived in the city yesterday morning [July 16] and will remain until Thursday. She came from Tucson, where she addressed a meeting Tuesday night. She will go from here to Prescott and Jerome before leaving the territory, after which she will go east. She addressed a large meeting at the city hall plaza last night.
“Mother” Jones was seen yesterday at the Commercial hotel. To the casual observer she has a kindly face and a deep sympathy for the struggles of her fellow kind. This impression is accentuated by snow white hair and grayish eyes smiling through a pair of old fashioned spectacles, much like our grandmothers used to wear. Her life she says, has been a hard struggle from an early date and she has always been more or less identified with the conflicts between labor and capital.
Her first experience along this line was when she was sixteen years old, in Canada, where she led a number of young women to induce a large body of men to strike. Part of the men had not been paid by some contractors and quit work and to enforce the payment of their wages, the rest at her instigation laid down their instruments of toil. Forty years ago she lost her husband, who was an iron moulder, and all her children, and since this time she has made the cause of the laboring man her life work, being prominent in strikes all over the country. Police and county officials have generally treated her well, but the injunction has been one source of trouble to her plans many times: often landing her in jail along with a number of other leaders of striking men.
While down in Alabama fourteen years ago she became interested in the child-labor question and for one year went about from place to place seeking work among the mills, remaining long enough to see the misery and poverty of the hands employed, and witness the destruction of young life in the lint-filled atmosphere and the mangling of baby hands in the machines. She says this touched her heart as nothing else had done.
Mark Hanna, she thought, was one of the greatest politicians that America had known, and she gives him the credit for the settlement of the troubles in the anthracite regions. She took occasion to express her disapproval of John Mitchell, who she said, would not sell out labor for any amount of money, but was susceptible to the slap on the back and the voice of flattery.
She is personally acquainted with Mover and Haywood and a number of the principals in the trial.
[She said:]
The eye of the world is on Idaho for it is the bitterest struggle of the age.
Socialism she think is the panacea for all national ills. While she can see in her mind’s eye the dawn of a new age of liberty, she does not think it will come in her time. She has been sent into places where it was not safe for men agitators to go, and what saved her, she believes, was not the fact that she is a woman, but her fearlessness and indifference to death.
She thinks that women could do much to uplift mankind if they were not as a class afraid of censure and public disapproval and too much in love with self adornment, society and clubs. She does not throw any bouquets at capital but denies that labor seeks the destruction of property and life to further its ends, but must come into its own by peaceable means and by the ballot.
———-
From the Prescott Morning Courier of July 22, 1907:
Dodged the Hot Belt.
The contemplated trip of Mother Jones to Yuma and other points in Southern Arizona, which was looked forward to with high expectations by the comrades, has had to be cancelled on account of the effect of the beat upon Mother Jones’ health. A tour was hastily arranged leading her to the cooler climate of Northern Arizona. Gobel will speak in the Territory some time next month.-Yuma Enterprise.
———-
More from the Courier:
-Mother Jones spoke from the platform on the [Prescott] plaza last evening to a large crowd of attentive listeners. Mother Jones is an elderly lady of pleasant appearance, as well as forceful and pleasing address; she is, in fact, an able and well posted speaker, and there is no question about her sincerity. A good deal that she says would by no means be out of place in a democratic platform. Her contentions are largely the same which democratic orator have been making for years. Her statement of the conditions as they exist are backed by facts and figures. Her remedy for these unquestionably bad conditions is socialism. This is a free country, so far as taking medicine and having political beliefs is concerned. When we were small it took about three stout colored ladies to give us a dose of castor oil. Now that we are a man, we do not believe any number of ladies, much as we think of them, could make us swallow a dose of socialism.
———-
From the Bisbee Daily Review of July 25, 1907:
An editorial from the Review lambasted the Western Federation of Miners, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Mother Jones:
NO ROOM FOR RED FLAG IN DOUGLAS.
(Douglas International-American.)
During the six years history of Douglas, In which the people of this city are justly proud, there has never been any clash between employees and employer so far as the smelter-me-n and mining companies have been concerned. The smeltermen of Douglas are numbered among the substantial and reputable citizens of Douglas….
The paid “organizers” of the Western Federation of Miners, who struck Douglas a few days ago, are naturally finding t hard work to spread dissension, strife and discontent among this class of our citizenship. They arrived upon their own invitation and for an argument were compelled to import their own grievance. Forced from Bisbee by a repudiation of the great majority of miners In the Warren district, they hope to interest the smeltermen of Douglas in their wild socialistic schemes and bind them hand and foot to an organization whose obligation refuses to an intelligent man the right to think religiously or politically as his conscience may dictate.
[There is nothing in the Constitution of the W. F. of M. which requires members to vote or worship any particular way.]
…The mechanics of Bisbee, together with three thousand miners there, had no grievance and the efforts of the late delegate to congress on the socialist ticket, ably assisted by “Mother” Jones, were unable to convince three-fourths of the working-men of the district that they should abandon their positions and join the army of the Industrial Workers of the World. …
It will take more than the “yawping” and “barking” of the Semples, Cannos, and Rawlins to induce the workingmen of Douglas to take the position that capital is the enemy of labor in this community, and enroll themselves under the folds of the red flag and socialism.
———-
From the Appeal to Reason of July 27, 1907:
TRE-STATE EDITION
[Socialist Party of America]
OKLAHOMA, TEXAS AND KANSAS
[…]
Texas
W. J. Bell, State Secretary, Tyler.
[…]
Notes-Mother Jones writes from Bisbee:
Tell the comrades that I more than regret that I had to break off all those meetings. I am coming back to see all my boys in Texas again.
From The Arizona Republican of July 28, 1907:
NEW STORM CENTER CALLS MOTHER JONES
—–
The Miners’ Joan of Arc Retraces Her Steps
Through Phoenix En Route to
The Clifton Strike.
—–“Mother” Jones was in the city a few hours yesterday, en route to Clifton, in answer to a telegram calling her to assist the striking miners in that district. The call came rather sooner than was expected, while she was in the northern part of the territory, holding meetings and addressing large audiences at Prescott, Jerome, Humboldt and McCabe. When seen yesterday, “Mother” Jones said she had received an enthusiastic reception in all the mining towns which she visited. The strike began on Wednesday [July 24] at Clifton and she said that she was going down there to stir up trouble and help the strikers win.
[Said she:]
“The Pinks” will probably get after me down there. They don’t have any love for me, I can tell you that. I am going down to fight the Copper Queen and if I don’t wake them up, it will be a wonder. Oh, I am still in the battle, young man, and in it to win.
Quite an interested crowd gathered around “Mother” Jones at the train last night, some bent on bidding her goodby, other anxious and curious to overhear what comment she would have to make on her mission. There will no doubt be some lively times when she arrives in the mining camp for which she is bound. She thought if the “Pinks,” as she called them, knew of her coming she would not arrive very promptly, unless she walked, which she said she was ready to do in a case of necessity. But she said she would get there some way regardless. She seemed certain that the “Pinks” would get her sure, if she doesn’t watch out. One thing she said she was not afraid of, and that was the loyalty of her followers. In fact, to tell the truth, she was not afraid of anything that she had ever met with yet in her travels, not even the “Bayonet Boys,” as she calls the state militia.
A telegram published in Friday morning’s Republican stated that 150 American employes of the Arizona Copper company at Clifton had struck and demanded an increase in wages to $3.50 a day. They had been receiving $3.00.
———-
SOURCES
Bisbee Daily Review
(Bisbee, Arizona)
-July 17, 1907
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024827/1907-07-17/ed-1/seq-1/
-July 25, 1907
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024827/1907-07-25/ed-1/seq-4/
The Arizona Republican
(Phoenix, Arizona)
-July 17, 1907
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020558/1907-07-17/ed-1/seq-5/
-July 28, 1907
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020558/1907-07-28/ed-1/seq-10/
Prescott Morning Courier
(Prescott, Yavapai County, Arizona)
-July 22, 1907, pages 1 & 3
https://www.genealogybank.com/
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-July 27, 1907
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67586927/
IMAGES
Mother Jones, Tacoma Times, Sept 19, 1904
https://www.newspapers.com/image/68052998/
See also:
I believe this is the Semple mentioned above:
Race and Labor in Western Copper:
The Fight for Equality, 1896-1918
by Philip J. Mellinger
University of Arizona Press, 1995
(search: semple)
https://books.google.com/books?id=z32aIwBq3aIC
Mother Jones and Manuel Sarabia
1907-Douglas, Arizona
—–
The story is nicely summarized here:
Mother Jones Speaks:
Collected Writings and Speeches
-Philip S Foner
Monad Press, 1983
(search: sarabia)
(See pages 55, 121, 143-5, 370, 375, 460-1.)
https://books.google.com/books?id=T_m5AAAAIAAJ
Page 55:
1907-June 30-while speaking to smelter workers in Douglas, Arizona, becomes involved in case of Manuel Sarabia, leader of the Organizing Junta of the Liberal Party, followers of Flores Magón, who were seeking to overthrow dictator Porfirio Díaz in Mexico. Helps to get him returned to the United States from Mexican prison to which he had been taken after being kidnapped from Arizona.
From the Bisbee Daily Review of July 4, 1907:
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024827/1907-07-04/ed-1/seq-2/
MORE DETAILS OF THE MEXICAN OUTRAGE
—–
Rurales Were In Waiting for Auto Across Line,
Thus Showing Conspiracy
to Kidnap Sarabia.DOUGLAS, July 3….
Continuing investigation of the disappearance of Sarabia from the city jail Sunday night (June 30), the International-American today ascertained that the Commissario of police of Agua Prieta, on the day of the of the outrage engaged for that night a team of horses and a double-seated buggy together with three saddle horses, from Cowden’s stables. It was understood that the outfit was to be taken either to Naco, or Cananea. The buggy and horses were driven across the line and, it is presumed, used in the final disposition of Sarabia….
In order to cover the story of Sarabia and Mother Jones here at Hellraisers Journal, at this time, I would need contemporary sources directly connecting Mother with Sarabia during late June/early July of 1907. Despite much, much searching, I can find no sources from 1907 directly connecting Mother to Sarabia. The newspapers of Douglas, Arizona, might cover that story, but I have no access.
The closest I can come is Jan-April 1909, when this story is thoroughly covered in the Appeal to Reason, including with articles by Mother Jones herself. That is the soonest that I can connect Mother directly with Sarabia. Hellraisers will certainly (Goddess Willing) be covering the story at that time, and again in 1910 when Mother fights for the Mexican Revolutionaries in Washington, DC.
Indirectly, I can say that she left El Paso on June 23 heading for Bisbee-she usually traveled by train. El Paso is 251 miles from Bisbee and Bisbee is only about 30 miles from Douglas. She could easily have been there when Sarabia was kidnapped.
See:
Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for June 1907: Found in Arizona
The Bisbee Daily Review of July 10, 1907, states that Mother Jones, along with WFM organizers, conducted a meeting for organized labor in Douglas “last night”-June 9th.
See:
Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for July 1907, Part I: Found in Speaking in Arizona
IMAGE
Manuel Sarabia, LA Herald, Jan 1, 1908
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/1908-01-01/ed-1/seq-5/
See also:
Autobiography of Mother Jones
Chapter 16-The Mexican Revolution
https://www.iww.org/fr/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/16
Search: “Manuel Sarabia” + 1907-1910
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=&date1=1907&date2=1910&proxtext=sarabia+arizona&x=13&y=15&dateFilterType=yearRange&rows=50&searchType=basic&sort=date
Magonism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magonism