You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Sunday November 22, 1903
Louisville, Colorado - Mother Jones Speaks Out Against Separate Settlement
A meeting was held in Louisville yesterday by District 15 of the United Mine Workers to consider an offer made by the operators of the northern coal fields to make a separate agreement with the miners of the northern Colorado. President Mitchell is in favor of the separate settlement, while Mother Jones is adamantly opposed. Mother arrived at the meeting with William Howells, District 15 President, who also opposes the separate settlement. Howells spoke at the meeting and advised the northern miners not to make a separate agreement. The meeting then erupted with loud calls for Mother Jones. Mother Jones rose to speak, determined to stand up for the Italian miners of the southern Colorado whom Governor Peabody has lately been speaking of with great disdain and threatening to deport. The speech of Mother Jones, in defiance of her employer, John Mitchell, was for Solidarity:
Brothers, you English speaking miners of the northern fields promised your southern brothers, seventy percent of whom do not speak English, that you would support them to the end. Now you are asked to betray them, to make a separate settlement You have a common enemy and it is your duty fight to a finish. Are you brave men? Can you fight as well as you can work? I had rather fall fighting than working. If you go back to work here and your brothers fall in the south, you will be responsible for their defeat.
The enemy seeks to conquer by dividing your ranks, by making distinctions between North and South, between American and foreign. You are all miners, fighting a common cause, a common master. The iron heel feels the same to all flesh. Hunger and suffering and the cause of your children bind more closely than a common tongue. I am accused of helping the Western Federation of Miners, as if that were a crime, by one of the National board members. I plead guilty. I know of no East or West, North nor South when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman's child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there I shall go.
I don't know what you will do, but I know very well what I would do if I were in one of your places. I would stand or fall with this question of eight hours for every worker in every mine in Colorado. I would say we will all go to glory together or we will die and go down together. We must stand together; if we don't there will be no victory for any of us.
I know that President Mitchell has sent a telegram to this meeting endorsing a settlement, but John Mitchell is in Boston, we are here in the field. A general cannot give orders unless he is in the field; unless he is at the battleground. Could a general in Washington give order to an army in Colorado? I know, too, that there are those in our union who would have us do nothing to help our brothers in the Western Federation of Miners now engaged in a life and death struggle with monopoly capitalists at Cripple Creek. I want the world to know, and all the papers to print, that I am going to Cripple Creek to speak there tomorrow for the Western Federation of Miners. I am not afraid to be classed as a friend of this organization and all criticism of me on that account falls flat upon my ears.
Goodbye, boys. I shall leave a happy woman if I know that you have decided to stand by our suffering brothers in the South. I will see you again, boys after I have licked the
C. F. & I.
Mother Jones received a standing ovation, and the miners voted 228 to 165 to stay out on strike with their Italian brothers of the southern coalfield.
SOURCE
Mother Jones Speaks
-ed by Philip S Foner
NY, 1983
Photo: Mother Jones, about 1902
Library of Congress
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Saturday November 22, 1913
From the Miners' Bulletin: The Copper Bosses' Gunthugs "Caught in the Act."
The Miners' Bulletin, the official newspaper of the Western Federation of Miners in the Michigan copper strike zone, has been having some trouble lately, as the latest issues explains:
On several occasions during the past few weeks the bundle of Miners Bulletin destined for the Ahmeek boys has failed to arrive at its destination, so last Tuesday, Federation board member, Yanco Terzich thought he would make an investigation. The bundle of Bulletins were placed on the Ahmeek car as usual while Yanco took a seat nearby. When the station of Centennial was reached two gunmen left the car and as they did so, picked up the bundle of papers and tried to make off with them. Terzich saw the act and was after the bold men in a jiffy. The gunmen at first refused to give up the papers, but when Yanco grabbed one of them in his vice like grip the puny pussyfooter thought he had better release his hold on the bundle which he did in double quick. While Terzich was recovering the the papers from one man the other one had him covered with a gun, but as Terzich knows the metal these thugs are made of, he did not fear.
After recovering the bundle of Bulletins, and as Terzich was mounting the car steps one of the gunmen grabbed his coat and tried to pull him off the car. Terzich made a vicious kick barely missing the handsome phiz of the pop-gun packer. Had Yanco's number ten struck the gunman square in the mug, there would have been a new face in hell that very day.
SOURCE
Miners' Bulletin
"Published by authority of
Western Federation of Miners
to tell the truth regarding
the strike of the copper miners."
-of Nov 22, 1913
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Friday November 22, 2013
More on Mother Jones and Her Stand Against the Separate Agreement of 1903:
In her Autobiography, Mother Jones tells the story of John F. Ream coming to her hotel before the miners met in Special Convention in Louisville. Ream was representing John Mitchell at the convention, and he came to tell her that, as John Mitchell's employee, she must support his position in favor of the separate settlement:
"I want to notify you," Ream said, "that you must not block the settlement of the northern miners because the National President, John Mitchell, wants it, and he pays you."
"Are you through?" said I.
He nodded.
"Then I am going to tell you that if God Almighty wants this strike called off for his benefit and not for the miners, I am going to raise my voice against it. And as to president John paying me...he never paid me a penny in his life. It is the hard earned nickels and dimes of the miners that pay me, and it is their interests that I am going to serve."
SOURCE
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
-ed by Mary Field Parton
Charles H Kerr Pub, 1990
Pittston Strike Commemorative Edition
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Solidarity Forever-Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong
-Ralph Chaplin