You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Thursday March 26, 1914
Walsenburg, Colorado - Chase and Debs Opine on Mother Jones Now in Military Bastille
General John Chase
GENERAL CHASE ON MOTHER JONES
We have learned that General Chase has been expressing his view of Mother Jones who is now a prisoner of the state of Colorado. In these modern times, a cold cellar cell in Walsenburg serves as Military Bastille for Mother Jones.
The General claims that John McLennan, President of District 15, confided to him that:
Mother Jones was a very headstrong old woman, who would not submit to guidance or suggestion of any kind, even from her own people, and that they had to suffer her to do as she wanted, oftentimes to the great annoyance of those in charge of the strike.
The General then continues, giving Mother Jones credit for most of the trouble in the strike zone:
She is an eccentric and peculiar figure. I make no mention of her personal history [the old Polly Pry charges], with which we are not concerned. She seems, however, to have in an exceptional degree the faculty of stirring up and inciting the more ignorant and criminally disposed to deeds of violence and crime. Prior to the advent of the state's troops she made a a series of speeches in the strike zone, of which I have authentic and verbatim reports. These speeches are couched in course, vulgar, and profane language, and address themselves to the lowest passions of mankind. I confidently believe that most of the murders and other acts of violent crime committed in the strike region have been inspired by this woman's incendiary utterances.
The fact that she is a woman and advanced in years she uses as a shield, as well as a means of invoking popular sympathetic sentiment in case of her incarceration. She is undoubtedly a most dangerous factor in the peace problem. I am informed that she was so found in West Virginia and elsewhere and that disturbance and anarchy held sway.
She was held for murder in West Virginia, and I am advised that her police record is in the possession of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
EUGENE DEBS ON MOTHER JONES
Not surprisingly, Eugene Debs has an entirely different opinion of Mother Jones. In this weeks issue of the Miner's Magazine,, official journal of the Western Federation of Miners, he lauds Mother Jones as a heroine of the working class:
Mother Jones.
Sitting in her prison pen in the strike zone of Colorado, Mother Jones, in the silence of her cell, broken only by the tread of the bettle-browed degenerates that serve as the dogs of the plutocratic scoundrels who have imprisoned her, is writing a chapter in the history of the American Republic, for which the children of the future will weave garlands for her grave and rear monuments to her memory.
Long after the Wellborns, Osgoods and Browns [the "big three" coal operators] have gone the way of kindred pirates and been swallowed up in oblivion, or are remembered only to excite loathing and execration, the name and fame of Mother Jones will inspire the gratitude and reverence of the people she fought for with such intrepid valor and suffered with such unflinching fortitude to set free.
Brave, defiant, battle-breathing Mother Jones!
She is the flaming incarnation of the world's proletarian revolt against Capitalism's bloody misrule!
The Madame Breschovsky of the American social revolution!
Prison and persecution cannot quench, but only fan into fiercer flame the inextinguishable fire of her unconquerable soul.
Like the Maid of Orleans, this snow-crowned old warrior of the working class, too, heard voices, but not the mystic voices heard in dreams. The voices she heard came up out of the pits; the choking, sobbing, agonizing voices of the abysmal hell of wage slavery, and these voices of toilers mangled and robbed, insulted and despised, and their children crying for bread, filled her soul with unutterable hate for wage slavery and fired her valorous spirit, as that of the sublime old fanatic, John Brown, had been fired half a century ago, into the flaming fuse of an avenging, destroying and emancipating revolution.
Mother Jones in a scab-herding militia prison pen!
Governor Ammons in the state's Imperial capital!
Behold them both, the one the inspired liberator of the masses, the other the servile lackey of the princes of plunder and assassination; the one as glorious in her guarded cell as the other is despicable in his guarded sanctum.
Here you see the living impersonation of the lofty revolutionary character, and the low reactionary creature that are face to face today in the mightiest struggle that ever shocked this earth.
The cruel, outrageous, infamous incarceration of a woman of eighty-three, with no shadow of accusation resting upon her fair name, would disgrace the beast of the jungle, but it cannot blacken the man-enslaving, woman-debasing, child-devouring misrule of the Moloch of the Twentieth Century — Capitalism.
Arouse, ye plundered toilers of the nation, in unvanquishable host and strike for industrial freedom and social justice! — Eugene V.Debs
SOURCES
Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel
-by Dale Fetherling
So IL U Press, 1974
The Military Occupation of the Coal Strike Zone of Colorado,
By the Colorado National Guard, 1913-1914
-by Colorado. Adjutant-General's Office
(choose "read on line," search with "jones," choose p.49)
http://www.forgottenbooks.org/...
Journal of the Switchmen's Union, Volume 16
-The Union, 1914
The article by Debs was republished to the May 1914 Switchmen's Journal.
(search preview with:"jones debs ammons")
http://books.google.com/...
Blood Passion
The Ludlow Massacre and Class War
in the American West
-by Scott Martelle
Rutgers U Press, 2008
Photos:
General John Chase of Colorado
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Eugene Debs and Mother Jones Proposed Postage Stamps
http://afscme3800.org/...
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I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - Hank Williams
Exactly how Mother Jones found the strength to carry on in this life after loosing her husband and four little children, is something that I can't imagine. But she must have thought of them at times during those long cold nights in the cellar cell in Walsenburg.
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