ATDTDA (36) Mother Jones

[Becky Alexander]

This is section of Mother Jones' autobiography relevant to the  
Luddlow Massacre. http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/mj/ 
bl_mj21.htm





 From The Autobiography of Mother Jones

Chapter XXI: In Rockefeller's Prisons

In January, 1914, I returned to Colorado.

When I got off the train at Trinidad, the militia met me and ordered  
me back on the train. Nevertheless, I got off. They marched me to the  
telegrapher's office, then they changed their minds, and took me to  
the hotel where they had their headquarters. I told them I wanted to  
get my breakfast. They escorted me to the dining room.

"Who is paying for my breakfast?" said I.

"The state," said they.

"Then as the guest of the state of Colorado I'll order a good  
breakfast." And I did-all the way from bacon to pie.

The train for Denver pulled in. The military put me aboard it. When  
we reached Walsenburg; a delegation of miners met the train, singing  
a miner's song. They sang at the top their lungs till the silent, old  
mountains see to prick up their ears. They swarmed into the train.

"God bless you, Mother!"

"God bless you, my boys!"

"Mother, is your coat warm enough? It's; freezing cold in the hills!"

"I'm all right, my lad." The chap had no overcoat -- a cheap cotton  
suit, and a bit of woolen rag around his neck.

Outside in the station stood the militia. One of them was a fiend. He  
went about swinging his gun, hitting the miners, and trying to prod  
them into a fight, hurling vile oaths at them. But the boys kept cool  
and I could hear them singing above the 'shriek of the whistle as the  
train pulled out of the depot and wound away through the hills.

 From January on until the final brutal out-rage, --the burning of  
the tent colony in Ludlow -- my ears wearied with the stories of  
brutality and suffering. My eyes ached with the misery I witnessed.  
My brain sickened with the knowledge of man's inhumanity to man.

It was, "Oh, Mother, my daughter has been assaulted by the soldiers- 
such a little girl!"

"Oh, Mother, did you hear how the soldiers entered Mrs. Hall's house,  
how they terrified the little children, wrecked the home, and did  
worse-terrible things-and just because Mr. Hall, the undertaker, had  
buried two miners whom the militia had killed!" "And, Oh Mother, did  
you hear how they are arresting miners for vagrancy, for loafing, and  
making them work in company ditches without pay, making them haul  
coal and clear snow up to the mines for nothing!" "Mother, Mother,  
listen! A Polish fellow arrived as a strike breaker. He didn't know  
there was a strike. He was a big, strapping fellow. They gave him a  
star and a gun and told him to shoot strikers!"

"Oh, Mother, they've brought in a shipment of guns and machine guns- 
what's to happen to us!"

A frantic mother clutched me. "Mother Jones," she screamed, "Mother  
Jones, my little boy's all swollen up with the kicking and beating he  
got from a soldier because he said, 'Howdy, John D. feller!' 'Twas  
just a kid teasing, and now he's lying like dead !"

"Mother, 'tis an outrage for an adjutant general of the state to  
shake his fist and holler in the face of a grey-haired widow for  
singing a union song in her own kitchen while she washes the dishes!"

"It is all an outrage," said I. 'Tis an outrage indeed that  
Rockefller should own the coal that God put in the earth for all the  
people. 'Tis an outrage that gunmen and soldiers are here protecting  
mines against workmen who ask bit more than a crust, a bit more than  
bondage! 'Tis an ocean of outrage !"

"Mother, did you hear of poor, old Colner? e was going to the  
postoffice and was arrested by the milita. They marched him down  
hill, making him carry a shovel and a pick his back. They told him he  
was to die and must dig his own grave. He stumbled and fell on the  
road. They kicked him and he staggered up. He begged to be allowed to  
go home kiss his wife and children goodbye.

"We'll do the kissing," laughed the soldiers At the place they picked  
out for his grave, they measured him, and then they ordered to dig- 
two feet deeper, they told him. Old Colner began digging while the  
soldiers stood around laughing and cursing and playing craps for his  
tin watch. Then Colner fell fainting into the grave. The soldiers  
left him there till he recovered by himself. There he was alone and  
he staggered back to camp, Mother, and he isn't quite right in the  
head!"

I sat through long nights with sobbing widows, watching the candles  
about the corpse of the husband burn down to their sockets.

"Get out and fight," I told those women. "Fight like hell till you go  
to Heaven t" That was the only way I knew to comfort them.

I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited  
clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid  
out the dead, the martyrs of the strike. I kept the men away from the  
saloons, whose licenses as well as those of the brothels, were held  
by the Rockefeller interests.

The miners armed, armed as it is permitted every American citizen to  
do in defense of his home, his family; as he is permitted to do  
against invasion. The smoke of armed battle rose from the arroyos and  
ravines of the Rocky Mountains.

No one listened. No one cared. The tickers in the offices of 26  
Broadway sounded louder than the sobs of women and children. Men in  
the steam heated luxury of Broadway offices could not feel the  
stinging cold of Colorado hill-sides where families lived in tents.

Then came Ludlow and the nation heard. Little children roasted alive  
make a front page story. Dying by inches of starvation and exposure  
does not.

On the 19th of April, 1914, machine guns, used on the strikers in the  
Paint Creek strike, were placed in position above the tent colony of  
Ludlow. Major Pat Hamrock and Lieutenant K. E. Linderfelt were in  
charge of the militia, the majority of whom were, company gun-men  
sworn in as soldiers.

Early in the morning soldiers approached the colony with a demand  
from headquarters that Louis Tikas, leader of the Greeks, surrender  
two Italians. Tikas demanded a warrant for their arrest. They had  
none. Tikas refused to surrender them. The soldiers returned to  
quarters. A signal bomb was fired. Then another. Immediately the  
machine guns began spraying the flimsy tent colony, the only home the  
wretched families of the miners had, riddling it with bullets. Like  
iron rain, bullets' upon men, women and children.

The women and children fled to the hills. Others tarried. The men  
defended their home with their guns. All day long the firing  
continued. Men fell dead, their faces to the ground. Women dropped.  
The little Snyder boy was shot through the head, trying to save his  
kitten. A child carrying water to his dying mother was killed.

By five o'clock in the afternoon, the miners had no more food, nor  
water, nor ammunition. They had to retreat with their wives and  
little ones into the hills. Louis Tikas was riddled with shots while  
he tried to lead women and children to safety. They perished with him.

Night came. A raw wind blew down the canyons where men, women and  
children shivered and wept. Then a blaze lighted the sky. The  
soldiers, drunk with blood and with the liquor they had looted from  
the saloon, set fire to the tents of Ludlow with oil-soaked torches.  
The tents, all the poor furnishings, the clothes and bedding of the  
miners' families burned. Coils of barbed wire were stuffed into the  
well, the miners' only water supply.

After it was over, the wretched people crept back to bury their dead.  
In a dugout under a burned tent, the charred bodies of eleven little  
children and two women were found-unrecognizable. Everything lay in  
ruins. The wires of bed springs writhed on the ground as if they,  
too, had tried to flee the horror. Oil and fire and guns had robbed  
men and women and children of their homes and slaughtered tiny babies  
and defenseless women. Done by order of Lieutenant Linderfelt, a  
savage, brutal executor of the will of the Colorado Fuel and Iron  
Company. The strikers issued a general call to arms: Every able  
bodied man must shoulder a gun to protect himself and his family from  
assassins, from arson and plunder. From jungle days to our own so- 
named civilization, this is a man's inherent right. To a man they  
armed, through-out the whole strike district. Ludlow went on burning  
in their hearts.

Everybody got busy. A delegation from Ludlow went to see President  
Wilson. Among them was Mrs. Petrucci whose three tiny babies were  
crisped to death in the black hole of Ludlow. She had something to  
say to her President.

Immediately he sent the United States cavalry to quell the gunmen. He  
studied the situation, and drew up proposals for a three-year truce,  
binding miner and operator. The operators scornfully refused.

A mass meeting was called in Denver. Lindsay spoke. He demanded that  
the operators be made to respect the laws of Colorado. That something  
be done immediately. The Denver Real Estate Exchange appointed a  
committee to spit on Judge Lindsey for his espousal of the cause of  
the miners.

Rockefeller got busy. Writers were hired to write pamphlets which  
were sent broadcast to every editor in the country, bulletins. In  
these leaflets, it was shown how perfectly happy was the life of the  
miner until the agitators came; how joyous he was with the company's  
saloon,. the company's pigstys for homes, the cornpany's teachers and  
preachers and coroners. How the miners hated the state law of an  
eight-hour working day, begging to be allowed to work ten, twelve.  
How they hated the state law that they should have their own check  
weigh-man to see that they were not cheated at the tipple.

And all the while the mothers of the children who died in Ludlow were  
mourning their dead.

***

Bekah