Appalachian History

Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), better known as Mother Jones, was an American labor organizer and one of the founders of the Social Democratic party (1898) and the Industrial Workers of the World (1905). Her August 1912 speech to striking coal miners in Charleston, WV was one in a series of organized activities which were blamed for violence in the state's coal fields, and led to her conviction of conspiracy to commit murder, which was later commuted. This excerpt is from the last portion of the speech.

Oh, men [speaking of mine owners], have you any hearts? Oh, men, do you feel? Oh, men, do you see the judgment day on the throne above, when you will be asked, "where did you get your gold?"

You stole it from these wretches. You murdered, you assassinated, you starved, you burned them to death, that you and your wives might have palaces, and that your wives might go to the seashore. Oh God, men, when I see the horrible picture, when I see the children with their hands off, when I took an army of babies and walked a hundred and thirty miles with a petition to the President of the United States, to pass a bill in Congress to keep these children from being murdered for profit. He had a secret service then all the way to the palace. And now they want to [re-elect] that man! What is the American Nation coming to?

Manhood, womanhood, can you stand for it? They put reforms in their platforms, but [we] get no reform. [Roosevelt] promised everything to labor. When we had the strike in Colorado he sent 200 guns to blow our brains out. I don't forget. You do, but I don't. And our women were kicked out like dogs at the point of the bayonet. That is America. They don't do it in Russia. Some women get up with $5 worth of paint on their cheeks and have tooth brushes for their dogs and say, "oh, them horrible miners. Oh, that horrible old Mother Jones, that horrible old woman."

I am horrible! I admit, and I want to be to you blood-sucking pirates!

I want you, my boys, to buckle on your armor. This is a fighting age; this is not the age for cowards; put them out of the way. Take your medicine [Governor], because we are going to get after you, no doubt about it.

I want you to be good. Give the Governor time until to-morrow night, and, if he don't act then it is up to you. We have all-day Saturday, all-day Sunday, all-day Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday if we need it.

Mother Jones brings shoes for children in union camps during West Virginia miners strike.

We are used to living on little; we can take a crust of bread in our hands and go.

Boys, stay quiet until tomorrow night. I think it would be a good thing to work tomorrow, because the mine owners will need it. The mine commissioner will get a pain in his skull to-night and his wife will give him some "dope." The mine owner's wife is away at the seashore. When she finds no more money coming she will say, "Is there any more money coming?" He will say, "Most of the miners are not working." She will say, "Take the guards and shoot them back into the mines, those horrible fellows."

The Governor says, if you don't go to work, said he, in the mines or on the railroads, I am going to call the militia, and I will shoot you...I said we can get ready too.

What militia can you get to fight us? Those boys on Paint Creek wouldn't fight us if all the governors in the country wanted you to. I was going yesterday to take dinner with them, but I had something else to do. I am going some day to take dinner with them, and I will convert the whole bunch to my philosophy. I will get them all my way.

Now, be good, boys.

Pass the hat around, some of these poor devils want a glass of beer. Get the hat. The mine owner robs them. Get a hat you fellows of the band...

Another thing I want you to do: I want you to go in regular parade, three or four together. The moving-picture man wants to get your picture to send over the country.

The hat is for miners who came up here broke, and they want to get a glass of beer. And to pay their way back — and to get a glass of beer. I will give you $5. Get a move on, and get something in it...

The National Government will get a record of this meeting. They will say, my friends, this was a peaceful, law-abiding meeting. They will see men of intelligence, that they are not out to destroy but to build. And instead of the horrible homes you have got we will build on their ruins homes for you and your children to live in, and we will build them on the ruins of the dog kennels which they wouldn't keep their mules in. That will bring forth better ideas than the world has had. The day of oppression will be gone. I will be with you whether true or false. I will be with you at midnight or when the battle rages, when the last bullet ceases, but I will be in my joy, as an old saint said:

O, God, of the mighty clan, God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a man. God grant that the woman who suffered for you, Suffered not for a coward, but oh, for a fighting man.


Source: www.infoplease.com/t/hist/jones-coal-miner

In 1924, when I was 16 years old, I started workin' at the Appalachian Mill as a cone winder operator. Now on that machine, that was a long machine, it had about 50 spindles on it and I was windin' threads from a cone up to a spool. There wasn't a clock in the room. I didn't have a watch and I didn't know what time it was. So about 9 o'clock I thought it must be time to go home. That was the longest day that I can ever remember. And I remember, very definitely, eating my lunch at 10:30 because I thought it must be lunchtime. It wasn't lunchtime.

I still had to continue on until 12, until the whistle blew and most of us carried our lunch. And that was the shortest 30 minutes you've ever had, too. We would go outside the mill and sit on the steps and eat our lunch, but that was a long day. And when I started to thinkin' about that, "From now till 4:30, can I make it, can I make it?" But I did make it and, of course, each day that got a little easier, you know.

Did I know what I was doin' when I went into the cotton mill? No, I did not. It was just a way to, ah, help earn a living for the family. I had no ideas at all about, ah, ah, union labor. Now I had heard of the railroad strike in 1921, but there were—there wasn't any railroad workers living around where we were and there was very little in the papers about it. But I didn't know that they were even in the union. I thought they just quit work. I—I had no way of knowing anything about the labor movement.

It was the last thing in the world that my parents wanted, for us to go into cotton mills. They wanted us to all continue going to school. My mother had visions of us going to university and college and graduatin' and becoming doctors and lawyers and all that. And that was a dream that was never realized, because of the Depression there and there was no way.

My father couldn't make a livin' workin' in a butcher shop and in food markets around. And he had no other skills either. And my mother had been a—a cook and a dressmaker and they had no way of makin' a livin'. So it was up to us children to do that. We—we had to. We had to go to work.

Boys and girls at Bemis Cotton Mill in Bemis, TN, 1905.

The—at the Cherokee Spinnin' Company there in 1933, where I was still working as a winding machine operator, but the end of my machine was near a window and right around the corner from that was the weave shop. And I looked out there one day and here's all these weavers sittin' out there in the afternoon—it wasn't their lunch hour—they were sittin' out there on a pile of lumber, just sitting there. And we all—I told everbody to run to the window and looked at 'em and we all wondered, "What are—what are they doing?"

And we still didn't quite understand it, but I think now that they did gain something from that strike.

Oh, yes. That's—that's when we got the 8 hours. When the NRA came in, we got 8 hours then and our wages went up to $12.40 a week.

That was great, but you know what an argument here in Knoxville was and it was in all the newspapers. What—wasn't that gonna cause a crime wave or wasn't something gonna happen with those people with all that leisure time on their hands? In fact, a newspaper reporter—I don't think that's in my scrapbook anywhere, but a newspaper reporter came out to my house one day to ask, "What do you do with all this leisure time?" We—that was time that we hadn't had before and they were really afraid of it, that we had that leisure time. And then we were off on Saturday. See what a break that was there? We got the 40-hour week.

Lucille Thornburgh

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In 1933, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Recovery Act, which included provisions that protected the right of workers to organize, Lucille Thornburgh and seven coworkers drew up a union charter. With the help of a local union organizer, they signed up all 603 employees at Cherokee Mills.

In 1934 Cherokee workers joined textile workers across the South in a general strike known as the Uprising of 1934. Knoxville workers remained out for eight weeks, but the strike collapsed following the sudden death of owner Hal Mebane, an event Thornburgh says workers interpreted in religious terms. When the workers returned, Thornburgh was blacklisted, and other mill owners refused to hire her.

In 1995 Thornburgh was featured in the PBS film Uprising of '34, which documented the general textile strike.


Source: Lucille Thornburgh interview, edited, from WORK 'N PROGRESS: Lessons in the History of American Labor at Archives, Library and Information Center, Georgia Institute of Technology www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/Labor/wnp/wnpdocument/uprising34/uprising34.pdf

commentary by Connie L. Lester, Mississippi State University/Tennessee Historical Society/Tennessee Encyclopedia

“We didn't even know what a union was. We'd never heard tell of a union. But we just decided that we wasn't going to work for this wage. We just wasn't going to work for $10.08 a week. But as it happened, there was a carpenter and a union man, John Penix. He called someone that he knew in the labor movement, and they came here and organized, and it was just one big mess, and they just panicked. [Everyone else in the plant was] getting the same wages, and I imagine that they decided that if we were going to quit, they'd quit, too.

“At that time they paid a flat scale. You started out at $8.96 a week; $10.08; $11.20. I don't know whether you got past $11.20 or not. I never did hear any man say how much they made, but I don't think they paid them more. If they did, they didn't pay them much more. [The supervisors] were American, most of the people from up close by, the close counties. A lot of people worked there from Johnson City and way back up in Pogey. One time, I think we went to Pogey. There wasn't a thing on earth but just mountains with rocks sticking out. And people worked from up in Butler. Oh, just all around.

“Fifty-six hours [a week], they didn't seem to pay any attention to it. People had never been nowhere, and they'd never done anything. Maybe go to a movie on Saturday night. So I don't guess the hours made that much difference. I don't remember, except I know you'd get awfully tired.

“I went to the washroom when I wanted to. I went by my own rules, if you needed to go to the washroom. Oh, you worked so hard, you didn't fudge on them any. They didn't take any breaks. They were just supposed to go to the washroom and back.

“I don't remember who did the talking. You see, they selected the one to do the talking, and they passed the word around they was going to ask for a raise. Said, ‘If they don't give us that raise, we'll just quit work.’ And that was it.

“It just got in a bigger and a bigger and a bigger mess. Other people kept joining us, first from North American and then Bemberg, because everybody wanted a raise anyway, until that John Penix got in touch with somebody in labor, and an organizer came here and organized.

“There was five thousand people out. And we had asked for an $11.20 raise! We were arrested twice, on those picket lines. It was over here on the old State Line Road. They brought out the National Guard. In the meantime, my daddy cooked down there at the plant during that time. Some of them stayed in there, I reckon, to take care of the machinery and things that had to be looked after, and he cooked for them.”

Christine Galliher
Interview August 8, 1979
Discusses plant strike at North American Rayon Corp.
In Johnson City, TN on March 12, 1929
Southern Oral History Program Collection
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/H-314/H-314.html

Related posts: “The stretch-out and the strike”


Christine+Galliher North+American+Rayon American+Bemberg labor+strike Johnson+City+TN appalachia appalachia+history appalachian+history history+of+appalachia