The Army of the Amazons

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
  - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

 On a cold Sunday morning, December 11, 1921, in the tiny frontier town of Franklin, Kansas, five hundred women crowded into a church hall. Men were excluded. They were mostly immigrants from eastern Europe. They were hungry, angry, and desperate. After a heated discussion they resolved on a course of action - they would march.

  By the following day women from miles around had come to join them. Their numbers swelled to somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000. Some marched while carrying infants in their arms. The local sheriff and his deputies was overwhelmed.

   By December 15th the Governor of Kansas had sent in three companies of cavalry and a machine gun company, to stop the "Army of Amazons", as the newspapers had dubbed them.

To understand how events had come to this dramatic stage, we must go back to November 1919, and one of the most militant union leaders in American history, Alexander Howat.

 In November 1919, the United Mine Workers called for a nationwide coal strike. When President Wilson declared the strike illegal, the UMW called off the strike. However, Alexander Howat refused to order the 10,000 men of District 14 back into the mines under the current conditions.  

  In those days there were 517 mines in south-east Kansas. The miners were lucky to make $1.25 a day for a 12-hour day. Conditions were wretched. Pay was arbitrarily withheld. Injuries and deaths were frequent. There was no pension, no insurance, no workman's compensation.

 Howat was born in Scotland and came to America at the age of three. He attended public schools until he was ten, after which he was sent down into the mines for the next twelve years. A few years later he was elected president of District 14.

 Faced with dwindling fuel supplies, the Kansas Supreme Court empowered the state to take control of the mines. Governor Henry J. Allen called for volunteers to work the mines. The privileged children of the wealthy responded to this call for strikebreaking.

 Within three weeks the strike was over, but not before Howat went to jail. The strikers gained little, but it did scare the Governor into taking action.

  Allen set up the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations. It was a created with a mandate to settle all labor disputes by binding arbitration. Strikes were officially illegal in Kansas, thus defanging labor unions.

 In response, District 14 decided to make it "illegal" to recognize the Court. The union would apply heavy penalties upon any member who had dealings with the Court.

  Howat was sent to prison several times for calling wildcat strikes in 1920 and 1921 and refusing to deal with the Court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. Several years later the U.S. Supreme Court would agree with Howat's opinion and the Court would be folded up, but in the meantime strikers in Kansas would have no allies in the state government.

The 1921 Kansas Coal Strike

 In August of 1921 the members of District 14 called for another strike. Howat was sent to jail in Girard, then in Columbus, and finally in Ottawa.

 The international UMW leadership demanded that Howat call off the strike. He refused, and for that he was expelled from the UMW. Despite that Howat remained in jail and the membership refused to acknowledge any other leadership.

  As the months drug on the mine owners began turning to scabs and the strikers began to run out of money. It was at this point that the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters of the strikers decided to take matters into their own hands.

  One of those women was Mary Skubitz, the mother of a future U.S. Representative, Joe Skubitz.

 Her son didn't go on the march, but vividly remembers being awakened at 2 or 3 a.m. by his mother before she started out.
   "She said, 'Joey, wake up, I've got to go to Franklin,' and then she gave me my instructions," he said.
...
Mrs. Skubitz was the wife of a miner. She called a meeting for December 12, 1921 to be held in Franklin at the union hall. Three hundred women came to that first meeting. They planned to march on the coal mines to prevent non-union miners from going in to work.

 The women issued a proclamation denouncing the International UMW and its support of the "Allen Industrial Slavery Law". Seven women signed this proclamation, swearing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their striking men. Skubitz wasn't one of the signatures.

 The women marched at Jackson-Walker mine first. Cars that approach the mine were blocked by the women. If the cars had curtains, they were ripped down so the women could see inside. If miners were found inside they were ordered to leave. Men that refused the women's demands had red pepper thrown in their eyes. 120 scabs were prevented from going to work that day.

  The following day they marched on mines near Edison and Ringo. The march was much larger this time. There was reports of lunch buckets being destroyed and motor cars being damaged. More red pepper was thrown. Around 100 scabs were prevented from working.

  The leaders of the march usually carried with them large American flags. The reception the women got was mixed at best.

 At one mine, the boss threatened to turn a water hose on the women. A mine superintendent ran down the American flag the women held as a barrier and trampled it. At Mine No. 21, the mine foreman promised to bring up what few men were working in the mine. The men made their appearance. Mrs. Skubitz said in her journal, "I never seen a more frightened lot of men in my life." When the situation was explained to them, one of the men said that if she would hold back the women, they would leave.

  In Gross, Kansas, a full shift was working when the women "rolled down the pits like balls and the men ran like deers."Mrs. Skubitz continues, "Hampered by their narrow skirts, the women grabbed the bottom of their skirts, pulling them up together in trouser form and ran like wild after them."

 On December 14, the march was becoming enormous, and more and more mines were being targeted. The local law enforcement had completely lost control of the situation.

"There was absolutely no fear in these women's hearts."
  - Mary Skubitz

  At this point rumors were running wild and the local newspapers were fanning the flames. Consider this example from the Pittsburgh Sun, December 15:

 At about 11 o'clock a report reached Pittsburgh that the Amazonian host was headed for this city with the object of first entering the Hotel Stilwell and doing bodily harm to Van A. Bittner, special representative of the international union of the United Mine Workers of America. It was also reported that the marchers would raid the offices of the international union, known as the provisional government of West Fifth Street.

  So persistent were the rumors of these intended raids, that the Chief of Police Ross Armstrong had an extra force of officers at police headquarters ready for immediate action in the event the rumors proved true.

 The women marchers had unnerved the local officials. They appealed to the Governor, who sent nearly the entire state's National Guard, 2,000 soldiers in all. The presence of all these guns convinced the marchers to call off further action.

  A few small marches were held in the coming days, but the Army of the Amazons was mostly over.

 The marchers had reached 63 mines during that week, most of the mines were shut down for at least a day.

 Howat, from jail, said the sending of troops was a "final and conclusive admission of Governor Allen and his industrial court, that the industrial court law, passed for the purpose of bringing about industrial peace by holding the threat of jail over labor, has miserably failed."

The crackdown

  The local sheriff, obviously unsure how to react to these women marchers, made his first arrest - Charles Stewart, one of the husbands of the marchers.

  But then the real crackdown started. The following day four women were arrested: Mary Battatori, Marie Deloney, Fannie Wilmer, and Mary Skubitz. They were all arrested in their homes.

  Over the next few weeks 49 women would be arrested for taking part in these demonstrations, mostly for disorderly conduct. While none would serve time in prison, all were given stiff fines.

 Some of the women regretted taking part. Others, like Ellina Purgatorio said "she was not ashamed of it and would probably march again if the troops were removed".

 On Jan. 13, 1922, Howat called an end to the strike.

 One of the marchers was a woman named Eugene H. DeGruson.

 Her daughter wrote a poem in memory of her mother called "ALIEN WOMEN".

 In '21, my mother still herself

at seventeen marched for Alexander

Howat to bust the scabs who worked

the mines in place of the fathers

and husbands of the thousand women

who marched with her carrying

their men's pit buckets filled

with red pepper to throw in the eyes

of the poor scabs who cursed back

in English to their Slovene, German,

French, and Italian over

the State Militia's rifle fire.

It's all dim in her mind now. She

remembers only that she was hungry

and frightened. She does not remember

Judge Curran, who said, "It is a fact

that there are bolsheviki, communists,

and anarchists among the alien women

of this community. It was the lawlessness

of these women which made necessary

the stationing of the State Militia

in our county for two months

to preserve law and order."

She does not remember they

were called an Army of Amazons.

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mhagle's picture

Thank you for sharing it!

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Marilyn

"Make dirt, not war." eyo

Meteor Man's picture

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_the_Plaza_de_Mayo

Mother's Roca:

http://rocainc.org/about/our-story/

Same story. I saw a suggestion that Antifa needs to move to the back of the pack and let the women and children step up and seize the moral high ground.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Bollox Ref's picture

tends to have long lasting repercussions.

Is TPTB learning?

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

thanatokephaloides's picture

@Bollox Ref

Too much stick, and not enough carrot

tends to have long lasting repercussions.

Is TPTB learning?

Nyet!!

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides