Hellraisers Journal: John Mitchell Again Elected President of the United Mine Workers of America

The strikebreaker is the hero of American industry.
-Dr. Charles W. Eliot,
Member of the National Civic Federation

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Monday January 29, 1906
From The Labor World: John Mitchell Again Elected President of U. M. W.

UMW Convention of 1906, Ipls News, Jan 17.png
The Scene in Tomlinson Hall, John Mitchell Presiding.
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The Convention of the United Mine Workers, held recently in Indianapolis, Indiana, has once again elected John Mitchell as President. This was reported by The Labor World on page three which followed a report on page two concerning Mitchell's response to attacks upon his leadership and his involvement in the National Civic Federation.

From the Duluth Labor World of January 27th:

JOHN MITCHELL IS AGAIN ELECTED PRESIDENT
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Coal Miners Also Adopt New Scale-
Will Meet Bosses Thursday.
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INDIANAPOLIS, Jan 23.-At the convention of the United Mine Workers of America today the report of the tellers showed the election of the following:

Prest. John Mitchell; vice president, T. L. Lewis; secretary treasurer, W. B. Wilson; delegates to American Federation of Labor, John Mitchell, T. L. Lewis, W. B. Wilson, John Dempsey, H. C. Perry and John Fahey.

The convention adopted the report of the scale committee with practically no change.

It was decided that when the joint conference of operators and miners meets for the first time Thursday, the first demand will be presented to operators for their acceptance or rejection, before any other demand is made. This demand is that operators willing to participate shall be admitted to the conference from Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan and the southwest.

The delegates decided to remain in the city and should the operators demand it the delegates would be called together again to consider further action. The sections demanding a general advance of 12 1/2 per cent over the present scale, a run of mine basis, differential of seven cents between pick and machine mined coal.

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SOURCE
The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-Jan 27, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/49584750

IMAGE
UMW Convention of 1906, Ipls News, Jan 17
https://www.newspapers.com/image/40289199/

See also:

"Hellraisers Journal: John Mitchell Under Attack at UMW Convention,
Defends National Civic Federation" by JayRaye
http://caucus99percent.com/content/hellraisers-journal-john-mitchell-und...

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Mother Jones on John Mitchell, the Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1903-04,
and the National Civic Federation.
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Mother Jones, Miners Angel .jpg

In 1906, Mother Jones was no longer employed by the United Mine Workers of America. Whether she was fired by John Mitchell or she resigned is unknown, but we do know that Mother never forgave Mitchell for what she believed was his betrayal of the Italian Miners of the Southern Colorado Coalfields during the Colorado Coal Strike of 1903-04. She was also a vehement opponent of the National Civic Federation.

From Chapter XIII of The Autobiography of Mother Jones:

Late one evening in the latter part of November [1903] I came into the hotel. I had been working all day and into the night among the miners and their families, helping to distribute food and clothes, encouraging, holding meetings. As I was about to retire, the hotel clerk called me down to answer a long distance telephone call from Louisville. The voice said, “Oh for God’s sake; Mother, come to us, come to us!”

I asked what the trouble was and the reply was more a cry than an answer, “Oh don’t wait to ask. Don’t miss the train.”

I got Mr. Howell, the president [of District 15 of UMWA], on the telephone and asked him what was the trouble in Louisville.

“They are having a convention there,” he said.

“A convention, is it, and what for? “

“To call off the strike in the northern coal fields because the operators have yielded to the demands.” He did not look at me as he spoke. I could see he was heart sick.

“But they cannot go back until the operators settle with the southern miners,” I said, “They will not desert their brothers until the strike is won! Are you going to let them do it?”

“Oh Mother,” he almost cried, “I can’t help it. It is the National Headquarters who have ordered them back!”

“That’s treachery,” I said, “quick, get ready and come with me.” We telephoned down to the station to have the conductor hold the train for Louisville a few minutes. This he did. We got into Louisville the next morning. I had not slept. The board member, Ream, and Grant Hamilton, representing the Federation of Labor, came to the hotel where I was stopping and asked where Mr. Howell, the president was.

“He has just stepped out,” I said. “He will be back.”

“Well, meantime, 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.”

I went to the convention and heard the matter of the northern miners returning to the mines discussed. I watched two shrewd diplomats deal with unsophisticated men; Struby, the president of the northern coal fields, and Blood, one of the keenest, trickiest lawyers in the West. And behind them, John Mitchell, toasted and wined and dined, flattered and cajoled by the Denver Citizens’ Alliance, and the Civic Federation was pulling the strings.

In the afternoon the miners called on me to address the convention.

“Brothers,” I said, “You English speaking miners of the northern fields promised your southern brothers, seventy per cent 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 to fight to a finish. 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 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 shall I go.”

The delegates rose en masse to cheer. The vote was taken. The majority decided to stand by the southern miners, refusing to obey the national President.

The Denver Post reported my speech and a copy was sent to Mr. Mitchell in Indianapolis. He took the paper in to his secretary and said, pointing to the report, “See what Mother Jones has done. to me!”

Three times Mitchell tried to make the northern miners return to the mines but each time he was unsuccessful. “Mitchell has got to get Mother Jones out of the field,” an organizer said. “He can never lick the Federation as long as she is still there.”

I was informed that Mitchell went to the governor and asked him to put me out of the state.

Finally the ultimatum was given to the northern miners. All support for the strike was withdrawn. The northern miners accepted the operators’ terms and returned to work. Their act created practical peonage in the south and the strike was eventually lost, although the struggle in the south went on for a year.

Much of the fighting took place around [Trinidad]. The miners were evicted from their company-owned houses. They went out on the bleak mountain sides, lived in tents through a terrible winter with the temperature below zero, with eighteen inches of snow on the ground. They tied their feet in gunny sacks and lived lean and lank and hungry as timber wolves. They received sixty-three cents a week strike benefit while John Mitchell went traveling through Europe, staying at fashionable hotels, studying the labor movement. When he returned the miners had been lashed back into the mines by hunger but John Mitchell was given a banquet in the Park Avenue Hotel and presented with a watch with diamonds.

From Chapter XXVII of The Autobiography of Mother Jones:

Many of our modern leaders of labor have wandered far from the thorny path of these early crusaders. Never in the early days of the labor struggle would you find leaders willing and dining with the aristocracy; nor did their wives strut about like diamond-bedecked peacocks; nor were they attended by humiliated, cringing colored servants.

The wives of these early leaders took in washing to make ends meet. Their children picked and sold berries. The women shared the heroism, the privation of their husbands.

In those days labor’s representatives did not sit on velvet chairs in conference with labor’s oppressors; they did not dine in fashionable hotels with the representatives of the top capitalists, such as the Civic Federation. They did not ride in Pullmans nor make trips to Europe.

The rank and file have let their servants become their masters and dictators. The workers have now to fight not alone their exploiters but likewise their own leaders, who often betray them, who sell them out, who put their own advancement ahead of that of the working masses, who make of the rank and file political pawns.

Provision should be made in all union constitutions for the recall of leaders. Big salaries should not be paid. Career hunters should be driven out, as well as leaders who use labor for political ends. These types are menaces to the advancement of labor.

In big strikes I have known, the men lay in prison while the leaders got out on bail and drew high salaries all the time. The leaders did not suffer. They never missed a meal. Some men make a profession out of labor and get rich thereby. John Mitchell left to his heirs a fortune, and his political friends are using the labor movement to gather funds to erect a monument to his memory, to a name that should be forgotten.

SOURCE
The Autobiography of Mother Jones
by Mother Jones, 1837-1930,
Edited by Mary Field Parton, 1878-1969,
Introduction by Clarence Darrow, 1857-1938.
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1925.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/jones/autobiography/autobiography...
-Chapter XIII
Note: Here Mother is conflating the 1903 Cripple Creek strike with 1903 Colorado Coalfield Strike, but we can still get gist of what Mother considered Mitchell's treachery toward the Italian miners of the southern Colorado Coalfields.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/jones/ch13.htm
-Chapter XXVII:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/jones/ch27.htm

IMAGE
Mother Mary Harris Jones, Miners Angel
http://www.biography.com/people/mother-jones-9357488

See also:
Emma F Langdon's Account of the Colorado Coalfield Strike of 1903-04
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=olgpAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...

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The Death of Mother Jones - Gene Autry

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