Les Misérables

Hellraisers Journal: "Fantine in Our Day" by Eugene Debs from the International Socialist Review

While there is a lower class, I am in it,
while there is a criminal element, I am of it,
and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-Eugene Victor Debs

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Monday March 6, 1916
From the International Socialist Review: Comrade Debs on the Fantines of Our Day

From this month's edition of the Review, Comrade Debs urges class solidarity and human compassion for the "girls, women who have walked the path of thorns and briers with bare and bleeding feet; who know the ways of agony and tears, and who move in melancholy procession as capitalist society's sacrificial offering to nameless and dishonored graves."

FANTINE IN OUR DAY

By EUGENE V. DEBS
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Fantine kneeling before Javert.png

THE reader of "Les Miserables" can never forget the ill-starred Fantine, the mournful heroine of Hugo's immortal classic. The very name of Fantine, the gay, guileless, trusting girl, the innocent, betrayed, self-immolating young mother, the despoiled, bedraggled, hunted and holy martyr to motherhood, to the infinite love of her child, touches to tears and haunts the memory like a melancholy dream.

Jean Valjean, noblest of heroes, was possible only because of Fantine, sublimest of martyrs.

Fantine—child of poverty and starvation—the ruined girl, the abandoned mother, the hounded prostitute, remained to the very hour of her tragic death chaste as a virgin, spotless as a saint in the holy sanctuary of her own pure and undefiled soul. It was of such as Fantine that Heine wrote: "I have seen women on whose cheeks red vice was painted and in whose hearts dwelt heavenly purity."

Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones with her snowy hair "is the very ideal of beautiful old age."

You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones

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Friday February 9, 1906
Greensboro, North Carolina - Interview with Mother Jones

The Daily Industrial News of Greensboro published the following interview with Mother Jones in its February 7th edition:

MOTHER JONES TELLS OF HER MISSION IN LIFE
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Noted Socialist Visits Greensboro and Chats Most Entertainingly of Her Work,
Her Purpose and the Tactics She Invariably Pursues.
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Mother Jones, seated.jpg

"Mother" Jones, the noted socialist who is to speak in Labor Union Hall on tomorrow night, came to this city two days ago. She was seen by a Daily Industrial News reporter last night, and talked freely of her life and work.

So many people picture "Mother" Jones as a kind of Carrie Nation who wields her hatchet against governments instead of saloons that the sight of the real woman fairly takes away the breath.

The best description of "Mother" Jones is her own soubriquet "mother," and when to that wholesome-hearted out-reaching motherliness is added humor, even mischievousness, jollity, and "spunk" immeasurable the reality is almost approached.

To reach it quite, however, would be impossible, for "Mother" Jones is one of those indescribable little persons who always just eludes description and analysis. Classify her as a woman fighter and striker, and her tender, sweet gentleness comes up in contradiction. Classify her as the woman with heart so exquisitely sympathetic and pitying that it aches for every hurt suffered by a fellow creature and the picture of the intrepid woman marching at the head of a great army of workmen baffles one.