Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»

Jones had arranged a series of meetings in the bleak and primitive towns of the 60-mile range—stretching from Hibbing to Biwabik. I spoke in miners’ halls and in auditoriums belonging to the local Finnish societies. It was sub-zero weather and the people gathered around the huge potbellied stoves that glowed red hot. A few feet away it was cold. Water froze in the pitcher in the bedroom during the night.

The snow-covered landscape, beautiful with fir and pine trees, was scarred by the great open-pit mines, from which rich red iron ore was scooped with huge steam shovels. The Oliver Iron Mining Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, owned the mining rights to the land under the towns. When they exhausted a pit location they moved the mining operations to another place. In the process, the towns were often shifted to make available the ore below. All structures were therefore of a temporary character, shabby and cheap. However, a few years later the population became weary of living in shacks at the mercy of the company. They elected progressive mayors who were not at the beck and call of the company. They picked permanent sites for the towns, and put a stiff tax on the mining companies. They used it to pave streets, lay sidewalks, build schools and public buildings, install lighting systems and generally turn “locations,” as they were called, into model towns. They even had drinking fountains on the streets. In Hibbing, the old Carnegie Library came down in one of the last “moves” and they built a brand new city public library—with no thanks to Carnegie. The “Range” as I knew it in 1907 was like the primitive frontier days in the West. All these changes came later.

The ore was loaded into open ore cars, sent to the Duluth docks and shipped down the Great Lakes, when they were not frozen, to Eastern steel mills in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was basic industry in the raw, in a rough wild country. I was young, not yet eighteen. I romanticized the life—so different from New York—and the organizer who lived and worked there, under conditions of hardship. I fell in love with him and we were married in January 1908.

Almost immediately after we were married I had to go to Minneapolis and St. Paul to fill some IWW speaking dates, which were of long standing. No sooner had I left than Jack got arrested with two miners, charged with attempting to dynamite a mine captain’s residence at Aurora, Minnesota. Lurid publicity appeared even in the New York papers. “Law Breaks in on Honeymoon of Girl Orator” was headlined in the New York World, and “Girl Orator Whose Husband of Ten Days is in Jail,” was another. The Duluth News Tribune carried an Aurora dispatch: “A young woman named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was recently here and her speech was particularly inflammatory. . . . Some of the ignorant miners took what she said for granted and when it was decided to lay off the night shift and confine the work to the day force, some of the men who lost their positions conceived the idea that Nicholas, the man immediately in charge, was responsible.”

But nothing serious came of it. Jack was held for eight days and then released for lack of evidence. At his insistence and because of my family’s great alarm, I returned home. Apparently, the romance was a possibility they had not anticipated and the arrest topped it off. I returned to Duluth in the spring, when Jones got a job in that city on a railroad tunnel, and brought my unemployed father out to work as an engineer. But they “agitated” so much on the job that they were both fired. All three of us went to New York, and I can see my mother’s pale face as this unemployed army appeared with suitcases full of dirty clothes. It was a hard summer. We were all very poor. The men remained out of work.

My mother resented Jones’ presence. She felt he should not have married me, so young a girl, so far away from home, without the knowledge of her parents, although she felt guilty for letting me go alone. She hated poverty and large families and was fearful that my life would become a replica of her own. It was bad enough to have one

By fall Jones was anxious to pull out of New York City. He felt his chances for employment were better in Chicago. We decided to go to the IWW convention there. I went first to Philadelphia to speak for a week to get enough money to pay my fare to Chicago. He hoboed his way out to Chicago. My mother had made me a red broadcloth cape, which I wore, with a broad-brimmed gray hat, for several winters. It kept me warm and was quite picturesque. Somebody gave me a pair of red silk stockings, but I never wore them. They were considered immodest and indecent, worn only in burlesque shows. No “good woman” wore silk stockings in those days. Black cotton was the conventional hosiery attire.

After the 1908 convention was over, Jack made arrangements with a railroad man, a member of the organization who lived at Blue Island, Illinois, for me to stay at home for a while until Jack got a job. But the man’s wife was extremely resentful and treated me like an intruder. That I had books and pamphlets, almost a suitcase full, and read and wrote all the time, did not fit her idea of what a young wife and expectant mother should do. I became so uncomfortable there that I urged Jones to get a room anywhere in Chicago so I could leave. We moved to Oak Street, on the North Side. We had a back room next to the kitchen which was heated by a small gas stove. The landlady was extremely kind and gave us credit on our rent during that hard winter. Jones got a job shoveling coal. Some other IWWs lived in the same house, among them B. H. Williams, later editor of the IWW paper Solidarity, and Joe Ettor, then 22 years old, smiling, rosy-cheeked, telling us of his adventures during the San Francisco earthquake when he worked in the kitchen of the St. Frances Hotel, below the street level. They thought the racket was the cook throwing the pots around. Later, he and Jack London sat on a hillside across the Bay and watched the city bum.

Joe Ettor almost always used to wear a black shirt with a red tie and carried a small suitcase full of IWW applications and membership

Jones was a teetotaler, but St. John and the other “fellow-workers” of the IWW used to take me with them to the North-Side Turner Hall on Clarke Street, where they played chess and checkers. With a five- cent glass of beer they could help themselves to all the free lunch they could eat—frankfurters, sliced ham, potato salad, rye bread and pickles. They would bring me all I could eat, too—at the table, of course, as ladies did not go to the bar in those days. The proprietor, who was also a sympathizer, said he would surely go out of business if he didn’t have the IWW to eat up the free lunch.

Jones frequented a nearby library a great deal and became interested in developing a better plan of industrial organization than the 13 hypothetical departments then projected but nonexistent in the IWW. These departments were presented to the public in a wheel-shaped diagram which Samuel Gompers derisively called “Father Haggerty’s wheel of fortune.” Thomas J. Haggerty was an ex-priest, editor of the Voice of Labor of the American Labor Union, and one of the founders of the IWW. Jones drew great diagrams on oilcloth, painted with bright colors. They were spread all over the floor and walls. Spirited arguments ensued on his scheme, which was all on paper, of course, and if adopted would have made little difference. But the other men blamed the smell of paint and turpetine for what happened to me and gave Jones hell.

One morning, after Jack had left for his coal shoveling job, I was gripped with excruciating pains. Finally, I knocked on the folding doors between our room and the front room which was occupied by Ben Williams and another IWW. Ben was an angular New Englander, who had been a school teacher. He immediately surmised that I had labor pains and called the landlady, who got a neighborhood doctor. The baby was bom prematurely a few hours later. Jones came home, but the baby boy, whom we had named John Vincent, died in the night. All I remember of this fleeting first child of mine was his big blue eyes—opened wide on a world so soon to be forsaken. We were grief-stricken. If he had lived, it might have drawn Jack and me together. Instead, I sought solace in greater activity.

We were in debt and owed the landlady, the doctor and undertaker.


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SOCIALIST AND IWW AGITATOR, 1906-1912

On New Year’s Day, I only had three cents to buy a postcard and stamp to write to my mother. Then my friend Vincent St. John, now in charge of the IWW, took a hand and sent Jones to Cobalt, Ontario, to get a job through the Western Federation of Miners local. It wasn’t long before he arranged for me to come to speak there, as well as at another camp still further north, to which we went by stage coach, a trip that took two days. It was an exciting trip, but the National Office of the IWW, or rather the Saint, as we called St. John, cut it short. He sent for me to return to Chicago to make a speaking trip to the Pacific Coast. I accepted with joy. It would be my first cross-country tour.

Mother Jones—Labor Agitator

The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen—she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the “city folks” hell. Why weren’t we helping the miners of the West? Why weren’t we backing up the' Mexican people against Diaz? We were “white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth,” she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners’ strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. “Get the poor child some water!” she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed. I was with my husband and James Connolly, who lived nearby. Connolly caught me as I fell and told my husband I should not be there. They walked me home from 148th to 134th Street, a long, silent, somber walk. Neither of them had the carfare to ride. Connolly said to my mother: “Put her to bed and give her a hot drink!” Apparently he realized I was pregnant.

The next winter I saw Mother Jones again in Chicago at a meeting in Hull House of the Rudewitz Committee, to which I was a delegate from Local 85, IWW. I heard her hot angry defiant words against the deportation of a young Jewish worker on the vile pretext of “ritual murder.” (Jane Addams and others saved him from certain death by their spirited defense). Mother Jones was dressed in an old-fashioned black silk basque, with lace around her neck, a long full skirt and a little bonnet, trimmed with flowers. She never changed her style of dress


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throughout her lifetime. She may sound like Whistler’s Mother but this old lady was neither calm nor still, breathing fearless agitation wherever she went.

She was bom in Cork, Ireland, and came here as a girl. She lost her husband, an iron molder, and her four children in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee. The union buried them. Alone and desolate, she went to Chicago. She did dressmaking for the rich. While she sewed in the magnificent mansions along the Lake front, she saw poverty and misery in the city. After the Chicago fire she attended meetings of the Knights of Labor in their scorched building. Following the first of May massacre of workers in 1886, outside the McCormick Harvester Works, and the subsequent Haymarket frameup of labor leaders, she became a restless labor pilgrim, going from strike to strike— agitating, organizing and encouraging. She began in West Virginia, going on to the anthracite area, and from then on she was with the coal miners in practically every struggle for the next 20 years, in the East, in Colorado—everywhere.

She was put out of hotels. Families who housed her in company towns were dispossessed. She spoke in open fields when halls were closed. She waded through Kelly Creek, West Virginia, to organize miners on the other side. Tried for violating an injunction, she called the judge a “scab” and proved it to him. She organized “women’s armies” to chase scabs—with mops, brooms and dishpans. “God! It’s the old mother with her wild women!” the bosses would groan. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when a group of women pickets with babies were arrested and sentenced to 30 days, she advised them: “Sing to the babies all night long!” The women sang their way out of jail in a few days to the relief of the sleepless town. She was asked at Congressional hearing: “Where is your home?” and she answered: “Sometimes I’m in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota. My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

In 1903 she led a group of child workers from the textile mills in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to confront President Theodore Roosevelt with proof of child labor. In Colorado, after the Ludlow massacre in 1914, she led a protest parade up to the governor’s office. In West Virginia, time after time, she led delegations to see various governors and “gave them hell,” as she said. One of the last strikes she participated in, when she

When she was a very old lady, she warned the rank and file against leaders who put their own interests ahead of labor. Until her death she stoutly affirmed her one great faith: “The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands!” She died in 1930, at the age of 100, in Washington, D. C. at the home of Terence V. Powderly, who had been the Master Workman of the Knights of Labor back in the 1880s. She is buried in Mt. Olive Cemetery, Illinois, surrounded by the graves of miners. In death as in life she is with “her boys.”

She inspired me a great deal when I first heard her in New York and Chicago in those early days, though I confess I was afraid of her sharp tongue. But when I reminded her of the meeting in the Bronx and told her I had lost my baby, she was very sympathetic and kind. Her harshness was for bosses, scabs and crooked labor leaders.

"The Saint”

I never met a man I admired more than Vincent St. John. He was a fabulous figure who came out of the class struggle of the West; he was only 30 years old in 1907, when he became General Organizer of the IWW. He was an American, born in Kentucky, of Irish and Dutch ancestry. His father before him had been an adventurous character who rode the Wells Fargo pony express, carrying the U.S. mails through the Southwest, and had lost his arm, shooting it out with Indians during a holdup. He is buried somewhere along the Arizona trail. Young Vincent went to work at 18 for the Bisbee Copper Company and became a union member. By the time he was 24, he was president of the Telluride, Colorado, local union of the militant Western Federation of Miners. It was a large silver and gold camp.

A strike was declared there under his leadership, in the Smuggler- Union mine, on May 1, 1901. It was one of the biggest mines and at first the struggle was in the nature of a sit-down strike, the first in the United States. The Governor’s Commission, sent ther§ jperh&ps investigate, reported that instead of leaving the mine and picketing, as usual in strikes, “everything was quiet in Telluride and the miners were in peaceful possession of the mines.” The cause of the strike was


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the piece-contract system, introduced by the manager, Arthur Collins, under which the miners were charged for board, room, tools, powder, candles, sharpening of drills and what not. They were paid per fathom to break ore, cut it to suitable size and load it into chutes. The result was that the miners’ wages were actually pared to a minimum.

Collins organized a Citizens’ Alliance of the businessmen, who were egged on by the Telluride Journal until a pitched battle ensued in which several people, Collins among them, were killed. St. John, as president of the union, was charged with the murder of Collins. To frame a strike leader, stick him in jail and keep him there for the duration of the strike was a usual tactic. He was defended by Judge Orrin N. Hilton, who was chief counsel for the miners’ union. (Hilton was the lawyer who, many years later, defended Joe Hill.) He used to say with a chuckle: “That little fellow, St. John—I was his lawyer in a dozen murder charges that never came to trial!” Among these occasions, one was in Idaho when Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone were on trial in 1907. He was released on bail after the acquittal of Haywood.

He became an executive board member of the Federation, in the earlier days. Wherever there were miners in gold, silver, copper and lead, battling to build their union, he was a legendary figure of courage and resourcefulness. The Rocky Mountain News of February 28, 1906, quoted a company detective as saying: “St. John has given the mine owners of Colorado more trouble in the past years than twenty other men up there. If left undisturbed, he would have the entire district organized in another year.” He was damned as a dynamiter, a'gunman, a dangerous agitator; he entered camps with a price on his head, used his mother’s name—Magee—and organized hundreds of men, often single-handed. He was one of the greatest labor organizers this country ever produced.

The chronic bronchial condition from which Saint suffered in his later years and which contributed to his untimely death in 1929, at the age of 53, was the result of a terrible mine disaster at Telluride in one of the tunnels of the Smuggler-Union mine. Burning hay (for the mules), lumber and timber caused a dense smoke to fill the mine. Collins was mainly concerned with removing Winchester rifles and ammunition from a nearby storehouse. Many miners were trapped in the mine. St. John led a rescue party, which had great difficulty because of

The place which is most identified in labor history with the name of Vincent St. John is Goldfield, Nevada. At the turn of the century it was the biggest, busiest, richest gold camp in the world. Today it is a ghost town. It was the scene of an intense labor struggle, led by Vincent St. John. The Miners Federation was still a part of the IWW in 1906, and the “town workers” were also organized by the Saint in another IWW local. Miners and dishwashers, engineers and stenographers, teamsters and clerks—all were union members. The newsboys were organized and when the Tonapah Sun attacked the IWW they refused to sell it. St. John described the efforts to make Goldfield a model union town as follows:

Of course, this could not last very long in an isolated community, controlled by big capitalist interests. The Mine Owners’ Association engineered a nasty jurisdictional fight between the American Federation of Labor and the Western Federation of Miners, which brought federal troops to the camp. The fight cost the mine owners over $100,000 and St. John nearly lost his life. He had been tricked into lending his gun and was carrying a smaller one that belonged to his wife. He had trouble in drawing it quickly. A company stool pigeon, Paddy Mullaney, shot him in both hands. Weakened by loss of blood, he was first thrown into jail and then inadequately treated at a company hospital. His friends virtually kidnapped him, rushed him to a Chicago hospital and secured from the governor of Illinois a promise that he would not sign extradition papers. Saint’s life was saved, but his right hand was permanently crippled as a result.

He was short and slight in build, though broad-shouldered, quick and graceful in his movements, quiet, self-contained, modest, but his keenness of mind and wit outmatched any opponent. Daniel De Leon called him “the little Napoleon of Western labor” until Saint wiped the floor with him in a debate in 1907 at the IWW convention, when there