me because she wanted to know what

I was like. She wanted to know if I was good for anything, and she wanted to tell me about her boys. From the moment she began to speak I put away the word "benign." Her eyes had seen something more than Main Street. I wanted to laugh and cry at the little bonnet-strings under that chin, for it was Mother Jones, known for forty years down every mine-shaft in America. Her boys were the two hundred thousand members of the United Mine Workers of America, and hundreds of thousands more besides. For the next two years I was to find her name a legend wherever we went, summoning the downtrodden to speak for themselves at our hearings. I still think she is the most significant woman in America, though her life has been alien to everything comfortable American womanhood is supposed to stand for. She has been a mother to men. She has kept alive their hunger for freedom. She has been a firebrand, foul-mouthed and partizan, a camp-follower and a comforter in the industrial war. Humble men, rough men, men who speak the languages of every country in Europe and Asia, are among her "boys." Something she said to a group of women out in Denver finally gave me the key to her. It was in the midst of Ludlow, and she was addressing a group of polite and earnest Denver club-women.

"I want to say to you," she shouted to them, "that you have had the ballot for twenty-one years, and your children will yet see the day when they will blush with shame at your indifference to these miners' women and children. I have never had the ballot, but I have raised hell, anyhow, and I

have made the nation know that I am alive and on the ground." She called it raising hell, and her enemies called it raising hell. To me she was only alive, felt, above the ground. Other people seemed dead beside her, themselves not feeling, and unfelt. Sometimes her talk was scattered, incoherent; still, you were stung by her spirit to pity and to awareness of the struggle about you. Once two years later at one of the city hall hearings in New York she said something complimentary to John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

"I'm afraid you flatter me, Mother Jones," he said. She retorted: "I don't throw bouquets; I am more used to throwing bricks."

Worse than bricks. She always told people exactly what she thought. In the beginning, seeing how I felt about her personally, I think she had great hopes of me as a recruit to the labor cause. She kept telling me over and over, "You can't do anything worth while till you get over minding what people say." She had put her finger on my greatest weakness. From the time I was a child I have hated being criticized or disliked. When I was a young woman I felt depressed all day if a butcher boy looked cross when he came for orders in the morning. She used to talk to me a lot about John Mitchell, and I hate to remember it now, for I imagine that since 1915 she feels toward me what she felt then toward him. "He was a fine fellow," she would say; then, with intolerable scorn, "he 's gone with the rich. He's no good to his own people any longer." With that she thrust him out of her picture.

I think of Mother Jones and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., together, and what I think of them throws less light on the

Even

problem of capital and labor than it does on my own philosophy. I had for some years thought of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as a psalm-singing, coldblooded capitalist. He came to us as a witness in the Ludlow strike, for he was one of the principal owners of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. I found him intensely human. Mother Jones felt that he was making an effort to do right. The tragedy had occurred. But for us he might never have got close to the terrible drama for which, because he was capital, he was in the last degree responsible. About such men as Rockefeller there is a wall. Their underlings tell them pleasant things. The rich must have imaginations indeed if, wrapped away as they are in cotton wool, they are to know the sufferings of the laboring classes and be moved by the misery that now exists in the world.

I remember one witness we had, an automobile-manufacturer worth many millions of dollars. I had no particular interest in him at the time. I had heard of him, nothing more. He gave his testimony in an absent-minded kind of way. I do not mean absentminded; it was vague. He had gentle eyes, like an animal. He told us about how he had left his first job and went from Detroit to work for Thomas Edison as a machinist. He had never had very much schooling except a little while at business college. One thing he said seemed important to me.

"I went to the Edison Illuminating Company. Within a year I took charge of the plant, and I shifted that into an eight-hour working day. It was twelve hours, and I shifted it into eight hours, without adding any men, and found that we could run at eight hours with the same number of men

better and more economically than they could do it with twelve."

The man who told us that was Henry Ford. I never forgot him. And whenever Judge Gary has given out a statement on the twelve-hour day, I remember the young machinist who reorganized a shop twenty-five years ago and told about it in such a simple, straightforward way.

§ 3

At the end of spring, 1914, I was very tired, and as it was necessary for Bordie to go to Carlsbad, it was decided that we should go abroad, and stop in England to collect various reports on British methods of dealing with the labor problem.

I had a London season largely occupied with dockers and employment bureaus, and had gone on to the German cure when war broke out. When I came back, my husband was still very ill, and I missed many of the autumn hearings of the commission. On December 1, Bordie died.

I did not want to be parted from Ethel, and so I took her with me at Christmas-time, though I knew we were bound for the terrible scene of the tent colony fire at Ludlow. It seems unfair to relate the circumstances of that famous Colorado strike without first pointing out how difficult it is to be fair. There was no villain, unless perhaps the publicity agent who worked for the corporation and falsified the statements he gave out about it. Behind the dispute that grew so rapidly into civil war were all the problems that our commission had been formed to study. There were immigrant workers, uneducated and far from their native land. Here was a corporation behaving like a monster,

though the people who owned its stock were cultivated men. Corporations have no souls. Men have not learned how to give them souls. I think now of the Colorado strike always in little broken images. In the city hall in New York, Mayor Mitchel had lent us a court-room for our hearings. The place was crowded. Many times we had heard the story from other lips. Each time it sank deeper home that something must be done to make such conflicts impossible. I can hear Mrs. Pearl Jolly's voice yet as she stood there, Melinda Scott behind her, telling how a miner's wife saw it all.

"Well, a week previous to the strike," she said, "my husband went to Trinidad to do a little shopping down there. When he came back

they wanted to know what his business was in Trinidad. He told them he was down there on private business. They asked him if he was a delegate to the convention at Trinidad that the United Mine Workers had held there before. He said no. They told him that they did not need him there any more; that he was to get out of camp. I think it was fifteen minutes that they gave him to move his furniture and everything... I went down to a farmhouse below and spent the week there until the Ludlow tent colony was built. . We

did not want to have any trouble. At one time the gunmen came to the Ludlow tent colony, just as near as they could get, fired two shots into the tent colony. Our men took their rifles and went to the hills, thinking that by so doing they would lead the fire that way and keep them from firing on the colony, where the women and children were. After that

our men took and dug pits under the tents, so that if the same thing should happen again there would be some means of escape for those women and children. When the militia came in there we made them welcome; we thought they were going to treat us right. They were escorted into camp with a brass band. They attended all of our dances. They came down and took dinner with us two or three different evenings, but when they were in there two or three days they turned, and we could see that. One of the women, I believe, told them that they could not be on two sides at One time myself and three or four different women started for the post office one Sunday morning. When we got about half-way there a detail got up in front of us and fixed their bayonets and their guns and told us we could n't go any further.

once.

diamond with their rifles. . One of the women said to them in a joke: 'Don't you know if a woman would start toward you with a BB gun you would all throw away your guns and run?' He says, "That is all right, girlie, you have your big Sunday to-day, but we will have the roast to-morrow. It would only take me and three or four men out there to clean out all the bunch'; and they cleaned out the bunch on the following day.

"They put guards in our camps Sunday night. Monday morning, about 9 o'clock, five militiamen sent in for Louis Tikas, when Louis Tikas came back he told us the machine guns and everything were set ready to wipe the tent colony. The next thing we observed was Louis Tikas coming from the depot waving a white handkerchief. There was about 200 tents in the tent colony and about 1000 inhabitants, about 500 women and 500 children. He was waving this white handkerchief, I suppose for us to get back. While he was running toward us and waving the white handkerchief they fired they turned the machine gun into the tent colony and started to firing with rifles. Our men decided if they would take to the hills, take their rifles and go into the hills, that they would lead fire from the tent colony into the hills and thus protect the women and children in the tent colony. There was just 40 rifles in the Ludlow camp. They will tell you there was 500 or so. There was 40 in there, and I would swear to that before any jury in the United States.

They kept the machine guns turned on the camp all that day more or less.

I had no business to take Ethel to the scene of all this tragedy.

As we came back in the chilly dusk, in the motor-car, Ethel, cold and tired, suddenly broke out against all uplift and uplifters.

"Why don't they stay at home and attend to their own affairs?" She turned on the poor young man who was conducting us about. With a nervous torrent of words she overwhelmed both him and me. But the next spring, at her school in Catonsville, she wrote a composition on the Colorado strike for the school paper. She had been drinking it in all the time!

In recalling what was so well known to the whole country ten years ago, I cannot say what were most important or what were the blackest scenes in the civil war. I can only turn a few pages in my own memory, recall a few of the men and women whose intolerable burdens it was my business to understand and to lift.

In March that year we went down to Dallas to hold hearings about the land question in the Southwest. looked forward to it as one might to going South for a vacation.

I

The problem there was that, whereas forty years ago virtually all the farmers in Texas owned their own

land, to-day more than half were "renters," and there was growing up the same bitter antagonism between landowner and tenant farmer that we had seen between capital and labor in industry. Complaints about absentee landlordism came into the testimony over and over. I understood at last why my grandfather sympathized with the Irish. As usual, it was not the statistics, none of the orderly facts, none of the accounts of various forms of tenancy, or history of crop prices, but two human beings who made the most impression on me.

I shall never forget the hours and hours we spent getting bit by bit, in answer to our questions, the life story of a farmer and his wife named Stewart. The man was forty-five and his wife, a tired-looking woman in a sunbonnet and a calico dress, a year or two younger. They had always lived pretty much in that part of the country. Hour after hour the monotonous inquiry went on. Levi Stewart was one of eleven children, all but one "renters" like himself. He had married a neighbor's daughter when she was fifteen. They had eleven children, eight still living. They worked! "We got up early and stayed with it late," he said. They went into the fields "by sun-up." He plowed and hoed, and his wife hoed. There were no amusements at all during "crop-times," and crop-time was from the middle of February to the middle of July. We asked who picked their cotton. "I and her picked it around them times," he said. He had some railroad land for a year, but cotton went down, and everything got balled up, and he could n't pay for it. He had cleared three acres of land and built a house with his own hands. One year he had

"no wagon." His oldest boy never got more than one year's schooling. He'd had only one suit in five years, and the whole family, the one year they kept account, spent only seventyfour dollars for clothes.

Wearily it went on. Year after year they raised corn and cotton, cotton and corn. He'd been obliged to give chattel-mortgages and had to pay ten per cent. interest. He'd always had to pay extra-credit prices for his goods at the store. His wife never went to town, except once when she had erysipelas, when he 'd carried her himself.

Always he was looking for a better place. He lost his tools. They had sunk seven hundred dollars in debt the year they moved to Mulberry Bottom. I remember one story he told about going to work for a man.

"I was a tenant once on one place," he said, "and a fellow had some Bermuda grass and Johnson grass on the place, and he came to me and he says, 'If you will take that place and kill that grass and fix them ditches, you can have it as long as you want to.' And I went up there, and I killed that grass and I took my team and filled up the ditches and got it in nice shape, and then he came round and says, 'I want to work this myself, and you can go over to this other place of mine I have got some Bermuda grass and Johnson grass on, and you can clean that up and you can have that.'"

What luck the man seemed to have! He was always having chills and fever. Most of the farmers down there had them. Chairman Walsh had me do the questioning of his wife. My own back seemed to ache as she went on with the story of their lives.

As the second year of the commis