She was permitted to spend the night in the hotel in Charlestown where she was accustomed to stopping. Immediately afterward at a miners’ convention in the city she was instructed by John P. White, president of the United Mine Workers, to go to Washington and give all possible aid to Kern in his fight.
And thus she went, without having been formally set at liberty and without knowing what the sentence of the military tribunal had been.
Reaching Washington she went into conference immediately with Kern, and the following day found her, loaded down with letters to senators from Secretary of Labor Wilson, trudging the interminable marble corridors of the senate office building, informing senators individually and at length of the conditions in West Virginia. At times her eighty-odd years bore heavily upon her and worn and weary she would return to Kern’s office, sink exhausted into a chair for a rest of a few minutes—then on her way again.
The most impressive and effective lobbyist that ever trod the stones of the capital was this old woman.
IX
Senator Kern in opening the debate on the “Kern resolution” on May 9th asked that “this investigation proceed that the full light may be let in on this foul spot and that all the facts bearing on these questions may be brought out to the end that wrongs, if they exist, may be righted, and that any men who are unjustly accused may be vindicated.”
Five days went by before the resolution was again considered by the senate. In the meanwhile the country was awakening to the significance of the fight and Kern was able to present scores of letters, telegrams, petitions from miners of West Virginia and elsewhere, and a striking telegram from the victims of militarism then held in the jail at Clarksburg, West Virginia, “stripped of constitutional rights, denied a jury trial, forced to face a drumhead court martial, deprived of their citizenship, reduced to subjects and thrown into jail.” This resulted in the renewal of the discussion and Senator Kern said:
“I had a telegram the other day from a leader of Socialism denunciatory of these conditions. When I showed it to a senator here he deprecated the idea that there was such relationship between me and that man that he would feel free to telegraph me. Men are being imprisoned in West Virginia to-day because they are Socialists; newspapers are being suppressed because they teach the doctrines of Socialism; men are discharged from mines, according to the testimony taken before the military commission, because they vote the Socialist ticket and because they belong to a labor union; and while the doctrine of judicial recall gains favor with the people whose rights are stricken down by unjust decisions, so do the forces of Socialism multiply in such breeding grounds as those in parts of West Virginia, with special privilege on one hand eating out the substance of the people, and with judges setting aside constitutional safeguards to the end that the people may be oppressed and denied rights for which their fathers fought and died.
“Socialism has grown in this country until more than a million men cast their votes for the Socialist ticket at the last election. The fire of Socialism is fed by such fuel as this West Virginia decision, and the lawless action there of men charged with the execution of the laws. Socialism grows and will grow in exact proportion as wrongdoing is countenanced and upheld, not only by the strong legislative forces of the country, but especially when they are backed up by the judicial arm of the government.
“Senators, these million men who voted the Socialist ticket last November are the men who ought to be full of that kind of patriotism in time of war that would impel them to go out and walk on the uttermost ridge of battle, to peril their lives in defense of their country and their country’s flag because they love their country, because they venerate the laws of the land.