“Mother, Mother, listen! A Polish fellow arrived as a strike breaker. He didn’t know there was a strike. He was a big, strapping fellow. They gave him a star and a gun and told him to shoot strikers!”
“Oh, Mother, they’ve brought in a shipment of guns and machine guns—what’s to happen to us!”
A frantic mother clutched me. “Mother Jones,” she screamed, “Mother Jones, my little boy’s all swollen up with the kicking and beating he got from a soldier because he said, ‘Howdy, John D. feller!’ ’Twas just a kid teasing, and now he’s lying like dead!”
“Mother, ’tis an outrage for an adjutant general of the state to shake his fist and holler in the face of a grey-haired widow for singing a union song in her own kitchen while she washes the dishes!”
“It is all an outrage,” said I. “’Tis an outrage indeed that Rockefeller should own the coal that God put in the earth for all the people. ’Tis an outrage that gunmen and soldiers are here protecting mines against workmen who ask a bit more than a crust, a bit more than bondage! ’Tis an ocean of outrage!”
“Mother, did you hear of poor, old Colner? He was going to the postoffice and was arrested by the militia. They marched him down the hill, making him carry a shovel and a pick on his back. They told him he was to die and he must dig his own grave. He stumbled and fell on the road. They kicked him and he staggered up. He begged to be allowed to go home and kiss his wife and children goodbye.
“We’ll do the kissing,” laughed the soldiers.
“At the place they picked out for his grave, they measured him, and then they ordered him to dig—two feet deeper, they told him. Old Colner began digging while the soldiers stood around laughing and cursing and playing craps for his tin watch. Then Colner fell fainting into the grave. The soldiers left him there till he recovered by himself. There he was alone—and he staggered back to camp, Mother, and he isn’t quite right in the head!”
I sat through long nights with sobbing widows, watching the candles about the corpse of the husband burn down to their sockets.
“Get out and fight,” I told those women. “Fight like hell till you go to Heaven!” That was the only way I knew to comfort them.