We took him to the hotel and sent for a doctor who sewed up the great, open cuts in his head. I sat up all night and nursed the poor fellow. He was out of his head and thought I was his mother.
The next night Tom Haggerty and I addressed the union meeting, telling them just what had happened. The men wanted to go clean up the gunmen but I told them that would only make more trouble. The meeting adjourned in a body to go see Jo. They went up to his room, six or eight of them at a time, until they had all seen him.
We tried to get a warrant out for the arrest of the gunmen but we couldn’t because the coal company controlled the judges and the courts.
Jo was not the only man who was beaten up by the gunmen. There were many and the brutalities of these bloodhounds would fill volumes.
In Clarksburg, men were threatened with death if they even billed meetings for me. But the railway men billed a meeting in the dead of night and I went in there alone. The meeting was in the court house. The place was packed. The mayor and all the city officials were there.
“Mr. Mayor,” I said, “will you kindly be chairman for a fellow American citizen?”
He shook his head. No one would accept my offer.
“Then,” said I, “as chairman of the evening, I introduce myself, the speaker of the evening, Mother Jones.”
The Fairmont field was finally organized to a man. The scabs and the gunmen were driven out. Subsequently, through inefficient organizers, through the treachery of the unions’ own officials, the unions lost strength. The miners of the Fairmont field were finally betrayed by the very men who were employed to protect their interests. Charlie Battley tried to retrieve the losses but officers had become corrupt and men so discouraged that he could do nothing.