The Autobiography of Mother Jones | Page 2

had come to formulate a program to fight another
brutal form of slavery-industrial slavery. Out of this decision had come
the Knights of Labor.
From the time of the Chicago fire I became more and more engrossed
in the labor struggle and I decided to take an active part in the efforts of
the working people to better the conditions under which they worked
and lived. I became a member of the Knights of Labor.
One of the first strikes that I remember occurred in the Seventies. The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad employees went on strike and they sent
for me to come help them. I went. The mayor of Pittsburgh swore in as
deputy sheriffs a lawless, reckless bunch of fellows who had drifted
into that city during the panic of 1873. They pillaged and burned and
rioted and looted. Their acts were charged up to the striking
workingmen. The governor sent the militia.
The Railroads had succeeded in getting a law passed that in case of a
strike, the train-crew should bring in the locomotive to the round-house
before striking. This law the strikers faithfully obeyed. Scores of
locomotives were housed in Pittsburgh.
One night a riot occurred. Hundreds of box cars standing on the tracks
were soaked with oil and set on fire and sent down the tracks to the
roundhouse. The roundhouse caught fire. Over one hundred

locomotives, belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were
destroyed. It was a wild night. The flames lighted the sky and turned to
fiery flames the steel bayonets of the soldiers.
The strikers were charged with the crimes of arson and rioting,
although it was common knowledge that it was not they who instigated
the fire; that it was started by hoodlums backed by the business men of
Pittsburgh who for a long time had felt that the Railroad Company
discriminated against their city in the matter of rates.
I knew the strikers personally. I knew that it was they who had tried to
enforce orderly law. I knew they disciplined their members when they
did violence. I knew, as everybody knew, who really perpetrated the
crime of burning the railroad's property. Then and there I learned in the
early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others' sins,
must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.
These early years saw the beginning of America's industrial life. Hand
and hand with the growth of factories and the expansion of railroads,
with the accumulation of capital and the rise of banks, came anti-labor
legislation. Came strikes. Came violence. Came the belief in the hearts
and minds of the workers that legislatures but carry out the will of the
industrialists.
CHAPTER II
- The Haymarket Tragedy
From 1880 on, I became wholly engrossed in the labor movement. In
all the great industrial centers the working class was in rebellion. The
enormous immigration from Europe crowded the slums, forced down
wages and threatened to destroy the standard of living fought for by
American working men. Throughout the country there was business
depression and much unemployment. In the cities there was hunger and
rags and despair. Foreign agitators who had suffered under European
despots preached various schemes of economic salvation to the workers.
The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of
toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.

Particularly the city of Chicago was the scene of strike after strike,
followed by boycotts and riots. The years preceding 1886 had
witnessed strikes of the lake seamen, of dock laborers and street
railway workers. These strikes had been brutally suppressed by
policemen's clubs and by hired gunmen. The grievance on the part of
the workers was given no heed. John Bonfield, inspector of police, was
particularly cruel in the suppression of meetings where men peacefully
assembled to discuss matters of wages and of hours. Employers were
defiant and open in the expression of their fears and hatreds. The
Chicago Tribune, the organ of the employers, suggested ironically that
the farmers of Illinois treat the tramps that poured out of the great
industrial centers as they did other pests, by putting strychnine in the
food.
The workers started an agitation for an eight-hour day. The trades
unions and the Knights of Labor endorsed the movement but because
many of the leaders of the agitation were foreigners, the movement
itself was regarded as "foreign" and as "un-American." Then the
anarchists of Chicago, a very small group, espoused the cause of the
eight-hour day. From then on the people of Chicago seemed incapable
of discussing a purely economic question without getting excited about
anarchism.
The employers used the cry of anarchism to kill the movement. A
person who believed in an eight-hour working