Fight Like Hell Till You Get to Heaven

Mother Jones

Listening to the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, I was struck by how at times we seemed back in the 1970’s with some of the appeals to populist issues.  Since similar rhetoric, in rightwing guise, has also been directed against Mitt Romney by Republican candidates in recent weeks, maybe the pendulum that Ronald Reagan set in motion 30 years ago is finally starting to swing back.  I suppose we can venture only so far into a second Gilded Age (income gaps between the wealthy and the rest of us haven’t been this severe since the 1880′s) before America’s natural tendency to find the middle reasserts itself.

But entrenched interests will not go down without a fight. Having suffered a setback in Wisconsin some months ago, unions have suffered a second one in Indiana. Meanwhile, voter suppression laws have been passed in 13 states. So maybe it’s time to become reacquainted with Mother Jones, once called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her role in unionizing West Virginia miners. This poem by my father, which echoes songs of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), helps us to do so:

(True Sayings of Mother Jones)

By Scott Bates

Mother Jones, Mother Jones,
Goes on living in workers’ bones;
Down at the factory and up at the mine,
She’s giving ’em hell on the picket line!

A priest told the strikers to obey the boss
And get heaven in the sky;
Said Mother Jones, “This strike’s to get you
Some heaven before you die.”

In Paint Creek, West Virginia,
They put her in a prison cell,
But she shouted out from the window
“Give those sons of bitches hell!”

She called the Judge a dirty scab;
“Call me your honor!” says he;
“I took an oath to tell the truth,
You’re only a scab to me.”

“Do you have a permit to speak in the streets?”
“Yet, Judge, they gave me one.”
“Who gave it you?” “John Adams, Patrick Henry,
And Thomas Jefferson.”

She asked a prisoner what he’d solen;
“Some shoes,” he said to her;
“My boy, if you’d stolen a railroad line,
“You’d be a Senator.”

“Mother, I think this strike is lost,”
Said a miner by her side;
“This strike is lost when your souls are lost
And only then!” she cried.

They tried to stop her with a machine gun;
She put her hand over the gun:
“I’ll take my hand off this muzzle
When you let my boys go on.”

In the Colorado mining strikes
She was jailed by the infantry;
“Big Standard Oil is certainly afraid
Of a little old woman like me.”

They put her in a smallpox shack
When there was no smallpox in town;
But they got her out for a meeting
And that smallpox shack burned down.

They killed the miners at Ludlow;
She spoke to the mourning women:
“Fight on,” she said to comfort them,
“Fight like hell till you get to heaven!”

She told the New York suffragettes
“Don’t talk about suffrage to me:
Women voted in Colorado
For Rockefeller’s plutocracy!

“Women voted in Colorado
Don’t talk women’s suffrage to me!
The plutocrats keep women busy
With suffrage and charity.

“I never have voted myself;
I never had freedom of choice;
You don’t need a vote to raise hell,
You need convictions and a voice!

“But no matter what your fight,
Don’t be ladies, please!
God Almighty made women,
Rockefeller made ladies.

“We lost in Colorado
With only the Constitution;
Rockefeller had bayonets;
In the end, the bayonets won.”

Mother Jones lived to be a hundred;
She was born on the first of May;
“Pray for the dead, but for the living,
Fight like hell!” she’d say.

“For those who create the wealth,
Will own it in every land;
The workers will make the future;
The future’s in labor’s hands!”

Mother Jones, Mother Jones
Goes on living in workers’ bones;
Down at the factory and up at the mine,
She’s giving ’em hell on the picket line!