Jerry Ash's Blog

The "Progressive Mineworker's Union Monument Committee" has risen again to restore the Miner's Monument and Mother Jones grave site at Mt. Olive, IL. Here's a great message I received from one of the leaders in this movement, Joan Kenevan. Through her and many like her, Mother Jones lives again.

Dear Jerry,

Thank you so much for writing this novel ("Hellraiser — Mother Jones: An Historical Novel"). 

My grandfather, John McCann, was a coal miner in Gillespie, Illinois. He was also a member of the Progressive Mineworker's Union Monument Committee for Mother Jones' Monument. The Progressive Miner's and their Women's Auxiliary ("We were women, not ladies"), raised $16,000 between 1932, when they organized and separated from the UMW and 1936, when the monument was dedicated in Mt. Olive, IL. This is a miracle in and of itself.

These men and women were so courageous, and everything about their Progressive Mineworkers Union was modeled after Mother Jones, her spirit and convictions.

In 2010 I visited the Monument for the first time in 20 years and found it needed some serious TLC. After contacting the Mother Jones Foundation in Springfield, IL, they agreed to use their pass the hat fundraiser at their October 2011 Dinner to raise funds for maintenance. They raised $2,000.

It was difficult coordinating the work since I live near Chicago, and this was a volunteer effort. At the 2011 Mother Jones' Monument ceremony a miners' union offered their help.

Anyway, communication was amiss, so I called him and said stay with us, let's have a meeting with the Union Miners' Cemetery Board on Memorial Day weekend in May 2012 at the Monument. It was literally over one hundred degrees. I was exhausted after driving 5 hours from Crown Point, IN to Mother Jones' Monument, but we met discussed plans, committed to work, held hands and prayed for God's blessing at the end of the meeting. Ed Becker, grandson of the general contractor for the Monument, Don Stewart, United Mineworker's representative , Mike Katchmar, grandson, son and member of the Union Miner's Cemetery Board, Jim Alderson of Gillespie, Il and Joan Kenevan, Granddaughter of John McCann, Member of the Mother Jones' Monument Committee and past President of the Progressive Mineworkers' Union and great-granddaughter of all agitators, Mother Jones were present. 

Now (September, 2013) the Union Miners' Cemetery Board is working with the AFL-CIO to raise monies necessary for maintenance and enhancement for the monument and the Union Miners' Cemetery. $25,000 has already been raised!

We both know there are no coincidences. When I found your website by chance on December 1, 2013 and read about your book. My first thought was this is the play script, screenplay for the MOVIE about Mother Jones.

So go for it. Call George Clooney. I just know this is a MOVIE that he would love to produce for our social political history worldwide.

I think she is a saint in the Joan of Arc mold, and her story needs to reach the masses. This is who she represented. Those without a voice. I know I am preaching to the choir!

Anyway, this has been my mission since 2010, and it is truly spiritual. I am a hell raiser too, and it is not a popular position.

Read what you can about the Progressive Mineworker's Union of America, 1932-1999. They were one of a kind from "a little bit of nowhere" who made their mark in the social, economic and political history in America. The locals don't want to talk about them or mention their contribution to the monument. There would not have been a monument without them!

All of the best to you I am going to request a copy of the book at our local library. Cannot wait. Historical fiction is the perfect genre' to launch her story. ~ Joan M. Kenevan




UPDATE: A world renowned conservator examined the Monument recently. He was the conservator for the Haymarket restoration, and traveled from Chicago to Mt. Olive as a favor to the Illinois Labor History Society. Stay tuned!

The quest for affordable and available healthcare for all Americans has been underway for a long time and I’ve been involved in it for more than 40 years.

Please try to put all the information, misinformation and disinformation (I could have used a shorter word) about the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, out of your mind and follow me through those 40 years to get some perspective on what’s happening now.

My part began on the front porch of an emaciated old woman’s front porch in Arthurdale, West Virginia, in 1971. I was a young editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper on the other side of the county.

Arthurdale was the first of many New Deal planned communities established in 1933 during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The idea for a self-sufficient community originated when Eleanor Roosevelt learned of a plan to relocate a group of West Virginia coal miners to a farm with the intention of combining subsistence farming with small industries to reclaim their economic footing.

The lady on the front porch had been 14 years old when she married one of those miners. He was quite a bit older, but they had a good life until he died. Now she was alone, uneducated, unskilled, unable to work because of multiple healthcare issues and without healthcare insurance.

Sitting with her was Senator Ted Kennedy, the longtime champion for healthcare-for-all. He understood that this woman hardly had enough money to pay her rent and not enough to put food on her table. She would die soon for the lack of adequate healthcare, even though she could receive bare minimum care as an uninsured patient.

Less than 10 years later I found myself a member of the West Virginia State Senate and chairman of the Healthcare Committee. It would have been my opportunity to do something about healthcare for the uninsured, but it was the era for transferring the blame to healthcare providers and shirking the social responsibility of government to level the field.

While demonizing the healthcare providers, the stampede was on to pass laws and create healthcare cost containment agencies that would whip the bad guys into submission. They loved to talk about the $10 aspirin while shifting the cost of welfare programs by passing them, but not funding them, shifting the cost of charity and, thereby increasing the cost of aspirin. Theoretically, states have to pass a balanced budget, but nothing prevents them from not paying their bills.

It was then that I began to talk about “sick taxes,” cost-shifting of the government’s responsibility to paying patients and then bragging about a balanced budget with no new taxes. I became disgusted with government and resigned my second term a year early. Went to work for the West Virginia Hospital Association (not as a lobbyist) and a few months later became president and CEO of the Nevada Hospital Association where the nation’s largest hospital r in Las Vegas was the whipping boy of the country.

Ironically, it was the American Hospital Association (AHA) that was the strongest supporter of Hilary Clinton’s brave effort to pass true healthcare reform. I served on committees of the AHA, which worked hard to support her effort. But you know the rest of that story.

And so, here we are. It’s 2013 and still nothing significant has been done to solve the problem. I give President Barack Obama high marks for his courage to stand up to the opponents of fair access to healthcare for all Americans in his very first term, when he was immediately a candidate for re-election.

I don’t need to read the details of the Affordable Care Act to know that it is right-minded for the American people. I trust it, warts and all. What I don’t trust is the political right, which is more interested in pleasing the ones who really run this country, capitalists who don’t have social responsibility written into their self-serving “winner-take-all” constitution.

I have opened a forum in the new Mother Jones Hellraiser Page Forum. When there are posts in the forum that have in-depth content I will bring them over to the Hellraiser website. To see all the posts and make contributions, please go to the Forum.

Forum Post:

This one was actually first posted on the Author’s Q&A at Goodreads. A long-time friend of mine during my days in knowledge management is Dave Pollard, who has an excellent blog called How to Save the World.

He sent me a question on my Google Q&A.

Dave asked:

"If we see our culture as a massive complex system, one where (as Dave Snowden's theory explains) we cannot 'solve' problems but only intervene in hopeful ways to try to understand and adapt to the current predicament, rather than trying to substantially reform/change it, then what is the most useful, effective and honourable way to live our lives under the hegemony of the ruling capitalist class until our teetering culture collapses and we can begin to create a more humane, sustainable, egalitarian culture?"

I'm worried Dave will think my answer too soft, but here it is:

My answer:

Good question, Dave. And I would have been frustrated by it before I researched and wrote about Mother Jones. And thought about her meanings.

I think what she had that is worth adopting now is eternal optimism, commitment, persistence, and a passion that would not be intimidated by the enormity of her task. To anyone's knowledge, she never ever admitted defeat (though she lost way more battles than she won) she never became discouraged and she never allowed herself to compromise.

Today's battle is even bigger than hers and the starting point presents a force bigger than the ruling class. This force is the very people she seeks to help, their apathy, insecurity and sense of defeat on the one hand and their false sense of well-being on the other.

Those who are pretending to have wealth by accumulating debt think they are somehow getting their fair share of America's wealth. But, they are not. This may be a wealthy country, but its people are not wealthy. And too many are poor, near poor, or about to become poor when they retire on Social Security.

Dave, I've admired you for years and this is no false compliment. I think you are a modern day Mother Jones. We need more, and we need to gather them together to create a unified (notice I avoided "organized") force.

You can find other topics and posts on my Goodreads Discussion Board.

The Hellraiser Club has a website and I’ve posted Bill Moyers’ Essay: The United States of Inequality which was broadcast in April12, 2013. Go to:

https://www.facebook.com/HellraiserClub

There’s a blurb on the page where the TV program is rebroadcast. It reads:

“The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California’s Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area’s homeless — who’ve grown 20 percent in the last two years — are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps.

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

At the end of the video essay, Bill Moyers quotes Warren Buffet:
“If there was a class war, my class won.”

Of course, Mother Jones devoted her life to a class war that was not completely won by the upper class of her time because she and many like her relentlessly fought against unrestrained capitalism until her death in 1930. The cause continued through the New Deal and into the 1950s, but by the 1970s the nation was the wealthiest in the world. But its people were far from wealthy. Buffet’s class won and kept on winning. Today the vast majority of the country’s wealth is held by a fraction of one percent of its richest citizens.

Please go to the Hellraiser Club’s Facebook Page and view the video. Then come back here and post your thoughts and opinions to this post.

I first became acquainted with Mother Jones in 1976 when I was chosen to co-author the book West Virginia USA. The other co-author, then Associated Press feature writer Strat Douthat, was given the assignment to write the chapter titled, “Fussin’ and Feudin’.”

Not only did that chapter touch upon the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, it told of a tiny old Irish woman who was, in her day, alternately referred to with reverence or hate as Mother Jones.

Strat’s chapter told only of a small part of her work in West Virginia, but her story was much bigger than that. Across the country, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Mary Harris Jones faced threats and jail terms, bullets and bombs to defend the American worker — men, women and children — against the greed of robber barons and, more broadly, to defend the promises of democracy from unrestrained capitalism.

She battled injustice and economic servitude from New York and Washington, D.C., across the Midwest to Colorado, up to the Pacific Northwest, and down Mexico way.

Her fight began during the latter years of the Civil War and ended upon her death in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression — an epic of more than 65 years.

 She was the counterpoint to the icons of the American Industrial Revolution — Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt and others. These men still stand tall in the history of the United States and the minds of most of its informed citizens, but the significance of Mother Jones is fading fast. Over the past few years, my casual mentions of this writing project largely brought looks of puzzlement. Apologetically my listeners mostly admitted they weren’t sure if they’d ever heard of Mother Jones.

Many fine historians have written tens of thousands of pages on the facts of her life and legacy, but unfortunately these tomes are not in the mainstream of popular books. In the fashion of Mother Jones, I wanted to bring back her message, not just to the few — the historians or history buffs or political wonks among us — but to the most of us, and so I have chosen the historical novel as my framework.

I am also interested in her because having followed the conflict and history of her experiences during the darkest days of the American Industrial Revolution; after gaining a better understanding of the nature of the differences between the motivations and behaviors of business and labor; and between the goals and objectives of capitalism and democracy ... well, I am seeing the America of today in a new light. 

History indeed repeats itself. The problems in MoJo’s time are the same and in many ways worse now. Our times call for the return of the spirit of MoJo. In fact, we need lots of Mother Joneses.  

I have written eight books ranging from histories to business management. Hellraiser is my first historical novel intended for the mass market. I have completed a novel titled Latent Images that is planned for release in 2014.

A coalminer’s son, I am a native of Bridgeport, West Virginia, located in the center of the northern coalfields referred to in my book. Among my published books is West Virginia USA, 1976, which was co-authored with AP feature writer Strat Douthat. It was a chapter written by Douthat that introduced me to Mother Jones.

I hold bachelor and masters degree in journalism from West Virginia University and I was an assistant professor of journalism there for seven years. In the 1970s, I was editor and co-publisher of a small town weekly newspaper in Terra Alta, West Virginia, The Preston County News, which won forty state and national awards during those years. At the same time I co-founded the Pioneer Press of West Virginia.

In the 1980s I was elected to two terms as a West Virginia State Senator. After leaving the Senate I became vice president of the West Virginia Hospital Association and then president and CEO of the Nevada Hospital Association. After a stint as executive director of Lifegift Organ Donation Centers in Houston, Fort Worth, Lubbock and Amarillo,Texas, in the 1990s, I worked as an independent business consultant and became known worldwide for my expertise in the field of knowledge management. I was editor of Knowledge Management Magazine in London, England, before retiring in 2010.

My wife Michele and I live in Sun City Center, Florida, where I ride my motorcycle to bluegrass music concerts and jamborees all over the state. I am a competitive tennis player and avid reader.

While my life-long career has been varied, writing has always been my strength and my passion and I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and writing about Mother Jones, off and on, during the past decade or more.