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| Mother Jones in 1902. |
When
the widow Mary Harris Jones drew the
last breath of her long life in the
bedroom of friends in Adelphi, Maryland
on November 30, 1930 she had no living
kin to mourn her. But she left
behind thousands and thousands of miners
and their families from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois,
all the way out to Colorado and
dozens of other places who grieved for
the woman they called simply, Mother
Jones.
At
her request, her body was taken to
rest with “her boys” at the Union Miner’s Cemetery at Mt. Olive, Illinois where so many victims of the vicious Illinois coal field wars and those killed in mine collapses and explosions were interred. She was laid next to the dead of the Virden Massacre. Later a modest
but impressive monument was erected with her bas-relief bronze image attached to a pillar and flanked by statues
of two miners, heads bowed. The monument also contains the inscribed names of the Virden dead.
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| Mother Jones and Union Miners monument at Mt. Olive Cemetery in Illinois. |
A
few months later an almost unknown former railroad
telegrapher recently turned to hillbilly
singer on radio named Gene Autry sang about her on one of his
first records:
The world today’s
in mourning
O’er the death
of Mother Jones;
Gloom and sorrow
hover
Around the miners’
homes.
This grand old
champion of labor
Was known in
every land;
She fought for
right and justice,
She took a noble
stand.
O’er the hills
and through the valley
In ev’ry mining
town;
Mother Jones was
ready to help them,
She never turned
them down.
On front with
the striking miners
She always could
be found;
And received a
hearty welcome
In ev’ry mining
town…
Mary
Harris started life far away, the daughter of tenant farmers living on the
fringes of the city of Cork in
1837. Her exact birth date is unknown, but she was faithfully baptized on August 1 meaning that she
was probably born sometime in July.
Almost 90 years later in The Autobiography of Mother Jones she
claimed the symbolic birthday of May 1, 1830. May Day as selected as the
International Workers Holiday commemorating the 8 Hour Day Strikes of 1886 in which she had participated and the
execution of the Hay Market Martyrs She back dated her birth year, frankly,
because her story of labor hell raising was even more impressive if people thought
she was even older than she was. To
this day, many sources therefore identify her as 100 years old at her death.
Her
family decided like so many others to seek
their fortunes in the New
World. They fortunately immigrated
to Ontario, Canada when she was five, just before the Potato Famine. They were
able to establish themselves in the
new country before hoards of desperate
and wretched immigrants would flood
the cities. They prospered enough to afford a good Catholic education for their
children. One brother, Father William Richard Harris went on
to be one of the most influential priests
in Ontario. Mary was sent to a convent school in Toronto.
Armed
with that education, she got a job teaching
in a Catholic school in Michigan
and then pushed on to the boom city
of Chicago where she first plied the trade of a seamstress. In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War she accepted another teaching
job in the busy river port city of Memphis, Tennessee. Her employment did not last long. She met and married George E. Jones an iron molder
and sometime organizer for the National Union of Iron Moulders.
Thus
would begin the happiest six years
of Mary Jones’s life. Four children arrived in quick
succession, each one doted upon. George, as a skilled tradesman, made a reasonably
good living although he could spend little time with his growing family
working 10-12 hour days, six days a week. That made him an ardent union man and also impressed his wife who ever after
maintained a working man should earn a decent enough wage to support a family on 8 hours a day. There were the inevitable disruptions to their life brought on by economic dislocations to the city
caused by the Civil War and from occasional local strikes.
Mary’s
happiness was shattered when her
husband and all four children perished in
a yellow fever epidemic in
1867. She donned the widow’s black mourning that she would
wear the rest of her life and vowed not
to marry again. Not only did she
lose her family, but the expense of
burying them made a pauper of her.
She tried to establish herself again as a seamstress, but found that the
many accomplished Black women in the city who had been
trained to sew elegantly in the homes of
the wealthy during slavery times,
too much competition.
She
returned to Chicago and started again as a seamstress. She also took
in laundry, the traditional job of
Irish widows, but tried hard to leave that stigmatizing trade behind as she built of a trade as a lady’s tailor.
Then just when that business was established her home and shop, and
everything she owned was destroyed in
the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871.
Stunned,
she stumbled through the next weeks nursing
the many injured. Then, as the city rose from the ashes she turned to the labor movement and poured the rest of her life into its service. She joined the Knights of Labor and was soon a noted speaker for them in the city which seemed perpetually in the throes of labor strife.
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| Mary Harris was in Pittsburgh with the Nights of Labor during the tumultuous Great Railroad Strike of 1877. |
In
1877 she was working for the Knights
in Pittsburgh when the Great Railway Strike broke out. Despite the official opposition to strikes by Knights leaders like Terrance V. Powderly, Mary Jones made
her first public mark as a speaker
urging the workers on and the spread of the strike. Pittsburgh became one of the hubs of the strike as it spread across
the country and the site of pitched
battles as strikers tore up tracks
and burned rolling stock.
The
strike impressed two things on her—the
incredible, power of working men
when they were righteously angry and
united and the ruthlessness of
the Capitalist bosses in suppressing the challenge to their
authority.
For
the next nine years she traveled for the Knights, but spent most of her time in
Chicago. She began to invent a new role for herself—not an organizer who had to be interested in
things like keeping membership rolls
and establishing permanent organizations,
but a self-proclaimed hell raiser and agitator whose job it was to stir
the workers to collective action and support
them in the heat of strikes and battles.
That often put her at loggerheads
with institutionalists in the Knights as it later would with the other
unions she was involved in.
In
1886 she joined the Knights, the local Central
Labor Council made up of craft
unions, and the anarchist agitators
of the International Working Peoples
Association in planning a city wide
strike on May 1 for the eight hour day.
There was already a major strike going on at the McCormick Reaper Works with pitched
battles between strikers, scabs, and police as well a half a dozen other
strikes, including one by seamstresses.
Mary was not a leader of the strikes, but was a reliable street corner orator who knew just how to stir up a crowd with a combination of salty language, vicious and colorful attacks on the bosses, and humor.
She was not at the Haymarket
for the protest meeting for the
killing of strikers at the McCormick Works on May 4 when the bomb went off in the midst of attacking
police. But she did witness the enormous oppression that followed and the quick railroading of the Anarchist leaders
and their executions.
If
there had been any vestige of labor
conservatism in her heart following those events, it was replaced by a burning anger.
In
the years after the Haymarket, the Knights collapsed
as an effective union. Mary was not
attracted to the craft union movement which had become the American Federation of Labor.
She felt that their refusal to
organize the mass of unskilled laborers in industry was not only a breach of solidarity but a long term prescription for disaster.
She
went to work in the notorious textile
mills in Birmingham, Alabama in
1894 to learn about conditions. Then she
led the workers out on a dramatic, but
futile strike.
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| United Mine Workers President John Mitchell hired Jones. They would have a long and often contentious relationship. |
After
that, she attracted the attention of
United Mine Workers president John Mitchel, who began to selectively employ her in the coal
fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
The UMW was the only AFL union whose charter permitted it to organize industrially and like Jones was interested in spreading that
principle to other basic industry.
Around
1897 when she was 60 years old and
already white headed, Mine Worker
periodicals began to recount the adventures of Mother Jones.
She
had also been a member of the old Socialist
Labor Party (SLP), and then had joined another industrial unionist, Eugene V. Debs in his new Socialist Party (SP). Both parties occasionally employed her as
a speaker. She was not opposed to electoral activity as an auxiliary support for workers in the labor movement, but it was neither her passion nor main interest.
She
published The New Right (about the rights
of labor, not conservatives) in 1899 and the two volumes of Letter
of Love and Labor in 1900 and 1901.
At
the turn of the new century, Mother
Jones was just beginning the most
famous and colorful part of her long career.
In
1901 Mine Worker leader Mitchel sent Mother Jones to help build solidarity for striking silk workers in Pennsylvania. Many were young girls and a key demand
was parity for them with men’s wages. But Jones had a different view. She wanted
the enactment and enforcement of child labor laws to keep many of the young women out of the
mills and high wages for men so
that their wives and daughters would not
have to work. This was in keeping
with her deeply held Irish Catholic
reverence for home and hearth
and a belief that women were happiest as wives and mothers with economic
security.
She
saw women as essentially an important
auxiliary for the struggle of men, who they would nurture and support. She organized striker’s wives and children
into “Broomstick militias” and
turned them out armed with said brooms sticks and pans to bang on when injunctions prevented their husbands from
picketing.
The
strike ended. Thanks to Mother Jones a
great deal of attention had been drawn to child labor issues, but the
settlement included wage boosts for the girls, not a release from labor. Mother Jones reluctantly recommended ratification of the contract anyway. But she never again involved herself in a
strike involving large numbers of women workers, and thus missed the big
strikes in the mills of Lawrence and
Paterson and by garment workers in New York and
Chicago.
In
1902 she was in West Virginia pulling miners out on strike. Reese
Blizzard, a local district attorney
told a jury trying her on charges of
violating an injunction against
picketing that she was “The most
dangerous woman in America…. She comes into a state where peace and
prosperity reign ... crooks her finger [and] twenty thousand contented men lay
down their tools and walk out.”
 |
| Mother Jones--Children's Crusade. |
Back
in Pennsylvania working with miners for the UMW and continuing her agitation to
end child labor for the next two years.
In 1903 she launched her famous Children’s
Crusade march with child laborers from the mines and silk mills from Kensington and Philadelphia to President
Theodore Roosevelt’s palatial home at Oyster
Bay, New York. The President snubbed her, refusing to
meet either her or the children and not even responding to a written
request for an interview. But the march
of bedraggled children led by a white haired old lady in old fashion clothes
got national press attention and
brought the issue of child labor to the fore.
An
exasperated Roosevelt, after she defied Federal
anti-strike injunctions in Colorado the
next year, would repeat Blizzard’s characterization and would thereafter usually be credited as the first one to
call her the most dangerous woman in America.
Mother
Jones had gone to Colorado, which was already in almost a civil war, right after the Children’s march. She found conditions deplorable and organized
violence by company thugs and the Colorado
Militia outrageous. Once again she
organized miners’ wives to support their husbands. Back east the UMW’s Mitchell became alarmed at reports of wide spread violence during what was an
unauthorized wildcat strike. He ordered
UMW members, representing about a third
of those out, back to work or
risk losing their union charters. That effectively
broke the strike with no gains despite enormous suffering. Many strike
leaders were blacklisted.
Outraged by the betrayal, Mother Jones broke with the Mine Workers, sacrificing the only steady, if meager,
income she had earned for
years. There after she lived mostly on charity and handouts from supports, living and
eating with whatever workers she was organizing.
The
experience also hardened Jones’s already state opposition to women’s suffrage. She had long argued, “You don’t need the vote to raise hell.” But now her ire was raised against the largely middle class suffrage movement, and indeed against women crusading for reform in general. Colorado women had the vote, and those same middle class women did not exercise their franchise in support of the starving and oppressed
workers, as many reformers claimed they naturally would. In fact they seemed to be especially vocal in opposition dreading
civil disorder more than they thirsted for justice. And many suffrage leaders were also prohibitionists who during and after World War I would successfully campaign to deny
workers one of their few pleasures
and solace—a dram of drink.
In
her 1925 Autobiography Mother Jones
would bitterly note that, “the plutocrats
have organized their women. They
keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity.” This aspect
of her career is often glossed over
or omitted by modern activists
who claim her inspiration,
especially feminists.
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| Mother Jones soap boxing in Seatle. |
After
the collapse of the Colorado wildcats, Mother Jones stayed mostly in the west
for the next 9 years agitating not only among coal miners, but among hard rock miners usually in association
with the radical Western Federation of Miners. She was active among copper miner in Arizona
and Idaho and was a repeated nuisance.
In
1905 she returned to Chicago to support her friends Socialist leader Eugene Debs
and Western Federation leader William D.
“Big Bill” Haywood in founding a
revolutionary new industrial union. She signed the March 1905 call to the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and was present at the June founding. She took out a red card but was never
active with the union, and when she resumed
relations with the UMW a few years later, was actively hostile to IWW organizing
attempts in the coal fields.
That
re-association with the UMW—although not employment—came when she rushed east
to support the Cabin Creek/Paint Creek
Strikes in West Virginia which had devolved into open civil war between
miners, authorities, and gun thugs of the Baldwin–Felts
Detective Agency. She arrived in
June 1912 when the strike was three months old a taking a turn for the
worse. Baldwin-Feltz agents using machine guns and even an armored train were moving to evict strikers from company housing. Shootings
and assaults on all sides were
common.
75
year old Mother Jones flew into action.
She rallied miners with fiery rhetoric.
She personally snuck past patrols
of armed guards on foot to reach miners isolated at Eskdale and bring them out on strike. Then in secret she organized a 3000 man march of armed miners to the steps of the state capital in Charleston to read a formal declaration of war on rabidly anti-union Governor William E. Glasscock.
After that, miners went on the
offensive, attacking mine guards and scabs at several occasions.
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| Mother Jones in custody and under guard in West Virginia. At age 75 she was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor for rioting and conspiracy to commit murder. |
Martial law was declared
three times over the next few months. The final time was on February 10,
1913. Three days later Mother Jones was
arrested attempting to publicly read
the Declaration of Independence. When she was hauled before a military tribunal on charges of inciting a riot, she refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of
the court or to offer a defense.
Charges were amended to
include conspiracy to commit murder. She was quickly convicted and sentenced
to twenty years in prison at hard labor.
Since
her arrest Mother Jones had been held in
isolation at Mrs. Carney's Boarding House
unable to communicate with supporters or
the press. While there she
contracted pneumonia. In May she smuggled a letter to pro-labor Indiana
Senator John Worth Kern who on May 23 announced the creation of a special Senate Subcommittee to investigate conditions in the West
Virginia mines. The subcommittee also extended its investigations to two
other violent hot spots—the Michigan copper
mines, and Colorado coal fields.
Meanwhile
a new pro-labor Governor Dr. Henry D.
Hatfield—yes one of those Hatfields—took office. He ordered Mother Jones transported to a hospital in Charleston for treatment and then released
unconditionally with several other jailed activists. Hatfield imposed
a settlement of the strike generally favorable to the UMW, but local militants
held out for more until June.
Despite
her ordeal, Mother Jones sprang back into action only a few months later as
Colorado coal miners prepared for another big strike in the coal fields. Once again she was on the stump and in the tent villages of evicted strikers. She organized marches and women. And once again she was arrested. Held for several days, she was deported to the Colorado border with
orders never to return. Before she could
come back Colorado Militia and Baldwin–Felts thugs attacked the sleeping camp at Ludlow
with machine gun fire and burnt the tents killing at least 19, mostly women and children.
Mother
Jones barnstormed the East publicizing
the outrage. The resulting publicity
caused John D. Rockefeller, owner of
one of the major employers, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company to meet personally with her and promise to
go to Colorado himself, which he did. He
also ordered some improvements in mine
conditions, but did not offer union
recognition. Also met personally with President Woodrow Wilson.
Mother
Jones remained mostly in the east until 1920 often working with the UMW in the
mine fields, but also offering support to other strikers, including those defying World War I strike bans in defense related industry. She only escaped
the persecution and prosecution
of Debs, IWW leaders, and other militant unionists because of her age and
public sympathy.
Well
passed 80 she still spoke up in union affairs, and was a vocal critic of some UMW actions.
She spoke out fearlessly on any topic when asked. Which, inevitably, got her into trouble one
last time. In 1924 the publisher of a fledgling
Chicago newspaper sued her for slander, libel, and sedition. As usual, she refused to contest the case and
was fined $350,000. A virtual
pauper, she had no money to pay.
 |
| The title page of Charles H. Kerr & Company's first edition of the Autobiography of Mother Jones with an introduction by Clarence Darrow. |
But
the same year Charles H. Kerr & Company,
the labor and socialist publisher,
issued The Autobiography of Mother
Jones. The modest royalties were expected to provide some small income in her advancing years. Now lawyers
got it all for the settlement.
Finally
surrendering to age and infirmity, Mother Jones moved into the
home of her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess where she was
lovingly cared for. She would entertain visitors and the press,
always willing to share a story or a
sharp opinion.
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| Mother Jones celebrating her adopted birthday, May 1, for the last time in 1930. |
On
her adopted birthday of May 1, 1930 a newsreel
team filmed her delivering a short
greeting from her bed. It was the only time her voice was ever recorded. Eight months later she was dead.
Her
legend and inspiration, however, live
on.
