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| Mother Jones with miners' children preparing for the Children's Crusade March on Teddy Roosevelt. |
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 the 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 were so many
victims of the vicious Illinois coal
field wars and those killed in mine collapses and explosions. 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.
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 birthdate 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 year 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 disruption 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 slave
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 she found home and shop,
and everything she owned destroyed in the Great
Chicago Fire of October 1871.
Stunned,
she stumbled through the next weeks nursing the injuries of 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.
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.
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 or 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 she 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 strikes 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, s 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.”
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 middleclass 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.
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 guard 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.
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 fine $350,000. A virtual pauper, she
had no money to pay.
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.
On here 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.
