Mary “Mother” Jones (1837–1930)
BY TERRY GOLWAY
Discontent in the coal mines of Colorado, fall of 1913. The miners are poorly paid and working in horrendous conditions. Immigrants, most of them, from places like Greece and Italy, they left their homes filled with visions of the great American dream. And here they are, living in squalor in the great American West, digging for riches inside the earth for the benefit of companies controlled by the Rockefeller family.
But if they believed that nobody outside of their miserable little towns knew of their plight, they were wrong. That fall, an aging Irishwoman would come to live and agitate with them, and regardless of their command of English, the miners soon would understand that here was a person with the courage to speak out. She addressed meetings and rallies in the mining towns of southeastern Colorado, urging the workers to walk off their jobs until the Rockefellers and their managers gave them what they wanted: better pay, safer working conditions, and simple dignity. Her words, delivered in the cadence of County Cork, were direct and forceful, and that they were coming from an elderly woman only added to their power.
“Don’t be afraid, boys,” she said. “Fear is the greatest curse we have. I never was anywhere yet that I feared anybody. I do what I think is right and when I die I will render an account of it. . . .You are the biggest part of the population in the state. You create its wealth, so I say let the fight go on; if nobody else will keep on, I will.”
The woman was called Mother Jones, and she stirred the miners like no other. In short order, they voted to strike and so set in motion a series of events leading to the infamous Ludlow Massacre of April 1914, when National Guard troops and security guards opened fire on a mine encampment, killing some two dozen, with women and children among the dead.
Ludlow was a turning point for the U.S. labor movement, and it placed a nearly eighty-year-old Irish immigrant at the center of the nation’s suddenly urgent conversation about the lives of those who worked in dark, dangerous mines, who trudged dreary factory floors, who picked vegetables and fruit in the searing heat, all for the benefit of gigantic corporations controlled by families who possessed riches beyond description.
Mary “Mother” Jones became the voice of American labor in the early twentieth century by transforming her own life, her own immigrant story, and, perhaps, if subconsciously, her own personal tragedies into a passionate campaign for justice and democracy during a dangerous time in American history. She was unafraid to enrage her foes with incendiary language—“I’m a Bolshevist from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head,” she would say in late 1919, as Attorney General Mitchell Palmer scoured the countryside in search of Communists. Around the same time, she told striking steelworkers in Indiana how they ought to deal with scabs: “I’ll be ninety years old the first of May, but by God if I have to, I’ll take ninety guns and shoot the hell out of them.”
Her unapologetic hell-raising and core beliefs reflected the injustice she saw in the streets, tenements, factories, and mines of America. But to hear her tell it, the passion she brought to the picket line could be traced not to her own hard luck but to her family’s experience in Ireland. As she later told a congressional committee, “I belong to a class which has been robbed, exploited, and plundered through many long centuries. And because I belong to that class, I have an impulse to go and help break the chains.”
Not all immigrants, from Ireland or from elsewhere for that matter, took such a path. A penniless Andrew Carnegie arrived in the United States from Scotland in 1848 and chose to identify not with the poor in his adopted country but with the industrialists. Carnegie did not break chains; his companies imposed them—he himself literally wrote the book on the “Gospel of Wealth.” And although the vast bulk of immigrants obviously did not become fabulously wealthy, many aspired to create their own immigrant success story, identifying more with the perceived champions of the Gilded Age than its victims. Here was a place where the penniless could become rich, a place where the heroes of Horatio Alger’s yarns pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and lived happily ever after.
But Mother Jones was different. She saw the creators of the industrial age in much the same way as her Irish ancestors saw their British overlords. They were not figures to be emulated but the enforcers of an oppressive and inequitable system. She saw opportunities in her new country, all right—the opportunity to create a fairer, more democratic society, a place where lives could be improved not through riches but through justice. That was her American dream.
And so by the early twentieth century, she became a familiar presence on picket lines, at union rallies, and at government inquiries. Workers, journalists, public officials, and even the occasional capitalist—like John D. Rockefeller Jr., with whom, oddly, she was quite friendly—called her Mother and thought they knew her. And in a way they did. They knew a person named Mother Jones, a name she adopted for herself as her fame grew. She was, in fact, not the first labor agitator to adopt the name—an English immigrant in Indiana, married to a coal miner, served as editor of a journal for railroad workers in the 1880s and signed her poetry and writing Mother Jones. But that other Mother Jones’s fame was short-lived, and she stopped writing by 1889. Soon after that, Mary Jones began referring to herself as Mother Jones. Did she know about the poet and coal miner’s wife from Indiana? Maybe. More important, though, she saw something in this name—recycled, perhaps, but new for her—that represented the person she had become.
MOTHER JONES WAS born Mary Harris in Cork, most likely in 1837. Some historians have argued that she was born several years later, but historian Elliott J. Gorn seems to have settled the debate, noting that she was baptized in St. Mary’s Cathedral on August 1, 1837. “I was born in revolution,” Mary later wrote. And indeed, there had been a political revolution that shook the British ruling establishment to its core in the years just before her birth. In 1828, a middle-class barrister from County Clare named Daniel O’Connell became the first Catholic elected to the House of Commons since Britain had imposed a religious test for elected officials in the late 1600s, a test that effectively barred Catholics from power. When O’Connell took his seat in the Commons, after years of peaceful agitation and political organizing among Ireland’s poor, authorities in London predicted civil war. After all, was not the British ruling structure built on the ideology of Protestant supremacy?
No such strife broke out, at least not on the scale authorities feared. But in places like Cork, landless peasants banded together in secret societies to carry out limited, though often brutal, acts of violence against the propertied class. Some accounts describe the rural violence of the early nineteenth century as defensive and conservative, a reaction to enclosure movements, falling prices, and other developments that did nothing to lift the burdens of poor tenant farmers. Other accounts portray the secret societies, with names like Rockites, Terry Alts, Threshers, and Whiteboys, as virtual guerrilla armies seeking to exact revenge against landlords and their agents, who, in their view, had stolen the soil of Ireland from its native Gaelic inhabitants.
O’Connell was the uncrowned king of Ireland when Mary Harris was born, and he and his allies used their considerable leverage to negotiate for reform in Ireland. But some in Ireland, like members of the Harris family, were not content with the actions of middle-class reformers or the political jockeying in the Palace of Westminster. They lived on the brink, subject to the whims of landlords, nature, and free-market dogma. And they fought back against those forces with clandestine, late-night raids against livestock, property, and, sometimes, those who represented the landlord class.
Mary’s grandfather was among those who joined in the struggle. There is no indication that, aside from their poverty, he had experienced a tenant farmer’s worst nightmare—abrupt eviction. But others did, and once thrown off the land they tilled but did not own, they were homeless and hungry, with few alternatives save emigration. Grandfather Harris often slipped away at night to join other landless farmers as they sought to instill fear in those whom they believed were terrorizing them with uncertainty and injustice.
He was arrested and hanged when Mary was about two years old.
According to one of Mary’s biographers, her father, Richard Harris, also became involved in secret society violence and was a wanted man. In this account, which has more than a dash of melodrama, soldiers came to the Harris cottage and searched the house for Richard, even checking the chimney, while little Mary and her mother looked on. But Richard was gone. He left abruptly and was on his way across the Atlantic. Soon, he had told his family, he would send for them, and they would be together again.
In her autobiography, written 1925, Mother Jones devoted four sentences—the first four—to the Irish childhood of her former self. Biographers and historians have pieced together other details about her life from various sources, but there is a great deal we do not know. It is safe to say, however, that the trauma of her early childhood—her grandfather hanged, her father forced to flee, the spectacle of soldiers in her house, looking for her father—influenced how she thought about resistance and power. Mary witnessed firsthand the kind of power the state can bring to bear against those who threaten it. She saw in Ireland what happens to rebels and revolutionaries more often than not.
But despite the value of these early lessons, Mother Jones was always reticent to reflect on her formative years and that distant person named Mary Harris. Rather, as historian Gorn has pointed out, she seemed far more intent on focusing on the character she had created.
She insisted, for example, that she was born in 1830—and, a century later, her friends and allies celebrated her hundredth birthday with a five-layer cake. An early newsreel camera was on hand to record the images and capture her voice. Workers should “stick together and be loyal to each other,” she said, before cutting her enormous birthday cake.
But that wasn’t so much Mary Harris speaking as Mother Jones, the wonderful character that Mary had created years earlier. Not a hundred years old, she was in her early nineties. She insisted that her father left Ireland in 1835, a decade before the famine, and that he sent for his family “as soon as he became an American citizen.” But most historians believe she actually left a bit later—after the potatoes turned black and failed, and failed again, year after year.
Growing up in the city, rather than in the countryside, Mary may not have seen the rotting fields or heard the moans and weeping from rural cottages. But all of that took place not far from her home. Famine Ireland was a dreadful place. Eyewitnesses wrote of corpses lying in fields and along roadways, of rats gnawing on the remains of children, of hollow-eyed men, women, and children in the final stages of fever and disease. The British administrator who presided over relief efforts, Charles Trevelyan, complained that the “great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the [Irish] people.” Indeed, Ireland actually had no shortage of food, but as the immigrant Roman Catholic bishop of New York, John Hughes, noted, the poor simply could not “pay for the harvest of their own labor.” Crops were exported while the Irish starved to death because political and economic dogma insisted that the government ought not to interfere with the marketplace.
The potato would return to health in 1852. But by then, so many were gone from places like Cork and the western province of Connaught, where the Irish language and Gaelic customs and traditions had been so strong. A million people were dead. Another two million had emigrated to somewhere else. The population of Ireland had been eight million in 1840, five years before the hunger began. It was five million in 1880. The famine had changed Ireland—and the United States—utterly.
How did it change Mary Harris and her family? Mary is silent on the topic. It is a puzzling silence. Perhaps it’s no wonder so many have accepted the narrative that she created, concluding that she must have left before the hunger and the dying began. Why else would she say nothing about it?
Perhaps she simply chose not to remember; perhaps she felt guilty, having fled her home as others starved. But as Mary transformed herself into Mother Jones, she pushed aside her childhood memories of hunger and death, as others did too. For silence followed the famine wherever the starving survivors settled, so much so that its centennial in the late 1940s and early 1950s passed almost without notice on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish American children two generations removed from the experience knew little or nothing about what it was like to see neighbors, friends, loved ones reduced to starvation. Had they asked, they likely would have been told that it is better not to speak of such things. Certainly Mother Jones did not.
Historians believe that the Harris family had to separate, in about 1847, when Mary was ten. Her father and her twelve-year-old brother left Ireland for work in North America. It seems likely that she and her other siblings and their mother followed about five years later. We know nothing of what she saw or how she felt as she left behind her native land, nothing about the journey across the Atlantic. Most likely it was uncomfortable at best, terrifying at worst. The emigrant ships were packed with the starving and the sick in appalling conditions. One passenger described the sight of hundreds of people “huddled together without light, without air” below decks, “wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart.” Many did not survive, dying of starvation or disease en route or drowning when rickety, unseaworthy ships sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.
The Harris family was reunited in the New World, not in the United States but in Toronto, where her father had found work after first living in Vermont. There the family began to build a new life three thousand miles from the land they thought of as home. It was, and remains, no easy task, but at least they had the comfort of each other.
Mary attended school in Toronto, learned the art of dressmaking, and was considered promising enough to earn a recommendation from a priest for admission to a normal school, a type of college that specialized in the training of teachers. While it seems she attended only the first year of a two-year program, she considered herself qualified to teach, having had a good deal more education than most people in either Canada or the United States. But she faced an obstacle: it was hard, if not impossible, for Catholics to obtain teaching jobs in Toronto’s public schools. Things were little better in America at the time: in many cities with large Irish Catholic populations, a nativist movement supported overtly anti-Catholic curricula in public schools, leading to the expansion of a separate Catholic school system.
Still, Mary left Canada for the United States in search of a teaching position. It is not clear whether she ever saw or spoke with her parents and siblings again. Like her memories of Ireland, her family is mentioned only in the first paragraph of her autobiography.
She found a teaching job eventually, but perhaps that second year in normal school would have served her, because she quickly learned that teaching was not what she hoped it would be. She moved to Chicago and opened a dressmaking shop. “I preferred sewing to bossing little children,” she wrote.
Her skepticism of bosses, authority figures—even of herself as an authority figure—was understandable. Authority figures in her native country were the very people against whom her father and grandfather rebelled. They were the people who enforced a skewed system of justice. They were not empowered to protect the likes of her or her family. Their job was to keep people like her in their place.
Nevertheless, she found herself back in the classroom, back to bossing little children, when she moved down to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1860, just as her adopted country was being torn apart. There, for what might have been the first time, she found happiness. George Jones was his name, an iron molder active in the National Union of Iron Molders. The two met in the fall and married soon thereafter, as Southern states, including Tennessee, came to terms with the election of Abraham Lincoln. Tennessee became the eleventh and last state to secede from the Union, in June 1861, about two months after South Carolina forces fired on Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the Civil War. Mary Harris Jones, who left privation and rural violence in Ireland, now found herself living in a strategically important city in what was to become the nineteenth century’s bloodiest conflict, a war in which her neighbors and fellow Tennessee residents fought to preserve their ability to own and sell human beings.
Precisely how Mary reconciled herself to living in a Confederate state, in a nation whose founding principles supported the degradation of men, women, and children with black skin, is another mystery. To be sure, she had little time for reflection, for she became, in short order, the mother of three small children all under the age of five. The woman who had no taste for “bossing little children” found herself doing precisely that, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The war in Memphis was blessedly short, but the city was not immune to the tensions that accompanied peace and the beginning of a new era in U.S. history. Black people, now free from the shackles of the slave owner, left the countryside in search of work, as so many white people had been doing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But white residents, including Irish members of the city’s police department, were not prepared to surrender the privileges of white supremacy. Nearly fifty blacks were murdered and dozens of homes burned during a three-day race riot in the city from May 1 to May 3, 1866. The violence ended only when federal troops arrived to restore order.
Through all of this, Mary tended to the needs of her growing family while her husband labored at the foundry and devoted some of his spare time to his union. Iron molders like George Harris were in demand, and he and his fellow workers used their leverage to increase union membership throughout the region and the nation itself. The iron molders’ chief organizer, William Sylvis, declared that “all wealth and all power centers in the hands of the few, and the many are their victims and their bondsmen.”
She gave birth to her fourth child, Mary, in 1867. But in late summer of that same year, reports of a yellow fever epidemic in the Deep South began to trickle into Memphis. The disease was a frightening killer of people who lived in close quarters in humid locales (its association with mosquitoes was unknown at the time). The disease struck Memphis in mid-September, and before long, the epidemic crossed the threshold of the Jones home, sickening the children. One by one they showed the symptoms: aches, intestinal pain, vomiting. One by one they died, all of them—Catherine, the eldest, born in 1862; Elizabeth, born in 1863; Terence, born in 1865; and baby Mary, just a few months old. And then the disease carried away George. His union brothers raised money to bury him.
Mary was quite suddenly alone again and in every way imaginable. No one dared even venture into her home to comfort her for fear of contracting the disease. She lay awake at night, listening to the sounds of carts as they moved through the stricken streets, collecting the bodies of the dead. After a while, she received permission from the city to tend to the sick and dying, putting her own health and life in jeopardy to try to save or at least comfort others.
But she could not remain in Memphis, not after this. Memphis held the graves of her children and her husband and her memories. She had to move away and move on.
She went back to Chicago, where she had lived briefly before the Civil War, and returned to running a dressmaking business with a partner she chose not to identify in her autobiography. Her description of this time in her life is almost as sparse as that of her childhood, and with good reason. Her children and her husband were dead and buried, but the memories of their suffering were fresh. She very likely was in a daze. If she chose not to dwell on this pain, she could hardly be blamed.
In these bitter years following her heartbreak, Mary developed a keen awareness of the injustices of the fledging Gilded Age. She sewed dresses for the wealthy, who lived in splendor on Lake Shore Drive along Lake Michigan, but often found herself looking out from her shop and seeing “the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front” in the winter or sleeping in parks to escape the heat of their tenement apartments in the summer.
On the night of October 8, 1871, a small fire broke out near the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary on DeKoven Street (named for the founder of the banking giant Northern Trust Company). The neighborhood’s wooden cottages were quickly turned to cinders, and within hours, the entire city seemed to be in flames. The great Chicago fire left one hundred thousand people homeless and destroyed nearly 17,500 buildings. One of them was Mary’s dress shop. She lost everything she had. She joined thousands of other residents on the lakefront, watching the city burn, watching her life take another tragic turn.
Decades later, Mother Jones would write that her devotion to the cause of labor and workers’ rights rose from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire. But her sense of empathy and capacity for outrage already had been formed by all that she had seen and experienced, both in Ireland and in the United States. If anything, the fire in Chicago brought to an end her time of grieving and reflection after the trauma of Memphis. Her days on the sidelines were over.
But her transformation was not entirely complete. She still was Mary Harris Jones, Irish immigrant, widow, childless mother. She had not yet reinvented herself into the character that would make her famous.
How and where she spent the years immediately following the Chicago fire is another mystery. Many accounts have Mary on the barricades as early as 1877, when one hundred thousand rail workers went on strike to protest their second pay cut in a year. She said her friends in the labor movement asked her to stand with them in Pittsburgh, where workers were demonstrating against the Pennsylvania Railroad. The state militia was called in, shots were fired, and nearly two dozen people were killed.
But again her most careful biographer, Elliott J. Gorn, makes a persuasive argument that this account is very likely not true, that it was another instance of Mother Jones creating a narrative for her character. She was not well known in 1877 and certainly was not as active in the union movement as she would later be. But she was living in Chicago, in the right place to observe the inequities of the age with the eyes of the newcomer, the immigrant, and the natural-born skeptic. While so many others dreamed of trading their rags for riches—the great American saga—she would seek to create a system in which fewer wore rags, because riches were more justly distributed.
Chicago was the home of men who were making great fortunes—Marshall Field, founder of the department store chain; Cyrus McCormick, founder of the company that became International Harvester; and George Pullman, who invented the sleeper railroad car. Along Lake Michigan’s shoreline, the wealthy built replicas of European villas where they entertained each other in grand style while sharing their anxieties about the dangerous ideas circulating among the city’s workers and jobless—the desperately poor families who sent their children into the factories so as to keep a leaky roof over their heads and stale bread on their table.
The city was restive and tense, alive with ideas that ran counter to the transatlantic dogma of free and unregulated markets and the unfettered pursuit of private profit. Mary may not have been a part of this conversation, at least not yet, but she surely was an eager listener. Almost fifty, she joined the nation’s dominant labor union, the Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, after it began admitting women. The union’s leader (with the title of “grand master workman”) was Terence V. Powderly, the son of Irish immigrants, mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a member of the secretive Irish nationalist organization Clan na Gael. She and Powderly became friends and allies; in fact, the bond between them was so strong that Mary addressed Powderly as “my own dear son” in a letter in the early twentieth century. Powderly’s involvement in Clan na Gael, a group that did not flinch from supporting violent revolution in Ireland, faded over time as he devoted most of his energy to improving the plight of American workers—regardless of their hyphen. Irish immigrants like the famous Fenian agitator Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, who saw his father die of starvation in Cork, raised money to send men with dynamite to blow up targets in London in the 1880s. But Mary, like Powderly, was more intent on winning justice for American workers than she was on winning freedom for her native land.
The Knights were the most formidable challenge to capital in the 1880s. They were a million strong, they admitted women and African Americans as equals, and they recruited skilled and nonskilled workers alike. The Knights and Powderly played a key role in providing support, education, and a platform for Mary’s final transformation into Mother Jones.
While so much of Mother Jones’s youth and early middle age is shrouded in mystery and half-truths, there is little question that May 4, 1886, truly was a pivotal date for her. It might be said that it was the day her new persona became complete. On that day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, somebody threw an improvised bomb loaded with dynamite at police officers as they were about to break up a pro-labor demonstration. Seven officers died. Shots then rang out, and civilians fell, although the precise number of civilian deaths remains uncertain. The deadly violence came three days after May Day, when workers in Chicago and across the country had gone on strike, demanding an eight-hour workday.
The city reacted as though a revolution were imminent. Radicals, or people thought to be radicals, were rounded up. The press stoked fears that Chicago would soon fall into the hands of anarchists. Eight activists were arrested and convicted in short order, and four were hanged six months later. Another committed suicide before he could be brought to the gallows. The others received life sentences. Business exploited fears by lashing back at unions, and membership in the Knights of Labor began to fall precipitously, from a million to about a hundred thousand in just three years.
While Mary said she did not agree with the anarchists, she had attended meetings they organized and listened “to what these teachers of a new order had to say to the workers.” The Haymarket violence did not turn her into an agitator overnight. That part of her life was still to come. What it did do was remind Mary that the goals she sought—justice and equality—required disruption, and disruption could and often did lead to violence. It happened in the darkened fields of County Cork. It happened in the streets of Chicago. It seemed, at times, inevitable—and yet was it necessarily so? Could it be avoided? This was an issue she seemed to struggle with during her many decades of hell-raising.
No longer young, indeed, verging on elderly, Mother Jones began her public career in the mining regions of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the 1890s, delivering speeches of encouragement to strikers. If she was, in fact, born in 1837, she would have turned sixty during the last decade of the nineteenth century. But her new cause and her new life seemed to invigorate rather than exhaust her.
She first came to public notice after the terrible economic depression following the Panic of 1893, when she joined forces with Coxey’s Army, named for a businessman from Ohio, Jacob Coxey, who aimed to bring thousands of unemployed men to Washington, DC, to demand a government jobs program. Mother Jones visited a platoon of Coxey’s Army near Kansas City, Missouri, raised money for them, and delivered fiery speeches, including one that encouraged the men to help themselves to food stored at a nearby army outpost. After all, she said, they had helped produce the food—it belonged to them as much as to the real soldiers for whom it was intended. One can only imagine how these militant words, coming from a little gray-haired Irishwoman who hardly looked a radical, must have lifted the spirits of these destitute men.
Mother Jones was a fervent supporter of the broader union movement and the still broader struggle of workers seeking to win a measure of dignity for themselves and ownership of the products they created, but over time she developed a special place in her heart and in her activism for mine workers and their union, the United Mine Workers. In an era when factories and slaughterhouses were virtually unregulated, at a time when workers were considered disposable commodities, few if any workers endured the conditions and dangers that mine workers experienced on a daily basis.
Every morning, often before the sun came up, they were transported into darkness, into the very bowels of the earth, where they breathed in foul gases and poisonous dust as they collected the fuel that powered the nation’s industrial might. When their workday was done, they retreated from the mine and returned to the surface, returned to homes the company owned in a town the company ran. They rarely saw the light of day. They died terrible deaths, being buried alive when things went wrong, as they often did, or wasting away before their time of lung diseases.
In the late 1890s, Mother Jones traveled primitive country roads to support striking members of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia. Although she was a woman, although she was older, and although she lived much of her life in cities, she instantly connected with the young, male, rural miners. One union official recalled that she “would take a drink with the boys and spoke their idiom, including some pretty rough language when she was talking about the bosses. This might have been considered a little fast in ordinary women, but the miners knew and respected her.” They knew and appreciated that she had made a conscious decision to side with them, to see in their struggles a variation of her own family’s history in Ireland. She sought not to escape from her class and background but to defend it.
Mother Jones immersed herself into the work of organizing the miners and railing against the injustices of the mines and company towns of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, and other coal-rich areas. And the men who ran the unions and worked the mines did more than simply welcome her help; they made her a leader. She was put in charge of organizing miners in parts of West Virginia in 1902 and was arrested and jailed for her activities. Her autobiography is filled with colorful anecdotes about this formative decade in her career, although it’s hard to know how many of the stories are true. But even if she exaggerated by half, her work and energy were remarkable all the same. She told of traveling to support a mine workers’ strike in Virginia and being greeted by a “terribly frightened” miner who said that her life was in danger. “The superintendent told me that if you came down here he would blow out your brains,” the miner warned. “He said he didn’t want to see you ’round these parts.”
Ah, but Mother Jones had the perfectly defiant response: “You tell the superintendent that I am not coming to see him anyway. I am coming to see the miners.”
Too melodramatic to be true? Perhaps, but there’s no question that mine owners and managers would not have wanted to see this eloquent and passionate Irishwoman anywhere near a picket line. And while they probably wouldn’t have threatened the life of a gray-haired woman, they had few qualms about brutalizing their young, male workers, or summoning state power on behalf of the company’s interests. In a dramatic turning point for the mine workers’ union, law-enforcement officers shot and killed nineteen miners during a peaceful demonstration near a mine in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, in 1897.
While women throughout the nation were stepping up their demands for a greater role in civic and public life, Mother Jones remained exceptional because of the world in which she chose to live (with and among miners), the leadership role she attained, and her unapologetic embrace of radical economic change. She was not satisfied with demanding higher wages, although she agitated for them, or a limit on the workday, although she supported such measures. She wanted to change the system top to bottom. And she recognized that oppression wore many faces—it divided not only classes but races as well. Her radicalism included challenges to white supremacy as well as to capitalist plutocracy. “The enemy seeks to conquer you by dividing your ranks, by making distinctions between North and South, between American and foreign,” she told a group of miners in Colorado in 1903. “You are all miners, fighting a common cause, a common master. . . . I know of no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there I shall go.”
As her fame spread, so did her commitments. She spoke out on behalf of Mexican revolutionaries who opposed the dictatorial regime of General Porfirio Díaz; she traveled to New York to encourage a strike by garment workers (whose plight would become a rallying cry for change when more than 140 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire in New York in 1911); and she organized a parade of children to march against the horrors of child labor.
Wherever she was, whatever the cause, Mother Jones left little doubt what she believed and how she felt about the injustices of industrial America. And she clearly relished her role as a provocateur extraordinaire. “Some people call us Bolsheviks . . . some call us Reds,” she told a labor conference in Mexico City. “Well, what of it! If we are Red, then Jefferson was Red, and a whole lot of those people that have turned the world upside down were Red.”
Her rhetoric was provocative and inspired great outrage in the press, which was probably the point. But without taking away from Jones’s steadfast principles, it is also true that she understood the theater of politics and of protest, as perhaps only she could. For she was, after all, playing a role she invented, a character who provided emotional distance from the realities of her own tragic story.
Behind the scenes, Mother Jones was not quite as incendiary. She often tried to find a middle course between more conservative union leaders and the radicals of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. As time wore on, this would become more difficult. The tensions between labor and capital seemed only to worsen, not improve, after the progressive administration of Theodore Roosevelt. In the fall of 1910, a homemade bomb planted near the Los Angeles Times building, which housed a newspaper known for its anti-union positions, killed twenty workers and injured more than one hundred. The bomb, made up of more than a dozen sticks of dynamite, was on a timer and designed to explode at four o’clock in the morning, when few people, if any, would be in the building. Instead, it went off about three hours early, when late-night workers were finishing up their shifts. Two brothers, John and James McNamara, who were active in the ironworkers’ union, were arrested for the sensational crime. James McNamara eventually pled guilty to the Times bombing, while John pled guilty to another bombing, this one at the Llewellyn Iron Works on Christmas Day, 1910. Both were sentenced to prison at San Quentin.
Mother Jones took part in a labor-backed campaign to win pardons for the two brothers, whose actions may well have reminded her of those of the secret societies her grandfather joined in early nineteenth-century Ireland. The effort on behalf of the bombers failed, and James McNamara died in prison in 1941, while his brother, who pled guilty to the less destructive ironworks bombing, was released and returned to organizing, dying the same year as his brother.
The Times bombing led President Woodrow Wilson to appoint a commission, headed by labor lawyer Frank Walsh, to investigate the very conditions that Mother Jones had been agitating against for decades. She traveled to New York to answer the commission’s questions, including Chairman Walsh’s formulaic question about her place of residence. She told him that she resided “wherever the workers are fighting the robbers.”
It was a very Irish moment in American labor history, as Chairman Walsh, an ardent Irish nationalist and renowned union activist, guided Mother Jones, a native of Cork, through two days of extraordinary testimony about her career as one of the nation’s most prominent voices for workers. She told of the hazards of organizing unions and strikes in the face of state and private power. She condemned the press for not reporting on industrial abuses. And she recounted her attempt to organize a march by children to the Long Island home of President Theodore Roosevelt to protest the use of child labor. The march, she said, never got close to the president’s Oyster Bay residence because of security guards. Roosevelt, she said, “had a lot of secret service men watching an old women and an army of children. You fellows do elect some wonderful presidents. The best thing you can do is to put a woman in the next time.”
The New York Times, which was not especially friendly to union organizers, described Mother Jones as “one of the most entertaining witnesses” the commission had heard. The paper noted that the commissioners had allowed her to speak virtually without interruption, so she “proceeded in her quaint way without being tied down to geography or continuity of events.”
It is hard not to notice the condescension in the Times’s description, but there was a bit of truth in what the paper said. Mother Jones certainly was entertaining, not only in front of the commission but on the picket line and on her soapbox. She understood the importance of theatrics and drama—even her physical presence was a performance, dressed as she invariably was in a flamboyant hat, and she delighted in shaking her fist at the imagined presence of bosses and capitalists.
The stories she told Walsh and his colleagues were filled with dramatic—and, as the Times suggested, mostly unverifiable—tales from the picket lines, where the workers were always heroic and the bosses always villainous. Nobody asked for details, perhaps because they understood that beneath the theatrics and the tall tales, Mother Jones truly did speak truth to power. American industrial workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had no safety net—they and their families were on their own. Meanwhile, the great industrialists of the age built fabulous fortunes, controlled politicians, manipulated supply and demand, and entertained each other with tall tales of their own, often ending with the moral that those who work hard will grow rich, while those who remained at the bottom were lazy and worthless. Many embraced social Darwinism and eugenics, which argued that success was a sign of fitness, and failure could be ascribed to genetics.
Mother Jones remained a voice for labor through the 1920s, a time associated with superficial prosperity and frivolity. She would have none of it. Despite failing health, she worked on her autobiography, visited with striking dressmakers in Chicago in 1924, and fretted over what she saw as “a peculiar apathy” among workers during the Roaring Twenties.
She picked out her final resting place—Mount Olive, Illinois, where seven mine workers and four security guards were killed during a strike in 1898.
She declared that May 1, 1930, was her one hundredth birthday. It wasn’t, but no matter—few would argue with her at that point in her life. Among those who sent good wishes was John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose anti-union sentiment was as profound as her loathing of capitalists. Somehow, the titan of corporate America and the Joan of Arc of the labor movement managed to get along, no doubt to the chagrin of their friends. “He’s a damn good sport,” Mother Jones said of Rockefeller. “I’ve licked him many times, but we’ve made peace.”
She refused to wear a corsage for the occasion, but she summoned the energy to smile and greet hundreds of admirers who had gathered for the party. On hand to record the event was the latest marvel of the age, a moving-picture camera that recorded sound. Her friends hushed as Mother Jones took a sip of water and then talked directly into that camera. “America,” she said, “was not founded on dollars but on the blood of men who gave their lives for your benefit. Power lies in the hands of labor to retain American liberty, but labor has not yet learned how to use that power.”
It was her last hurrah. She died several months later, on November 30. American workers, reeling from the effects of the stock market crash, mourned one of their greatest champions. She had been “in the forefront of labor struggles, cheering and inspiring men and women to fight for the cause of organized labor,” said William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor.
She had lived through hell on both sides of the Atlantic—from Mary Harris, child of Cork, to Mother Jones, voice of American labor. A member of an exploited class, she knew how those with power treated those without it. And as a witness to tragedy, she became even more so a participant in resistance. Mother Jones carried unexpressed sadness and loneliness wherever her activism brought her, but she refused to be defeated and would not allow those who called her “mother” to surrender to hopelessness or to resign themselves to the status quo. Rather than submit to heartbreak and tragedy, she chose to raise hell at a time when hell needed raising.