Cork-born Mary Harris, better known as Mother Jones, was one of America’s most outspoken socialists and labour rights campaigners. The woman who once said her home address was ‘wherever there is a fight against oppression’ was passionate in her hatred of unfettered capitalism and all its attendant ills.
Mother Jones’s early life was not an easy one. Her family hailed from Cork City and were proud of their long Republican tradition. Poverty drove them to emigrate to the USA when Mary was a young child. Mary’s father worked the railroads, but he managed to put Mary through school and she became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1861 she met and married George Jones, an ironworker and committed member of the Iron Moulders’ Union.
Tragically, in 1867, Mary’s husband and all four of their children died in a yellow fever epidemic. In her autobiography, The Autobiography of Mother Jones, she relates how she laid out the little ones herself since no one would come near them for fear of contagion. After this she went to Chicago to start again as a seamstress, only to lose her business and her home in the great fire of 1871. She camped by the lake in the city with all the other homeless citizens, and faced the prospect of starting all over yet again at the age of forty-one.
At this point, Mother Jones experienced an epiphany. She looked at the people living in shacks around her and compared the insecure fortunes of the average worker with what she called the ‘tropical comfort’ and security of their fat-cat employers. She joined a society known as the Knights of Labor [sic], a secret assembly open to all skilled and non-skilled workers, which had been founded by Philadelphia garment workers in 1869. Within a short time Mother Jones was engrossed in the labour movement. Now, with no family, no home and no business to distract her, her life course was set.
For fifty years Mother Jones travelled, lectured and agitated for labour rights. She wrote for the socialist press and, as she put it, ‘raised hell’ all over the country. She co-founded left-wing workers’ organisations, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (1905). She was jeered at, jailed, assaulted and, in 1912, damned as ‘the most dangerous woman in America’.
Mother Jones was always most interested in the welfare of coal miners, who endured possibly the worst working conditions in the country. In the 1880s and 1890s she travelled to coalfields far and wide and witnessed first-hand the misery of fourteen-hour underground shifts, the company-owned shacks that miners’ families lived in, the dead children buried by mothers who already had another on the way, the lack of medical and educational facilities and the exploitation of cheap immigrant labour. Eventually she became an organiser for United Mine Workers (UMW), which worked to protect and extend the rights of miners.
Mother Jones was campaigning at a time when brutal suppression of unions was the norm. Employers were often backed by the force of state troops and hired gunmen. In 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado, while visiting the coalfields, she witnessed a particularly nasty incident that was to become known as the Ludlow Massacre.
Coal miners at one of John D Rockefeller’s Colorado mines had downed tools over a dispute about membership of UMW. As the strike wore on, families lost their homes and took to living in tents. Rockefeller sent for the state troops as a precautionary measure. One day some of the soldiers opened fire on the strikers, who returned fire. One soldier and five strikers died in this exchange. In retaliation, the infuriated soldiers attacked the tented city, razing it to the ground. At least two women and eleven children died. This incident led to statewide warfare for ten days until neutral federal troops were called in to quell the violence. Several months later a truce was called and the strikers were forced to return to work.
Mother Jones was also especially aggravated by child labour in textile mills. In order to report on the situation first-hand, she went to work in a succession of mills herself. She described how ‘undersized, round-shouldered, hollow-eyed, listless sleepy’ little children of six and seven years old routinely lost limbs while cleaning between spindles during twelve-hour night shifts. One female mill worker claimed she had a ‘good boss’: she had been let off early the night she gave birth, and allowed back with the baby two days later. The baby slept under the machinery its mother operated. The percentage of children working in such factories was high, for example, in 1903 a factory of 75,000 textile workers in Kensington, Pennsylvania, included 10,000 children, most under ten years old.
Mother Jones felt her mission was to combat all this and her tactics were nothing if not direct. During a coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania in 1899, she heard that the hated scabs, as strike-breakers were called, were undermining the action. She armed miners’ wives with their own brooms and mops, and mobilised them into a physical charge against the scabs. This proved a psychological turning point in the dispute and the strike was a success. During another campaign, she organised a march of mill children from Philadelphia – a city, she claimed, that was ‘built on the broken bones of children’ – through New Jersey to New York City. The march helped change legislation, raising the minimum age of workers from twelve to fourteen.
Mother Jones was famous for her confrontational style. She admitted she had a tendency to ‘put it strong’ when speaking. ‘I am not choice when the constitution of my country is violated,’ she declared, ‘I do not go into the classics. I am not praying.’ She was also renowned for her sharp wit. On being refused entry to Canada by a border official, she threatened to take the matter up with her uncle. ‘Who’s your uncle?’ asked the official. ‘Uncle Sam,’ replied Mother Jones.
Mother Jones always regarded herself as a ‘patriotic American’, but claimed that her hatred of oppression sprang from her Irish roots. ‘I believe that this country is the cradle of liberty,’ she said, citing the Irish Fenians as just one group that was afforded the liberty, in America, to continue their fight for freedom at home.
But Mother Jones’s politics, though sincere, were in no way consistent. For all her talk of equality and liberty, she was bitingly critical of those fighting for women’s rights. ‘You don’t need a vote to raise hell,’ she declared to a group of suffragists in 1915. ‘I have never had a vote and I have raised hell all over this country!’ She maintained that politics was the ‘servant of industry’, and that plutocrats kept women oppressed by keeping them ‘busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity’. She was characteristically blunt on this matter: ‘I do not believe in “careers” for women, especially a “career” in factory and mill where most women have their “careers” … The training of the children – this is her most beautiful task.’ Needless to say, with this attitude, Mother Jones was not popular with the women’s franchise movements.
In her long career, the controversial Mother Jones agitated in almost every state in North America, including Illinois, Tennessee, Michigan, Kansas, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, California, Alabama, Washington, and also in Canada, in British Columbia. At the age of ninety-one she travelled to Mexico to address the Pan-American Federation of Labour. Her last labour dispute was in 1924 (she was ninety-four), when she addressed a textile union strike in Chicago.
Although organised religion came in for much of Mother Jones’s scorn – ‘Don’t listen to ministers,’ she is reported as saying, ‘we know the Lord as well as they do’ – she died a devout Christian at 100 years of age. She is buried near strike victims in the Union Miners’ cemetery in Mount Oliver, Illinois.