2 2 The years 1860 through 1890 were dramatic ones in American history, and in the life of Mary Jones. Yet she introduces that era in her autobiography with a bland description of her young adulthood: “My first position was teaching in a convent in Monroe, Michigan. Later, I came to Chicago and opened a dress-making establishment. I preferred sewing to bossing little children.… However, I went back to teaching again, this time in Memphis, Tennessee. Here I was married in 1861. My husband was an iron molder, and a staunch member of the Iron Molders’ Union.”1 How did she feel about being a wife and mother? Did her husband have family in Memphis? Was he Irish Catholic? What kind of community did they live in? There is little evidence with which to answer these questions.
Mary probably landed the Michigan job through a contact in her Toronto parish. Mother Mary Joseph, who was in charge of the order in Monroe, sought a secular teacher to aid her small staff of eight Sisters and three novitiates. She hired Mary Harris on August 31, 1859, and paid her eight dollars per month. The school was an austere and depressing place, especially since dwindling enrollments constantly threatened its existence. Then too, the academy’s self-described mission might have felt onerous to young Mary: “The morals and general deportment of the pupils are assiduously watched by the sisters, who, while forming their hearts to virtue and their minds to the usages of refined society, give every attention to their advancement in the different sciences, and their comforts and personal habits receive the same attention as if they were in the bosom of their own families.” Early in 1860, Mary collected $36.43 in back pay and headed for Chicago.2 There, she became a dressmaker, but she did not settle down for long. Before the year was out, her wanderlust took her south to Memphis, Tennessee, where she began teaching again. Within a few short months, she met and married George Jones.3
Memphis might seem an unusual destination for someone from the North in late 1860. Perhaps Canada insulated Mary from the sectional crisis that was about to explode in the United States. Nevertheless, she was one of thousands of migrants to Memphis shortly before the Civil War. Crises of the Union were regular events in the nineteenth century, so many believed that this one would blow over like the others. Besides, with its brisk river trade, growing industries, and commercial ties to border cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati, Memphis had strong Unionist sympathies until just before the Confederacy was formed.4
Memphis was a lively Mississippi River port, the sixth-largest city in the South, growing rapidly on the strength of German and especially Irish immigration. It was not quite an ethnic stronghold on the level of St. Louis (50 percent immigrant), New Orleans (40 percent), or even Louisville (33 percent). Still, Memphis’s population more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, and the Irish population grew sixfold, to over four thousand people. The city had become one of the most important points in the country for collecting, grading, and shipping cotton. Slaves in the hinterlands planted, cultivated, and harvested the crop, and the railroads brought both cotton and prosperity to Memphis. In 1860, four lines—built partly with slave, partly with Irish labor—terminated in the Bluff City, and two more were under construction. Measured by population, trade, or wealth, Memphis was the fastest-growing city in the South.5
For Irish men, Memphis offered jobs building docks and levees, laying rails, grading roads, and hauling goods to market; according to the 1860 census, three-quarters of them worked as unskilled laborers. For Irish women, Memphis had the same sorts of jobs as other North American cities—domestic service, housecleaning, laundry work, and sewing. Before the late 1840s, much unskilled labor was performed by slaves or free blacks, and only the presence of a very low-cost alternative workforce, such as the famine Irish, could compete with them. Ireland’s refugees settled predominantly in the First Ward, the poorest in the city, in a neighborhood known as “Pinch,” short for “Pinch Gut,” because of the leanness of its denizens. Before the famine, blacks had been the predominant ethnic presence in Pinch. African Americans and Irish, then, competed for space in the most unhealthy and overcrowded part of town and for positions on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.6
Among native-born Memphians, anti-black racism had its analogue in anti-Irish nativism. Memphis developed a local version of America’s Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. Nativism gained support from people across the (white) social spectrum, but it had special appeal to the business class—cotton merchants, professionals, and owners of stores and factories.7
The sectional crisis, however, made allies of immigrants and businessmen. Urban laborers tended to oppose secession, and commercial ties to the North caused many businessmen to be less than enthusiastic about the Confederacy. In the end, Tennessee secessionists outnumbered Unionists, and when the time came, Memphians supported the Confederacy. As it turned out, the war did relatively little damage. Less than a year after the conflict began, Grant’s troops advanced along the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Mississippi Rivers, surrounding the city. By March 1862, martial law had been declared, trade cut off, and town officials began to leave for safer places. Finally, after a brief naval battle witnessed by citizens from the bluffs along the Mississippi, Memphis fell to Union forces. Although life did not exactly return to the status quo ante, at least trade was restored, much of it smuggling to the Confederacy.8
New problems sprouted from the ashes of the Civil War. Freed from bondage, cut adrift in the devastation that Union armies brought to the countryside, black men and women began to migrate across the South. Their movement was an exercise of newly won freedom, but even more, they were searching for work and a better life. Many went to the cities, and Memphis’s free black population grew exponentially. Southern journalists and politicians sketched terrifying images of freedmen out of control. But the unspoken fear was that African Americans would compete successfully with whites for work and status. For the Irish, still working at low-paying, unskilled jobs, worries of economic and social competition with blacks ran especially deep. They had learned to fear blacks’ stigma and crave whites’ status.9
Tensions boiled over in the spring of 1866. Black soldiers, newly mustered out of the Union army, went looking for jobs along the river docks and train depots. Beginning on May 1, and lasting for three days, one of the ugliest race riots in American history occurred. Irish police and firemen led the way in terrorizing African Americans. White rioters killed forty-six blacks, shot or beat two hundred more, and raped five women. The mob burned eighty-nine homes, four churches, and twelve schoolhouses; only the arrival of Union troops restored order. The riot was a prelude to the campaign of violent intimidation that the Ku Klux Klan, founded by the Memphian Nathan Bedford Forrest, began against the freedmen in 1867.10
Large social events provide a context for lives that are lived in sheer dailiness. War, emancipation, federal occupation, and race riots were the backdrop for the young Jones family. George and Mary were not among the proletariat, nor were they of the business class. As a teacher, Mary had reached the top of the occupational ladder for Irish women; indeed, it was usually not until the second generation that Irish Americans attained her level of accomplishment. Still, the pay was low, and because most schools in this era would not employ mothers, Mary quickly ceded the role of breadwinner to George. As an iron molder, George Jones was part of the aristocracy of labor. Foundry work was a highly skilled trade, one that preserved some of the old training and hierarchy of traditional crafts. Molders had their economic difficulties, but George Jones possessed skills that ensured considerable security for a man and his family.11
What had changed for iron molders was the transformation of shops into factories. Jones worked for the Union Iron Works and Machine Shop, a large company that specialized in building and repairing steam engines, freight cars, sawmills, and gristmills. Spurred in part by wartime demand, foundries that manufactured capital goods had become an important part of Memphis’s economy. With the consolidation of small shops into highly capitalized ones, a man like Jones, though possessing great knowledge of his craft, would rarely have owned his own shop and tools. Jones might be a highly skilled employee, but he was an employee nonetheless.12
Not only did Jones work in a factory, he was a member of the International Iron Molders Union. The nascent trade organizations of the early nineteenth century had blossomed into several unions by the Civil War era. Coopers, blacksmiths, machinists, shoemakers, and workers in other trades had their own organizations, but the iron molders union was the most powerful. “Labor has no protection,” declared William Sylvis, the man responsible for organizing the North American molders union: “the weak are devoured by the strong. All wealth and all power centers in the hands of the few and the many are their victims and their bondsmen.” Sylvis never questioned the right of shop owners to their property. He advocated self-help, temperance, and Christian free agency as sources of both religious salvation and upward social mobility. But he was adamant that more of the money produced by workers end up in their hands. Sylvis insisted that labor not allow capital to take a disproportionate share of wealth, that the producing classes not be reduced to poverty.13
As Sylvis organized tirelessly, his union grew from a few locals with dozens of members to two hundred locals and upwards of nine thousand men. By the end of the Civil War, the International Iron Molders Union had attained substantial control of the trade. Three-quarters or more of America’s journeyman iron molders were union members, and closed shops were the rule in many of the largest foundry towns. High demand for foundry goods during the war meant steady hours and good pay. Men at the top of the trade made up to fifteen hundred dollars per year, roughly four times the wages of unskilled workers. Moreover, the union advocated the end of the piecework system, uniform pay scales, and a ten-hour workday.14
Every month the Iron Molders’ International Journal—with the words “Equal and exact justice to all Men, of whatever state or persuasion” emblazoned across the masthead—came into the Jones household. Reading the Journal was probably Mary Jones’s first direct exposure to the American labor movement. George’s early commitment to the union and his relatively high income must have made the family steadfastly pro-union. And Sylvis’s message of the dignity of labor no doubt resonated deeply for Mary, given the hard circumstances of her parents’ lives.15
As the molders union reached the height of its power with the war’s end, Sylvis and other labor leaders began planning a new organization, the National Labor Union, which would unite various trades in one large umbrella organization. Sylvis shared in the racism of his day, yet he insisted that freed blacks, as well as women and immigrants, be allowed to join, because labor could not afford to exclude anyone who might end up competing for jobs. Although the National Labor Union eventually foundered in the economic turbulence of the Reconstruction era, Sylvis’s ideas circulated widely. His faith in unions, his charisma as an organizer, and his belief that “it is not what is done for people, but what people do for themselves, that acts upon their character and condition” fed the ideals of Mother Jones decades later.16
For now, Mary and George had established a solid household in America. They had four children—Catherine in 1862, Elizabeth in 1863, Terence in 1865, and baby Mary in 1867—and as a new mother, Mary was constantly busy with the same tasks she had performed in Toronto, cooking and cleaning, sewing and mending. They lived in the newly established St. Mary’s Parish, and even though the church was not yet built and services were held in an old schoolhouse, they affiliated themselves with the new congregation.17
The family home was on tiny Winchester Street, one of a few blocks of freestanding houses in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, Pinch lay between the two forks of the Bayou Gayoso, an open cesspool that became stagnant in the summer and flooded in the rainy season. The swampy landscape was a breeding ground for disease, and the city’s lack of sanitation services made matters worse. Still, the neighborhood had its compensations—voices with an Irish lilt, an immigrant-dominated church, and strength in numbers against the larger, sometimes hostile, population.18
The life George and Mary built for their family did not last. When the war ended, a sluggish economy cut into the molders’ business, and owners of the largest shops used slack demand to counterattack the union. Businesses merged, locked out workers, and rolled back wages. During the second half of 1867, with hard times continuing, many foundries shut down. At the end of the year, Sylvis estimated that three-quarters of union molders were unemployed. Membership fell, debt rose, and internal disputes threatened to tear apart the organization.19
But all of this pales beside the horror that now struck the Jones family. Yellow fever came west from Africa with the spread of the slave trade. It was most virulent in tropical climates, so while American cities as far north as Philadelphia and Boston experienced horrible outbreaks over the years, it hit hardest in the South. By the 1830s, epidemics of yellow fever, often accompanied by deadly cholera, had swept into cities like New Orleans and Memphis, leaving hundreds or even thousands dead in their wake. Yellow fever’s unpredictability and its mysterious origins added to the terror. Not until 1905 did medical science discover that it was passed from person to person by the female Aedes aegypti mosquito. Ironically, the very symbols of industrial progress, steamboats and railroads, became vehicles for transporting the disease-bearing insects in their water supplies.20
All of the necessary elements—the long rainy season, the dense population, the large numbers of people without previous exposure to the illness—were in place in Memphis in 1867. The disease spread like a wave: “The Yellow fever has assumed an epidemic form in Galveston, Indianola, and other Texan gulf ports, while at New Orleans it is raging beyond precedent,” warned the Memphis Daily Appeal on September 7. From late September through the end of November, yellow fever had its way with Memphis, and those who could afford to fled for their lives. No organized board of health kept accurate statistics, but around twenty-five hundred people contracted the disease in 1867, and another six hundred developed cholera. The epidemic struck hardest at those who lived near the Bayou Gayoso. Southerners called yellow fever “strangers’ disease” because immigrants and Northerners, having developed no immunity, suffered the highest casualties. Indeed, the illness was often blamed on outsiders and on the laboring poor, who could not afford to leave town when epidemics swept in.21
Yellow fever was horrifying to behold. Flu-like symptoms—headache, chills, aching joints—lasted a day or two, then, in mild cases, disappeared. Those less lucky might be bedridden for a week, first with migraine or lower-back pains, followed by nausea, stomach cramps, and rising fever. As the disease progressed, mucous membranes hemorrhaged, so patients bled from the nose, gums, and tongue, as well as from the uterus and urethra. Soon hemorrhages filled the stomach and intestines. Victims vomited black blood (whence comes the Spanish term for the disease, vómito negro), and delirium set in. Finally came jaundice, liver failure, and death.22
Memphians tried anything to halt yellow fever’s spread. They set barrels of tar on fire in the streets and spread lime, carbolic acid, and other disinfectants. Citizens held sponges to their noses to avoid inhaling noxious vapors, and they burned the bedclothes of the disease’s victims. Newspapers, fearing panic and bad publicity, alternated detailed (and often contradictory) advice on how to treat the afflicted with stories downplaying the severity of the outbreak. All in vain. A doctor writing during a later epidemic in 1878 left the following account of his patient: September 11: “Mouth dry; thirst great; gums ragged and inclined to bleed, lips scarlet; nasal passages dry; urine scanty …” September 12: “He was bleeding from the nose, gums, and lips; dejections from the bowels black, watery, and frequent; thirst intense; he said he was ‘burning up inside’ …” September 13: “Slept in snatches; vomited several times mucus and water containing dark flocculi … Delirium had set in; he was unmanageable, except by force. The extremities were getting cold. He died early next morning.”23
Mary Jones recalled her experience of the epidemic almost sixty years later, and for the first time, the matter-of-fact tone of her autobiography breaks with emotion:
In 1867, a yellow fever epidemic swept Memphis.… Across the street from me, ten persons lay dead from the plague. The dead surrounded us. They were buried at night quickly and without ceremony. All about my house I could hear weeping and the cries of delirium. One by one, my four little children sickened and died. I washed their little bodies and got them ready for burial. My husband caught the fever and died. I sat alone through nights of grief. No one came to me. No one could. Other homes were as stricken as mine. All day long, all night long, I heard the grating of the wheels of the death cart.24
How can we even imagine Mary Jones’s helplessness, her emptiness? She must have felt cursed—first the death carts’ grating wheels in Cork, then resurrection from those horrors, now that sound again, death carts real or imagined, bearing away her family. She no doubt struggled against the disease, fought for her husband’s and children’s lives. Did she blame herself for the agony her babies underwent? Being alive had to fill her with anguish for surviving those she loved, especially since she could only watch helplessly as they died. But feeling accursed because she had outlived her family only brought more guilt for thinking of herself. How did she bury them? Did the rituals of the Church ease her pain? How did she bear the loneliness? Better to forget, to seal out memories of the family and its deathwatch. Yet forgetting only fed remorse: George deserved to be remembered for his hard work and devotion, prayers must be said and candles lit for the children. As if forgetting was possible anyway. What nightmares haunted her? Did she dream of baby Mary, her namesake, whimpering with pain, vomiting black blood, then dying?25
Local 66, the Memphis chapter of the International Iron Molders Union, held a special meeting in honor of George Jones and adopted resolutions to “the memory of our departed brother.” The men draped their charter in mourning, sent condolences to the widow, and published an obituary for their “earnest and energetic brother.” Mary Jones soon left Memphis a thirty-year-old widow, as bereft as any human being could be. It would be decades before she got over her personal tragedy, if people ever get over such things. But she came away from Memphis with images and feelings that would emerge again in her life. It was in Memphis that Mary witnessed how greed caused some men to reduce others to slavery, in Memphis too that she saw armies come to liberate the slaves from bondage. Here she witnessed the explosive mix of racial hatred and class. In Memphis also she first became familiar with the American labor movement and thought about what solidarity meant for people like herself. And, in Memphis, she was called Mother, a title she would not hear again for thirty years.26
Even decades later, Mary Jones rarely mentioned her bereavement, and the Autobiography says little about her loss: “After the union had buried my husband, I got a permit to nurse the sufferers. This I did until the plague was stamped out.… I returned to Chicago and went again into the dressmaking business with a partner.” Mary Jones carried to her grave these days of sorrow.27
After recounting the death of her family in the Autobiography, she describes her new life in Chicago. The quiet grief of the yellow fever passage gives way to indignation over the greed of the rich and the plight of the poor. The suppressed rage over her own tragedy emerges when she describes the lives of the needy, those whom she eventually came to think of as her people. She does not so much forget her own pain as displace it:
We worked for the aristocrats of Chicago, and I had ample opportunity to observe the luxury and extravagance of their lives. Often while sewing for the lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking along the frozen lake front. The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care.
Mother Jones positions herself as an observer of the separation between the two classes, seeing through the glass a rigidly divided world that denied the existence of its own divisions.28
She saw even the summer heat through the lens of social class: “From the windows of the rich, I used to watch the mothers come from the west side slums, lugging babies and little children, hoping for a breath of cool, fresh air from the lake.” Chicago’s elite donated a few dollars to the charity ice fund, then headed out of town to the seaside or the mountains. Despite the outrage Mary Jones expresses in her autobiography, she was probably too numb from her personal tragedy to dwell for long on class divisions. Her time was absorbed by the day-to-day realities of a working woman’s life.29
The details of Mary Jones’s existence in Chicago are few, but the social context of those details is important. She returned to dressmaking; maybe she found it too painful to spend her time with children. Her shop was located on Washington Street, downtown near Lake Michigan. The 1871 Chicago City Directory gives her address as 174 Jackson Street, within easy walking distance of work. She and her unidentified partner seem to have done custom work, so although Mary must have been quite skilled, she was constantly reminded of her status as a worker by her frequent contact with wealthy patrons.30
When Mary Jones returned to Chicago, it was the greatest boom-town in America. Chicago had prospered with wartime demand and entered the last third of the nineteenth century trumpeting its position as the capital of the West and the fastest-growing city in America. A third of a million people lived there in 1870, though the city had been incorporated only thirty-three years before. The railroads, rivers, and canals that fanned out from Lake Michigan were the key. Raw goods poured into Chicago, where they were milled, processed, and packaged, then shipped east along trunk lines or by boat on the Great Lakes. The city was new and full of energy, an economic dynamo. It was a place where people came to work and to restart their lives. There was opportunity for the likes of Mary Jones, but opportunity was, of course, limited by prejudice against the Irish and women.31
Chicago was a divided city, and these divisions grew deeper as large-scale capitalist enterprises became entrenched. Wealth displayed itself shamelessly alongside shocking scenes of poverty. Immigrants crowded into neighborhoods once filled with native-born rural folk. Ethnicity coincided roughly with social and economic status. Simply put, the wealthiest fifth of Chicago’s population—mostly native-born Protestants—held 90 percent of the city’s total assets, while the poorest half (which included most of the Irish) possessed less than 1 percent.32
The stability Mary Jones created for herself stitching garments did not last. Four years after the horror of Memphis, disaster stalked her again. On the night of October 8, 1871, around the fourth anniversary of her family’s death, an unusually strong and steady southerly wind began to howl through the city. Recent fires, caused by an unprecedented drought, had exhausted Chicago’s firemen, and when another one started southwest of downtown in a barn owned by the O’Leary family, it quickly got out of control. Within hours, the fire spread north and east, advancing along a broad front. By early morning it had turned into a firestorm—the updraft of heated air generated winds so strong that they sucked fuel into the flames, fanned the fire to over two thousand degrees, and tossed burning timbers into the dark. From Harrison to Fullerton and from the Chicago River east to Lake Michigan—three and a half square miles—Chicago burned to the ground. Miraculously, only three hundred people died, but seventeen thousand structures vaporized, nearly $200 million worth of property vanished, and a hundred thousand people were left homeless.33
The fire took all of Mary Jones’s belongings. Like thousands of others, she raced east to the lake to stay ahead of the flames, remained all night and the next day by the shore, stranded without food, forced by the heat to retreat into the water. People stood with the few goods they managed to save as falling embers threatened to set their clothes ablaze and flames from the still-burning city blistered their skin. Later Mary Jones huddled in Old St. Mary’s Church on Wabash Street until she found other accommodations.34
The rebuilding of Chicago became part of the city’s mythology. Everyone pulled together, it was said, and within a few years, Chicago rose from the ashes. Chicagoans felt a sense of civic pride in resurrecting their town. But the social divisions that preceded the fire remained and, if anything, grew deeper in coming years. Some newspapers attributed the fire to a radical plot and printed alleged confessions by European terrorists. Even as the flames died, rumors spread that incendiaries conspired to torch the city again. The unfounded legend of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocking over a gas lamp that ignited the barn, then the whole city, also grew out of widespread stereotypes of the poor and the Irish as the “dangerous classes.” The Chicago Times, the city’s largest-circulation newspaper, ran a story claiming that before the fire, O’Leary had fraudulently collected relief. When a Cook County agent cut her off, she swore revenge.35
As architects planned and workers rebuilt with unprecedented speed, the construction boom only seemed to feed the suspicions that capital and labor held for each other. Before the panic and depression of 1873 ended the building spree, both sides articulated their positions as never before. Business and civic leaders insisted on a vision of the new city based on individual workers selling their labor in free markets. But local building trade unions and the National Labor Union argued that individualism was a formula for disaster. They rejected the alien doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, insisting that only workers’ solidarity gave them protection from the ravages of the marketplace.36
The great Chicago fire struck when Mary Jones was thirty-four years old. She gave it only a few sentences in her autobiography, after having described her entire life up to that point in just three pages. From then on, however, she turned her narrative wholly into an account of her involvement in the labor movement. Amid the still-smoldering ruins of the Chicago fire, she tells us, she began to attend lectures of the Knights of Labor, America’s largest union of the late nineteenth century. Those stirring lectures, she declared, made her appreciate more than ever the struggles of the working class, and so she joined the organization.37
The problem with her story is that the Knights did not organize in Chicago until years after the fire, and they did not admit women until 1880. Yet there probably is a core of truth here. The Autobiography must be treated less literally than metaphorically; its specific details are often incorrect, but the book is best thought of as akin to religious testimony, to bearing witness, to a pilgrim’s story. Mary Jones underwent a sort of conversion, probably in the 1870s. Her ideas matured as she immersed herself in the labor movement in the 1880s. She must have joined the Knights of Labor around the height of its power in the mid-1880s, and before the decade was over, she began her lifelong friendship with fellow Irish Catholic Terence Powderly, the head of the organization.38
“Those were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor,” she wrote of the late nineteenth century. “Those were the days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers, no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of the martyrs and the saints.” The legacy she wished to impart from those early years was the purity of the cause, purity uncorrupted by institutions. Here was labor’s springtime, to which subsequent generations must rededicate themselves. Her rhetoric was a labor version of the American jeremiad, that pattern of thought and speech which comes down to us from the Puritans, where we confess our sins and return to the old ways, to the memory of those who sacrificed themselves for the true religion. The next ten pages of the Autobiography describe the great railroad strike of 1877 and the Haymarket affair of 1886. She was no more than a bit player in these events (she implies a much larger role for herself), but just living in Chicago was enough to make a lasting impression.39
In September 1873, a financial panic, fueled by rampant speculation, closed the bank of Jay Gould, and America slid into the deepest depression it had ever experienced. For five years, faith in the beneficence of capitalism was challenged by the specters of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness. In 1874, a million workers were without jobs, and some cities had unemployment rates approaching 25 percent. Railroad employees saw their workdays grow longer and their pay drop. With so many men desperate for work, the labor organizing of previous years began to unravel. William Sylvis’s National Labor Union crumbled; so did two-thirds of the nation’s trade unions, as the number of union members shrank from 300,000 to 50,000 during the crisis. Business leaders and their supporters in editorial offices and pulpits declared that nothing could be done to ease the suffering, that relief efforts would ruin worker incentives to look for jobs, that economic contractions were as natural as the seasons, that the task of entrepreneurs was to run their companies as efficiently as possible. “The necessities of the great railroad companies demanded that there should be a reduction of wages,” the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher told his rich Brooklyn congregation. “Was not a dollar a day enough to buy bread! Water costs nothing.… The man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.”40
With so many unemployed laborers willing to work for less than those who still had jobs, strikes were doomed to failure. But that did not stop the beginnings of militant organizing. In Chicago, mass meetings, hunger marches, armies of tramps—whom the Tribune suggested be handled like farm rodents, with strychnine and arsenic—appeared. The police, acting at the behest of city fathers, responded with intimidation and violence. Despite the repression, the Working-Men’s Party was born in 1876. Here, unionists and political radicals joined together in an uneasy but militant alliance.41
The patience of many American workers finally broke in July 1877. The heads of four railroads—the Erie, the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania—cut employee wages by 10 percent (the second such cut within a year) though stockholder dividends had continued through the depression. Employees of the Baltimore and Ohio in Martinsburg, West Virginia, reacted first; they walked off the job. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in federal troops to put down the “insurrection,” but the strike spread. The single most dramatic episode occurred in Pittsburgh. America’s largest corporation, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which employed over thirty thousand people, was already very unpopular in that city. Small businessmen and workers blamed the company for unfair freight rates and corrosive competition. On July 19, railroad workers, iron molders, and other tradesmen shut down the train yards. Local militia, filled with working-class men, refused to enforce laws against their compatriots, but troops sent from across the state in Philadelphia were not so sympathetic. Bayonets were met with rocks, rocks with bullets. Twenty protesters were killed, including several women and children. As workers poured toward the train yards, the strike turned into a riot. The crowd routed the soldiers, surrounded the roundhouse, tore up miles of track, and set fire to countless trains and cars.42
Mary Jones claims in her autobiography that she was in Pittsburgh for this bloody denouement, that the workers sent for her to come help them. This is almost certainly untrue. There is no evidence that she had yet achieved any prominence in the labor movement, and given the spontaneity of the strike, it makes little sense that anyone had called for her help. Moreover, her narrative gives no feeling of familiarity with specific people or places; it reads like a description cribbed from published sources, not like an eyewitness account. But mere facts were not the point. Placing herself in Pittsburgh for this first great national strike was a way of projecting her activism backward in time, validating her claim to being the founding mother of the labor movement. Writing in 1925 that the boys “sent for me to come help them” meant that she had been at the center of the storm for half a century. Above all, she claimed that 1877 revealed new truths to her: “Then and there I learned in the early part of my career that labor must bear the cross for others’ sins, must be the vicarious sufferer for the wrongs that others do.” Organizing workers required Christlike sacrifice, even as false prophets blamed the just for others’ sins.43
Even if Mary Jones was not in Pittsburgh, the great strike must have left a deep impression on her. In Chicago, news of events from Pennsylvania touched off a citywide general strike that had the flavor of open class warfare. Strikers—men and some women from all ethnic groups—roamed through industrial sections of town, calling other workers to join them, as bands in the streets played the “Marseillaise.” Workers took control of factories, foundries, and loading docks; they fought strikebreakers, police, and local militia. The upheaval lasted three days, and only the troops’ firing grapeshot into crowds—killing thirty and wounding two hundred—ended the troubles. Meanwhile, headlines screamed that “Howling Mobs of Thieves and Cut-Throats” had taken over the city. Local businessmen organized their clerks and managers into militia units and contributed to special police funds; after the crisis was over, they began to collect money to build armories.44
Nationwide, a hundred thousand workers participated in the strike, at least one hundred died, and hundreds more were wounded. The strikers were not well organized and did not have a clear ideology. They responded viscerally to their own immiseration, to the growing arrogance of corporations, and to the erosion of their rights to secure economic well-being for themselves, their families, and their communities. The great strike lasted only two weeks, but it spread from coast to coast, and for the first time, the federal government intervened decisively for capital and against labor.45
America changed in 1877, and the events of that year caused forty-year-old Mary Jones to think more deeply about the place of labor in America. The strikers included not just railroad workers but farmers, miners, and mill hands. Despite its failure to restore laborers’ pay, the strike signaled the beginnings of a broadly based working-class movement, more powerful than anything seen before. For a few days, all of the trappings of a ruling class fighting for its survival were on display. Chicago’s civic elite, including men like George Pullman and Marshall Field, believed that revolution was imminent. And labor activists for the first time found their ideas had resonance with masses of workers.46
Prosperity returned during the late 1870s and early 1880s, only to be punctured by another long depression beginning in 1883. Trade unions revived, and the Knights of Labor grew rapidly. The Knights had a strong strain of worker radicalism, of defiant republican mistrust of the growing power of business. They hoped to form a bulwark against new corporations by organizing workers of all trades. Meanwhile, the old Working-Men’s Party, now known as the Socialist Labor Party, elected a few people to office around the country and was especially popular among German immigrants. Perhaps most important, various anarchist organizations called for the overthrow of capitalism in America, by violence if necessary. Anarchists held radical ideals of equality, but they were suspicious of efforts to harness state power because centralization was the problem, not the solution. Anarchists valued the creativity of labor and the freedom of individuals; they wanted not only a living but a way of life, including a broad sense of participation in human affairs. Strains of anarchist ideas came from France, Russia, Germany, and from within America, so that by the mid-1880s, the movement was dynamic and growing. With the economic downturn that began in 1883, mass rallies led by articulate orators became commonplace. Chicago’s enormous immigrant population, gifted leaders, and active press (five newspapers in three languages promulgated anarchist ideas) made it the center of the movement.47
By 1885, anarchists had taken leadership positions in the Central Labor Union, Chicago’s largest worker organization. The Alabama-born former Confederate Albert Parsons told several thousand members in September 1885, “We are revolutionists. We fight for the destruction of the system of wage-slavery.… The claim of capital to profit, interest or rent is a robber claim, enforced by piratical methods. Let robbers and pirates meet the fate they deserve! … Proletarians of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains, we have a world to win!” A wave of strikes broke, mostly for restoration of wages. The reaction was swift and violent, making the logic of anarchist ideas even more compelling. Police repression was met by an escalation in the anarchists’ rhetoric; their talk was generally more violent than their acts, but the threat of rebellion was real.48
Trade unionists, too, grew restive, and they demanded the eight-hour day for all workers. Anarchists at first opposed the eight-hour movement as a mere cosmetic gesture, but it caught the imagination of masses of workers willing to fight to gain control of their time. So while the original impetus came from the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (forerunner to the American Federation of Labor), anarchist leaders became closely associated with the eight-hour movement. Three hundred thousand American workers left their jobs on May 1, 1886, forty thousand of them in Chicago, the center of the strike. The Chicago Mail said of the anarchist leaders Albert Parsons and August Spies, “They are looking for riot and plunder. They haven’t got one honest aim nor one honorable end in view.… Hold them personally responsible for any trouble that occurs.” Radicals hoped a revolution was about to begin; businessmen felt now was the time to smash radicalism for good.49
May Day itself was tense yet peaceful. The walkout for the eight-hour day continued, however, and it became entwined with the ongoing strike at the enormous McCormick harvester plant. McCormick was attempting to roll back wages by replacing its entire force of iron molders. Police, commanded by the notorious John Bonfield, attacked workers—first with clubs, then with guns—who had rallied in front of the plant on May 3. Two workers were killed and many wounded. The next night, May 4, the anarchists called an open meeting in Haymarket Square. The crowd was disappointingly small, perhaps three thousand people, and was on the verge of breaking up when the police appeared, obviously ready to begin a new assault. As they charged, a bomb hurtled toward them, landed in their midst, and exploded. Windows shattered for blocks around, police began to fire their revolvers indiscriminately as the crowd fled in panic, and before it was over, seven officers lay dead (mostly from “friendly fire”), along with an undetermined number of civilians.50
Fear and indignation gripped the public. The connection between the violent rhetoric of the anarchists and the blood flowing in the streets seemed inescapable. All the talk about dynamite, all the words about revolution now were thrown back at the radicals—indeed, at anyone who had advocated the cause of labor. The press whipped up an intense anti-red hysteria. Wild rumors circulated that the Haymarket bomb was a signal for a full-scale uprising. Mainstream labor unions began to distance themselves from the radicals. The Chicago newsletter of the Knights of Labor disavowed any connection with the anarchists, called them “a band of cowardly murderers, cut-throats and robbers,” and urged that they be treated as such. Not a shred of evidence was ever produced to prove who threw the bomb, but that did not stop authorities from rounding up Chicago’s leading radicals. For two months, civil liberties were suspended and newspapers shut down as police questioned, detained, and beat hundreds of activists and laborites, especially those of foreign birth. Sensational stories in the newspapers convinced the public that a gigantic conspiracy existed, which justified extreme police measures to root out the troublemakers.51
Eight anarchist leaders were arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit murder. Their militant rhetoric was enough to convict them. Four, including Parsons and Spies, were hanged in November 1887, three were given life sentences, then pardoned a few years later, and the last man, Louis Lingg, committed suicide just before his scheduled execution. Tasting blood, businessmen and editors widened their assault on labor and the left. Unprecedented numbers of workers were locked out of their jobs as a wave of union busting began. The Knights of Labor had about one million members just before the bomb exploded in Haymarket. A year later, that number was cut in half, and in 1890, only a tenth of the members remained. Repression caused many workers to turn to much more narrow organizing along craft lines. The Knights’ bold vision of labor engaged in a moral struggle for autonomy suffered a major setback, and the business unionism of Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor—defining issues narrowly in terms of wages and hours, not ownership or control of the workplace—seemed the prudent strategy to many unionists.52
3. The press often depicted the police under siege and the demonstrators as rabble during the Haymarket affair. Here a patrol wagon is “attacked by a mob of 12,000 rioters.” Mother Jones described Haymarket as a formative moment in her life. From Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 15, 1886 (Courtesy Newberry Library)
Forty years later, Mary Jones remembered the 1880s as a time when the working class everywhere was in rebellion. Foreign agitators, she recalled, gave men vision and hope; the police gave them clubs. Haymarket was a turning point in her life: “Although I never endorsed the philosophy of anarchism, I often attended the meetings on the lake shore, listening to what these teachers of the new order had to say to the workers.” The radicals alienated many would-be supporters with their extreme rhetoric, but they died heroes, as their funeral attested: “Thousands of workers marched behind the black hearses, not because they were anarchists but they felt that these men, whatever their theories, were martyrs to the workers’ struggle.”53
The Haymarket affair was a watershed. The ideological passions of 1886 and the resulting clash of power continued to perturb all who struggled with the meaning of massive social and economic changes. Mary Jones remained obscure for several more years, but the great issues of her day already consumed her. She paid deference to the Haymarket martyrs, those “teachers of the new order,” in her own way. After the turn of the century, as May Day increasingly became recognized as a labor holiday, Mary Jones began declaring May 1 to be her birthday. And in a symbolic sense, it was the day she was born into the labor movement.54
Early in the twentieth century, journalists reported that one or another epiphany led Mary Jones to militant activism. Some had her traveling abroad during the 1870s or 1880s, where she discovered that the American working class was even worse off than the European. Others claimed that in the late 1870s she was converted on the sandlots of San Francisco, where she developed her oratorical skills declaiming for the Working-Men’s Party against the perils of Chinese immigration. Certainly such travels, if she made them at all, fit the footloose pattern of her later life. But these stories, even if true, fail to tell us much about how Mary Jones became Mother Jones.55
Above all, there is silence. How did she become a radical? The Autobiography implies that her political ideas were only logical, natural. Any heir of true American ideals who witnessed things like poverty and child labor would become a socialist and a militant laborite. But most people became no such things. The Irish had even less tendency than other groups to join anarchists or militants. The Catholic Church discouraged class-conscious politics, Irish nationalism focused energies overseas, and Irish American politicians were dependent on the entrenched party structure.56
Being unencumbered by a family may have freed her to explore radical ideas that helped make sense of her past and of the life she saw around her. She left no hints of intimacy. Assuming that her personal life before the turn of the century resembled that after 1900 (when we start to have records), her connections to people were cordial but not particularly deep. A middle-aged, working-class Irish widow, she had every reason to feel that her life was more than half over and that her best days were behind her. But Mary Jones had no intention of accepting whatever fate had in store for her.57
Although there is much we do not know about Mary Harris and Mary Jones, one thing we do know: long before she conceived the persona of Mother Jones, she witnessed repeated, unspeakable tragedies. Literally unspeakable—later in life, she never mentioned the Great Hunger, the passage to North America, the fever sheds of Canada, the American Civil War, or the Memphis riots. She gave the barest descriptions of George Jones and the deaths of her children, never said a word about her mother, mentioned her successful brother William a few times to reporters around 1900 then dropped the subject, named none of her siblings or children in her autobiography, and failed to note events such as the deaths of her parents. Mother Jones had a history; Mary Harris and Mary Jones did not.58
Mary Jones remained on the fringes for a while longer. But if there was a crucible of her faith, it was Chicago. Chicago in the late nineteenth century was the most radical city in America, a hotbed of ideological ferment. There, a constant upsurge of ideas—foreign and domestic versions of trade and industrial unionism, anarchism, socialism, populism—was part of daily working life. The radical ideas, the mix of peoples from so many lands, the city’s mythology of rebuilding itself out of the ashes, all made it remarkable. But much more than that, Chicago was where people came to transform themselves. With a population that doubled then doubled again every ten years, it truly was a city of strangers. Here, amid a culture whose hallmark was the manipulation of images, changes of identity were not only possible but desirable. What brought so many to Chicago was ambition, and the mutability of cityscape and self fed their desires. The reinvention of identity in a city that constantly re-created itself was all part of the protean quality that Americans had identified with urban life at least since the early nineteenth century, but never before on the scale of Chicago.59
The city was one big flow of commodities—timber, grain, coal, steel, clothing, cattle, people—all floating on a river of capital. When we think of Mary Harris and Mary Jones before she became Mother Jones, there is a profound sense of her life being tossed in the floods of social and economic change. If she was prey to natural forces and naturalized ones like the marketplace, becoming Mother Jones, as we shall see, was a way of rejecting the victim’s role. Rather than give in to the epic changes that reshaped the world in the nineteenth century and buffeted working-class lives like the Harrises’ and the Joneses’, Mother Jones refused to accept her fate passively.60
The first half of Mary Jones’s life prepared her for the task of becoming Mother Jones. She was, above all, a survivor—she passed through horrific times and transcended them. That is how the twentieth century came to know her. Every time the frail old woman in her outdated black dress was arrested, issued proclamations from jail, then emerged to lead a parade of strikers, the image of her as a survivor was reinforced.
But Mary Harris Jones was a survivor in a darker way too. Famine, war, and plague took those around her. Why she remained alive while others fell must have been a mystery to her. Beyond grief and shock and loneliness at the loss of loved ones comes a sense of culpability. How could it be otherwise? This is not to reduce Mary Jones’s words and deeds to mere psychologizing. Her life as Mother Jones was a story of astonishing courage, of fighting the good fight. While others of her generation shrank from the issues of the day, Mother Jones was consumed with them. But who she became was inseparable from who she had been. Tragedy freed her for a life of commitment.
Looked at another way, though, Mary Jones was never truly free. The ghosts of her past haunted her so deeply that she could not even speak about them. Probably she achieved a small exorcism when she set out on the road sometime late in the nineteenth century, when she gave up possessions, home, self and became Mother Jones. Her witness against the horrors visited on the poor by the rich was energized, in part, by a need to expiate her own survival. Poor and homeless, she reenacted her parents’ exile; a tireless union organizer, she continued her husband’s commitments; mother to the poor, she nurtured a family again. Chicago gave her an arena to develop her political ideas, while profound loss enabled her to find commitments outside a woman’s normal sphere. It was the tragedies of her early days, then, that energized the life of Mother Jones.